• By
  • Tripti Lahiri

Most Indians know Akbar the Great, the third of India’s Mughal emperors, as the man who tried to fuse three of the subcontinent’s three religions into one, who had wives of different faiths, and who had a very clever counselor called Birbal with whom he engaged in witty banter over governance problems.

Courtesy Amaryllis

Some of these stories are true, and some aren’t, according to Dirk Collier, who spent seven years researching and writing his first novel, an ‘autobiography’ of Akbar, the man considered the best of the Mughal rulers, a medieval dynasty that first conquered parts of India in the 1500s. The book was released in New Delhi last week by Amaryllis.

“There is a lot of legend around Akbar,” Mr. Collier, who lives in Belgium and chairs the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust, said in a phone interview. “I spoke to cab drivers as well as leaders of industry for what the average person thinks about him and then compared that to what history says we know.”

For his book, “The Emperors’ Writings,” Mr. Collier also undertook the admittedly “ambitious” exercise of trying to put himself in Akbar’s shoes, so as to breathe life and feeling into the historical details he had amassed. (For history buffs, the writer has appended a 13-page bibliography, which covers not just Mughal history and statecraft, but also architecture, medicine and maps.)

He describes it as an attempt to put “new flesh on the dry bones of historical facts.”

The book is conceived as a series of letters from Akbar to the son that would eventually succeed him as the fourth ruler of the Mughal dynasty, Emperor Jahangir. Historical records don’t show that Akbar, who ascended to the throne at the age of 13, was much of a student and he hasn’t left writings of his own, but Mr. Collier says he couldn’t believe that such a clever man would be unable to read or write.

So his version of Akbar has dyslexia, which he overcomes late in life in order to learn to write.

Mr. Collier tries to bring out what the relationship between Akbar and Jahangir might have been like and how frustrating it must have been for the son to approach middle age as his father continued to rule into his 60s. Over his lifetime, Akbar expanded the empire and came to govern an area that stretched from Kandahar to Bengal and from Kashmir to central India.

But it was a constant source of sorrow to Akbar that the two were estranged and that Jahangir set up his own court in Allahabad, Mr. Collier recounts.

“On the face value of it, it’s a turban-and-scimitar adventure story about a 13-year-old boy who conquers a world empire,” said Mr. Collier. “But underneath that, a friend of mine said it’s actually a management book because it has so much advice about how to deal with people.”

The book already came out in March in Belgium and the Netherlands, translated into Dutch by the author.

Mr. Collier thinks the example of Akbar is particularly important today—a Muslim ruler who was interested in other religions and sought to learn from different faiths at a time when religious wars were the norm—and says the book tries to explore the theological questions the ruler asked of himself.

“If you are Muslim you believe the Koran is the literal word of god and Mohammed is the last prophet, and if you believe that, how do you deal with people who are different from you?,” he said. “It’s something I tried to investigate because it’s something that Akbar tried to do.”

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