To return to Akbar. He certainly has been over-praised. He had charming qualities and had a keen intellect, but he was by no means a saint or a philosopher. He had by no means worked out the beast, and he had the defects of his age and race, and of his own idiosyncrasy. If regarded as a Man, who makes his moral being his first care, he was inferior to the bigoted Aurung­zeb. After all, he was a Tārtār, or at best had Cingiz Khān blood in his veins. He was both ruthless and self-indulgent. The man who could order* a lamp-lighter to be flung over the battlements for the crime of having fallen asleep in an imperial bed, and could condemn some twenty children to death or idiocy because, like Psammaticus of Egypt, he could learn in this way what was man's primæval language,* and who could subject an officer to the agony of being thrown under the feet of an elephant even though the beast had been privately ordered not to kill him, was at heart a savage. This has been well put by my friend Vincent Smith in a note to p. 343 of his life of Akbar.

On another occasion, when he was on the banks of the Indus in 1581, he sent an officer to look for a ford. (Monserrate, p. 582). The man went up-stream for 25 miles, but could not find a ford and was told by the villagers that there was not any ford in that part of the country and so he returned. But as Akbar found that he had not gone as far as he had directed him to go, he ordered him to be taken to the place he (Akbar) ḥad mentioned to him, tied upon an inflated ox-hide and flung into the river! When this order was given practically the whole army turned out to see what would happen. The unfortunate man was carried down the stream, lamenting and crying for pardon. When he was passing the imperial tent he was taken out by Akbar's orders but his property was confiscated and he himself was publicly sold as a slaye. A friend bought him in for eighty pieces of gold, taken, apparently, from the royal treasury, and he was eventually pardoned!

Akbar's order to the officer was that he should inquire if the Indus could be forded anywhere on horse-back. After Prince Jelālu-d-dīn's exploit in Cingiz Khān's time it was perhaps impos­sible to say that the Indus could not be crossed by cavalry. But it would seem that for practical purposes the Indus is unford­able either above or below Attock unless one goes very far upstream. Even when the Indus or the Cabul river is fordable, they are liable to sudden freshets as shown by a melancholy experience near Jelālābād during the Afghān war. Major Rennell says in his Memoir of 1792, p. 98: “The Indus is sometimes fordable above Attock, but we never hear of its being fordable below.”

The Akbarnāma tells us that on another occasion Akbar, in anger at a poor man coming into his presence drunk, had him drenched with cold water with the result that he eventually died of shock.

The love of cruelty for its own sake was a characteristic of the age and race, and was shown in the chivalrous Bābur who had a man flayed alive and who had men killed by inches, and in the generally humane Humāyūn and in Akbar's son Jehāngīr who took pleasure in inventing new methods of killing people, such as causing them to be bitten by snakes and who inflicted the linger­ing death of impalement upon rebels, and added thereto the making his son witness the deaths of his followers. It is true that Akbar, after he became half a Hindu or half a Parsee, expressed horror at his son's cruelties, but it was Akbar who hanged the innocent Manṣūr Shīrāzī, and it was he who killed or connived at the killing of his old and once venerated teacher! There is ground for the current native view of Akbar that he was a man who could disembowel a pregnant woman in order to see what she carried in her bosom, even if it be not true that he actually did this.

I may add that if the tradition that Akbar buried the slave-girl Anārkalī (the pomegranate flower) alive for the crime of exchanging a glance with his son Selīm (afterwards Jehāngīr) be true, he committed an atrocity which excuses, if it does not justify, the son for making war upon him, and might even have excused an act of parricide.

The tomb and its touching inscription still exist, but the bigotry of a good but narrow-minded Bishop caused it to be removed from the mosque (now the English Church) into what the Imperial Gazetteer of India euphemistically calls “a repertory of Secretarial records,” in plain language, a daftarḵẖāna, to lumber-room for waste paper! But perhaps Lord Curzon had the tomb removed to a more fitting place.