Number of words: 313

Babar is an attractive person, a typical Renaissance prince, bold and adventurous, fond of art and literature and good living. His grandson, Akbar, is even more attractive and has greater qualities. Daring and reckless, an able general, and yet gentle and full of compassion, an idealist and a dreamer, but also a man of action and a leader of men who roused the passionate loyalty of his followers. As a warrior he conquered large parts of India, but his eyes were set on another and more enduring conquest, the conquest of the minds and hearts of the people. Those compelling eyes of his were ‘vibrant like the sea in sunshine,’ as Portuguese Jesuits of his court have told us. In him the old dream of a united India again took shape, united not only politically in one state but organically fused into one people.

Throughout his long reign of nearly fifty years from 1556 onwards he laboured to this end. Many a proud Rajput chief, who would not have submitted to any other person, he won over to his side. He married a Rajput princess, and his son and successor, Jehangir, was thus a half Mughal and half Rajput Hindu. Jehangir’s son, Shah Jehan, was also the son of a Rajput mother. Thus racially this Turko-Mongol dynasty became far more Indian than Turk or Mongol.

Akbar was an admirer of and felt a kinship with the Rajputs, and by his matrimonial and other policy he formed an alliance with the Rajput ruling classes which strengthened his empire greatly. This Mughal-Rajput co-operation, which continued in subsequent reigns, affected not only government and the administration and army, but also art, culture, and ways of living. The Mughal nobility became progressively Indianized and the Rajputs and others were influenced by Persian culture.

Excerpted from pages 279 of ‘Jawaharlal Nehru The Discovery of India, by Jawaharlal Nehru