The Institutes of Akbar 130: NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR ON THE RELIGIOUS VIEWS OF THE EMPEROR AKBAR.

130

In connection with the preceding Ain, it may be of interest for the general reader, and of some value for the future historian of Akbar’s reign, to collect, in form of a note, the information which we possess regarding the religious views of the Emperor Akbar. The sources from which this information is derived, is, besides Abulfazl’s Ain, the Muntakhab ut Tawarikh by ’Abdul Qadir ibn i Muluk Shah of Badaon—regarding whom I would refer the reader to p. 104, and to a longer article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for 1869—and the Dabistan ul Mazahib, a work written about sixty years after Akbar’s death by an unknown Muhammadan writer of strong Parsi tendencies. Nor must we forget the valuable testimony of some of the Portuguese Missionaries whom Akbar called from Goa, as Rodolpho Aquaviva, Antonio de Monserrato, Francisco Enriques, &c., of whom the first is mentioned by Abulfazl under the name of Pádri Radalf. There exist also two articles on Akbar’s religious views, one by Captain Vans Kennedy, published in the second volume of the Transactions of the Bombay Literary Society, and another by the late Horace Hayman Wilson, which had originally appeared in the Calcutta Quarterly Oriental Magazine, Vol. I., 1824, and has been reprinted in the second volume of Wilson’s works, London, 1862. Besides, a few extracts from Badáoní, bearing on this subject, will be found in Sir H. Elliott’s Bibliographical Index to the Historians of Muhammadan India, p. 243 ff. The Proceedings of the Portuguese Missionaries at Akbar’s Court are described in Murray’s Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Asia, Edinburgh, 1820, Vol. II.
I shall commence with extracts from Badáoní. The translation is literal, which is of great importance in a difficult writer like Badáoní.