Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into its Origin, Development, and Ideals c7.33

c7.33

Akbar (1556-1605) was the most brilliant of all the Mughal emperors, but it is remarkable that he is generally supposed to have been unable to read or write. This, indeed, has been disputed,⁴ but whether it was so or not we cannot call him an uneducated man, and he was deeply interested in the work of spreading education and learning. Several Muhammadan sovereigns in India seem to have been active in founding libraries. We have already mentioned the library of three thousand volumes at Bīdar,⁵ in the Bahmanī kingdom, and it was by falling from the balcony of his library that Humāyūn met his death. Akbar⁶ was particularly zealous in building up a great library, and almost every day he had books from it read to him. He was a patron not only of Muhammadan learning but also of Hindu learning, and had a large number of Sanskrit and other books translated into Persian. Akbar, like other sovereigns, was a builder of colleges, not only at his new city of Fathpur Sīkrī, but also at Agra and other places. Colleges, it seems, were not always residential institutions, and one scholar in giving an account of himself says that he used to go twice a day, morning and evening, to a college at Delhi, although he lived two miles away.¹ Colleges also were erected by private individuals, and amongst others by Māham Anaga, who was Akbar’s nurse. This lady erected a college at Delhi, the ruins of which are still to be seen. Painting, music, and calligraphy were encouraged by Akbar, as well as other fine arts.