Promotion of Learning in India during Muhammadan Rule (by Muhammadans) c21.15

c21.15

continued up to 1555, the year of Humāyūn’s death, and a few years beyond it, even assuming that no teachers were engaged for him after the last of the aforesaid five. Of this period of training, even though limited by the above assumption, no less than eight years (1547 to 1555) belonged to the period of Humāyūn’s fatherly solicitude for his son’s training, the remaining years being passed under Bairam’s guardianship. In 1555, Akbar was still a boy of about thirteen years of age. He was under the stern Bairam’s guardianship for about five years. The many dismissals of tutors indicate that both Humāyūn and Bairam paid attention to his education. Even granting that he was idle and fond of sports, I do not understand how a boy, however recalcitrant he might be, could so systematically resist all attempts at training him for at least ten or twelve years on the part of his guardians so as to come out at the end of the period without the modicum of capacity for reading and writing the few letters of the alphabet. Nor can it be believed that the child of five or the boy of fourteen and still in tutelage could insist on his own peculiar mode of training himself so as to enjoy the luxury of having books read out to him in order to make himself educated by the use of his ear alone. Akbar was very intelligent, and a month or two snatched out for studies out of the whole period of his training, or devoted to them under the fear of his guardians, could, no doubt, have enabled him to read and write the alphabet, which even the dullest boy does not take long to master.