A painting of Akbar in a drunken brawl is a history lesson in manliness and kingship

In a library in Dublin lies a 17th-century painting with a scene that will be all too familiar to any pub goer in 21-century India: a drunken brawl. In it, Mughal emperor Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar can be seen fighting with Man Singh, the maharaja of Amber, surrounded by more than two dozen courtiers watching in horror as one tries to break them up.

The miniature, self-explanatorily titled Akbar fights Man Singh of Amber at a drinking party (circa 1603-1605 CE), is part of an illustrated Akbarnama. How does its depiction of an ostensibly undignified episode speak to the articulation of Shahenshah Akbar’s Mughal persona as patriarch and sovereign? What might be the political dynamic that the painting alludes to? And what are the interrelated Akbari codes of manliness and kingliness it reveals to us?

Before answering these questions, it is essential to understand what supposedly happened at the party from the great Mughal’s biographer Abu’l Fazl.

During his campaign to conquer Surat in 1573, the emperor was at a drinking party engaged in conversation with his courtiers. A group of Rajput noblemen boasted that their bravery was such that feuds were settled by both the warring rivals running towards a double-headed spear. Apparently inspired, likely drunk (Abu’l Fazl evasively proposes existential melancholia), the unrivalled Akbar attached his sword’s hilt to a wall and prepared to race towards it to his death in a bid to prove that he is no less valiant than a Rajput. A shocked silence followed this turn of events, the courtiers contemplating the end of the Mughal empire from a suicidal stab. At the last minute, Akbar’s close friend Amber’s Raja Man Singh ran towards him and dislodged the sword, nicking the badshah’s hand. Furious, Akbar tackled his longtime boon companion to the ground “and squeezes him”.

This vaguely ridiculous episode is rendered in the miniature made 25 years later by the artist Dawlat for the latter of the two known illustrated versions of Akbar’s biography.

As vivid and veracious as the painting is, there are minor but telling differences from Abu’l Fazl’s original narration. For one, the roles of dominator and submitter, somewhat evenly distributed in the text’s recounting, are unambiguously delineated in the painting in favour of Akbar. Though there is a dramatic momentum in the painting befitting its depiction of real events, Man Singh’s original intervention in disarming the king is barely suggested. And while Abu’l Fazl explicitly notes the king’s rage as he tackles his friend, the picture painted is far more temperate: the raja, sporting an expression of pained disbelief, lies pinned to the ground by a distraught badshah. True to the Akbarnama, a courtier named Saiyid Mozaffar tries to encourage Akbar to release Man Singh by twisting his injured finger.

The tweaking of details to favour Akbar in propaganda painting is unsurprising. In his 1917 book Akbar the Great Mogul: 1542-1605, Irish civil servant and historian Vincent Arthur Smith noted that in general “the uncritical panegyrists of Akbar make no mention of his drunken bouts”. Smith reiterates Abu’l Fazl’s report that the brawl took place whilst Surat was being besieged and won from the commander Hamzaban, an erstwhile servant of Humayun.

This background provides a broader sociopolitical context within which to read the painting, according to art historian Dipanwita Donde, researcher at Max Weber Stiftung New Delhi, whose doctoral dissertation at Jawaharlal Nehru University looked at portraits of Akbar. Over email, she weighs in on the general dynamic the painting referenced: “The two men of power, Akbar and Man Singh, both leading their men in battle against Hamzaban…were keen to exhibit their courage and dominance. Both men were sovereigns, each with their own fields of influence. While Man Singh was in the service of the Mughal emperor, he was also the raja of Amber and had his own sphere of dominance in his own kingdom. He was no less equal to Akbar in terms of stature, power, masculinity, dominance and courage.”

Masculine virtue

A drunken scuffle between the two – friends, men, kings – in life is transformed into a theatre of masculinity and sovereignty in art. This was on brand for Akbar the patron. In the catalogue for the 1985 Festival of India’s exhibition Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, curators Michael Brand and Glenn D Lowry assert that “Akbar desired to create and codify…a new pictorial language in which ideas would be given a formal representation, or set of signs, as effective as the letter in the fields of writing…” One of these ideas was the co-constitutive elaboration of manliness and divine kingship in accordance with akhlaq – the cultivation of virtue through practices enshrined in Greek and Persian ethical digests circulating in early modern north India. In her essay Kingdom, Household and Body History: Gender and Imperial Service, historian Rosalind O’Hanlon argues that to construct a Hindustani idiom of manhood, Akbar “drew on a careful selection of akhl ̄aq ̄i themes to construct a socially inclusive model of masculine virtue which transcended law and religion, caste and region…and the possibilities for moral and human perfection in all three of the homologous worlds that men inhabited as governors: the individual body, the household and the kingdom”.

In the manner of the popular moral guides, in the Akbarnama, Akbar is portrayed by his chief publicist Abu’l Fazl as the ultimate akhlaqi exercising control over his empire, his court household and his own person: the insan-i-kamil or perfect man. One vector of north Indian or Hindustani masculinity which the emperor performed along, posits O’Hanlon, was that of the martial or warrior type. Combining his akhlaqi self-fashioning with both the Indo-Muslim figure of the self-immolating martyr and the honour-bound Rajput self-sacrificer, Akbar was the “disciplined military servant, who could put the defence of wider imperial interests above that of his own individual or group honour”. At the same time, O’Hanlon underscores, these martial qualities were to be detached from scenes of explicit, physical combat and presented within the self-controlled equilibrium of the insan-i-kamil mode. But surely the badshah had imperfect urges. Specifically referencing his tussle with Man Singh, O’Hanlon says, “There may have remained moments, however, in which Akbar felt the tension between these highly controlled expressions of physical courage and spiritual power, and the simpler Rajput ideals of direct personal sacrifice.”

This tension is evident in the painting based on the incident. Akbar is the patriarch of the party, who must tend to his “household of men” comprising his symbolic children, his courtiers. A sword lies to the right of the skirmishing protagonists, its curvature rhyming with the shape of the crowd, a phallic symbol of the emperor’s martial masculinity – the shahenshah literally holds court. At the same time, he has just displayed an imperial desire to emulate Rajput martiality – the image of him bodily tackling Man Singh symbolises a corporeal interlock of the two dominant modes of warrior masculinity at his court.

Models of kingship

Dawlat’s interpretation of the Akbarnama episode not only engages with syncretic imperial norms of masculine virtue, it may also have revised certain aspects of the actual event to comply with acceptable and aspirational models of kingship. The all-too-human intoxicated anger that Abu’l Fazl observed in the original account has been transformed in Dawlat’s painting into an expression of regal dismay. Contrasting an obscure Marwari account of another, later episode of Akbar’s ire with its narration in the Akbarnama, Cynthia Talbot gives us a clue to the semiotic politics of Akbar’s rage in her essay Anger and Atonement in Mughal India: An alternative account of Akbar’s 1578 hunt: “Because Akbarnama is fundamentally a text that aims to propagate the emperor’s greatness, it consistently casts Akbar in the best possible light. According to the conventions of Persianate statecraft, just as in the Sanskrit case, anger was inappropriate for a ruler, who should ideally be judicious in his speech and actions.” Could it be then that the explicit visual depiction of the badshah’s rage, historically proscribed within both Persianate and Indic models of kingship, would be even less acceptable than its fleeting mention in the textual record? Through the change in Akbar’s countenance from irrational wrath to discomfort at having to to subdue his friend, paternal regality is affirmed and control maintained over the body physic and politic.

At the bottom of the painting are two figures, outside the enclosure of the palace, curious but excluded. The inner life of the king is not available for public consumption even as the viewer is made privy to these goings-on, evoking a feeling of being let in on the secret life of the god-like emperor. Through the exploration of the inextricable codes of manliness and kingliness, the painting gives us insight into Akbar’s world and also how it was conceived and constructed. And just maybe, we catch a glimpse of the individual wearing the taj.

Getting drunk and committing regrettable actions? Shahenshahs, they’re just like us.