Governing the body and the state: Akbar’s vegetarianism through the lenses of coeval literary sources

During the last years of his rule Akbar both advocated and practised vegetarianism, albeit only in selected periods or dates. Existing literature, that relies mainly on Persian coeval sources, usually connects this tendency to the developments which followed the institution (1575) of the celebrated ibādat-khānā, thus confining it to the sphere of the private religious attitudes of the emperor. In my paper, that is based also on the analysis of local and regional literary sources, and on the poetical production of Avadhi Sufis, I suggest that Akbar’s plea for vegetarianism should rather be interpreted as an element of a complex political strategy, aimed primarily at establishing the undisputed supremacy of the imperial authority. In a broader perspective, studies on Akbar’s religious outlook are often interspersed with shades of bias. A large number of analyses focus, for instance, on the emperor’s private spiritual attitudes, which brings the authors either to emphasize their bizarre or even freakish aspects;or, on the contrary, to highlight Akbar’s tolerance as both a token of his innate open-mindedness and a primary source of inspiration for administrative activities. Scholars’ cultural background may also be a source of prejudice: Muslim communalist historians tend to accuse Akbar of apostasy, while Indian scholars often perceive in his measures elements of protosecularism and even national identity – to the point that, as it has been observed, ‘Akbar was reassessed in ways as diverse as the historians who reassessed him’ (Hodgson 1974, 61). Problems in interpretation are also linked to the fact that Akbar’s religious politics has generated sharply conflicting viewpoints since his very times, as it is demonstrated by the dramatic conceptual distance between the works of two of his most illustrious courtiers: in fact, while Abū al-Fażl’s panegyric narrative celebrates the emperor’s enlightened rule, Al-Badāoni harshly criticizes Akbar’s ‘heretical attacks on orthodoxy’. Another intrinsic contradiction lies in the fact that, although it is difficult to find in the history of the whole Indian subcontinent a monarch so interested in religious knowledge and personally involved in spiritual enquiries, these elements do not implicitly authorize interpretations that attribute to Akbar’s religious sensibility any choice where religious issues were at stake.