Published in India Today

Sant Kabir, both a Hindu and Muslim and neither, and a fleeting character in Ira Mukhoty’s brilliant biography of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar, shared something exceptional with the third Mughal Emperor. Brajbhasha! Mukhoty, whose effortless prose is one of her hallmarks besides psychological acumen, salvages Akbar, the polymath and human, from bickering symbols, politics and ‘bastardised cuisines’ of our age.

Akbar saw lutes from Mongolia married to the ragas of Hindustani classical music, the rebirth of Dhrupad, and adopted Brajbhasha, the dialect of Awadhi Bhakti poets from Tulsidas in the 16th century to Wajid Ali Shah in the 19th, for his court. For readers who know that the first ever Persian translation of the Ramayana was commissioned in the emperor’s reign, or that the Mahabharata was copiously copied and orally circulated at this time, it may be puzzling to think of the communal frictions associated with the return of these epics on Indian television.

The author is a Professor at OP Jindal Global University.