In a fascinating essay on the evolution of Rajput loyalties to the Mughal state, Norman P. On his return, he stopped for a day in Sambhar, where Raja Bihari Mal arranged a wedding in a ‘most admirable manner’ then, making sure that Sharafuddin kept Akbar’s promises to the Rajput king, the padishah returned to Agra, galloping some 300 kilometres in less than three days. The match settled, he rode off to Ajmer and visited the shrine he had set out to see. Akbar himself wasn’t overly self-conscious about it. Perhaps the fact of a Rajput bride entering the Mughal dynasty is remarkable only in retrospect. Abul Fazl, Badauni, Nizamuddin merely describe a ruler adding another ‘honourable lady’ to his harem.
The chroniclers do not underscore the fact of Akbar’s marriage with drumrolls.
Ajmer was Akbar’s third excursion into a commander’s ‘fief ’ in nine months and it’s possible that the restoration of Bihari Mal and the marriage to his daughter was another sharp signal to his scattered warlords: not only the riches of his realm but also the decisions about its rule were Akbar’s, and Akbar’s alone. Ali Quli, cleverer than Adham, had hurried to meet Akbar on his way and handed over a substantial bounty. Sometime between his gallop to Malwa and this meeting in Amber, Akbar had also ridden a short distance east, towards Ali Quli Shaibani in Jaunpur and all his unsettled dues. Sharafuddin liked to extract obedience through fear this was not Akbar’s way. ‘What can be the reason of the flight of those people?’ Clearly, he continued, they were reacting to the ‘oppression they have undergone’. ‘We have no other intention than to do good to all mankind,’ he had said in dismay. Abul Fazl implies that the padishah made up his mind when he saw how people fled at his advance through Rajasthan. It doesn’t seem to have taken much for the raja to bring Akbar to his side. A few days later, when Akbar and the Rajput king met near Bihari Mal’s capital, Amber, Akbar also agreed to give him back his hostage and his throne, and to marry his daughter.
Seeing that Akbar was travelling through his land, and remembering, perhaps, the padishah’s friendliness from some years ago, Raja Bihari Mal sent him a message, asking for an audience.Īkbar agreed. At the moment, therefore, the raja’s situation ‘was by no means enviable’, as a modern historian writes, ‘but it improved rather unexpectedly. Suja, therefore, occupied the Kachhwaha throne, while Bihari Mal ‘had taken refuge in the folds of the hills’, forced to pay Suja tribute and let him keep his son hostage. For all that Bihari Mal may have impressed Akbar, it was a rival of his called Suja who had managed an alliance with Akbar’s brother-in-law, Sharafuddin, who governed this area as independently as Adham had hoped to rule Malwa. Five years had passed since the Rajput’s brave showing at Akbar’s court, and the raja’s fortunes had declined in the interim. It was en route to Ajmer that Akbar met Raja Bihari Mal Kachhwaha again.
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