A Belgian Management Executive's love affair with Mughal Emperor, Akbar

A romantic attempt, by a twenty-first century Western European, to read into the mind of a sixteenth century Indian monarch.

Back in 2009 when I had recently moved to Belgium and begun a job as the Europe correspondent for The Business Standard newspaper, amongst my first reports was an interview with a certain Baron Ajit Shetty. Bangalore-born Shetty ran one of the world’s most successful pharmaceutical companies, Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. It was headquartered in Beerse, a town in Flanders.

(For more on this unlikely baron and the story I wrote about him click here)

But it wasn’t Shetty who had left the strongest impression on me at the meeting, but another Janssen executive, Dirk Collier. Suited, bespectacled, soft-spoken, Dirk had shown me around the site and engaged me in a long conversation that had less to with Imodium (the company’s best-selling drug) than medieval Indian statecraft.

Over the course of the years I lived in Brussels, Dirk and I became friends, and occasional lunch companions. The Belgian had an extraordinary curiosity, an abundance of empathy and an enormous library, all very good things in my book. And speaking of books, he went on to write two, both of which were eventually published in India.

In today’s guest blog Dirk details the path that led him to write about Akbar, one of India’s, and arguably the world’s, greatest emperors - not because of the power he wielded, but because of his intellectual openness.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. In the meantime, please do subscribe to The Global Jigsaw, buy a Christmas guest subscription for friends, and share widely.

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Nothing is more dangerous than an idea – especially if you have only one.

Émile-Auguste Chartier

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Nietzsche

For the truth, my son, is like a beautifully shaped diamond.  It is one; yet it has thousands upon thousands of facets, colors, aspects and reflections.  Every person who honestly seeks the truth will have something important to say to you, but remember that no one will ever possess it entirely.

The Emperor’s Writings, First Letter.

I was born in Antwerp, Belgium, a tiny country in western Europe, but I have traveled widely both corporeally and in the imagination. For the two great loves of my life have been: travel and books. Reading about history, one phenomenon has always fascinated and horrified me: fanaticism. In this context, one tends to think about religious fanaticism – the horrors of Europe’s religious wars come to mind, or today’s Islamist fundamentalism. But the problem is by no means limited to religion: it is inherent in any kind of ideology.

Ideology usually starts as a commendable attempt to reconcile politics with ethics, but quickly tends to ossify into the mistaken belief that one’s beliefs are neither beliefs, nor mistaken.

History abounds with examples of people who could have lived perfectly ordinary, valuable lives, but instead became monsters, because they allowed their minds to be imprisoned by some or other dogmatic belief.

One example: Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Many people will be surprised to discover that through his adolescence, this horror of a human being had been a deeply devout Catholic; that he was a mild-mannered, polite, hard-working, meticulous, and extremely scrupulous man. That whenever he took a pencil from the office he had the expense deducted from his salary. Here was a man who could have been an accountant, or a pharmacist; instead, he became a mass murderer. Why? Because he became obsessed with pseudo-scientific racist theories.

When I was about 35, I had a plan: one day, after retirement, I would write a book about fanaticism. The protagonist would be a 14th century Catholic inquisitor, who would come to realize that his victims were good people – even though they did not adhere to the One True Faith.

But then Asia happened. In my mid-40s, my job at the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, took me dozens of times to China and India. I had many interesting dinner conversations, bought myself lots of books and started reading voraciously about Chinese and Indian history and philosophy.

I discovered, for instance, the level headed pragmatism, the maturity and depth of thought in Kautilya’s Arthaśhāstra and the political writings of Confucius (Kǒng Fūzǐ 孔夫子) and Mo Zi (Mòzǐ, 墨子), written hundreds of years BCE, and oftentimes more to the point and more relevant to today’s world than Plato and Aristotle.

The Rule of Law, I found, is not a European invention.

Even more impressed was I by the lack of dogmatism in Asia’s philosophies. “Western” monotheist religions (i.e. Christianity, Islam, and to a lesser extent, Judaism) tend to be extremely preoccupied with orthodoxy: there is only one almighty God, who will reward the good and punish the evil. Humans, if they want to avoid damnation, must follow the One True Faith.

Hinduism is quite different. It is preoccupied with wisdom, with the attainment of freedom or liberation through re-unification with the Divine, not with any particular set of beliefs. In the eyes of a true Hindu, religions and philosophies (even atheism) are just different paths towards the same mountain top, rivers flowing to the same ocean, separate pools of water, all reflecting the same moon.

My mind was made up: my inquisitor would be stationed in Goa, which – so I discovered – had had quite an active inquisition, with lots of suitable Hindu victims. Reading up on the history of Goa, I discovered, to my surprise, that the then ruling emperor, Akbar the Great, had invited no less than three Jesuit missions to his court. He was eager to learn about the Christian faith and very much looking forward to debates between those foreign priests and representatives of Islam and other faiths.

At a time when Europe found itself plagued by persecution and bloody religious wars, this seemed to be a remarkably tolerant and open-minded attitude. I soon found myself fascinated with Akbar’s story: his swift and spectacular rise to absolute power, amidst strife and intrigues, often against overwhelming odds. His remarkably modern vision of a prosperous, diverse, and tolerant India. And his eventful, tragic personal life. And while I will readily admit (as I’m sure, he would do as well) that he was by no means a saint, I found true greatness in him. 

I dropped my Goan project and wrote a novel about Akbar instead. The Emperor’s Writings is a fictional (but fact-based) autobiography, in the genre of Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, or Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. A romantic attempt, by a twenty-first century Western European, to read into the mind of a sixteenth century Indian monarch.  An incomplete one, admittedly; an imperfect one, undoubtedly; but an honest one, most definitely. 

More than just a fascinating story, it offers ample food for thought for today’s world. For it was the reintroduction of religious apartheid under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb that led to the decline and disintegration of Akbar’s Hindustan, and ultimately, to the tragic partition of the subcontinent.

And sadly, religious fanaticism still is one of the seismic fault lines of our planet.

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Dear friends, I hope you enjoyed this post by Dirk. You can read more about his book here. Adios until next week, and please do subscribe so that I can continue bringing you The Global Jigsaw in the New Year.