You may wonder how it was that Akbar – whose strategising had taken battalions to the stars; who took poets as well as generals on galactic campaign; and who loved the art and literature of her people with a passionate, critical love -- came to be illiterate. And you may wonder how she remained so, even after she had led armies, conquered worlds, and ordered their libraries be catalogued and copied.
I am afraid I do not know the reason for this. It may be that the child Akbar was disobedient, and could not be stilled long enough to study. She was heard to say to her tutors that the letters were unruly: alif and meem unravelled like string in front of her eyes, and perhaps it was more difficult for her than the other children. After the wars were over, I suspect it was because she was ashamed of her lack. When she resolved that she must learn, for the sake of her people as well as herself, she asked that it might be kept a private matter. Birbal, who loved her well, arranged that it should be so.
(You must remember how young Akbar was then, and how prideful. In the dignity of her later years she read well but slowly, and would encourage the children of her navaratnas to come to the dais and lead her through the obfuscations of the court economists. But that is another story.)
The tutor that Birbal found was a brisk and kind woman. "Jahanpanah," she said, "we learn at any age."
She had taught grown men who had played truant during their schooling and gone on to regret it. She had taught soldiers who had spent their lives on Akbar's campaigns, and come home knowing only the scripts of other worlds. She had taught a woman whose father's house had been a petty tyranny, whose freedom to learn had come with her marriage. There were always reasons, which were not important. What was important was the student's application.
So Akbar settled down to her studies, and in due course alif and meem ceased to dance around the page and came obediently from her pen. On a day of rain, some months after Akbar had begun her lessons, she noticed that her teacher seemed listless.
"What troubles you, adhyapika-sahiba?" Akbar asked.
(Does it surprise you, that Akbar addressed her thus? Akbar accorded her advisers respect, and her teachers too.)
The teacher did not at first wish to speak of it, but the afternoon was cool and pleasant, and Akbar a willing listener. It seemed that there was to be a sitar recital in the darbar that day, given by a well-respected man, known throughout the kingdom for his talent. He was the brother of Akbar's tutor, and although she was pleased to see him perform to such acclaim, he brought to mind a secret sorrow. She had had talent of her own in her childhood, but she had been lazy about studying the instrument, and squandered her opportunity to play alongside him.
Akbar said, "Adhyapika-sahiba, we learn at any age."
After the lesson was over she went to Birbal and asked if someone might be found who could teach the sitar to a beginner, privately, with consideration for a long-ago regret.
Birbal said, "It shall be done, huzoor."
The darbar was full of musicians and those who loved music, and they directed Birbal to a man who had been a flagship musician during the campaigns, and who lived in a quiet retirement in Agra. He was happy to take Akbar's tutor as his pupil and teach her the music he loved.
Now, this man was a widower. His wife had died from a sudden illness soon after their return to Earth, and his grief had been all the more terrible for its being unexpected. When the first cloud of it had passed, he found that his ten-year-old son, who had been the apple of his mother's eye, now looked at his father as though he were a stranger. "A good boy," he told Birbal. "A good, obedient boy, who works hard at his studies. But I know nothing of him."
"What does he enjoy, this good boy of yours?" Birbal asked. "If you give him a little money to spend and a day free of study, what does he do?"
The sitar player did not know. He went home and gave his son a coin and said he should do with it as he pleased. He came back to Birbal to say he had seen his son and his friends on the curve of hillside above the palace, flying their kites in the spring breezes.
"Well, sahib," Birbal said, "we must teach you how to fly a pathang."
The sitar player agreed that perhaps this would bring him closer to his son, but he was apprehensive. How, he asked, does a man who is nearly forty years old, who was always consumed by his art and never by the joys of his schoolfriends, learn to unroll a string and catch a wind?
For once, it was Akbar who said, "It shall be done, my friend."
You will recall that Akbar had a son, Jahangir, who had been born on campaign. Back on Earth he was unruly, as Akbar herself had been, and more inclined towards playing carrom and roaming the hills than working at his lessons. Akbar had seen him flying kites above the battlements, and she meant to promise him some sweetmeat or trinket, if he would teach the sitar player how to do the same.
But then she remembered Jahangir's tutors had said he was shiftless, that he took no responsibility, and it occurred to her that to take responsibility one must have responsibility. She told him of the sitar player's son, her tutor's regrets, and though it troubled her to speak of it, her own illiteracy. "I owe this man a debt," she said. "You must discharge it for me."
Jahangir said, "Amma, I will try."
Birbal was one of Jahangir's tutors who believed he was lacking in application, but she trusted Akbar's judgement, and she was not wrong to do so. On breezy mornings when Birbal breakfasted with Akbar on the verandah, they would see Jahangir climbing up to the battlements with the sitar player, and from the voices carried in the wind they learned that Jahangir was a patient teacher.
"You see, Birbal," Akbar said. "I cannot teach him to read and write, nor to play the sitar. I cannot teach him geography or history or languages. I can teach him to take care of his people, and that only."
"It is not a little thing, huzoor," said Birbal.
After that Jahangir gave his tutors less trouble, and Akbar, too, studied hard. Reading remained a chore for her -- she always preferred to hear the poets recite and the musicians sing – but she could make her way through a dispatch from her frontiers, and through a column of figures, and was content. Among her musicians was her tutor, who struggled with her technique no matter how hard she practised, but she was persistent and Akbar liked to hear her.
Grief is a terrible thing, and it did not lift easily from the sitar player and his son. But they walked the hills together with their brightly-coloured kites, and it came to pass that they found contentment again.
And as you will have learned in school, dear reader, Jahangir became the fourth emperor of the greatest empire ever seen. But that, too, is another story.