Akbar
The Mughal emperor who conquered most of India and then tried to govern it by treating Hindus as citizens rather than subjects.
Akbar came to the Mughal throne in 1556 as a thirteen-year-old with one unstable province and a regent, and left it in 1605 as the ruler of nearly all of northern India and the richest monarch on earth. What makes him more than a successful conqueror is the settlement he built on top of the conquest. Akbar decided that a Muslim dynasty of Central Asian origin could not hold a subcontinent of Hindus by force alone, and he restructured the empire around that judgment. The policy had a name, sulh-i kul, universal peace or peace with all, and it was the most ambitious experiment in multi-religious government anywhere in the sixteenth-century world.
Building the machine
The military work came first. His regent Bairam Khan won the Second Battle of Panipat in November 1556 against the Hindu general Hemu, restoring a dynasty that had been in exile a decade earlier. Akbar pushed aside the regent at eighteen and then spent forty years campaigning: Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal, Kabul, Kashmir, Sindh, and the northern Deccan.
He held it together with administration, not just cavalry. The mansabdari system ranked every officer of the empire on a single numerical scale that set his pay and the number of horsemen he owed, converting a coalition of warlords into a graded imperial service. His finance minister Todar Mal, a Hindu who had learned the trade under the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri, measured cultivated land, classified soils, and set the state's demand from a ten-year average of local prices and yields. It was tax by survey rather than by extraction, and it funded everything else.
The most consequential appointments were the ones Akbar made across the religious line. He married a Rajput princess of Amber in 1562 and brought Rajput clans into the empire as commanders and governors rather than tributaries, letting them keep their lands, their faith, and their own troops. In 1563 he abolished the pilgrimage tax on Hindus, and in 1564 the jizya, the poll tax that Islamic law imposed on non-Muslims. Hindus rose to the top of the revenue service and the army.
The house of worship
From 1575 Akbar convened debates in the Ibadat Khana, the house of worship at his new capital Fatehpur Sikri, first among Muslim scholars and then, when they bored and irritated him with their factionalism, among Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Jesuit priests from Portuguese Goa. He was illiterate, probably dyslexic, and had everything read aloud to him. Out of these sessions came a 1579 decree making him the final arbiter of disputed religious questions in his realm, and in 1582 the Din-i Ilahi, a small elite order of personal discipleship built around the emperor himself.
The Din-i Ilahi is often described as Akbar founding a religion. It is better read as a court cult with perhaps a few dozen members that died with him. The durable innovation was not the new faith but the old tax he canceled and the offices he opened.
Why it mattered, and why it did not last
Akbar's grandson Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal on the wealth Akbar organized. His great-grandson Aurangzeb reversed the settlement, reimposing the jizya in 1679 and spending twenty-seven years grinding the Mughal army down in the Deccan against Hindu Maratha resistance he had helped create. Within fifty years of Aurangzeb's death the empire was a shell that the East India Company could pension off.
That sequence is why Akbar remains one of the most politically loaded figures in South Asia. Indian secular nationalists claim him as proof that religious pluralism is indigenous rather than a British or Western import. Hindu nationalists counter that he was a foreign conqueror with good manners. Pakistani textbooks tend to prefer Aurangzeb. Four centuries later, the argument about whether Akbar's bargain was Indian statecraft at its best or a ruler's vanity project is still a live argument about what India is.