Akbar: The Great Mughal is an instructive retelling of the emperor's life

This vivid retelling of Mughal emperor Akbar's life is both timely and instructive

Jacob Burckhardt, the great historian of the Renaissance, once observed, “History is what one age finds worthy of note in another.” For many of us living in India today there is a compulsion to hark back to Akbar and how he ruled India in the second half of the 16th century, and to some of the values he represented. Ira Mukhoty’s extraordinarily vivid retelling of Akbar’s life and times is, thus, extremely timely and instructive.

Akbar was by any reckoning an unusual monarch. He was probably illiterate — he may have been dyslexic — but he was profoundly interested in