Excerpt From Rushdie, Salman. “Languages of Truth.”
India, in the mid-sixteenth century. Just thirty-one years have passed since a fierce Timurid warlord, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babar of Ferghana in what we would now call Uzbekistan, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and possessor of a surprising literary gift, was unhoused from his native land and swept down from the northwest to establish, by force of arms, a new kingdom in Delhi and to write a magnificent autobiography, one of the first ever written in Asia. Just fourteen years have passed since that warlord’s less puissant son Humayun was deposed and fled into ignominious Persian exile, abandoning his infant son to be raised by an Afghan uncle. Just two years have elapsed since the fugitive’s victorious return and the reestablishment of his dynasty, and just one since the returned monarch fell down a flight of steps and died in a moment of bathetic slapstick, leaving his thirteen-year-old son, the son who barely knew him, to ascend his father’s precarious throne. What follows this period of near-perpetual upheaval, almost impossibly, is a time of political stability, economic prosperity, religious tolerance, cultural openness, the rule of law, and an artistic renaissance: the half-century-long reign of one of the most remarkable rulers the world has ever known. Jalaluddin Mohammed, known as “Akbar,” “the Great,” also called jahanpanah, the shelter of the world. In a portrait by one of Emperor Humayun’s Persian master artists, Abdus-Samad, the young Akbar is seen riding confidently in a bullock cart just before he became king. The kid was about to make quite a mark.
The second half of the sixteenth century was one of those exceptional periods, not unlike our own, when the whole world seemed to be changing rapidly, a “hinge moment” in history. The sixteenth century, perhaps unlike our own times, was also a hinge moment in the arts. Akbar’s reign coincided almost exactly with that of Queen Elizabeth I of England; he ascended to the throne a year and a bit before her and lived a couple of years longer. In Italy this was the time of the High Renaissance, of Michelangelo and Titian and the poetry of Ariosto. In Spain it was the time of Cervantes and the two parts of Don Quixote, and in Elizabethan England, of course, it was the age of Shakespeare. What else of world-changing note? Yes: Sometime in the 1560s, the graphite pencil was invented and was used, originally, for the marking of British sheep.
(The New World, I’m sorry to say, lags behind a little; there is not a great deal of what one might call brilliance there at this time. Francis Drake initiated the slave trade with America in 1562, the Roanoke colony was established in 1584 and vanished by 1590. There is not much else to report.) ...
...The West knew very little about the East then.
