A redoubt of cosmopolitanism – The Hindu

In an age when nationalism increasingly presents itself as grievance, and patriotism is confused with hostility towards difference, a question seeks attention. What kind of civilization is being invoked in the name of the nation? It is understandable that India must imagine its future with pride and not any rancour in its heart. But pride, if it is to transcend mere posturing, must be anchored in memories that unsettle the prevailing ethos of ethnic politics rather than pander to the self‑flattering narratives of present day India.

During my recent visit to Fatehpur Sikri, I felt this unsettling quality of the past’s proximity, an inescapable sensation manifested palpably in a Proustian reverie of my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. That was the halcyon era, seemingly untainted by the hardened fault lines of communal discord or the political grammars of difference that would later inscribe themselves upon our social fabric. In that early in-between space, childhood existed before the world began to demand an explanation of sectarian consciousness.

As Walter Benjamin might suggest, Fatehpur Sikri’s ruins evoked for me a “Messianic cessation of happening”, a jolt that arrests linear time, allowing fragments of the past to erupt into the present. My visit became an act of “brushing history against the grain,” thereby interrupting the present narrative of division through childhood memories of times when communal harmony was not a utopian ideal but a given reality.

In an age when Europe was still inching toward what Francis Bacon would later call “the advancement of learning,” Fatehpur Sikri had already become a living laboratory of intellectual cosmopolitanism. At the heart of Fatehpur Sikri stands the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship. Standing there in the silence of a cold winter morning, I could visualize the Sunni and Shia theologians debating alongside Hindu pundits, Jain monks, Zoroastrians, and Jesuit priests, the encounters sustained in a form of brainstorming. Akbar was not seeking a final synthesis, nor endeavouring to declare authority as the final truth, but expose his rule itself to debate. Scholars, missionaries, theologians, Central Asian mystics, artists, architects and philosophers crossed linguistic and civilizational frontiers to gather at his court, an approach that we later see Rabindranath Tagore introducing in Shantiniketen.

The Ibadat Khana was not merely a hall of worship but a theatre of ideas, where translation, disputation, and philosophical encounter unfolded in real time. One is reminded of Bacon’s utopian vision in New Atlantis, the ship that sails across oceans gathering knowledge from distant lands, or even of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, when defeat at sea did not prevent him from carrying scientists, engineers, astronomers and archaeologists up the Nile, inadvertently laying the foundations of Egyptology. Fatehpur Sikri belongs to that larger genealogy of experimental cosmopolitan spaces, a court that imagined empire not simply as territorial dominion, but as the orchestration of knowledge, language and belief across borders.

Commonly described as a “ghost city,” abandoned for logistical reasons, it would be a mistake to consider Fatehpur Sikri as an architectural wonder of a past rather than of political thought. What was attempted here in the sixteenth century was not simply imperial administration, but a civilizational argument about power, belief, and difference. The city matters not because it failed, but because of what it dared to imagine and experiment.

From this practice emerged Sulh-i-Kul or “peace with all”, not as a sentimental ethic, but as a principle of governance. It rejected the assumption, now taken almost for granted, that political stability requires cultural uniformity. In Akbar’s imagination, power was strong enough to survive doubt which, to him, was not an administrative inconvenience but a condition of ethical rule.

This confidence is precisely what contemporary nationalism lacks. Across democracies today, the authoritarian turn is overtly proclaimed, but is imperceptibly allowed to proceed through the narrow narratives of ultra-nationalism and belonging. Race, religion, and culture are thereby mobilised as instruments of political consolidation. While dissent is made out to be disloyalty, the minorities are deemed to be demographic threats.

Standing in the midst of such a space, I could feel deep within me its philosophical essence resonate with other subcontinental traditions that resisted structures of centralized authority. Sikh thought, emerging soon after, made a decisive break by transferring sovereignty from rulers and lineages to the Word. With the declaration of the Guru Granth Sahib as the eternal Guru, authority was removed from charisma, bloodline, and coercion. Truth was placed beyond capture. The Bhakti movement similarly unsettled caste and religious hierarchies through devotion that refused social arrogance. Poets like Kabir dismantled Hindu–Muslim binaries with disarming clarity, insisting that spiritual truth dissolves identity pride. Sufi traditions, with their emphasis on humility and inward ethics, offered another sustained resistance to punitive religion. What unites these traditions is a refusal of the finality of interpretation, of dominance, of the claim that power alone can arbitrate truth. The tyranny of thought stood out rightly rejected.

Fatehpur Sikri therefore, represents power as a process of dialogue. The Diwan-i-Khas, with its central pillar and radiating paths, suggests that multiple perspectives can emerge from a shared space without needing uniformity. To remember Fatehpur Sikri today is for me a political act, challenging the claim that equality, pluralism, and human rights are embedded in our own civilizational experiments, articulated long before modern constitutionalism gave them legal form. The struggle for equality gains strength, not weakness, when anchored in such memory.

My visit to Fatehpur Sikri underscored a crucial question: can a civilisation secure in its identity afford to engage in dialogue, debate, and evolution toward a more humane system? The answer will shape not only the future of pluralism but also the trajectory of democracy itself.

shelleywalia@gmail.com

Published – March 22, 2026 07:28 pm IST