In the last four episodes, you've heard about three very similar experiments that three different monarchs in three very different societies are rumoured to have conducted. In each one, the ruler arranged for multiple children to be raised from birth in such a way that for the first few years of their lives they did not hear any language – with the goal of determining which language they would speak by default. And now for the fourth and final of these, from another ruler in yet another very different civilisation.

We left off on the island of Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, between Edinburgh and Fife, where James IV, the King of Scotland, was alleged to have had two babies raised in isolation by a mute wetnurse, and, if the rumours reported by the chronicler Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie are to be believed, they ended up speaking Hebrew. From here to the next destination, the west-to-east distance is enough that the difference between a great circle route and a constant bearing is very significant, meaning that rather than south-east, the shortest route begins going pretty much due east, straight out of the Firth of Forth into the North Sea, and then cutting across Denmark and the Southern tip of Sweden into the Baltic.

Only here does the route begin to bend southwards. We reach the sandy shore of Lithuania, just north of the Curonian Lagoon, and then cross vast thick forests, passing the occasional wooden, palisaded town, or onion-domed monastery, and then entering the open skies of the Steppe. We cross the huge, sluggish Volga, and the landscape becomes more and more arid. The green of the Steppe becoming brown semi-desert and then desert. We pass the northeastern tip of the Caspian Sea, with dazzling white patches of salt decorating the sand, and then the southern edge of the Aral Sea, at the time still a huge expanse of salt water. We cross the lush delta of the Amu Darya, which thins to a small strip of fertile land along the river, and over the great Silk Road oasis city of Bukhara, before the snow-covered Hindu Kush, north of Kabul, with colossal, cloud-piercing peaks on the left, and rugged Afghan valleys on the right. And then the mountains fall away to the fertile plains of the Indus, green and abundant. We pass the great city of Lahore, and then Delhi, and then follow the Yamuna river south-east, to Fatehpur Sikri, the newly-built capital of the Mughal Emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar.

Akbar the Great, as he is now, somewhat tautologically, known, was born in 1542 in Umarkot Fort in Sindh, now in Southeastern Pakistan. He was the son of the Mughal Emperor Humayun, and the Grandson of the first Mughal Emperor, Babur. Babur was a descendant of Genghis Khan via Timur, and he had conquered Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India after his kingdoms in Samarkand and Fergana in present-day Uzbekistan were conquered by the Uzbeks. At the time of Akbar's birth, Humayun was living in exile after the Mughal Empire was defeated by the Pashtun Sher Shah Suri, and Akbar would mostly grow up in Kabul, which remained under Mughal control. Humayun would reconquer much of his former domain in Northern India. He retook Delhi in 1555, and died shortly afterwards, to be succeeded by a 12-year-old Akbar. The vizier Bairam Khan would serve as Akbar's regent until 1560, when Akbar dismissed him after two separate incidents where he had Akbar's elephant trainers executed.

Bairam, with all the loyalty we have come to expect of a man with the title of 'vizier', rebelled against Akbar and was defeated. Within a year, he had been stabbed to death on the way to Mecca.

The Mughal Empire's resurgence, that had begun under Humayun, and been continued during Bairam Khan's regency, would continue further under Akbar's rule. 

Akbar spent the 1560s expanding his empire through central India, and dealing with his rebellious brother, the ruler of Afghanistan. He conquered the Malwa Sultanate in present-day Madhya Pradesh in 1561, and the Garha Kingdom to its east in 1564. Chittor fort in present-day Rajasthan, in Northwest India, the Capital of the Hindu Rajput Mewar Kingdom, fell in 1568, and its surviving inhabitants were massacred and had their heads displayed at strategic locations in the area. The conquest of Gujarat was complete in 1574, allowing easy access by sea to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and Bengal in far-eastern India was conquered from its Afghan rulers in 1575.  In the 1580s the Empire expanded Northwards, into the green mountains of Kashmir, and in the 1590s it went South, expanding into the Deccan,  in the middle of India, conquering it from various smaller Muslim sultanates. By his death in 1605, Akbar's empire controlled all but the southernmost parts of the Indian Subcontinent, extending from the Helmand river of Afghanistan in the West to the mouths of the Ganges, in present-day Bangladesh, in the east, and from the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains in the North to the Deccan Plateau in the South. 

Of course, these conquests meant Akbar was ruling over a huge and diverse population. He was a Muslim, but the majority of his subjects were Hindus, including the Rajputs, powerful Hindu noble families who could make your empire very difficult to hold together unless you stayed on decent terms with them.

Akbar dealt with the religious diversity of his Kingdom through tolerance, something that has become a centrepiece of his historical reputation. He abolished the Jizya, a tax that historically had to be paid by non-Muslims living in many Muslim countries. He allowed Hindus to pray in public. He allowed Hindus forcibly converted to Islam under previous Muslim rulers to openly convert back to Hinduism.  His tolerance went further still though, beyond the usual tolerance exhibited by a monarch from a minority religion who avoids persecuting the majority of his subjects purely on grounds of practicality, and Akbar in fact took a great interest in the various religions of his subjects. He celebrated Hindu festivals. He sponsored translations of Hindu scriptures into Persian, the language of the Mughal court. He carefully scrutinised the tax-exempt land grants his predecessors had granted to Muslim scholars, and confiscated the ones that he judged had been obtained fraudulently, instituting a more rigorous system of applying for these land grants, where Hindu and Zoroastrian religious leaders were also able to benefit. He even went as far as having a Hindu wife.

Mariam-uz-Zamani, the daughter of a powerful Rajput Raja, was Akbar's favourite of his wives. It was by no means unusual in the early modern period for Muslim rulers to marry non-Muslim women (For example, the Ottoman Sultans mostly married Christians from the Balkans and the Caucasus). What was unusual about Mariam was that she never converted to Islam. Generally, wives of Muslim rulers would have to convert, but Mariam-uz-Zamani continued to be a completely openly practising Hindu.

And it wasn't just Hinduism he was interested in, either. Akbar's conquests had given the Mughal Empire access to the Sea at the Arabian Sea port of Surat, at a time when European countries were establishing closer contact with India, and Portugal in particular was trying to dominate the Indian Ocean, and maintained a colony at Goa (which they retained until 1961), a relatively short trip south along the coast from Surat. This Portuguese presence ended up introducing various things to Indian culture over the years – potatoes, tomatoes, chillies (which caught on in Indian food in a way they never really did in European food), the dish vindaloo (which ultimately derives from the Portuguese dish carne de vinha d'alhos, or pork with a wine and garlic marinade), and most importantly for these purposes, the Portuguese brought Catholicism. The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, whose ultimate goal was to convert the entire world to their religion, were dispatching missionaries just about everywhere, and India was no exception.

Like Hinduism, Akbar took a great interest in Catholicism, too, and Jesuit missionaries became likewise part of the pluralist milieu of his court, with one of them, the Catalan Antoni de Montserrat, even employed as his son's tutor.

In 1571, Akbar had moved his capital out of Agra to a small town a few miles to the south, by the name of Sikri. He renamed the town Fatehpur Sikri  - Sikri, the City of Victory.  He built a splendid mosque here, to house the tomb of Salim Chishti, a local Sufi mystic with whom Akbar had a particularly close relationship. The mosque, built in the same local red sandstone as the better-known Red Fort of Agra that would be built by Akbar's grandson Shah Jahan, is a masterpiece of Indo-Islamic architecture, incorporating elements brought from the Persian-influenced Central Asian background of the Mughals, and influences from Hindu religious architecture. And in 1575, Akbar founded an institution known as Ibadat Khana, the "House of Worship", in his new capital.

Originally, it was a space for Muslim scholars to debate, often on topics such as the accuracy of the Quran, that were controversial to the point of being scandalous. The Muslims of Akbar's court were diverse enough on their own, with hardline Sunni fundamentalists who wanted the state to be run strictly according to Sharia law, Sufis with a more mystical approach to spirituality, Shi'ites, who had been targets of persecution under earlier Sunni Muslim rulers, and the Millenarian Mahdavi sect, who believed that the 1000th anniversary of Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Medina (due on September 27, 1592), would be marked by the resurrection of Muhammad. Eventually, after the debates between the Muslims became too heated for his liking, he opened the space up to intellectuals from all religions – Sunni and Shia Muslims, Hindu and Jain scholars, Buddhists from Tibet, Zoroastrian Parsis, Sikhs, whose religion was then only a few decades old, Catholic Jesuit missionaries, mostly from Spain and Portugal, and there even appear to have been representatives from Mughal India's small and poorly-attested Jewish community. 

Akbar continued pissing off the Muslim clerics at his court and, in 1579, when he declared himself to be the supreme authority over matters of religion in the Mughal Empire, they finally snapped and rebelled. The rebellion posed a serious threat, but Akbar saw it off, eventually giving the rebel leaders jobs as Mughal representatives in Mecca, a very safe distance from Akbar's court. 
 
Akbar's religious views became increasingly syncretic and detached from mainstream Islam, and his pluralistic worldview and passion for religious inquiry are expressed in a letter to King Philip II of Spain, that he wrote (or presumably dictated, since he was illiterate) in 1582, asking for a Persian translation of the Bible. 

"As most men are fettered by the bonds of tradition, and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers ancestors, relatives and acquaintances, every one continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated, thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. Therefore we associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions, and thus derive profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations."

And bear in mind, this is Spain in the age of the Inquisition, an exceptionally intolerant society even by the standards of the time, where Akbar's praise of religious pluralism must have seemed very strange. That said, you get the impression that the Jesuits thought this attitude was just a step on the way to outright converting to Catholicism, with them writing very excitedly about the reverence he seemed to show for the Bible when they'd given him a copy in four languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Chaldean) two years earlier.

1582 was also the year when Akbar's rejection of mainstream Islamic orthodoxy reached a new height, and he announced the founding of what's often described as a new religion (although there's controversy about whether it really was a new religion or if it was more of an extremely idiosyncratic interpretation of Islam). Akbar called his movement Tawhid e-Ilahi, 'the oneness of God', although it's now better known as Din e-Ilahi, or 'the doctrine of God'. It incorporated elements from just about all the religions represented at the Ibadat Khana. There was a broad overall base of Sufi-inspired spirituality, Like Hindu Brahmins, Jains and Buddhist monks, the adherents of the Doctrine of God followed a code of non-violence and vegetarianism. It was not mandatory to be celibate, like a Jesuit friar, but celibacy was held in high esteem. As in Zoroastrianism, fire and the Sun were taken as sacred symbols, representing the pure light of God. This movement only attracted a total of 17 followers, all of them affiliated to Akbar's court, and it fizzled out in the years after Akbar's death, but it was quite extraordinary for the time.

In some respects, Akbar seems like a similar figure to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, the 13th-century King of Sicily who I talked about in the second episode of this miniseries. Both had very little respect for the religious orthodoxy that was expected of them, and both really pissed off religious authorities with their antics. You kind of get the impression that both of them saw themselves as far too important to have religious leaders telling them what to do. But on the other hand, the impression I got of Frederick is that he just didn't really care about religion very much, whereas that's the opposite of the impression I get of Akbar. Akbar was absolutely obsessed with religions, and trying to figure out how they all worked and what the best bits of all of them were.

And I should point out here that Akbar was doing all of this religious enquiry while being completely illiterate. I've seen quite a few modern sources suggest he might have been dyslexic, and that's very plausible. I guess that's part of why this style of learning by oral discussion must have appealed to him so much. 

Of course, as fascinating a historical figure as Akbar the Great is, the reason we're talking about him here, as you might have guessed, is that there are reports that he, like Psamtik, and Frederick II, and James IV, had children raised without exposure to language in order to find out what language they would end up speaking. This experiment stands out from the others, though, in that there are multiple contemporary accounts. For Psamtik we only had Herodotus, for Frederick we only had Salimbene, and for James only Pitscottie, but for Akbar's experiment there are three separate accounts of the same event, albeit that differ in the details.

First, the Akbarnama, the "Book of Akbar", Akbar's authorised biography, written by the historian Abul Fazl at the request of Akbar himself. 

"One of the occurrences was the testing of the silent of speech. There was a great meeting, and every kind of enlightenment was discussed. In the 24th Divine year (1578, the 24th year of Akbar's reign), His Majesty said that speech came to every tribe from hearing, and that each remembered from another from the beginning of existence. If they arranged that human speech did not reach them, they certainly would not have the power of speech. If the fountain of speech bubbled over in one of them, he would regard this as Divine speech, and accept it as such. As some who heard this appeared to deny it, he, in order to convince them, had a serai built in a place which civilized sounds did not reach. The newly born were put into that place of experience, and honest and active guards were put over them. For a time tongue-tied wet-nurses were admitted there. As they had closed the door of speech, the place was commonly called the Gang Mahal (the dumb-house). On the 9th August 1582 he went out to hunt. That night he stayed in Faizabad, and next day he went with a few special attendants to the house of experiment. No cry came from that house of silence, nor was any speech hear there. In spite of their four years they had no part of the talisman of speech, and nothing came out except the noise of the dumb. What the wise Sovereign had understood several years before was on this day impressed on the hearts of the formalists and the superficial. This became a source of instruction to crowds of men.  

His Majesty said, 'Though my words were proved, they still are saying the same things with a tongueless tongue. The world is a miserable abode of sceptics. To shut the lips is really to indulge in garrulity. They have hamstrung the camel of the Why and Wherefore, and have closed the gate of speech with iron walls.

'Enough, Nizami, be silent of discourse,
Why speak to a world with cotton in its ears,
Shut your demonstrations into a narrow phial,
Put them all in a phial and place a stone thereon.'"

Next up, from an opposite perspective, there's a history by the orthodox Sunni Muslim writer Abd al-Qadir Badayuni, who had earlier produced Persian translations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, but had nonetheless regarded Akbar as an impious heretic. This history is extremely hostile to Akbar, and was kept secret until after his death in 1605. The account is as follows:

"At this time they brought a man to Court, who had no ears nor any trace of the orifices of the ear. In spite of this he heard everything that was said to him, though the place of the ears was quite level. And in this year, in order to verify the circumstances of this case, an order was issued that several suckling infants should be kept in a secluded place far from habitations, where they should not hear a word spoken. Well-disciplined nurses were to be placed over them, who were to refrain from giving them any instructions in speaking, so as to test the accuracy of the tradition which says: 'Every one that is born is born with a natural tendency', by ascertaining what religion and sect these infants would incline to and above all what creed they would repeat. To carry out this order about twenty sucklings were taken from their mothers, for a consideration in money, and were placed in an empty house, which got the name of 'Dumb-house'. After three or four years they all turned out dumb and the appellation of the place turned out prophetic. Many of these sucklings became the nurselings of mother earth:

My mother is earth, and I am a suckling,
The propensity of children for their mother is strange,
Soon will it be that resting from trouble
I shall fall drunk with sleep on my mother's bosom."		

The third account is from the Spanish Jesuit missionary Jeronimo Xavier, who Akbar invited to his court in 1598, to teach him about Catholicism. Xavier reports a conversation he had with the emperor, where the Emperor himself recounted the experiment: 
"He told me that nearly 20 years ago he had 30 children shut up before they could speak, and put guards over them so that the nurses might not teach them their language. His object was to see what language they would talk when they grew older. He was resolved to follow the laws and customs of the country whose language was that spoken by the children. But his endeavours were a failure, for none of the children came to speak distinctly. Wherefore at this time he allowed no law but his own."

This story sounds like the sort of thing that would be made up, and I'd love for it to be made up. If it was just Badayuni, we could say it's like Frederick and Salimbene, and Badayuni, who hated Akbar, was repeating lurid gossip that associated his idiosyncratic religious views with a sort of general moral depravity. The problem, though, is that for the first time in this miniseries we've got three sources, from different perspectives – one favourable, one hostile and presumably the Jesuit was reasonably neutral. And the Jesuit, who I can't see as having any particular reason to lie, says that Akbar himself told him that he did it. If it was just a rumour, then it was something Akbar was clearly fine with people thinking he did, even to the point of spreading the rumour himself. 

And the accounts are basically in agreement on most of what happened, too. Xavier and Abul Fazl even agree that it took place in 1578. The most important difference is the hypothesis. Abul Fazl says Akbar was trying to prove that language is learned by hearing it, in other words that there is no innate language, and was proven right when the babies, not hearing any language that they could learn from, turned out unable to speak. Xavier says that Akbar said that he was trying to find out what language they would speak. In this case his assumption that they would speak some language was proven wrong. Badayuni says the experiment had nothing to do with language, and Akbar was trying to find out what religion they would follow (and I'm not sure what it was supposed to demonstrate about the guy with no ears). The assumption that they would follow a particular religion innately seems to me even weirder than the assumption that they'd speak a particular language innately, but an investigation into religion is very much in keeping with what we know of Akbar's interests.  

I like the way Abul Fazl says Akbar was proven right and Badayuni says he was proven wrong. It's like if we had a contemporary report from Canute's best friend saying he was making a pious and humble statement about how, despite how much everyone was understandably in awe of his intelligence and good looks, he still couldn't stop the tide coming in, and another from a guy who hated his guts saying he was trying to prove that he could stop the tide coming in only to be left bedraggled and humiliated when it did anyway, but they both agree that Canute went to the beach when the tide was coming in and ended up getting wet. Interestingly though, Akbar's own account, as retold by Xavier, is in agreement with Badayuni, that he was trying to find out what language they would speak, and was unsuccessful when they didn't speak any language at all.

Apart from the hypothesis, the only disagreement about the actual method is on fairly minor details. Abul Fazl says the nurses were actually mute, whereas Badayuni and Xavier say they were just under strict orders, enforced by guards, not to talk to the babies. Also, another point in favour of the reliability of the three sources is that they're actually from people at Akbar's court who'd met him. Herodotus was writing 200-odd years after Psamtik's reign. Pitscottie's Historie and Chronicles of Scotland were published over 60 years after James IV's death and over 80 years after the experiment was supposed to have taken place. Salimbene was contemporary with Frederick II, but there's no evidence he ever actually interacted with him. On the other hand, here we have three people who regularly conversed with Akbar, one of them writing a book that Akbar himself actually commissioned, all saying this happened. 

We can even put together a pretty good account, about as detailed as the accounts of the other experiments, only using things the two historians both agree on. What we have is:

"In the late 1570s, Akbar conducted an experiment in which he arranged for some babies to be raised in a building called the "gang mahal", or "dumb-house", where they were looked after by nurses who didn't speak to them. After 3 or 4 years, the children turned out to be unable to speak."

The next thing to do is to look at what the authors were trying to say about Akbar by writing about this experiment, and particularly what else they were writing about in the bit where they included it.

In the Akbarnama, the story follows immediately from an account of how, when the Emperor was celebrating his birthday with his courtiers by a reservoir above Fatehpur Sikri, the dam burst. Abul Fazl briefly mentions how 

"Many persons of the lower rank suffered loss, and many houses of the common people were carried away by the flood", 

before moving quickly on to what he clearly considers to be the important part of the story, which is that Akbar, and all but one of his entourage, were fine, demonstrating the divine favour that the emperor enjoyed. Every lunar year, on the Emperor's birthday in the lunar calendar, the Mughal empire already had a custom of weighing the emperor against various commodities, and then distributing the emperor's weight in each commodity to the poor, and Abul Fazl describes how the Emperor decided to thank God that nobody important was harmed in the flood by holding a second Akbar-weighing ceremony on his solar birthday, making for two or occasionally three such ceremonies per solar year.

This doesn't particularly have that much obviously to do with the language experiment, except in that it's a pretty good example of just how glowing an account of Akbar's life the Akbarnama is (which is hardly surprising for a biography that Akbar personally commissioned), and also of how astute Akbar was when it came to his public image. This could easily have been a massive propaganda coup for the Sunni hardliners at Akbar's court who saw him as a dangerous heretic. A dam bursting at Akbar's birthday party looks on the face of it like a sign of extreme divine disapproval, but Akbar was able to flip the narrative on its head. Now the story wasn't "a dam burst at Akbar's birthday party", but "Akbar survived a dam bursting at his birthday party". 

It looks like Abul Fazl's doing a similar thing for Akbar with the experiment. Badayuni and Xavier both tell us a version of the story where Akbar attempted to carry out an experiment that ended in total failure. Abul Fazl, on the other hand, tells us a version where the result of the experiment is exactly the same, but in this case Akbar had anticipated it and was conclusively proven right.

Badayuni brings up the experiment immediately after a fairly routine description of Akbar imprisoning his finance minister, appointing a replacement, and appointing as the replacement's assistant a man who he describes as 

"A heart-troubler, unlucky, preposterous, owl-like, rejected of God and mankind".
But before that, he's describing how people he calls
	
"low and mean fellows, who pretended to be learned, but were in reality fools"

had been showing Akbar various astrological and numerological prophecies claiming that the Mahdi, a messianic figure in Islam, particularly important in the Twelver branch of Shi'a Islam (and remember Badayuni was very emphatically a Sunni Muslim, and Akbar too was at least supposed to be), would appear in the year 989 or 990 Hijri (that is, 990 years of the Islamic lunar calendar since Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Medina, i.e. 1582, in 2-3 years' time), and that he would abolish all the distinctions between Muslim and Hindu sects.  Of course, according to Badayuni:

"All this made the Emperor the more inclined to claim the dignity of a prophet, perhaps I should say, the dignity of something else."

The point being, that Badayuni's description of the experiment comes while he's accusing Akbar of blasphemous and heretical self-aggrandisement, and even of attempting to replace genuine Islam with an idolatrous personality cult around himself. The way Badayuni takes Akbar's experiment as focused on the innate religion of the children, rather than their language, could suggest he's treating it as an absurd example of the Emperor's religious deviance, that of course ends in failure. The poetic description of the deaths of several of the experimental subjects, and the mention of mothers, presumably either faced by extreme poverty or threats of punishment, selling their newborn babies to the Emperor, serves to emphasise the cruelty of the experiment in a way that the account in the Akbarnama obviously doesn't, and in some respects the whole thing has similar vibes to Salimbene's description of Frederick II's experiment, that I covered in the second episode of this miniseries.

Indeed, it's interesting to note that Akbar himself doesn't seem to have thought there was anything morally wrong with doing this experiment. Abul Fazl, whose Akbarnama contains nothing but praise for Akbar, very matter-of-factly remarks that he did this (although Abul Fazl doesn't say explicitly where the emperor got the children from, it's not much of a reach to assumethat he must have got them from somewhere). Herodotus doesn't say anything condemnatory about Psamtik's experiment either. Nor does Pitscottie with James IV, although Pitscottie's writing style is so weird that I don't think we can read that much into it.

In fact, the only other author who does seem to regard the very act of conducting this experiment as any kind of stain on the reputation of the monarch in question is Salimbene.

I wonder how much of this seeming difference in moral attitudes is a product of the configurations of these different societies. The society in which Salimbene was writing was not really a slave society. It's shockingly hard to find information about it, but as far as I can tell slavery existed a bit in High Medieval Italy, particularly through involvement in the Mediterranean Slave Trade dominated by the Islamic world, but slaves were a small fraction of the population, enslaving Christians was certainly illegal, and in 13th century Sicily I don't think it would have been at all straightforward even for the Holy Roman Emperor to just acquire some babies by means that people at the time would have thought of as legitimate. 

Herodotus, though, was an Ancient Greek by language and culture, born in the Achaemenid Persian Empire, living between Greek and Persian civilisations, and in this case writing about Ancient Egypt – three civilisations in which slavery was widespread and accepted as a natural part of how things worked. The same is true of the Mughal Empire. Parents in Mughal India selling their children as slaves was something that happened, presumably in most cases as a last resort where the alternative was both the parents and children dying of starvation. 

Akbar himself, interestingly enough, seems to have been broadly opposed to slavery, and taken steps to limit it. Early in his reign, he banned his army from enslaving civilian relatives of enemy soldiers, which had been a normal practice up to that point. Not long afterwards, he went so far as banning the practice of enslavement altogether, and the buying and selling of enslaved Indians, although slaves could still be imported from abroad. Enforcement though, seems to have been patchy at best, and during famines, faced with the prospect of starvation, parents are known to have sold their children into slavery even while it was theoretically illegal. And in 1594, Akbar formally acknowledged this practice and decreed that in these cases the parents had a right to buy their children back for the same price they were originally paid.

In 1582, almost 20 years after banning the sale of slaves, Akbar freed the thousands of slaves owned by his own court, making them paid employees, officially free to leave if they wanted (although how much freedom they actually had in practice is unclear). Up to that point, though, including when the experiment is said to have taken place, there were many enslaved people working at the Mughal court, which would have provided Akbar with a completely legal (if, by our standards, ethically monstrous) way of obtaining experimental subjects. Buying children, though, as Badayuni accuses Akbar of doing, would have been illegal under Akbar's own law, and a law that Badayuni thoroughly supported. 

Now for the Jesuit. Jeronimo Xavier was a great-nephew of Saint Francis Xavier, the founder of the Jesuit order. He'd been dispatched to India in 1581, at the age of 32, and spent 14 years rising through the ranks of the Jesuits in Portuguese India, spending time both in Goa and in Kochin, another Portuguese colony further down the West coast in Kerala. In 1595, Akbar the Great asked for some more Jesuits to discuss Christianity, and the Jesuits of Goa sent Xavier and two other Jesuits north to Lahore, where Akbar had moved his court to have easier access to his troublesome Central Asian frontier.

The Emperor welcomed the missionaries, accommodating them in his palace and inviting them to come with him on military campaigns. As always, he seems to have been fascinated by learning about Catholicism, and Xavier, presumably still learning Persian, debated with him about topics such as the divinity of Christ, which appeared to be a particular sticking point, and Xavier writes that the Emperor's son, Prince Salim, seemed particularly receptive to Christianity, although the requirement of monogamy was an insurmountable hurdle for a man with as many wives as he had. By 1602, Xavier's Persian was good enough that he completed a book in it, commissioned by Akbar, explaining the life of Christ, and then another arguing for the superiority of Christianity over Islam.

The letter where Xavier describes the experiment starts by describing his visit to Kashmir with Prince Salim, and a famine he witnessed there, and he writes about how enthusiastic Salim was about Christianity (except the monogamy), and then he gets to describing Akbar. He's quite complimentary, detailing his passion for debate about religion. Xavier describes conclusively winning a debate with one of Akbar's courtiers about the question of whether God could have a son, and I'll directly quote the bit of the letter immediately before the experiment, which I think is an interesting insight into Akbar's character as much as anything else:

"On the fourth day of the moon, musical instruments, in which he much delights, were brought in, and also some images and among them the likeness of the sun which he worships each day at dawn. But thinking that I might object that the sun was not God, but only a created thing and the work of God, he ordered it to be removed, and straight-way the idol vanished. There was then brought in the likeness of our Saviour bound to a pillar, and this he placed on his head as a sign of reverence and worship, (a thing which he did not not do to the image of the sun). He took pleasure in hearing the narratives of the conversions of St. Paul and Constantine the Great."

So on the whole, I don't think it seems like Xavier has much of an angle here. Akbar comes across seeming basically decent, if a bit weird. Akbar's interest in Christianity comes across very well, but I don't think there's anything to suggest Xavier has any reason to make up the bit about the experiment.

Remember, though, that Xavier's account isn't just Xavier's account. It's Xavier's account of Akbar's account. This is the first of these four experiments where we actually might have the experimenter himself telling us what he did and exactly why he did it. But Akbar had an agenda too. Like Abul Fazl, Akbar himself presumably also had an interest in making Akbar look good, and making his decisions look justified. That's why he hired Abul Fazl to write the Akbarnama, after all. And notice here that Akbar himself gives us a third account of what point the experiment made.

Xavier says that Akbar took his experiment's failure to reach a result as justification for following "no laws but his own", and bear in mind that in 1579, the year after the experiment, Akbar had declared himself to be the Caliph of Islam, the supreme religious authority of the entire Islamic world, claiming supremacy in religious matters over the Ottoman Sultan, who was much more widely accepted as Caliph, and also over the religious leaders in his own empire. I think this looks similar to the thing with the dam bursting at Akbar's birthday party. To me, this looks a lot like another case of Akbar taking something that could have been an embarrassing failure and spinning it masterfully into a piece of propaganda in his favour. Although Akbar and Abul Fazl could have done a better job of coordinating their spin. The fact that they've both tried to spin the same event in mutually contradictory ways kind of gives the game away.

So what we've got is pretty convincing evidence that the experiment happened, and that the result was that the children didn't speak any language at all. We've got three different sources from people with different agendas, all of whom were based at Akbar's court and personally knew the Emperor. And they agree on most of the important stuff about the method and the results. What's less clear, though, is what exactly the experiment was trying to prove. There we've got a tangled mess of conflicting propaganda. Abul Fazl says Akbar was trying to prove language was learned purely by hearing, rather than known innately, and was proven right when babies without hearing any language they could learn from failed to speak any language. Akbar himself, according to Xavier, says he was trying to find out what language the children would speak so he knew which country's laws he should follow, and the fact that they didn't speak any language at all was a sign that he could just do whatever he wanted. And Badayuni says he was trying to find out what religion they would follow, so he could abandon Islam in favour of that religion, and he failed miserably when they couldn't speak to tell him what the true religion was.

And that's where I'll leave it for now. Next time, likely the last episode in this miniseries, we'll look at the question of where Akbar got the idea from. With Frederick II and James IV, it's plausible that both of them knew about the story of Psamtik's experiment, told by Herodotus. With Akbar though, that's much less likely, leaving this question open and fascinating. 

That's all for now. You've been listening to Science: A Peculiar History. You can find the podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or most places you can get podcasts. Remember to give the podcast good ratings and reviews (although if you really want to give a bad review there's not much I can do to stop you). Remember to follow the Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Twitter. You can go to the website, scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, to find episode transcripts, and pictures and sources for the earlier episodes (I'm gradually adding them, whenever I get round to it, in chronological order). If you want to get in touch with any questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions, you can use any of the podcast's social media channels, or the contact form on the website, or email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk.

Come back next time, where I'll attempt to address the question of why Akbar might have thought of doing this experiment, and potentially to finish off the miniseries.