Emperor Akbar, Dyslexia, and Neurodivergence in Mughal India
Dr Hadi Baghaei-Abchooyeh, Postgraduate Research Supervisor and Director of Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David
Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605), the third Mughal emperor, grew up in circumstances that offered little continuity for a conventional education. His childhood was shaped by warfare, displacement, dynastic insecurity, and interrupted attempts at formal instruction, and he appears never to have mastered conventional reading and writing. The contrast with his later life is striking, since Akbar presided over one of the most intellectually ambitious courts of the sixteenth century, surrounding himself with historians, theologians, poets, translators, and artists. Abu’l-Fazl’s Akbarnama, the fullest courtly account of his life, records this uneven educational history without treating it simply as a deficiency. The Jesuit Antonio Monserrate gives the contrast a more personal dimension, describing a ruler who could not read or write conventionally yet possessed excellent judgement and a remarkable memory. Akbar nevertheless participated deeply in the world of books, relying on others to read to him while engaging closely with what he heard. His difficulty with literacy therefore did not exclude him from textual culture; instead, it shaped the particular way in which he participated in it.
Akbar’s court became a significant site of religious and cultural exchange among the many communities of the Mughal Empire over which he ruled. He assembled an imperial library containing thousands of manuscripts and commissioned Sanskrit works to be translated into Persian, most famously the Mahabharata as the Razmnama. These translation projects depended on collaboration within the court, where manuscripts were produced and illustrated while their contents circulated through reading aloud, discussion, and recitation. A comparable openness shaped Akbar’s religious life, as encounters between different traditions increasingly became part of the intellectual culture surrounding the emperor. Discussions at the Ibadat Khana, initially dominated by Muslim scholars, later included Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians, bringing different understandings of religious truth into direct conversation. His court also developed ṣulḥ-i kull, usually translated as “universal peace” or “peace with all,” as a framework for accommodating religious difference throughout a diverse empire. Abu’l-Fazl’s preface to the Razmnama reflects the same impulse, presenting translation as a means of investigating truth through comparison among traditions rather than simply defending inherited authority. Akbar’s religious experiments, later associated with the Dīn-i Ilāhī, ‘the Divine Religion,’ belonged to this wider search for common ground without requiring religious difference to disappear.
The Emperor’s unusual relationship with reading becomes clearer when access to written knowledge is understood as something that did not depend on private reading alone. Court histories describe his sustained interest in literature, history, religion, and philosophy, much of which he encountered by listening to others read and discussing what he heard. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art likewise notes that Akbar listened to books recited at court and commissioned illustrated manuscripts despite not reading conventionally. The Arabic term ummī, often translated as “illiterate” and sometimes applied to Akbar, carried meanings that do not correspond neatly with modern ideas of educational failure. Within some Islamic traditions, it could suggest knowledge acquired without ordinary instruction, allowing Abu’l-Fazl to present Akbar’s inability to read conventionally alongside claims for exceptional understanding and divinely favoured kingship. Ellen Smart returned to this tension in her 1981 essay “Akbar, Illiterate Genius,” proposing dyslexia as an explanation for his persistent difficulty with reading and writing. Modern understandings of dyslexia recognise that substantial difficulties in reading and spelling can coexist with much stronger attainment in other areas. His persistent difficulty with conventional literacy makes Akbar’s reliance on listening, memory, questioning, and discussion especially revealing when the different aspects of his learning are considered together.
A modern diagnosis cannot be established from sixteenth-century evidence, since Akbar left no first-person account of his reading difficulties and no educational assessment survives. His disrupted childhood and unconventional education remain part of the context, as does a Mughal elite culture in which oral learning, memorisation, delegated reading, and secretarial labour were already important. Akbar’s intellectual life, however, was not defined by literacy alone, since he repeatedly moved beyond inherited boundaries and sought connections between traditions usually kept apart. Comparison, translation, discussion, and synthesis became recurring ways in which he encountered unfamiliar ideas and brought different bodies of knowledge into relation with one another. His persistent literacy difficulties therefore sit alongside a broader pattern in which oral exchange, memory, comparison, and connection played unusually prominent roles in learning and thought. Smart’s suggestion of dyslexia speaks directly to this combination, particularly because the difficulty with conventional reading and writing persisted alongside sustained and sophisticated intellectual engagement. Akbar’s life consequently raises a broader possibility of neurodivergence, visible not in any single characteristic but in the recurring ways he learned, connected ideas, and approached knowledge beyond conventional literacy.
About the author
Dr Hadi Baghaei-Abchooyeh is a Postgraduate Research Supervisor and Director of Studies at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. His research examines Orientalism, British India, Indo-Persian literary and intellectual exchange, Sufism, and cross-cultural encounters. He is the author of Beyond Orientalism: Sir William Jones (1746–1794), A Journey of Understanding, published by Leiden University Press, and “William Jones” for Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics.
Further reading
Abu’l-Fazl. The Akbarnama of Abu-l-Fazl. Translated from the Persian by H. Beveridge. 3 vols. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1897–1939.
Melo, João Vicente, ed. and trans. The Writings of Antoni de Montserrat at the Mughal Court. Translations by João Vicente Melo and Lena Wahlgren-Smith, with a foreword by Joan-Pau Rubiés. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023.
Moin, A. Azfar. “Sulh-i kull as an Oath of Peace: Mughal Political Theology in History, Theory, and Comparison.” Modern Asian Studies 56 (2022): 721–748.
Pye, Christian Blake. “The Sufi Method behind the Mughal ‘Peace with All’ Religions: A Study of Ibn ‘Arabi’s Taḥqīq in Abu al-Fazl’s Preface to the Razmnāma.” Modern Asian Studies 56 (2022): 902–923.
Schimmel, Annemarie. The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture. Translated by Corinne Attwood. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.
British Dyslexia Association. “What is Dyslexia?” British Dyslexia Association.
Smart, Ellen S. “Akbar, Illiterate Genius.” In Kalādarśana: American Studies in the Art of India, edited by Joanna G. Williams, 99–107. New Delhi: Oxford University Press and IBH Publishers, 1981.
National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution. “An Illiterate Bibliophile.” National Museum of Asian Art.
Related work by the author
Baghaei-Abchooyeh, Hadi. Beyond Orientalism: Sir William Jones (1746–1794), A Journey of Understanding. Leiden University Press, 2025.
Baghaei-Abchooyeh, Hadi. “William Jones.” Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2026.
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