Abul Fazal’s Concept of Sovereignty and Social Contract in Mughal Governance

How does a ruler convince millions of people, across dozens of religions and ethnicities, to accept his authority? In sixteenth-century Mughal India, this question fell to Abul Fazl, the brilliant courtier and historian who served Emperor Akbar. His answer was striking. Instead of grounding the emperor’s power in religious law, Abul Fazl built a theory of sovereignty on social necessity and reason. He argued that without a strong, central authority, society would collapse into disorder, a line of reasoning that mirrors the European philosopher Thomas Hobbes, even though the two men never met and worked in completely different worlds. This blog unpacks Abul Fazl’s theory of sovereignty, its surprising resemblance to social contract thinking, and why it mattered for governance in a diverse empire.

Who was Abul Fazl and why does his theory matter 🔗

Abul Fazl (1551-1602) was a historian, administrator, and one of the famous Navaratnas (nine jewels) of Akbar’s court. His major works were the Akbarnama, a detailed chronicle of Akbar’s reign, and its third volume, the Ain-i-Akbari, which laid out the structure of Mughal administration and governance. It is in the Ain-i-Akbari that Abul Fazl developed his political ideas about kingship and sovereignty.

His central task was practical. Akbar ruled over an empire of Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Zoroastrians, and many regional communities. A theory of power based purely on Islamic law (Shariah) would have alienated most of these subjects. Abul Fazl therefore offered a fresh justification for monarchy that did not depend on any single religion. According to one scholarly account, his work created a theory of sovereignty based on social contract rather than Shariah, drawing a picture of the disorderly society that existed before strong rulership and explaining how sovereignty then emerged.

This shift is what makes Abul Fazl important in the study of Indian political thought. He took an idea common to Islamic civilization, the institution of monarchy, and reinterpreted it through reason, social order, and welfare.

Sovereignty as a response to chaos 🔗

Abul Fazl began with a question that political thinkers across cultures have asked: what would life be like without a strong ruler? His answer was bleak. He believed that in the absence of a central authority, society would descend into lawlessness, rebellion, and harm. Only a powerful ruler could hold this disorder in check.

The pre-state society 🔗

In the Ain-i-Akbari, Abul Fazl described a picture of society as it existed before organised political authority. This was a condition of insecurity where people could not be safe in their lives or property. From this picture, he explained why sovereignty became necessary. Kingship, in his view, arose almost as a corrective institution, holding a monopoly over force so it could punish troublemakers and end anarchy.

This is a crucial point. For Abul Fazl, the ruler’s power was justified by what it prevented. A society without a sovereign was not free or peaceful; it was dangerous. The strong monarch was the solution to that danger.

The Hobbesian parallel 🔗

Here lies the most fascinating comparison in this topic. Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher writing his Leviathan in 1651, described a “state of nature” in which human beings, driven by self-preservation, lived in constant fear and conflict, a “war of all against all.” According to Britannica’s account of the state of nature, Hobbes famously called life in this condition “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape it, people agreed through a social contract to surrender certain freedoms to a sovereign authority who would maintain order.

The resemblance to Abul Fazl is hard to miss. Both thinkers started with a frightening picture of life without strong authority, and both concluded that society needed a powerful sovereign to keep order. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Hobbes had definite ideas about the proper nature and scope of sovereignty, stressing the importance he placed on the rule of law even within an authoritarian-sounding system. Abul Fazl, writing roughly half a century earlier in a completely different setting, reached a similar destination through his own reasoning.

Where the two thinkers differ 🔗

The parallel is real but not perfect, and the differences are just as instructive as the similarities.

First, in Hobbes’s theory, the contract is made among the people themselves, who collectively agree to transfer their authority to a sovereign. In Abul Fazl’s version, there was no contract among the people. The relationship was directly between the ruler and his subjects.

Second, Hobbes built his sovereign on consent and human reasoning alone. Abul Fazl combined the contractual idea with a divine element, which we will explore below. This is why his theory is often described as semi-contractual and semi-divine.

Third, in both systems the subjects had little room to remove a tyrannical ruler. Hobbes was famously reluctant to grant a right of rebellion, and the Ain-i-Akbari likewise did not provide a mechanism for changing a king who became cruel or unjust. The only safeguard Abul Fazl offered was the idea that only a just sovereign could truly honour the contract, but there was no guarantee built into the system itself.

The contract between ruler and subjects 🔗

If sovereignty was a kind of contract, what were its terms? Abul Fazl was precise about this. He defined sovereignty as an arrangement in which the emperor protects the four essences of his subjects, and in return the subjects offer obedience and a share of their resources.

According to NCERT-based notes on Mughal kingship, the four essences the emperor preserved were life (jan), property (mal), honour (namus), and faith (din), given in exchange for loyalty and a portion of resources. In this framework, taxation was not arbitrary extraction. Tax functioned almost like wages paid to the king for the protection and order he provided.

This is a genuinely transactional understanding of political authority. The ruler delivers security and welfare; the subjects deliver obedience and taxes. Each side has obligations. That mutual structure is what gives the theory its contractual character, even without a formal agreement among the people.

The divine light: sovereignty justified beyond religion 🔗

Alongside the contractual element, Abul Fazl wove in a powerful idea borrowed from Persian and Sufi traditions: the concept of divine light, or farr-i-izadi.

What divine light meant 🔗

Abul Fazl argued that sovereignty was, in its nature, a divine light emanating from God. According to one detailed account of his thought, this statement allowed him to dismiss as inadequate the older description of the king merely as the “shadow of God” (zill-i-ilahi); the king now received light directly. The idea drew on the Ishraq (illumination) philosophy associated with the Sufi thinker Shihabuddin Suhrawardi.

Crucially, this divine light was not tied to any single religion. The ruler who possessed it was, in Abul Fazl’s framing, not the product of a particular sect or creed but an agent carrying the authority of God. This was a deliberate move. It freed the emperor from dependence on the religious scholars (the ulama) and from the requirement to rule strictly by Shariah.

Why this was politically clever 🔗

By locating legitimacy in divine light rather than religious law, Abul Fazl made it possible for Akbar to stand above the various faiths of the empire rather than represent only one of them. This connected directly to Akbar’s policy of Sulh-i-kul, or absolute peace, which the Ain-i-Akbari presented as the cornerstone of enlightened government. Under Sulh-i-kul, different religions enjoyed freedom of expression as long as they did not undermine the state or fight among themselves.

This policy had concrete results. Akbar abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya (a tax on non-Muslims) in 1564, and his nobility was drawn from Iranis, Turanis, Afghans, Rajputs, and Deccanis appointed largely for their loyalty and service rather than their faith. The theory of sovereignty and the practical politics of the empire reinforced each other.

Rational governance and popular welfare 🔗

One of the most progressive features of Abul Fazl’s theory was its emphasis on reason and the welfare of subjects. He argued that a legitimate ruler should rely on wisdom and rational judgement rather than blind obedience to religious texts. Promoting science, reason, and rationality was treated as a duty of the king and the state, not an optional virtue.

The welfare dimension was equally central. Abul Fazl frequently described the ideal relationship between ruler and subjects in paternal terms: the king was like a father and the subjects like his children. According to an analysis of his governance ideas, it was therefore the king’s duty to work for the welfare of his people and to take care of every aspect of their lives, whether economic, social, political, or religious. The running threads in his discussions of kingship were paternal love toward subjects, justice and fair play, and the observance of Sulh-i-kul without discrimination.

This is where the title of the unit, “Monarchical authority and popular well-being,” becomes clear. Abul Fazl did not separate power from responsibility. The same divine light that elevated the ruler also obligated him to deliver justice and prosperity. A king who failed to protect and provide for his subjects was, by definition, not a just sovereign.

The just ruler as the only true sovereign 🔗

This emphasis on justice is what kept the theory from being a simple defence of despotism. Abul Fazl held that only a just sovereign could honour the contract with both power and divine guidance. Power alone was not enough; it had to be paired with fairness, tolerance, and care for the vulnerable. The legitimacy of the ruler, in the end, rested on how well he maintained order, justice, and the welfare of society.

Why Abul Fazl’s theory still repays study 🔗

Abul Fazl’s achievement was to build a theory of state power that could hold together an extraordinarily diverse society. By grounding sovereignty in social necessity and reason rather than in one religion, he created intellectual room for tolerance and inclusive governance. By framing the relationship between ruler and ruled as a kind of contract with obligations on both sides, he anticipated questions about the responsibilities of government that remain alive today.

The comparison with Hobbes shows that thinkers in very different civilisations, working independently, can arrive at similar insights about why human societies need authority. Yet the differences, especially Abul Fazl’s blending of contract with divine light and his strong emphasis on welfare, give his thought a distinct character rooted in its own time and place. Studying it offers a richer picture of how political legitimacy has been imagined beyond the familiar European canon.

What do you think? Was Abul Fazl’s emphasis on a strong central ruler genuinely a path to social order and welfare, or did the absence of any check on the sovereign leave too much room for abuse? And how convincing do you find the parallel between his theory and Hobbes’s social contract, given that one rested on consent among people and the other on divine light?

References

1. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/84771/1/Unit-11.pdf
2. https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-of-nature-political-theory
3. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/
4. https://unacademy.com/content/upsc/study-material/ncert-notes/mughal-kingship-and-their-authors/