Assesment Of The Millenium
...year 1000 in the Hejira calendar
approached, Emperor Akbar was on the Moghal throne. The excitement, which was
widely felt in Delhi and Agra about the completion of the millennium in that reckoning,
led Akbar to issue a series of proclamations, about principles of governance. The
pronouncements included, among other classics of civil administration, his famous tenets
on religious tolerance, for example: "No man should be interfered with on account of
religion, and anyone [is] to be allowed to go over to a religion he pleased." There was no
particular reason to think that this or any other principle had any special relevance at the
end of a millennium - rather than at any other time. And yet the end of the millennium in
what was then the official calendar did seem like a good moment to take stock, to reflect
on basic principles, and to contemplate the shape of things to come.
There is, of course, something quite arbitrary in the segmenting of time that any calendar
presents. Counting could have commenced at a different starting point and the division of
periods could have been of a different length. The arrival of a new millennium is, in this
sense, entirely a matter of convention. Indeed, Emperor Akbar himself had made an
attempt, in 1584, to replace the Hejira calendar by a new synthetic calendar, the Tarikh-
Ilahi, which - like Din-Ilahi (the synthetic religion he tried to promote) - did not survive
very long. Any reckoning of a millennium must contain some inescapable plasticity.
And still, an artificially created special moment in history, once established in our minds,
can be a good occasion to reflect seriously on what has happened and what might happen.
The impending end of the second millennium in the modified Roman calendar that we
now see as the Christian calendar, which is the most used international calendar in the
contemporary...
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