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To his third son, Azam Shah, he admitted deeper doubts: ‘I entirely lacked in rulership and protecting the people. My precious life has passed in vain. God is here, but my dimmed eyes do not see his splendour.’
He was quite possibly the richest man of his day
In accordance with Aurangzeb’s wishes, the tomb was plain and unmarked, located within a Sufi shrine.
Aurangzeb named himself the ‘Seizer of the World’ (Alamgir) and lived up to the title by seizing kingdom after kingdom during his forty-nine-year reign.
Perhaps Nehru’s most damning blow was to pronounce Aurangzeb too Muslim to be a successful Indian king: ‘When Aurungzeb began to oppose [the syncretism of earlier Mughal rulers] and suppress it and to function more as a Moslem than an Indian ruler, the Mughal Empire began to break up.’ For Nehru, Aurangzeb’s adherence to Islam crippled his ability to rule India.
By holding up Akbar and Dara to balance Aurangzeb, we fail to learn anything new about any of these men and shackle ourselves to ranking Mughal kings according to their purported Muslimness.
Aurangzeb was less malevolent than his contemporary reputation would have us believe.
We need a fresh narrative about Aurangzeb. Here I offer one such story.
‘Hindus’ of the day often did not even label themselves as such and rather prioritized a medley of regional, sectarian, and caste identities (for example, Rajput, Maratha, Brahmin, Vaishnava). As many scholars have pointed out, the word ‘Hindu’ is Persian, not Sanskrit, and only became commonly used self-referentially during British colonialism.
The Mughals inherited a Central Asian custom that all male family members had equal claims to political power. Emperor Akbar had managed to narrow the list of legitimate contenders to sons (thus cutting out nephews and male cousins), but birth order was largely irrelevant.
Dara Shukoh’s first wedding, for example, outshone all others in Mughal history. At the cost of 32 lakh rupees,
Ya takht ya tabut Either the throne or the grave —A mantra of Mughal kingship
Shah Jahan ordered the murder of two of his brothers, Khusrau in 1622 and Shahriyar in 1628,
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Shah Jahan’s father, Jahangir, bore responsibility for the death of Danyal, Jahangir’s youngest brother
In 1657 Shah Jahan was sixty-five years old and had already lived longer than any of the four Mughal kings who had preceded him.
The united troops of Aurangzeb and Murad met Dara Shukoh’s 50,000-strong army just east of Agra on a fiercely hot day in May of 1658. The ensuing clash, known today as the Battle of Samugarh (fig. 1), proved the decisive moment in determining the Mughal succession crisis.
Shah Shuja had kept busy throughout the past year. Upon receiving news of Shah Jahan’s ailment in 1657, he had crowned himself king, complete with the ostentatious title Abul Fauz (Father of Victory) Nasruddin (Defender of the Faith) Muhammad Timur III Alexander II Shah Shuja Bahadur Ghazi.
Aurangzeb, now forty years old, settled into his new role as emperor by dealing with the messy aftermath of his contested rise to power.
When Dara Shukoh arrived in Delhi a prisoner, late in the summer of 1659, Aurangzeb ordered him and Dara’s younger son, the fourteen-year-old Sipihr Shukoh, to be dressed in rags and paraded through the streets. The two defeated men wound through Delhi on an uncovered, mangy elephant, roasting under the scorching September sun, a sorry sight for all to behold.
He repaid the loans that Murad had taken from the prosperous Gujarati Jain merchant Shantidas.
Dara composed The Confluence of Two Oceans, a Persian treatise contending that Hinduism and Islam lead to the same goal (the treatise was translated into Sanskrit under the title Samudrasangama). Faced with this strong interest in Hindu philosophy, especially Sanskrit texts, on the part of the previous heir apparent, Aurangzeb introduced a clear rupture.
This early moment also marked a key characteristic of Aurangzeb’s commitment to justice, namely, that it was limited by ambition. During his long reign Aurangzeb faced numerous conflicts between his principles and his politics, and the former rarely won
Aurangzeb inherited a wealthy, thriving, expansionist empire.
At times Aurangzeb claimed that being a fair, ethical ruler ranked above controlling territory, a surprising assertion by the head of an expansionist state.
Aurangzeb’s entire ethos of sovereignty was infused with his fixation on justice, albeit sprinkled with healthy doses of a knack for devious politicking and an unquenchable thirst for power.
In the region of Hindustan, this scrap of bread [i.e., the Mughal Empire] is a generous gift from Their Majesties, Timur and Akbar. —Aurangzeb, in a letter to his grandson Bidar Bakht
The shining white mausoleum, known as Bibi ka Maqbara (Queen’s Tomb), mimics the appearance of Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal, although it is half the size and displays exteriors of burnished stucco rather than marble. Its derisive modern nickname, ‘the poor man’s Taj’, hardly does justice to Aurangzeb’s vision of honouring his wife with a classic Mughal tomb.
On his solar and lunar birthdays he was publicly weighed against gold and silver that was distributed to the poor, a Hindu ritual that the Mughals had adopted in Akbar’s days.
For instance, he penned a letter to Mahant Anand Nath in 1661, requesting a medicinal preparation from the yogi.
In the second decade of his reign Aurangzeb began to alter his royal behaviour. He rolled back some of his court rituals with Hindu roots and withdrew imperial patronage from certain practices, such as music. He also eliminated the position of formal court historian.
Aurangzeb broke with this precedent when, upon receiving Muhammad Kazim’s Alamgirnama (History of Aurangzeb Alamgir), which covered the first ten regnal years, he reassigned the author to other tasks.
Aurangzeb instituted several alterations to court protocol in the late 1660s. He ceased appearing to his subjects in a daily royal darshan in 1669. Around the same time, he reportedly cancelled his birthday weighings against gold and silver. He pulled musicians from many public court rituals and assigned them to other tasks (at enhanced salaries, curiously).
Aurangzeb’s earlier turn against Sanskrit pandits also dispersed talent to sub-imperial patrons. For example, after losing his imperial stipend on Aurangzeb’s orders in the late 1650s, Kavindracarya found employment in the court of Danishmand Khan, a Mughal noble, and later assisted the French traveller Francois Bernier.
the mid-1670s Aurangzeb sponsored the construction of the monumental Badshahi Masjid in Lahore (fig. 3). Unlike with Dilras’s ‘poor man’s Taj’, here Aurangzeb approached Shah Jahan’s genius.
At the time it was built, the Badshahi Masjid was the largest mosque in the world, and its expansive size—it can hold 60,000 people—still impresses modern visitors.
During the next hundred years, poets composed numerous distinct Persian Ramayanas, and many dedicated their works to the reigning Mughal king. Even at the end of his reign, Aurangzeb had not moved so far afield from Mughal cultural practices as to break the perceived association between Mughal royalty and the epic Hindu tale of Ram.
In response, Aurangzeb reduced his son’s mansab rank and noted, ‘If it had been an officer other than a Prince, this order would have been issued after an inquiry. For a Prince the punishment is the absence of investigation.’
This entire set of events is sometimes framed by modern historians as the ‘Rajput rebellion’ and cast as Hindu hostility to Muslim rule. This communal reading is belied by the decision of both the Rathors and the Sisodias to support Prince Akbar, a Muslim,
But in many cases, Aurangzeb was unconcerned with the religious identity of his state officials, whom he selected primarily for their administrative skills.
Aurangzeb appointed Raghunatha as his diwani, the chief finance minister of the empire. This high position mirrored Akbar’s appointment of Todar Mal as his top finance minister a hundred years earlier. At his second coronation ceremony Aurangzeb honoured his Hindu diwani with the title of raja and raised his mansab rank to 2500.
Aurangzeb rejected the proposal and opined, ‘What connection have earthly affairs with religion? And what right have administrative works to meddle with bigotry? “For you is your religion and for me is mine.” If this rule [suggested by you] were established, it would be my duty to extirpate all the (Hindu) Rajahs and their followers. Wise men disapprove of the removal from office of able officers.’
The Mughal–Maratha conflict was shaped by a craving for raw power that demanded strategic, shifting alliances. Shivaji allied with numerous Islamic states, including Bijapur, Golconda, and even the Mughals when it suited him (sometimes against Hindu powers in south India). Shivaji welcomed Muslims within his army; he had qazis (Muslim judges) on his payroll, and Muslims ranked among some of his top commanders. Mughal alliances and the imperial army were similarly diverse, and (as mentioned earlier) Aurangzeb sent a Hindu, Jai Singh, to besiege Shivaji at Purandar. Modern suggestions that
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Aurangzeb’s willingness to disregard religious scruples when it suited him.
Beginning in 1679 Aurangzeb levied the jizya on most non-Muslims in the empire in lieu of military service (Rajput and Maratha state officials and Brahmin religious leaders were exempt, but lay Jains, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims were obliged to pay). The jizya tax had been abated for 100 years in the Mughal kingdom, and Aurangzeb revived it, perhaps in part, to employ the ulama in its collection. In theory, the jizya also helped Aurangzeb’s reputation among the ulama, especially those suspicious of the religious sincerity of kings, by marking the Mughal Empire as a proper Islamic state.
the notion of sulh-i kull (peace for all), which had been a bedrock of Mughal policy since Akbar’s time.
Notably, Aurangzeb regulated the activities of Hindus and Muslims alike. In many cases he prescribed similar behaviour for his subjects regardless of religion. In other instances, he addressed issues specific to one religious group, although he typically applied analogous principles to all.
Aurangzeb carried on the traditions of his forefathers in granting favours to Hindu religious communities,
In 1672 Aurangzeb issued an order recalling all endowed lands given to Hindus and reserving all such future land grants for Muslims, possibly as a concession to the ulama. If strictly enforced, this move would have been a significant blow to Hindu and Jain religious communities, but historical evidence suggests otherwise.
This Islamic proclivity was perhaps rooted in the idea that Islamic law does not sanction harming religious institutions for government interests, whereas spreading Islam arguably justified such acts.
Aurangzeb similarly evinced concern with elite Brahmins deceiving common Hindus about their own religion and was perhaps especially alarmed that Muslims were falling prey to charlatans. Brahmins may even have profited financially from such ventures. The French traveller Jean de Thevenot opined that Brahmins were numerous in Benares and ‘find their Profit’ in lavish festivals that drew large crowds. In such cases Mughal royal obligations demanded strong intervention to prevent their subjects from being hoodwinked. For most temples in Benares and elsewhere, Aurangzeb ordered Mughal officials to
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Perhaps and deemed apt conjecture
