THE REVILED KING
A new book on Mughal emperor Aurangzeb examines him in context of the rulers of the time and finds that not all his actions deserve the reputation he came to acquire in historical record
Aurangzeb’s name has repeatedly been effaced from road signs and school books, but the legend of his cruelty and intolerance endures. Even in his own day, he must have had a serious PR problem, and history can be unkind to father-usurping fratricides. But is the received view of the Mughal everyone loves to hate historically informed or a caricature formed by the prejudices of our own times? Rutgers’ historian AUDREY TRUSCHKE’s new book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth revisits the historical record and context to upturn many presumptions and reveal a complex figure, ruthless and restrained by turns. A political animal whose similarities with the powerful, whether of the 17th or 21st centuries, are as fascinating as they are disturbing. Excerpts
Aurangzeb holds a special, uncoveted place among India’s reviled kings. Common opinion, even among those who do not share the sentiments of the BJP and like-minded Hindu nationalist groups, pillories Aurangzeb as a callous Islamist oppressor who despised everything about India, especially Hindus. Across the border in Pakistan too, many endorse the vision of an evil Aurangzeb, even responsible for South Asia’s modern woes. As Shahid Nadeem, a Pakistani playwright, recently put it: “Seeds of Partition were sown when Aurangzeb triumphed over [his brother] Dara Shikoh.” Such far-fetched suggestions would be farcical if so many did not endorse them. The Pakistani playwright’s view has a precedent in the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru, a founding father of modern India, who was no fan of Aurangzeb. In his Discovery of India, first published in 1946, Nehru listed Aurangzeb’s purported faults at length, rebuking him as “a bigot and an austere puritan”. He excoriated the sixth Mughal king as a dangerous throwback who “put back the clock” and ended up destroying the Mughal empire. 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. Nehru was hardly original in his censure of Aurangzeb as dangerously pious and therefore a bad emperor. Such views were espoused by many of Nehru’s contemporaries, including Jadunath Sarkar, the foremost 20th-century historian of Aurangzeb. British colonial thinkers had long impugned the Mughals on a range of charges, including that they were effeminate, oppressive, and Muslims. As early as 1772, Alexander Dow remarked in a discussion about Mughal governance that “the faith of Mahommed is peculiarly calculated for despotism; and it is one of the greatest causes which must fix for ever the duration of that species of government in the East”. For the British, the solution to such an entrenched problem was clear: British rule over India. While Indian independence leaders rejected this final step of colonial logic, many swallowed the earlier parts wholesale. Such ideas filtered to society at large via textbooks and mass media, and several generations have continued to eat up and regurgitate the colonial notion that Aurangzeb was a tyrant driven by religious fanaticism. Over the centuries, many commentators have spread the myth of the evil, bigoted Aurangzeb on the basis of shockingly thin evidence. Many false ideas still mar the popular memory