Not Just a Bad Guy

The book is a timely antidote, appearing not very long after Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road was renamed in favour of APJ Abdul Kalam, replacing bad Muslim with good Muslim. It is written for lay readers, but do we have patience for the rigours of historical relativism? The politics of the moment is driven by narratives rather than facts, and the complex story of a shrewd politician who kept the faith must seem dreary in comparison with the traditional fable of a cartoon bigot and temple-smasher who lived exclusively for the fierce joy of harassing Hindus.

The real, historical Aurangzeb was a figure of contrasts, not the stuff of simplistic narratives of good and evil. He commissioned Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque, which would remain the world’s biggest for three centuries, but chose to be buried under the dome of the open sky in a Sufi shrine, in an unmarked grave. The world’s richest monarch financed his pauper’s grave with pocket money, earned by sewing prayer caps and making copies of the Quran by hand. It was so distressingly bare that Lord Curzon felt impelled to embellish it. The viceroy had an unhealthy interest in Mughal remains. He also tried to improve the Taj, by mowing down the lush greenery it stood in and turning it into a neatly manicured English garden.

Aurangzeb, who is execrated for silencing music in India — he only banned some forms from court, actually — famously fell head over heels in love with the singer Hirabai Zainabadi, and spent his last years in the company of another musician, Udaipuri Mahal Sahiba. He reintroduced the jiziya poll tax on unbelievers but protected many more temples than he demolished. An instinctive expansionist, he stretched Mughal borders to their widest ambit, but lived in dread of political collapse and posthumous disrepute. He was clearly a cool-headed general. Stanley Lane-Poole wrote of a campaign in Balkh where the time for namaz came amidst a pitched battle, and Aurangzeb dismounted and prayed, as calmly as he would have in Delhi’s Jama Masjid. His opponent, an Uzbek king, exclaimed, “To fight with such a man is self-destruction!” And yet he exasperated his troops with decades of useless campaiging in the Deccan.

Lane-Poole, whose work is a lively source of medieval colour, also quotes Dr JFG Careri, who was with the emperor in the Deccan in 1665, to the effect that his justice was so mild and restrained that corruption flourished. How does that sit with the reputation of the bloodthirsty Aurangzeb, who ruthlessly eliminated his brothers to seize the throne? Both are true, but must be read in the context of medieval ethics and governance.

A formidable general, Aurangzeb spent the last three decades of his life on restless, profitless campaign in the Deccan, living in a tented mobile court that was a throwback to the old nomadic way of life in Central Asia. In that time, writes Truschke, the Red Fort was so deserted that visitors from overseas could not be entertained there.

Truschke suggests that guilt drove Aurangzeb’s complexity. He was no caricature puritan, but an ambitious man with a strong sense of identity and propriety. Expediency and ethics had to be reconciled. By the standards of his times, his vicious treatment of Dara Shikoh was not unacceptable, for all Mughal male relations of a generation had equal claims to succession, settled by force of arms. But his father’s imprisonment in Agra Fort provoked international outrage, and Mecca did not recognise his claim to the throne till Shah Jahan was considerate enough to die.

Apart from the crime of imprisoning his father, Aurangzeb’s attacks on Muslim kingdoms was taken poorly by believers. But his reaction to orthodoxy was equally sharp. When asked to discriminate against Shias in government, he replied: “What connection have earthly affairs with religion? And what right have administrative works to meddle with bigotry? … If this rule 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.” Aurangzeb’s administration included numerous Hindus, including Raja Raghunatha, who headed the treasury.

Truschke reasons that temple demolitions ordered by Aurangzeb were selective, and owed primary to political motives, while the majority of Hindu and Jain shrines enjoyed imperial protection and benefited from state grants. She also warns that the past did not understand history and its uses as we do, that accounts were frequently written for political advancement or literary recognition, at the expense of the facts, and that in a far-flung empire, orders were often ignored.

For instance, it is a fact that Aurangzeb’s attempts at prohibition and the suppression of opium were ridiculous failures. But it may not be true, as the Italian traveller Niccolau Manucci wrote, that the emperor complained that he and his chief qazi were the only sober people in the empire. Not because Manucci himself claimed to have sent the qazi a bottle every day on the sly, but because he was writing for a European audience fascinated by eastern opulence, and laid on the local colour somewhat thickly.

Truschke attributes the caricature of the bigoted Aurangzeb to later colonial history, which constructed the “eastern potentate” as a malevolent clown, with the political objective of showing British rule as enlightened by contrast. It follows, quite ironically, that the currently popular nativist readings of Muslim rule are effectively reviving a long-dead colonial project.