Aurangzeb and the colonial era-scholorship

If you look up for the most controversial Indian King it’s Aurangzeb who will show up. But, was he a real tyrant or is it just a propaganda?

Aurangzeb (birth, 1618 – death, 1707), was the 6th Mughal Emperor, ruled for forty-nine years over a population of 150 million people, majority of whom were Hindus. Aurangzeb, who like other emperors had an Imperial agenda, he expanded the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent, subsuming most of the Indian subcontinent under a single Imperial power for the first time in human history.

Today the likes of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) are aggressively doing all that they can do to portray Aurangzeb to be the worst and tyrannical emperor to have ever stepped on the lands of India and this is as true as “cow jumping over the moon” i.e. False. The propaganda is meant to fuel the fire of religious hatred and disturb the communal harmony within India. To put it into simple words, they’re making Aurangzeb look like ‘a Muslim King who oppressed the Hindus’ by doing so they’re kindling a fire of hatred in the hearts of the Hindus towards the Mughals and towards the ‘Muslims’ so that the eventual ramification shall be what V.D Sarvarkar wanted i.e. Hindu Rashtra.

Was Aurangzeb was an oppressor of the Hindus?

Ishvaradasa, a Hindu astrologer wrote about Aurangzeb in Sanskrit in 1663 and called the king “righteous” (dharmya) and even noted that his tax policies were lawful (vidhivat). Aurangzeb maintained personal contacts with Hindu religious figures for instance, he penned a letter to Mahant Anand Nath in 1661, requesting a medicinal preparation from the Yogi in the 1660s he increased Anand Nath’s land holdings in a village in the Punjab.

The view that Aurangzeb oppressed the Hindus, have roots in colonial-era scholarship, where positing timeless Hindu-Muslim animosity embodied the British strategy of divide and conquer. The likes of RSS and BJP adopted such colonial-era scholarship and claim to list Aurangzeb’s “atrocities” against Hindus (typically playing fast and loose with the facts) and fuel communal fires.

And the proposition that Aurangzeb razed temples because he hated Hindus is just another propaganda. A historically legitimate view of Aurangzeb is that he protected Hindu temples more often than he demolished them. Aurangzeb counted thousands of Hindu temples within his domains and yet destroyed, at most, a few dozen! This incongruity makes little sense if we cling to a vision of Aurangzeb as a cartoon bigot driven by a single-minded agenda of ridding India of Hindu places of worship.

Aurangzeb followed Islamic law in granting protection to non-Muslim religious leaders and institutions. Indo-Muslim rulers had counted Hindus as dhimmis, a protected class under Islamic law, since the eighth century, and Hindus were thus entitled to certain rights and state defences. Yet, Aurangzeb went beyond the requirements of Islamic law in his conduct towards Hindu and Jain religious communities.

Aurangzeb issued dozens of orders that directed officials to shield temples from unwanted interference, granted land to Hindu communities, and provided stipends to Hindu spiritual figures. For instance, in the ninth year of his reign Aurangzeb dispensed a farman to the Umanand Temple at Guwahati in Assam. In 1691 Aurangzeb conferred eight villages and a sizable chunk of tax-free land on Mahant Balak Das Nirvani of Chitrakoot to support the Balaji Temple. In 1698 he gifted rent-free land to a Brahmin named Rang Bhatt, son of Nek Bhatt, in eastern Khandesh in central India. The list goes on and includes temples and individuals in Allahabad, Vrindavan, Bihar, and elsewhere. Miraculously, Aurangzeb built and protected a lot more temples than he destroyed them. The gullibles who swallow the lies with no second thought might wonder in awe!

But why demolish places of worship?

The political nature of religious patronage was also the rationale behind acts of destruction. All across India, whenever a king conquered another, he signalled his victory by either seizing or destroying the religious sites with close ties to his victim – and it made no difference if conqueror and conquered were co-religionists. Just as Shaivite and Vaishnava dynasties in south India patronised mosques, dargahs and churches, they did not hesitate to capture the temples of their enemies and seize or destroy the images. The Cholas seized temple images from the Calukyas; and Vijayanagara’s Krishnadevaraya, to celebrate his defeat of the Gajapati king, removed an image of Balakrishna from Udayagiri to the capital, the Rathor ruler, Ajit Singh destroyed mosques erected by the Mughals in Jodhpur.

Animosity towards people who belong to other faiths was not really the thing of the Kings. We see many Hindus working and who supported Aurangzeb, for instance, Raja Jai Singh, leader of the Kachhwaha Rajputs and a Hindu, was one of the chief Rajputs who supported Aurangzeb and it was Raja Jai Singh who on orders of Aurangzeb pursued Shivaji, besieged him and took him as a captive to Aurangzeb. Similarly Shivaji welcomed Muslims within his army; he had Qazis (Muslim judges) on his payroll, and Muslims ranked among some of his top commanders. Aurangzeb and Shivaji were staunch enemies of each other, their enmity was because of the lust for power and not because both practiced different faiths.

Aurangzeb imprisoned his father Shah Jahan.

Aurangzeb’s life can be viewed as pre and post, it’s true that Aurangzeb had locked away his father in Agra’s Red Fort. The Sherif of Mecca, The Safavid king Shah Sulayman criticised Aurangzeb for his mistreatment of his father and denied to recognise him as a proper ruler of Hind (India). This guilt of imprisoning his own father haunted Aurangzeb which eventually lead him to become a better Muslim and a better King.

Aurangzeb killed his brothers, Dara Shukoh and Shah Shujah.

Aurangzeb rose to power in 1658 in the midst of a bloody war of succession that left two of his brothers dead, a third exiled in Burma. Even the early days of Mughal rule under Babur and Humayun were characterized by violent clashes that pitted brother against brother and son against father. We see the same among the Ottomans. Aurangzeb’s brothers had already planned to kill him but the tables turned and the one to ascend the throne was Aurangzeb. It can be justified, if not from a religious perspective then in a view of self-defense, that he killed his brothers because they wanted to kill him.

Aurangzeb’s vision of justice.

The stability of the foundation of sovereignty depends upon justice (adalat). —Maxim for rulers, quoted approvingly by Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb organized his life as ruler of Hindustan around a few key ideals and preoccupations. He wanted to be a just king, a good Muslim, and a sustainer of Mughal culture and customs. Aurangzeb’s vision of justice was deeply coloured by the wider Islamic tradition, much of which had little to do with theology. In this vision, divisive concepts such as jihad and jizya (holy war and poll tax, respectively) were less important than the ideals of akhlaq and adab (political conduct and ethical conduct, respectively).

Aurangzeb, the man.

Though Aurangzeb who is human in nature, made some mistakes but tried all his life, to better himself as a King and as a Muslim. He memorized the Qur’an in 1660s, in his later years he sewed prayer caps and copied the Qur’an by hand, he never tasted alcohol, though the Mughal Kings were fond of it.

Aurangzeb paid many learned Muslim men (ulema) to write the massive intellectual project i.e. Fatawa-i-Alamgiri (a synthesis of Hanafi legal judgements) over the course of eight years, from 1667 until 1675. During its compilation Aurangzeb heard parts of the work read aloud and even offered corrections.

I came as a stranger, and I leave as a stranger.

'My precious life has passed in vain. God is here, but my dimmed eyes do not see his splendour'

– Aurangzeb