Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King

In contemporary India, particularly since the rise of Hindutva ideology, Emperor Aurangzeb has been villainized as a religious bigot. Given the politicization and crass ideologization of history in today’s India, Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press, 2017), renders a corrective but critical assessment of Aurangzeb as a ruler in a succinct and readable booklet in which she shatters several myths. She shows that the popular conception of Aurangzeb is a misleading caricature. Even Jawaharlal Nehru’s portrait of Aurangzeb in his Discovery of India is misleading. Her book covers Aurangzeb’s early years, his reign, his role in the administration of Hindustan, his leadership and moral qualities, his role as an overseer of the Hindu communities, his later years, and, finally, his achievements and failure.Aurangzeb was a powerful emperor. He was cunning, ruthless, and Machiavellian. He was a shrewd military strategist and an empire builder. He took the Mughal Empire to its zenith. The Mughal Empire’s national output put it ahead of all the world’s countries and regions in that era. He may have overextended the empire, thus, it eroded rapidly after his death. However, his strategy of statecraft was not qualitatively or quantitively different from other premodern India rulers, Hindu or Muslim. He was not a religious zealot. His actions were often at odds with Islamic jurisprudence and practices. Some of his decisions and actions¬—such as imprisoning his father and aggression against Muslim rulers—incurred the wrath of the Muslim clergy, both in Mughal India and elsewhere, and among the members of the Mughal elite. He prioritized the expansion of his empire and control over his territory more than anything else. He resorted to harsh methods against rulers and rebels to achieve regime consolidation and territorial expansion, but at that same time he was committed to the common prosperity of the population, public safety, fairness, dispensation of justice and administration, cultural flourishing, and the coexistence of religious communities under his domain, establishing a coherent legal framework and law and order.Truschke’s slim book is a worthwhile and timely effort to debunk the myths about Aurangzeb’s reign.

The world always remembers the bravest – those who have the courage to bravely stand up against the despots of each age. When it comes to taking a stand against the pseudo-history being created by India’s ultra right wing Hindutva groups, the names of famous historians such as Romila Thapar, and Richard Eaton immediately come to mind. Now add the name of Audrey Truschke to this esteemed group of scholars.Over the ages, the fertile lands of India have constantly attracted wave after wave of peoples to migrate and settle on its vast lands. From the natives in the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, followed by the Harappans, then the Aryans, the Achaemenids, the Greeks, the Magadhans, the Scythians, the Parthians, the Huns, and finally the Muslims made India its home and hearth. The two things common to all these groups was that they all made India their permanent home - living and dying here, and secondly, none of these groups transferred wealth out of India. Firaq Gorakhpuri, the great Urdu poet wrote about these successive waves of people that made India into the grand mosaic that it now is, as follows:Sar Zamin-e-Hind par aqwaam-e-alam ke firaqQafile guzarte gae Hindusthan banta gaya(Translation: On the lands of Hind, caravans from around the world kept arriving; and India kept taking shape)Fast forward to the British colonial period, and we see an abrupt departure from the tradition to settle on this land. The British came not to settle here, but to steal and ship all the wealth out of the country; tombstones of British civil servants who died in India unexpectedly due to disease mention of the sadness in dying in an alien land. The Persian term “Hindu,” is a geographical identifier, under which the colonial British lumped together all non-Muslim residents of India, to serve their nefarious divide-and-rule policy. The British created this myth that people of the sub-continent before the Muslims’ arrival followed a single homogeneous, indigenous religion called Hinduism, which was always at loggerheads with an alien invading religion Islam. In this colonial narrative you had “good Muslims” like Akbar who had given up Islam and adopted “Hindu beliefs” such as daily worship of the Sun; and then you had the “terrible Muslims” like Aurangzeb who dared to follow his Islamic beliefs, although, he was overall a very good and just administrator to all his subjects. The ultra right wing Hindutva groups in India adopted the colonial narrative of history, as it helped them unite the diverse Indian religions into a single entity, based on a perceived common enemy – the Muslims.Audrey Truschke’s book “Aurangzeb: The life and Legacy of India’s most controversial king,” removes the hate-lenses from our eyes, so that we could see Aurangzeb for what he actually was. Using original Persian sources, Dr. Truschke shows us an efficient ruler who cared deeply for all subjects regardless of their religious beliefs. He appointed 50% more Hindu Rajas to his court then did the much touted Akbar. He granted lands and money for the building of Hindu temples.Truschke writes, “In reality Aurangzeb pursued no overarching agenda vis-à-vis Hindus within his state. ‘Hindus’ of the day often did not even label themselves as such and rather prioritized a medley of regional, sectarian, and caste identities (e.g. 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.”Truschke points out that Aurangzeb was fluent in Hindi from childhood, and quotes the Italian traveler Niccoli Manucci about Aurangzeb “He was of a melancholy temperament, always busy at something or another, wishing to execute justice and arrive at appropriate decisions.” She also quotes Ishvaradasa, a Hindu astrologer, who wrote about Aurangzeb in Sanskrit in 1663 calling the king righteous (dharmya) and even noted that the King’s tax policies were lawful (vidhivat).She also quotes the following stanza authored by Chandar Bhan Brahman, a Hindu, Persian-medium poet in Aurangzeb’s employ:O King may the world bow to your command;May lips drip with expressions of thanks and salutations;Since it is your spirit that watches over the people,Wherever you are, may God watch over you!She continues “Hindus fared well in Aurangzeb’s massive bureaucracy, finding employment and advancement opportunities. Since Akbar’s time, Rajputs and other Hindus had served as full members of the Mughal administration. Like their Muslim counterparts, they received formal ranks known as mansabs that marked their status in the imperial hierarchy and fought to expand the empire.”Truschke quotes Aurangzeb’s February 1659 farman “You must see that nobody unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they might remain in their place and pray for the continuance of the Empire.”Truschke concludes “I have argued that Aurangzeb acted according to his ideals of justice, commitment to political and ethical conduct (adaab and akhlaq), and the necessities of politics. Aurangzeb’s worldview was also shaped by his piety and the Mughal culture he inherited. He was not interested in fomenting Hindu-Muslim conflict – a modern obsession with modern stakes- but he was fixated on dispensing his brand of justice, upholding Mughal traditions, and expanding his grip across the subcontinent.”A spellbinding, fascinating, absolute must read!

Gave you all the highlights of the life of Aurangzeb but its not necessarily a traditional or exhaustive biography, the author seems to examine Aurangzeb's life with the goal of proving her thesis. Quick afternoon read, good supplemental history to a broader study of the Mughals. Read for an episode of my podcast (Hard Fried History).

Aurangzeb is always painted in a worst possible light in India. This book tells the unbiased story.

A great insight into the time the place and Aurangzeb himself.Highly recommended a fantastic book much respect to Audrey Truschke.

This book is worth reading. Aurangzeb has been misused by many to support their own agendas, be it the colonial British or the present day Hindutva using tactics such as misinformation campaigns against Emperor Aurangzeb. This book really does clarify a lot of misconceptions and myths created by the Hindutva History denialists.

What a great and concise book this is! amazing work by the author to remove all the hatred and false info that has been circulating around about Aurangzeb

Superb book and superb quality

This amazingly thorough book about the reign of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb brings out both the good and the bad aspects of his long reign.The many bad points of Aurangzeb’s reign revolve around his assumption of power in the first place. He had three brothers, and he was not the firstborn; therefore, the power struggle even to assume the throne meant that he needed to unpleasant completer actions to assume the thrown with none of his brothers trying to assume the thrown themselves. Two of his brothers were killed in this struggle while the third was exiled to Persia.The remaining difficulty was his father, the reigning emperor. Aurangzeb put his father in prison where he remained for the rest of his life. This action more than the killing and exiling of his brothers upset the European monarchs because they believed it was an unseemly method of taking the thrown.Aurangzeb’s assumption of thrown was not the end of the deeds leading to his poor reputation in Indian history; in a predominantly Hindu country, it is perceived that his ransacking of Hindu temples by a Muslim emperor could not be sustained.Unfortunately, his good deeds seem unable to outway these difficulties and his good deeds were many. For example, Aurangzeb expanded the Mughal empire to it’s most significant extent, by absorbing much of central India into his kingdom. This region, the Deccan, had long eluded the previous Mughal emperors and it finally fell to Aurangzeb due to his persistence. Aurangzeb, by remaining on the thrown the longest of any Mughal monarch meant that his positive influence on his reign must not be overlooked.