Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb, who took the regnal title Alamgir, "World-Seizer", was the sixth Mughal emperor, ruling from 1658 to 1707. He won the throne by defeating and killing his brothers and imprisoning his father, and under him the Mughal Empire reached its greatest extent, covering almost the whole of the Indian subcontinent. He was also the most religiously conservative of the great Mughals, and the long, costly wars of his last decades left the empire overstretched. He remains one of the most argued-over rulers in South Asian history.

Muhi al-Din Muhammad was born on 3 November 1618 at Dahod in Gujarat, the third son of Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, and Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj Mahal was later built. When his father rebelled against Emperor Jahangir, the eight-year-old prince and his elder brother Dara Shikoh were handed over as hostages, and they rejoined their parents only when Shah Jahan took the throne in 1628. He received a thorough education in Persian and Turkic literature, the Quran and Islamic law, and became known for his personal piety.

At fifteen he won his father's praise by facing a charging war elephant. From 1636 he held a series of senior posts: viceroy of the Deccan, governor of Gujarat, commander of a failed campaign in Balkh in Central Asia, governor of Multan and Sindh, and leader of two unsuccessful attempts to retake Kandahar from the Safavid Empire. In a second spell in the Deccan from 1653 he attacked the sultanates of Golconda and Bijapur, but was restrained by his father. He was an able general and administrator, and he resented the favour Shah Jahan showed to Dara.

The Mughals had no rule that the eldest son inherited, and successions were usually decided by force. When Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in 1657, all four of his sons prepared for war. Shuja, in Bengal, and Murad, in Gujarat, proclaimed themselves emperor. Aurangzeb allied with Murad, promising to divide the empire, defeated an imperial army at Dharmat in April 1658 and routed Dara at Samugarh, near Agra, in late May. He then took Agra fort and confined Shah Jahan there, where the old emperor lived under guard, cared for by his daughter Jahanara, until his death in 1666.

Aurangzeb quickly broke his bargain with Murad, who was imprisoned and later executed. Shuja was defeated at Khajwa and fled to Arakan, where he was killed. Dara was betrayed, paraded through Delhi and executed in August 1659 after a court condemned him for apostasy; his interest in Hindu and Sufi mysticism made the charge plausible to the orthodox, though historians generally see the trial as political. Historians also stress that support for the brothers did not divide neatly along religious lines: Hindu and Muslim nobles fought on both sides, and Aurangzeb's superior generalship counted for more than ideology.

Aurangzeb was a devout Sunni Muslim who lived austerely, prayed regularly and was said to copy the Quran and sew caps to earn money for his personal needs. He sponsored the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, a large compilation of Hanafi Islamic law, appointed censors of public morals, and restricted drinking, gambling and some court ceremonies. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, a poll tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished a century earlier, and he levied higher customs duties on Hindu merchants than on Muslims.

His treatment of temples is the most disputed part of his record. Court chronicles report the destruction of a number of prominent temples, among them the Vishvanath temple at Varanasi in 1669 and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura after a Jat revolt in 1670, as well as temples associated with rebel Rajput rulers in 1679–80. At the same time, surviving orders show him granting land and funds to other temples, Hindu monasteries and Sikh shrines. The historian Richard Eaton, working from primary sources, has argued that the destructions were fewer than often claimed and were mostly aimed at sites linked to political rebels, while others read the evidence as showing a broader religious motive. Many recent historians, among them Audrey Truschke, argue that his policies combined piety with political calculation; critics reply that this underplays real discrimination against non-Muslims. Hindus served in his administration in larger numbers than under his predecessors, especially Marathas recruited during the Deccan wars.

He also executed people he regarded as religious threats. The Sufi mystic Sarmad was beheaded for heresy, and in 1675 the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi. Sikh tradition holds that the guru died defending the right of Kashmiri Hindus to keep their faith; the episode pushed the community founded by Guru Nanak towards armed resistance under his son, Guru Gobind Singh.

Aurangzeb's reign saw risings by Jat peasants near Agra, the Satnami sect near Delhi, Pashtun tribes on the north-west frontier and, from 1679, the Rajputs of Marwar after he tried to control the succession there. His most persistent opponent was the Maratha leader Shivaji, who raided Mughal lands, sacked the port of Surat in 1664, escaped from house arrest in Agra in 1666 and crowned himself king in 1674.

In 1681 Aurangzeb moved south to deal with the Marathas and with his rebellious son Prince Akbar, who had fled to them. He never returned. He conquered Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, and in 1689 his forces captured Shivaji's son and successor, Sambhaji, who was tortured and executed. But the Marathas, without a single centre to strike, fought on under Rajaram and then his widow Tarabai, taking forts back as soon as the Mughals moved on. The emperor spent his last two decades besieging hill forts with a vast moving camp. The cost in money and lives was enormous, revenue collection in the north suffered, and the empire was only nominally at its largest.

Aurangzeb died at his camp near Ahmednagar on 3 March 1707, aged 88. He had asked for a simple burial, and his plain grave lies at Khuldabad, near Aurangabad in Maharashtra. His surviving sons fought each other for the throne, and within a few decades the Maratha Empire, the British and other regional powers had taken over most of the territory the Mughals once controlled.

Historians have long debated how far he caused this decline. An older view, common among colonial and nationalist writers such as Jadunath Sarkar, blamed his religious policy for alienating the Hindu majority and the Rajput allies on whom Akbar had built the empire. Later historians, including Satish Chandra, John F. Richards and others, put more weight on structural problems: the strain of the Deccan wars, a shortage of good land to reward nobles, overtaxed peasants and the rise of regional powers. Most now see both factors at work.

His memory remains politically charged. In Pakistan he has often been presented in textbooks and official writing as a model of Muslim piety. In India he is widely portrayed, especially by Hindu nationalists, as a bigot and destroyer of temples, and streets and places named after him have been renamed. Academic historians on the whole reject both the heroic and the villainous caricature, describing an able, hard-working and ruthless ruler whose personal faith shaped his policies, but whose decisions were also driven by the politics of holding a vast and diverse empire together.