How Do You Solve a Problem Like Aurangzeb?

The spirit of Aurangzeb continues to haunt India’s political discourse, as the latest row in the Maharashtra Assembly over remarks eulogizing the Mughal Emperor prove.

The latest controversy over Mughal emperor Aurangzeb erupted in Maharashtra’s Assembly when Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi, after praising the Mughal, declared that Aurangzeb was not a cruel ruler and had, in fact, built temples. He argued that the emperor’s war against Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj was a battle for state control, not a Hindu-Muslim conflict.

The statement provoked a furious backlash, culminating in Azmi’s suspension.

So, how does one make sense of Aurangzeb and his reign of nearly half-a-century? If there is one work that provides an unvarnished, rigorously researched and gloriously three-dimensional portrait of the Mughal Emperor, it is Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s monumental five-volume ‘History of Aurangzib’ (1912-24). It is precisely because Aurangzeb remains a lightning rod in contemporary politics that Sarkar’s magisterial work is more relevant than ever.

At a time when historical discourse is increasingly dictated by political biases, reading Sarkar is an act of intellectual defiance. It asks us to understand Aurangzeb - his motivations, his ambitions, his prejudices and his failures - on the basis of documented history rather than polemical fantasy.

What makes Sarkar’s History of Aurangzib indispensable is its scholarly integrity, in letting the sources speak. Nowhere is this more evident than in Volume 3, Chapter 34, titled ‘Islamic State Church in India.’ In it, Sarkar lays bare Aurangzeb’s vision of an Islamic state governed by the strict tenets of Sharia. The emperor, he writes, was a rigid upholder of the doctrines and rules of the Mohammedan Canon Law and sought to remake India in its image. Unlike his great-grandfather Akbar, who had envisioned a syncretic state accommodating multiple faiths, Aurangzeb believed in enforcing orthodox Islam as state policy, seeing it as his divine duty.

He does not attempt to rehabilitate Aurangzeb nor demonize him beyond what the evidence supports. It is this commitment to historical truth that makes his work essential reading, particularly today, when intellectual dishonesty masquerades as scholarship. Take Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (2017) a slim volume that offers a sanitized, even hagiographic, portrait of the emperor.

Truschke’s argument hinges on selective anecdotes, such as Aurangzeb’s alleged generosity towards Brahmins, while conveniently downplaying the destruction of countless temples and the forcible conversions under his reign.  Her mendacious arguments only underscore the necessity of returning to Sarkar’s tour-de-force, which is a meticulous reconstruction of not just Aurangzeb’s policies, personality and military conquests, but practically the whole history of 17th century India based on Persian, Marathi, old Hindi and European sources.  

Sarkar’s History of Aurangzib is not merely great history in a Gibbonian vein, but a safeguard against intellectual dishonesty. For decades, India’s historical discourse has been shaped less by scholarship and more by ideology, especially, the Nehruvian era and later regimes saw Marxist historians gaining control over key academic institutions and rewriting textbooks to fit a narrative that downplayed the atrocities of Islamic rulers.

The facts, however, remain immutable. Aurangzeb was no misunderstood administrator but a zealot who imposed Sharia as state policy and persecuted religious minorities. Sarkar gives us an Aurangzeb who is ruthless but disciplined, acknowledging his subject’s military genius, his sheer endurance that allowed him to fight wars into his eighties, his piety but extreme cruelty; a man of immense willpower yet ultimately a failure, having left behind a fractured and declining empire.

One need not be a partisan to acknowledge the sheer weight of historical evidence against the narrative of Aurangzeb as a tolerant or benevolent ruler.

Take Mathura, once a stronghold of his brother Dara Shikoh, who had sought to bridge Hindu and Muslim traditions. Aurangzeb appointed Abdun Nabi as faujdar of Mathura and tasked with ensuring that Hinduism in the sacred city was not just suppressed but erased. While we know of the horrific fate of Chhatrapati Sambhaji, less known is that of Jat leader Gokla, the zamindar of Tilpat, under whose leadership the Jat peasantry rose against Aurangzeb’s oppression in Mathura in 1669. The uprising was ruthlessly crushed and Gokla was taken to Agra, his limbs hacked off in public, his family forcibly converted to Islam.

Aurangzeb’s intolerance was not merely an outgrowth of political expediency but the logical outcome of his puritanical theocracy. His personal piety was extreme - he lived simply, sewed his own skullcaps - but this asceticism did not temper his zealotry. Holi was prohibited. Muharram processions were banned after a fight between rival processions in Burhanpur in 1669. Hindu fairs, which even Indian Muslims attended, were suppressed in Malwa and elsewhere.

His policy of religious discrimination extended far beyond symbolism. The jaziya tax on non-Muslims, abolished by Akbar a century earlier, was reinstated. Even during the Maratha war, when Hindu traders were scared off by forced jaziya enforcement, which in turn led to food shortages in the Mughal camp, Aurangzeb refused to revoke the tax even as his soldiers starved, arguing that he could not “jeopardize his soul by violating the Quranic precept.”

In fact, an army of Muslim collectors fanned out across the empire to ensure the enforcement of jaziya. So much so, that in 1687, an Inspector-General of jaziya was appointed to oversee its realization in the four Deccan provinces. An ordinance issued in 1671 required that revenue officials in crown lands be exclusively Muslim, throwing out the Hindu accountants and head-clerks (though this was later deemed impractical due to the sheer necessity of Hindu clerks).

The scale of temple destruction under Aurangzeb was unprecedented. In 1669, he issued a general order to demolish all schools and temples of ‘infidels.’ This resulted in the second destruction of Somnath, the Vishwanath Temple of Benares and the Keshav Rai Temple of Mathura. In Chittor alone, 63 temples were destroyed in February 1680 during the Rajput revolt while 172 temples in and around Udaipur were decimated. The grand temple in front of the Maharana of Udaipur’s palace was razed, its deities shattered.

Aurangzeb’s own family bore the weight of his tyranny. Obsessed with Shah Jahan’s prophecy that his sons would turn against him, he kept them under watch, minutely regulating their lives. His eldest son, Mohammad Sultan, was imprisoned for twelve years (he had defected to the side of Aurangzeb’s brother Shuja during the Battle of Khajwa). His youngest, Kam Baksh, spent time in confinement. His favourite, Muhammad Akbar, revolted in 1681, aligned with the Rajputs and sought refuge with Chhatrapati Sambhaji. Harried and hounded, he eventually died a fugitive in Persia.

A dishonest narrative that paints Aurangzeb as a secular, misunderstood ruler does disservice not just to history but to those who suffered under his rule. The chilling execution of Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, his massacre of the Satnamis, a non-conformist Hindu sect, are just two instances.

Aurangzeb’s own letters reveal his commitment to Islamic supremacy, his disdain for non-Muslims, and his belief in ruling through the lens of religious orthodoxy. For those who wish to understand Aurangzeb, not as a villain or hero but as he truly was, there is no better guide than Sarkar. History is not meant to be screamed from a screen or distorted in political speeches. It must be studied and understood in all its grandeur and horror.