BOOK REVIEW. Not quite a fanatic

Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth is a very short, readable biography of the sixth Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb Alamgir. Although it is written by a scholar of considerable repute, the book has none of the complexity associated with an academic treatise, being free of the citations and footnotes blighting similar works. Truschke’s work resembles an older and more profound one by AJP Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and The Statesman . But then, Taylor had a lot more easily accessible material to draw on, and Bismarck, unlike Aurangzeb, lived much closer to our time in archive-crazy Europe.

A different man Truschke’s Aurangzeb emerges as a more troubled, more human personality, capable of giving and receiving love — one who was sensitive enough to put up a beautiful mausoleum for his wife, Dilras Banu Begum, who died in childbirth, in Aurangabad. He was, if one goes by Truschke, cultured, perpetually seeking to enforce justice, and not quite the Muslim fanatic he is made out to be. In support, she quietly slips in Aurangzeb’s gushing admiration for Hindu, Jain and Buddhist temples in Ellora calling them “one of the finely crafted marvels of the real, transcendent Artisan (i.e., God).”

To buttress her point that he was alive to the realities of his time, Truschke draws upon Persian and Hindu sources as well as Aurangzeb’s own observations to let us know that he even ‘endorsed Shah Jahan’s enjoyment of music’ and recognised ‘Hindu-based weighing ritual as part of the Indian Mughal tradition, even if he had personally shied away from it.’ In his later years — when he was considered to have turned to fundamentalist Islam — ‘Aurangzeb’ Truschke tells us ‘even endorsed the syncretism that was part of his bloodline as a great strength that might enable the empire to survive in the face of formidable opposition.’

Truschke certainly makes out a good case for a reconsideration of Aurangzeb’s legacy as a man of his times and one who should not be judged by the standards of our own. Yes, he had blood on his hand and not the least of his murdered brothers; amongst these, the sadistic execution of a seemingly gentler Dara Shukoh sticks out. But where does the truth lie? When Aurangzeb asks him what he would have done had roles been reversed with Aurangzeb at the receiving end, Dara Shukoh, Truschke tell us, ‘sneered, telling him, ‘that he would have Aurangzeb’s body quartered and displayed on Delhi’s four main gates.’

Unpopular measures The most contentious part of Truschke’s book is on the anti-Hindu aspect of Aurangzeb’s rule, not the least his imposition of Jizya, a tax on non-Muslims. It is possible, Trutschke tells us, that he imposed the tax to ingratiate himself with the powerful body of Muslim religious scholars, the ulema, and to firmly mark ‘the Mughal Empire as a proper Islamic State.’ This was an unpopular tax, riling Hindus while doing little to increase his control over the ulema. Nor did the Jizya collection amount to much, especially since much of it did not get past ‘the pockets of greedy tax collectors.’

In popular imagination, Aurangzeb is also seen as destroyer of Hindu temples. Truschke tries to debunk this, contending that Aurangzeb destroyed far fewer temples than he is said to have, and that anyway temple-destruction was an activity that Hindu as well as Muslim rulers indulged in. Even if, for one moment, we accept her argument, the fact remains that Aurangzeb razed three of Hinduism’s holiest shrines in Benares, Somnath and Mathura to the ground and built mosques there.

Truschke explanations, for such selective destruction, are unsatisfactory. As a historian, Truschke would have done well to examine if there was a link between the imposition of the Jizya, the destruction of Hindu shrines and the relentless expansion of the Mughal empire that took place under Aurangzeb till it had covered almost the entire Indian subcontinent. For this we need to understand the nature of the Mughal Empire and its fragile base.

Of the three great Islamic empires of its time – the Ottoman and the Safavids being the other two – the Mughal Empire was the only one where a small Muslim elite controlled a mass of non-Islamic people making it a insecure quasi-garrison state. Not too long after Aurangzeb took charge of it, the empire was being seriously challenged internally, amongst others, by the Marathas under the redoubtable Shivaji.

The way of force It is very possible that Aurangzeb concluded that there was an existential threat to the empire. It was a threat which he felt, could only be seen off by a sustained application of force and what better way, than by demonstrably letting the world know where power lay –– through the imposition of the Jizya, the unchallenged destruction of Hinduism’s holiest shrines and a marked expansion of the Empire through force? This is the kind of interconnection that Elias Canetti would almost not have missed.

In her concluding chapter, ‘Aurangzeb’s Legacy,’ Truschke brings out the immense difficulty in understanding a complex personality like Aurangzeb. She acknowledges that Aurangzeb ‘repeatedly acted against his professed values to feed an insatiable hunger for political power’ and, to some extent, Truschke also holds him responsible for initiating the collapse of the Mughal Empire.

Truschke’s sensitive biography partially rehabilitates Aurangzeb and helps us make better sense of his 49-year-long reign, without downplaying his faults. Her book on Aurangzeb, Truschke admits, is obviously not the last word on an emperor who continues to live in our memory, even more so than his illustrious great grandfather, Akbar, does. Our own historians would do well to attempt a deeper study of Aurangzeb whose actions impact us to this day.

The reviewer is a visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, Bangalore

MEET THE AUTHOR

Audrey Truschke teaches South Asian history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She is the author of Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court.

COMMENT NOW