Aurangzeb is the prince of Jihadis. His name is invoked in public speeches, and his pictures are set as WhatsApp display pictures for no other reason. His spectre has been haunting political discourse in India, and it won’t be exorcised as long as his legacy remains alive. This, however, isn’t possible till his historical persona is presented in its true light. His critics have been very candid about their reasons for disliking him. His partisans, however, have been mealy-mouthed about why they like him. They try to explain away his policies through bizarre reasoning and employ every interpretational tool, from Marxian economic determinism to realpolitik pragmatism. It’s important for their politics to salvage Aurangzeb from being condemned as a religious bigot who discriminated among his subjects based on their faith.
More important than how history views him is how Aurangzeb saw himself. Did he visualise himself as an Islamic ruler striving for the glory of Islam, or as a king who equally belonged to all Indians? To answer this question, one must examine the nature, legitimacy and legal structure of the State he presided over. Was it a Muslim State or not? And if it was, could a king maintain his legitimacy if perceived to have deviated from the path of Islam?
Furthermore, besides its religious character, was it a foreign rule or not? What does one call a State run by people of foreign origin, many of them recently arrived? Till the decline of the Mughal empire in the mid-18th century, the ranks of nobility were replenished by a steady stream of fortune seekers from Arabia, Iran and Central Asia. About 70 – 80 per cent of the ruling class — consisting of less than 2,000 families — were Muslims of foreign origin. It was a conquest State. To deny its foreign character by arguing that there was no drain of wealth from India is a half-truth.
Aurangzeb epitomised conquest
While it’s true that they didn’t send India’s money out, much of the State’s riches were concentrated in the hands of the foreign ruling class, which they squandered on conspicuous consumption and extravagant displays of vanity such as building mausoleums for their immortality. They dotted the country with royal necropolises while the peasantry groaned under heavy taxation, which took away up to three-fourths of their produce, leaving them with little beyond bare subsistence. So much so that, according to 17th-century French traveller and historian François Bernier, there was no middle class between the super-rich nobility and the destitute peasantry. Before the Muslim rule, taxation was never beyond one-sixth of the produce. So, to suspect that religious hostility played a role in the excessive exploitation of peasants during the Muslim rule would not be far-fetched.
It is quite understandable for a Hindu to have a critical attitude towards Muslim rule, and to harbour particular antipathy for kings who were more harsh than others. Aurangzeb was one such emperor. He destroyed temples on a larger scale than his predecessors, reimposed and enforced discriminatory taxation, and made it more clear than ever that the State was Islamic and the ruling class was Muslim, even though the country was Hindustan and its major inhabitants Hindus.
But why would a Muslim idolise this idol-breaker? Surely, they don’t adore him for giving land grants to temples, nor do they admire him for his cap-sewing piety. Aurangzeb is lionised for showing Hindus their place. He epitomises the ideology of conquest. He is the only king revered as a saint, and his imperial name, Alamgir, is suffixed with ‘Rahmatullah Alaih’ (Allah’s blessings upon him), an honorific title bestowed on Muslim saints. Poet Allama Iqbal in his Persian book of verse, Rumuz-e Bekhudi, called Aurangzeb the Abraham of India, for, like the Semitic patriarch, he, too, was an idol breaker. Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, the foremost maulvi of the Muslim League, couldn’t find better words for praising Muhammad Ali Jinnah than calling him the greatest Muslim after Aurangzeb. Even today, Alamgir is a more common name than Akbar.
Also read: Aurangzeb almost drank wine to prove his love for a courtesan
The falsehoods of Ashraaf scholars
The apologists mainly belong to the foreign ruling class that presided over India during the Sultanate and Mughal periods, and continue to hold important positions in independent India’s politics, academia and culture industry. Working from the academic redoubts of advanced study centres, these historians shaped much of the historical narrative about the mediaeval period, which they, taking the secular high ground, refused to call the Muslim period.
They interpreted history with Marxian tools and accordingly attributed all the wrongs of Muslim rulers to economic motives, thus shielding their religion from any blame, though the rulers and their chroniclers didn’t mince words while mentioning religious motivations behind the sacrileges they committed. So power-oriented and interest-based is the moral universe of these historians that, in their view, a religious atrocity wouldn’t be reprehensible if it were committed for economic or political reasons. Such an understanding of economic determinism and human agency may be flawed and even self-serving. The Ashraaf-Marxist school of history practices conscious falsehood while using the Marxian insight of religion as false consciousness.
The apologia for the bad and ugly of Muslim rule resorts to the falsification of historical records. Thus, if a mediaeval historian said that a particular battle was a jihad against kafirs, the apologists interpret it as just another battle where religion played no role, even though temples were demolished, idols were broken, and captives were circumcised. One could only wish that instead of belying the contemporary historians, and trying to read their “real meaning and intention”, the apologists would learn something from the art of higher criticism of Biblical studies for an earnest understanding of the “world behind the text”, without controverting what is actually written. One may ask, if the words of mediaeval historians don’t mean what is written, then why should today’s historians be taken at their words? Going by their own methodology, their defence of Aurangzeb as a fair ruler could actually be a hidden homage to his bigotry.
They extenuate Aurangzeb’s excesses as the expediency of the time. By doing so, they suggest that the Mughal State’s commitment to Islamic ideals compelled him to persecute his subjects for the sake of appearances, which only leads to this question: Would his brother Dara Shikoh have done the same if he were king?
Another method of covering up the wrongs of Muslim rulers is to hype the exception and downplay the rule. So, nowadays, Aurangzeb is better known for the maintenance grants he gave for some temples rather than the demolition of many others.
Also read: ‘No problem before’ — Aurangzeb tomb caretaker says tension stoked by Owaisi visit ‘rare blip’
Don’t wallow in the past
Today’s Muslims, particularly the native converts, are not answerable for what rulers like Aurangzeb did. But if they gloat in the glory of that past, they will also have to own up to its wrongs. The way forward is to effect an ideological break from that legacy and appraise the good, bad and ugly of the past on the touchstone of the constitutional values of our republic.
Defending Aurangzeb is to continue the legacy of conflict and fuel the fire of religious discord. True, in the past, Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Buddhists and Jains clashed with one another, sometimes violently; but those strifes are long forgotten and don’t affect inter-community relations today.
There is no reconciliation without truth. What happened then is not our responsibility, but what happens now, is. The blame is on us if the truth is buried and half-truth is bandied. We must recognise the past for what it was. Sanitised history makes the chasm between memory and history unbridgeable.
Historical wounds are healed neither by denial nor by revenge. It takes a historical temper and a mature sense of the past. Historical thinking is a humbling exercise that makes us aware of how the past lives within us. Any attempt to deny what happened in history will make us inauthentic. It will distort both our present and future.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets at @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s Note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)