Who is aurangzeb

If, as Hindu nationalists aver, India has long been a Hindu nation, why was it for a long time ruled by Muslims? Even more troubling to the claims of Hindu nationalism, why was Mughal India characterised by fruitful Hindu-Muslim relations in many areas, including state administration, literature, painting, music, and even religion and spirituality? Instead of admitting the complexity of the past, Hindu nationalists insist that religious oppression must have been the signature trait of Mughal rule.

H atred of Aurangzeb extends far beyond the Hindu Right in modern India. In some cases, other groups have their own reasons for despising this premodern king. Many Sikhs, for example, remember a history of animosity between early Sikh religious leaders and the Mughals. More widely, via school textbooks and mass media, the colonial-era image of Aurangzeb the bigot has seeped deep into Indian society.

Many Indians accept and repeat misinformed ideas about this king without realising the troublesome politics behind such views. In late summer , after the idea received the endorsement of several BJP members of parliament, New Delhi officials agreed to rename Aurangzeb Road in Delhi.

In , RemoveMughalsFromBooks exploded on Twitter as part of a campaign that called for Indian textbooks to skim over or altogether remove Mughal history — a period spanning more than years. Historians who object to such activities, both in India and abroad, risk becoming the target of intense harassment campaigns. Of the many scapegoats of Hindu nationalists, Aurangzeb is perhaps their favourite Indian Muslim to criticise. Though it is easy to make fun of some of the more outlandish mischaracterisations, the stakes involved remain quite serious.

There is simply no way to understand the state of the subcontinent on the eve of British colonialism without a reasonable, historically grounded perspective on Aurangzeb, who was almost certainly the most important political figure in 17th-century India.

Numerically and geographically, his empire was vast. At the height of his power, Aurangzeb ruled over million people, more than the entire population of Europe at the time. The imperial treasury boasted lavish collections of gems, diamonds and gold that likely made Aurangzeb the richest man of his day.

In the eyes of most people in 17th-century Asia and Europe, Aurangzeb Alamgir truly lived up to his names: the throne-adorner Aurang-zeb and the world-seizer Alam-gir. Historians of the day struggled to convey the carnage, describing battlegrounds drenched in so much blood they glimmered like fields of red tulips. Aurangzeb was the third of four sons of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, but he had an equal claim to the throne as his brothers. The Mughals did not recognise primogeniture, the succession rights of the eldest son.

Indeed, Aurangzeb indisputably held the Mughal crown only when all three of his brothers were dead or exiled from India. Over a period of two years, from until , the brothers battled with one another in numerous violent clashes that resulted in death tolls in the tens of thousands. Historians of the day struggled to convey the carnage.

They often resorted to poetic descriptions, such as describing battlegrounds that were drenched in so much blood they glimmered like fields of red tulips. In the end, Aurangzeb captured and executed two of his three brothers. The third escaped to Burma, where a few years later a local leader murdered him. But, in Mughal India, the succession struggle surprised few. Indians, however, were less alarmed, having been conditioned by prior Mughal successions. Recent scholarship has highlighted how princely fighting for the throne strengthened the Mughal state, by allowing the most capable son to rise to power and incentivising princes to recruit new groups into Mughal service in their competition to be the next emperor.

Thus, Aurangzeb ascended to the helm of a strong empire, armed with the leadership, and the administrative and battle experience and skills, that would make him an effective king. Of all these, justice strikes many as a surprising way to think about a king so much defamed today.

It featured, for example, capital punishment for state enemies, sometimes preceded by torture. Rather than judging these acts by contemporary standards, however, a better way to understand him and 17th-century India is to grasp what he thought it meant to be a just, Muslim, Mughal king.

Above all else, Aurangzeb wanted to enlarge Mughal domains, and his expansion aims limited his other goals, especially his pursuit of justice. Often, we can glimpse some of the key tensions of his reign by identifying points of conflict between his unbridled imperial ambitions and his professed commitment to piety, just rule and Mughal kingship. For example, immediately upon taking the Mughal throne, Aurangzeb found himself in violation of Islamic law and condemned by Muslim rulers across Asia.

Quite inconveniently, his father did not die from his severe illness in as expected. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir is one of the most hated men in Indian history.

Widely reviled as a religious fanatic who sought to violently oppress Hindus, he is even blamed by some for setting into motion conflicts that would result in the creation of a separate Muslim state in South Asia. In her lively overview of his life and influence, Audrey Truschke offers a clear-eyed perspective on the public debate over Aurangzeb and makes the case for why his often-maligned legacy deserves to be reassessed.

Aurangzeb was arguably the most powerful and wealthiest ruler of his day. However he failed and found his position as governor of the Deccan.

His sons began to tear. The son's troops gained the upper hand over that of the father who was taken prisoner at the red fort of Agra. He spent the last 8 years of his life with a view of the Taj Mahal. He had to flee to a friend, Malik Jiwan, a Baluch chief, but he handed it over to Aurangzeb who humiliated him throughout the city. He was quickly beheaded. He will die in the Burmese jungle some time later. The reign of Aurangzeb is marked by two very distinct phenomena.

First he was a dreaded warlord, expanding his territory even further. It conquered Assam, a province of India above Bangladesh eastward extension , part of Afghanistan westward extension , and the southern states of India, including Tanjore extension to the South.

Only the North was not a destination of conquest, it must be said that there is the formidable barrier of the Himalayas. The second element characterizing the reign of Aurangzeb is intransigence about religion. These are the core obsessions that drive our newsroom—defining topics of seismic importance to the global economy. Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend.

At the entrance of the [Badshahi Masjid in Lahore] are some pictures from the colonial era. It narrates the story of colonial historiography, the categorisation of history into Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and British eras, pitting epochs, communities, religions, and histories against one other, and in the process creating new classifications that might not have been there at the start.

History is used as a political tool, an excuse, a justification for the imposition of colonial rule. The British were needed to rescue the Muslims from the Sikhs, the Hindus from the Muslims, the Dravidians from the Aryans, the Dalits from the Brahmins, the past from the present. The narrative continues to unfold even today, throughout south Asia, as modern sensibilities are imposed on historical characters, making heroes out of them, of imagined communities.

In this narrative there was room for Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs within the fold of Hindu nationalism, but not for the Muslims, the successors of foreign occupation. This imagined memory became the basis of laying down future plans, with one group determined to uproot all vestiges of foreign influence, and the other wanting to take inspiration from the past to reclaim lost glory.

The British, in the meantime, were more than eager to perpetuate this communalisation of history for it provided them with a justification to govern as arbitrators, as correctors of historical injustices.