Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir: Saint, tyrant, or something far more complicated?

PART ONE: A TALE OF TWO HISTORIES

📍 Context

The Mughal Empire (1526–1857) was one of the largest and wealthiest empires in human history, at its peak governing roughly 150 million people — about one-quarter of the world's population — and generating nearly 25% of global GDP (Maddison 2007). It was founded by Babur, a Timurid prince of Central Asian and Mongol descent, and reached its zenith under Akbar (r. 1556–1605), Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). The empire governed a religiously plural society: roughly 80% Hindu, alongside Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians. Aurangzeb was the sixth and last of the 'Great Mughals.' After his death in 1707, the empire rapidly fragmented.

The partition of British India in 1947 created two new nations — India (predominantly Hindu) and Pakistan (predominantly Muslim) — along with the ideological need for each state to construct a national historical narrative. Aurangzeb became a fiercely contested figure in this ideological battleground.

I. The Problem: A Single Man, Two Completely Different Histories

I want to begin today with a thought experiment. Imagine I hand you two books — both purporting to be biographies of the same historical figure. The first, published in Lahore in the 1970s, describes him as "a pious, just, and saintly ruler — a model of Islamic governance, frugal in personal life, dedicated to justice, and the greatest defender of the faith the subcontinent has ever known." The second, published in New Delhi around the same era, calls him "a fanatical bigot, a temple-destroyer, a persecutor of Hindus and Sikhs, whose narrow religious zeal destroyed the syncretic composite culture that his predecessors had so carefully built."

Both books are describing the same man: Muhi-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth Mughal emperor, who ruled from 1658 to 1707 — nearly half a century — over the largest empire the subcontinent had ever seen.

How can two literate, educated societies look at the same historical figure and see something so completely opposite? And more importantly — which, if either, is telling us the truth?

That is the central question of today's article. And I want to warn you upfront: the honest answer is going to be uncomfortable for everyone — whether you come from Islamabad or from Delhi, from Karachi or from Mumbai. Because the real Aurangzeb does not belong comfortably to either narrative. He is genuinely, irreducibly complex. And that complexity is precisely what makes him one of the most fascinating figures in world history.

1.1 Why Does This Matter?

Before we proceed, let me pre-empt a question some of you may be forming: why should 21st-century historians and anthropologists care about the reputation of a man who died over three hundred years ago? The answer is: because he never really died. Aurangzeb remains alive in contemporary politics. He is invoked in communal riots in India, in Pakistani state curricula, in Hindutva ideological frameworks, in debates about the Babri Masjid, in arguments about Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi — which, incidentally, Aurangzeb is accused of building on the site of a destroyed Hindu temple. He is cited in conversations about the 'two-nation theory' that underpins Pakistani nationhood. He lives in WhatsApp forwards, in YouTube polemics, and in parliamentary speeches.

As the historian Audrey Truschke has argued, Aurangzeb 'looms large over modern South Asia. He is used to justify present-day communal animosities and, sometimes, violence' (Truschke 2017, 2). Understanding who he actually was — with all the evidence at our disposal — is therefore not merely an academic exercise. It is a matter of historical justice and, in some respects, of contemporary political hygiene.

PART TWO: THE MAN HIMSELF — A BIOGRAPHY

II. Muhi-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb: The Biographical Arc

Vital Statistics

Full Name: Abu Muzaffar Muhi-ud-Din Muhammad Aurangzeb Alamgir

Born: 3 November 1618, Dahod, Gujarat (Mughal Empire)

Died: 3 March 1707, Ahmadnagar, Deccan (aged 88)

Reign: 31 July 1658 – 3 March 1707 (nearly 49 years — longest Mughal reign)

Parents: Shah Jahan (father); Mumtaz Mahal (mother, for whom the Taj Mahal was built)

Title: Alamgir: 'Seizer of the Universe'

Capitals: Agra (early reign); Aurangabad; Bidar (Deccan campaigns)

Territory at peak: ~3.2 million sq. km — the largest extent of any Mughal ruler

Population governed: Estimated 150–170 million (roughly 25% of world population, c. 1700)

Languages: Persian (court), Urdu, Arabic; reportedly also understood Hindi and Marathi

2.1 Early Life and Education

Aurangzeb was the third son of Shah Jahan — the emperor who commissioned the Taj Mahal — and the same Mumtaz Mahal whose death inspired that monument. Born in 1618, he grew up in the cosmopolitan Mughal court, receiving the standard princely education: Persian poetry, Islamic theology and jurisprudence (fiqh), the Quran, mathematics, history, military strategy, and the arts of calligraphy. He memorised the Quran — a distinction he was proud of throughout his life. His early correspondence, preserved in collections like the Ruq'at-i-Alamgiri, reveals a young man of exceptional intelligence, sharp wit, and a sardonic sense of humour rarely attributed to him.

Importantly, from a young age, Aurangzeb was marked by a distinctive personal piety. Unlike his father and grandfather Jahangir — the latter an open wine-drinker who patronised Sufi mysticism with syncretic flair — Aurangzeb gravitated toward the more austere Naqshbandi Sufi tradition and toward orthodox Sunni Islam. This was a personal choice, not merely a political one: throughout his life, even as emperor, he reportedly copied the Quran by hand and sewed prayer caps to earn a modest income independent of the treasury, refusing to use state funds for personal expenses (Sarkar 1912, vol. I, 81–82).

2.2 The War of Succession (1657–1659): How Aurangzeb Became Emperor

To understand Aurangzeb's character, we must understand the brutal context in which he seized power. The Mughal Empire had no law of primogeniture — the throne did not automatically pass to the eldest son. Instead, Mughal successions were characterised by what historians have called 'the rule of the sword': princes were expected to fight for the throne, and victory was its own legitimacy.

When Shah Jahan fell gravely ill in 1657, his four sons — Dara Shikoh, Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb, and Murad Bakhsh — launched a four-way civil war. Dara Shikoh was the eldest and Shah Jahan's favourite: a deeply syncretic thinker who had translated the Upanishads into Persian and argued for a 'perennial philosophy' uniting Islam and Hinduism. Aurangzeb defeated and killed Dara Shikoh in 1659, imprisoned his aged father Shah Jahan in the Agra Fort — where the old emperor lived comfortably until his natural death in 1666 — and eventually disposed of his other brothers.

⚖️ Historical Context: Mughal Succession Violence

The killing of rival princes was not unique to Aurangzeb — it was standard Mughal practice. Akbar the Great, universally celebrated for his religious tolerance, executed his own brother Kamran and blinded him. Jahangir rebelled against his father Akbar. Shah Jahan himself overthrew his father Jahangir's favourite prince Shahryar. As the historian John F. Richards (1993, 22) notes: 'Succession struggles were built into Mughal imperial structure.' The Ottoman Empire had formalised fratricide — the law explicitly required the new sultan to execute all brothers upon accession. Aurangzeb's succession was violent, but it was not aberrational within its historical context.

What was more unusual was the execution of Dara Shikoh on grounds that included charges of heresy (zindiq) — a death that carried ideological implications beyond mere political elimination.

2.3 The Emperor at Work: Administration and Governance

Aurangzeb was, by any measure, a formidably capable administrator and military commander. He had served as governor of the Deccan twice before becoming emperor, gaining intimate knowledge of the empire's most contested frontier. As emperor, he was legendarily hands-on: he reportedly read every petition, wrote extensive marginalia on official documents (many of which survive), and conducted a personal correspondence of extraordinary volume. The Adab-i-Alamgiri preserves many of his letters; the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri — a massive compilation of Islamic law he commissioned — runs to thirty volumes and was one of the most ambitious legal projects in Islamic history.

Here is a crucial, often overlooked statistical fact that should give pause to both nationalist narratives: Aurangzeb employed more Hindus in senior administrative positions than any of his predecessors. The historian M. Athar Ali's meticulous analysis of Mughal administrative records shows that at the height of Aurangzeb's reign, Hindu mansabdars (military-administrative rank-holders) comprised approximately 31.6% of the nobility — higher than under Akbar (22.5%) or Jahangir (22.4%) or Shah Jahan (24.5%) (Ali 1968, 30–31). The empire's most powerful Hindu administrator, Raja Jai Singh I of Amber, was one of Aurangzeb's most trusted generals.

📊 Hindu Representation in Mughal Noble Ranks (Mansabdars)

Akbar (r. 1556–1605): ~22.5% Hindu nobles

Jahangir (r. 1605–1627): ~22.4% Hindu nobles

Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658): ~24.5% Hindu nobles

Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707): ~31.6% Hindu nobles at peak

Source: M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb (1968), Oxford University Press. These figures demonstrate that the narrative of Aurangzeb systematically excluding Hindus from power is not supported by administrative records.

PART THREE: THE CONTESTED LEGACY — TWO NATIONALIST NARRATIVES

III. The Architecture of Memory: How Two Nations Built Opposite Histories

The divergent images of Aurangzeb did not emerge spontaneously from the historical record. They were constructed — deliberately, systematically, by state actors, textbook writers, and ideological entrepreneurs responding to the political imperatives of nascent nation-states. To understand why, we must briefly examine the ideological foundations of both India and Pakistan.

3.1 The Pakistani Narrative: Aurangzeb as Saintly Hero

Pakistan was created in 1947 on the basis of the 'Two-Nation Theory' — the argument that Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent constituted two distinct nations, incapable of coexistence within a single secular state. This thesis required a historical architecture: a narrative in which Muslim rule in India had been benevolent, just, and distinct from Hindu political culture.

Aurangzeb fit this architecture almost perfectly. He was the last 'great' Mughal, a devout Sunni Muslim, a man who lived austerely, refused wine, and reportedly spent his own earnings on personal expenses rather than state funds. Pakistani state textbooks — particularly those produced after General Zia-ul-Haq's Islamisation program of the 1980s, which dramatically restructured the national curriculum — elevated Aurangzeb to near-hagiographic status.

📚 From Pakistani Textbooks: Representative Passages

Grade 8 Social Studies (Punjab Textbook Board, 1984 edition): 'Aurangzeb Alamgir was a great Muslim ruler, a pious Muslim, and a brave soldier. He spent all his life in the service of Islam. He spent his own earnings on personal expenses and never misused state funds. He expanded the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent. He was a true follower of Islam who implemented Islamic laws.'

Federal Education Ministry textbook (2002): 'Unlike his predecessor Shah Jahan, who indulged in luxuries, Aurangzeb lived simply. He was just to all his subjects. His reign saw the application of Islamic principles of governance.'

These characterisations reflect a broader pattern identified by historian K.K. Aziz in The Murder of History (1993): Pakistani textbooks systematically present Muslim rulers as pious and just while omitting or minimising their acts of violence.

The Pakistani hagiography of Aurangzeb typically includes the following elements: his personal piety and asceticism; his expansion of the empire to its greatest geographical extent; his legal achievement in commissioning the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri; his opposition to Dara Shikoh's allegedly 'Hindu-influenced' syncretism as a principled defence of Islamic orthodoxy; and the framing of his wars against the Marathas, Rajputs, and Sikhs as just defensive wars against rebels rather than as wars of aggression.

What Pakistani textbooks typically omit or minimise: the prolonged and ultimately destructive Deccan Wars (1681–1707) that drained the empire; the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur; the reimposition of the jaziya tax on non-Muslims; and the political consequences of his reign — namely, that the empire he left was already fracturing and would collapse within fifty years of his death.

3.2 The Indian Narrative: Aurangzeb as Destroyer of Syncretic Culture

India's dominant nationalist narrative, rooted in the Indian National Congress tradition and later intensified by Hindutva ideology, tells a diametrically opposed story. In this narrative, Aurangzeb is the villain who dismantled the 'Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb' — the syncretic, composite culture built by Akbar, Dara Shikoh, and the great Rajput-Mughal alliance — replacing it with Islamic orthodoxy and communal violence.

The foundational texts of this tradition include Jadunath Sarkar's monumental five-volume History of Aurangzib (1912–1924), which, while a work of genuine and impressive scholarship, is coloured by a 19th-century Bengali nationalist sensibility that views Aurangzeb largely as a destroyer. Sarkar's work — long the standard reference — describes Aurangzeb as possessed of 'a religious intolerance that brooked no rival' (Sarkar 1912, vol. I, 154).

"No ruler who had made up his mind to be guided by the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet could have been a good king of India, a land of many races and many creeds. In trying to be an orthodox Muslim king, Aurangzeb ceased to be a national ruler."

— Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib (1912), Vol. III, p. 164 — A formative but ideologically inflected judgement

In the Hindutva tradition, most powerfully represented today by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and associated organisations, Aurangzeb is a totemic figure of Islamic oppression. His alleged destruction of thousands of temples — the number varies wildly from hundreds to tens of thousands depending on the source — is cited as justification for contemporary political claims, including the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Gyanvapi Mosque controversy today.

🏛️ Context: The Gyanvapi Mosque Controversy

The Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi stands adjacent to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple — one of Hinduism's holiest sites. Aurangzeb is alleged to have demolished the original Vishwanath temple in 1669 and built the mosque partially on its ruins. Archaeological surveys in 2022–23, ordered by Indian courts, fuelled intense political controversy. The case exemplifies how Aurangzeb's 17th-century actions remain live political flashpoints in 21st-century India. Historian Richard Eaton (2000) argues that while some Mughal-era mosque construction did occur on the sites of demolished temples, the political motivations were primarily about punishing rebels and asserting sovereignty — not implementing a programme of religious persecution.

Pakistani Narrative: VENERATION	Indian Nationalist Narrative: DEMONISATION
Pious, just Muslim ruler	Religious bigot and fanatic
Defender of Islamic faith	Destroyer of Hindu-Muslim synthesis
Ascetic, personally incorruptible	Persecutor of Hindus and Sikhs
Expanded empire to greatest extent	Temple-destroyer and iconoclast
Author of the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri	Reimposed oppressive jaziya tax
Wars were justified against rebels	Killed Guru Tegh Bahadur (1675)
His fall = failure of successors, not him	His policies destroyed Mughal Empire
Model ruler for modern Pakistan	Symbol of Islamic oppression

Both of these portraits are ideological constructs, not historical analyses. The real Aurangzeb was shaped by specific historical contexts, political pressures, and personal convictions that neither nationalist narrative is willing to fully examine. Let us now turn to the actual historical evidence.

PART FOUR: THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE — CONTESTED CASES

IV. Five Contested Cases: What the Historical Record Actually Shows

Let us now examine the five most contested aspects of Aurangzeb's reign in detail, assessing the primary sources and modern historiography for each. I want us to approach this as historians — not as partisans — asking: what do we actually know? What is conjecture? And what has been deliberately distorted?

Case Study 1: Temple Destruction — Sacred Cow of Both Narratives

Did Aurangzeb destroy thousands of temples? Was this a systematic program of religious persecution — or something far more selective and politically motivated?

This is the question that generates the most heat, so let us approach it with the most rigour. The answer requires us to distinguish between three very different claims:

1. Did Aurangzeb destroy any temples? Yes, unambiguously.

2. Did he destroy thousands of temples? The evidence does not support this.

3. Was the destruction religiously motivated? Only partly — the primary motivation appears to have been political.

The foundational modern study is historian Richard Eaton's 2000 paper 'Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India,' published in Frontline and subsequently expanded into academic work. Eaton, widely regarded as one of the leading historians of medieval South Asia, conducted a systematic survey of the primary sources — Mughal chronicles, provincial administrative records, and court documents — and identified approximately eighty instances of Hindu temple desecration under all Muslim rulers in India between 1192 and 1729. Of these, perhaps fifteen to twenty are attributable to Aurangzeb's explicit orders.

"Considering that many tens of thousands of temples were built in India between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, the number actually attacked by Muslim armies... is insignificant. Far more Hindu temples were destroyed by Hindu rulers — in feudal warfare, political competition, and the normal conduct of pre-modern kingship."

— Richard Eaton, 'Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India,' Frontline (2000)

Eaton's analysis reveals a critical pattern: virtually every temple that Mughal armies attacked was associated with political rebellion against Mughal authority. The three most cited examples of Aurangzeb's temple destruction are the Kashi Vishwanath Temple (Varanasi, 1669), the Mathura temple complex, and the Somnath Temple. In each case, the timing directly followed an act of political defiance: Varanasi's temple was attacked after the Brahmin community there was accused of harbouring and educating political rebels; Mathura's temples were attacked following the Jat rebellion; Somnath was attacked during a military campaign against a rebellious local Rajput prince.

🏛️ Case Study: The Kashi Vishwanath Temple (1669)

In April 1669, Aurangzeb issued a firmán (royal order) to demolish the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi. The historical context: Aurangzeb had received intelligence that Brahmin teachers at the temple were indoctrinating zamindars (landowners) and their students — including Muslim zamindars — with doctrines that threatened imperial authority. This was, in essence, a punitive political action against an institution seen as a focal point of resistance, not a general decree against Hinduism.

Evidence supporting this interpretation: Aurangzeb issued farmans (royal grants) to several other Hindu temples in Varanasi and elsewhere both before and after 1669, including the Umananda Temple in Assam and the Vrindavan temples. A 1659 farman to the Jangam Bari Temple in Varanasi explicitly granted protection and financial support. This would make no sense under a model of systematic religious persecution.

Source: Richard Eaton (2000); Audrey Truschke (2017); Rajeev Kinra (2015).

Moreover — and this point is almost never mentioned in popular discourse — Aurangzeb issued numerous farmans protecting and even endowing Hindu temples. Historian Audrey Truschke has documented farmans to the Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain, the Balaji Temple in Chitrakoot, and several Jain temples in Rajasthan. The Banaras records preserve a firman from 1659 in which Aurangzeb explicitly orders local officials to 'allow the Brahmins and other Hindus of the province of Banaras to practise their religion peacefully' (cited in Truschke 2017, 64–65).

This does not excuse the destructions that did occur. But it fundamentally changes the narrative from 'systematic religious persecution' to 'selective, politically motivated punitive action following the logic of Mughal statecraft.' The distinction matters enormously.

Case Study 2: The Jaziya Tax — Reimposing Discrimination?

In 1679, Aurangzeb reimposed the jaziya — a tax on non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis) that had been abolished by Akbar in 1564 and not reimposed by Jahangir or Shah Jahan. This decision generated immediate controversy; a famous petition from Hindu traders in Delhi protested the imposition. Aurangzeb's reimposition of the jaziya is widely cited as evidence of his anti-Hindu bigotry.

The historical reality is more complex. First, the jaziya rate was modest — roughly 10–12 dirhams per year for the poorest eligible taxpayers, graduating upward — and came with significant exemptions: women, children, the elderly, the infirm, the mentally ill, the very poor, and those serving in the Mughal army were all exempt. The last exemption alone was enormously significant, as Aurangzeb's army contained hundreds of thousands of Hindu soldiers.

Second, the reimposition had a fiscal dimension that is often ignored. The 1670s and 1680s saw Aurangzeb increasingly engaged in expensive military campaigns — the Deccan campaigns alone cost enormous sums. The jaziya, at least in theory, provided an additional revenue stream. Whether it was actually collected efficiently across the empire is doubtful: the administrative machinery for such collection was imperfect, and many records suggest significant exemptions in practice.

⚠️ The Jaziya in Context

The jaziya was a pre-Islamic institution — a poll tax on subjugated populations — that early Islamic jurisprudence adapted into a fiscal instrument. In classical Islamic law (fiqh), it was the tax paid by dhimmis (non-Muslim 'protected peoples') in exchange for exemption from military service and in return for state protection of their lives and property. By the 17th century, it had become something of an anachronism even within the Islamic world.

Aurangzeb's reimposition was arguably a political signal to the ulama (Islamic clerics) — a demonstration of orthodoxy — as much as a practical fiscal measure. Historian Satish Chandra (2005) argues that 'the economic impact of the jaziya was probably limited, but its symbolic impact was significant and damaging to Aurangzeb's relationship with his Hindu subjects.'

Importantly: the jaziya did not apply to Aurangzeb's military commanders, most of his administrative nobility, or the major Rajput allies — undermining its force as a tool of persecution.

Case Study 3: The Execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur (1675)

In November 1675, Aurangzeb had the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, executed in Delhi's Chandni Chowk. For Sikhs, this is a foundational moment of martyrdom; the Guru is venerated as 'Hind di Chadar' — the shield of India. For Indian nationalists, it is one of the most damning indictments of Aurangzeb's reign.

The historical record on the circumstances of the execution is complex. The traditional Sikh account, recorded in later hagiographies (janam sakhis), holds that Tegh Bahadur was defending the right of Kashmiri Pandits — Hindus — to practise their religion against forced conversion pressures, and was executed when he refused to embrace Islam. This account portrays an act of extraordinary interfaith solidarity.

Mughal court records offer a different framing: Tegh Bahadur was charged with political sedition, specifically with encouraging resistance to Mughal authority in Punjab and with meeting with Shivaji (Aurangzeb's most powerful enemy) during the latter's famous 'escape' from Mughal captivity. The political dimension is significant: the Sikh community under Tegh Bahadur had grown into a well-organised, politically influential movement in Punjab — exactly the kind of power centre that the Mughals found threatening.

Historian Louis Fenech (2001) argues that the execution must be understood within the context of Mughal imperial politics and the growing power of the Sikh Panth, rather than as a simple act of religious intolerance. This does not diminish the horror of the execution or its profound impact on Sikh history and identity — but it complicates the simple narrative of religious bigotry.

"Aurangzeb was not carrying out a programme of forced conversion. He was responding, as Mughal emperors invariably did, to what he perceived as political threats to imperial sovereignty. His mistakes were catastrophic, but they followed a political logic — not merely a religious one."

— Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986), Oxford University Press

Case Study 4: Aurangzeb and the Marathas — A Catastrophic Military Blunder?

From 1681 until his death in 1707, Aurangzeb spent virtually the entirety of his last twenty-six years in the Deccan plateau, conducting a grinding, inconclusive war against the Maratha Confederacy founded by Shivaji Bhonsle. This war has been characterised as a jihad against Hindu power; it was in fact one of the most strategically catastrophic decisions in Mughal history.

Shivaji himself was an extraordinary figure — a guerrilla warrior-king who had carved out an independent Maratha state through brilliant military innovation and popular mobilisation. Aurangzeb had a complex relationship with Shivaji: he initially underestimated him, then attempted to co-opt him (inviting him to Agra in 1666, where Shivaji famously escaped from house arrest), and finally decided to eliminate Maratha power entirely.

📊 The Deccan Wars: A Strategic Disaster

Duration: 1681–1707 (26 years)

Estimated Mughal military deaths: 100,000+ over the campaign (various estimates)

Estimated civilian deaths from famine, plague, and warfare: several million in the Deccan region

Territories gained: Initially considerable — Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687) were conquered — but Maratha guerrilla resistance made control illusory

Strategic outcome: Complete failure. Maratha power grew stronger, not weaker, during the war; the Mughal army was exhausted and demoralised; the treasury was depleted; and the empire began disintegrating even while Aurangzeb still lived

Aurangzeb's own assessment (from a letter to his son, 1706): 'I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.'

Source: Satish Chandra, Medieval India (2005); Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818 (1993)

The Deccan Wars were not primarily religious. Aurangzeb had allied with and employed Maratha chiefs against other Marathas. His enemies included Muslim sultans of Bijapur and Golconda. When he finally conquered those sultanates in 1686–87, he was fighting Muslim rulers — undermining any simple religious-war narrative. The wars were about Mughal imperial expansion and the suppression of autonomous political power — the same dynamic that had characterised Mughal strategy since Akbar.

Case Study 5: The Music Ban and Cultural Policies

Aurangzeb famously banned music at court — a dramatic break with Mughal tradition, given that the Mughal court had been one of the great patrons of Indian classical music. He also imposed restrictions on certain Hindu festivals and public celebrations. These policies are cited as evidence of his cultural intolerance.

The music ban is well-documented, though its enforcement was inconsistent and its scope limited primarily to court settings. Aurangzeb's personal distaste for court music was genuine and rooted in his Naqshbandi spiritual orientation. However, the musicologist Nina Bhatt has pointed out that the period of Aurangzeb's reign also saw the flourishing of regional musical traditions outside the court — as imperial patronage redirected music into provincial and aristocratic spaces rather than eliminating it. The ban was, in practice, a withdrawal of royal patronage rather than a general prohibition.

The celebrated story of musicians marching to the palace with a mock funeral procession for music — calling out 'Music is dead! Let us bury it!' — to which Aurangzeb allegedly replied 'Bury it deep enough that its sound cannot emerge again,' is almost certainly apocryphal, but it captures the spirit of popular resistance to the ban.

PART FIVE: MODERN SCHOLARSHIP AND THE REVISIONIST TURN

V. The Revisionist Turn: What Modern Historians Say

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a substantial revisionist movement in Aurangzeb scholarship. This revisionism does not aim to rehabilitate Aurangzeb as a saint — it aims to rescue him from mythology and return him to history. Let us survey the major contributions.

Historian	Core Argument/theme
Audrey Truschke	Separates myth from evidence; argues Aurangzeb followed political logic, not religious hatred; challenges both hagiography and demonisation
Richard Eaton	Proves temple destruction was politically motivated and far less extensive than claimed
Muzaffar Alam	Analyses how Aurangzeb's policies weakened the empire; political-economic framework
Satish Chandra	Balanced Indian scholarship; acknowledges failures but contextualises them
M. Athar Ali	Quantitative analysis of noble appointments; dismantles anti-Hindu exclusion narrative
Jadunath Sarkar	Foundational scholarship but ideologically inflected; Bengali nationalist perspective
Harbans Mukhia	Sophisticated analysis of Mughal political culture and Aurangzeb's place within it
John F. Richards	Magisterial overview; contextualises Aurangzeb within long-run imperial dynamics

5.1 Audrey Truschke and the Controversy of Revisionism

Audrey Truschke's 2017 book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, published by Stanford University Press (and in a Penguin India edition), has been the most controversial work of recent Mughal historiography. It is a short, accessible book — deliberately written for a general audience as well as scholars — and it generated extraordinary backlash in India, with Truschke receiving death threats, being accused of whitewashing Islamic violence, and facing coordinated online harassment.

Her argument, stripped to its core, is straightforward: the popular image of Aurangzeb as a systematic persecutor of Hindus is not supported by the primary sources. The temple destructions were real but limited and politically motivated. The jaziya was real but came with extensive exemptions. The music ban was real but its scope was limited. Against these must be weighed the farmans protecting temples, the extensive employment of Hindus in the administration, and the political pragmatism that characterised most of his actual governance.

🎓 Critical Assessment of Truschke's Work

Truschke's work has been criticised from multiple directions. Some historians argue she goes too far in exculpating Aurangzeb — that her political sympathy for victims of Islamophobia in contemporary America subtly colours her reading of the sources (Lal 2018; Mehta 2018). Others argue her work is methodologically impeccable and that the backlash is itself evidence of the power of nationalist mythmaking.

Indian historian Vikram Sampath's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj: The Great Maratha (2019) contests some of Truschke's conclusions, arguing she underestimates the systematic character of Mughal religious policy in the Deccan.

The most balanced assessment: Truschke's core empirical findings — that temple destruction was politically motivated and far less extensive than claimed — are well-evidenced. Her rhetorical tendency to foreground exculpatory evidence over damning evidence is a legitimate methodological critique.

5.2 K.K. Aziz and the Pakistani Textbook Problem

On the Pakistani side, the most important critical scholarly voice was K.K. Aziz (1927–2009), a Pakistani historian whose landmark book The Murder of History (1993) was a systematic demolition of the distortions in Pakistani textbooks — including the hagiographic treatment of Aurangzeb. Aziz analysed sixty-six Pakistani textbooks and found systematic falsification, omission of inconvenient facts, and the subordination of historical evidence to ideological imperatives.

"Pakistani history textbooks teach students not to think but to recite. They present a past that never existed, inhabited by heroes without flaws and villains without virtues, in service of a national ideology rather than historical truth."

— K.K. Aziz, The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan (1993), Vanguard Books, Lahore

Aziz's specific criticisms of the Aurangzeb narrative in Pakistani textbooks include: the omission of the Deccan Wars' catastrophic impact; the failure to mention the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur; the presentation of the jazz tax and temple destructions as non-events; and the complete absence of Aurangzeb's role in precipitating the empire's decline. Aziz's book was banned in some Pakistani schools and remains controversial in Pakistan to this day — a fate that speaks volumes about the power of nationalist mythology over scholarly truth.

5.3 The Question of 'Forced Conversion'

One of the most charged claims against Aurangzeb is that he conducted or encouraged mass forced conversion of Hindus to Islam. This is a claim that appears frequently in popular discourse but is conspicuously absent from serious historical scholarship.

Richard Eaton's authoritative study The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier (1993) examined the actual mechanisms by which Islam spread in Bengal — the region of greatest Muslim conversion in South Asia — and found that forced conversion played virtually no role. Conversion was driven primarily by frontier agriculture, the prestige of Sufi shrines, and social mobility, not by coercion. In Aurangzeb's empire specifically, the evidence for systematic forced conversion is remarkably thin.

What Mughal records do show is isolated instances of conversion under pressure — particularly of high-profile political prisoners or rebels — and the general cultural atmosphere created by the reimposition of the jaziya, which may have provided indirect pressure on some communities. But the population of the Mughal Empire at Aurangzeb's death was not significantly more Muslim than at his accession — if anything, the Muslim percentage remained stable at approximately 20–25% — a demographic fact that is simply incompatible with a policy of systematic religious conversion.

PART SIX: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL LENS — POWER, LEGITIMACY, AND IDENTITY

VI. The Anthropological Lens: Power, Legitimacy, and the Production of Historical Memory

Let us step back from the particular controversies and apply an anthropological frame to the larger question: why do societies construct mythologised histories? And what does the Aurangzeb controversy specifically tell us about the relationship between historical memory and political identity?

6.1 The Invention of Tradition

Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's concept of 'invented traditions' (1983) is directly applicable here. Both Pakistan and India, as young nations formed in the traumatic crucible of Partition, required founding myths — historical narratives that gave coherence, purpose, and dignity to their national identities. The invention of tradition, as Hobsbawm notes, is not primarily about historical falsification but about the selection, emphasis, and symbolic loading of particular historical moments or figures to serve present needs.

Pakistan needed a usable Muslim past that demonstrated the viability and virtue of Islamic governance in South Asia — and Aurangzeb, as the last great Muslim emperor, was the most obvious candidate. India needed a narrative of Hindu civilizational resilience against Muslim oppression — and Aurangzeb, as the Mughal emperor whose policies were most easily construed as anti-Hindu, was the obvious villain. Neither selection was arbitrary; both were rooted in genuine historical events. But both involved a massive simplification of a complex reality.

6.2 The Role of Trauma: Partition and Its Historiographic Shadows

It is impossible to understand the intensity of the Aurangzeb debate without understanding the shadow of Partition. The Partition of 1947 was one of the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century: between twelve and twenty million people were displaced, and somewhere between 200,000 and two million were killed in communal violence. This trauma created a profound need, on both sides of the border, to explain — and to assign blame for — the unbridgeable gulf between Hindu and Muslim communities.

Aurangzeb, in this traumatised landscape, became a convenient origin point for communal antagonism. Indian nationalist historiography effectively argued: 'The seeds of Partition were planted by Aurangzeb's intolerance.' Pakistani nationalist historiography argued: 'The wisdom of Partition is proven by the existence of rulers like Aurangzeb, who showed that Islamic governance is distinct from and incompatible with Hindu cultural supremacy.'

Both are what the philosopher of history Hayden White (1973) called 'emplotments' — the imposition of narrative structure (tragedy or romance) onto historical events that were, in reality, far more contingent and ambiguous.

6.3 The Subaltern Problem: Whose Voices Are Missing?

Both nationalist narratives share a crucial methodological flaw from an anthropological perspective: they are constructed entirely from elite sources — Mughal court chronicles, colonial-era history writing, nationalist polemics. What is almost entirely absent is the perspective of ordinary people — the Hindu peasant who may or may not have paid the jaziya, the village musician who may or may not have been affected by the music ban, the Maratha farmer who lived through the Deccan Wars.

The Subaltern Studies school of historiography — founded at JNU Delhi and including scholars like Ranajit Guha, Gyan Pandey, and Partha Chatterjee — has argued powerfully that the histories of South Asia written from above, whether by Mughal court historians or by nationalist ideologues, systematically erase the experience of ordinary people. An honest anthropological history of Aurangzeb would need to grapple with the experience of the subaltern — the low-caste farmer, the lower-class artisan, the woman — whose lives were shaped by but rarely recorded in the imperial archive.

PART SEVEN: THE SCHOLARLY CONSENSUS — AND ITS LIMITS

VII. Where Does the Scholarship Stand Today? The Emerging Consensus

After all this evidence and analysis — was Aurangzeb a saint, a tyrant, or something else entirely? What do serious historians actually agree on today?

The current scholarly consensus — insofar as one exists in a field as contested as this — can be summarised in seven propositions. I want to be clear that 'consensus' here means agreement among the majority of serious, evidence-based academic historians; the popular and political discourse remains as polarised as ever.

Consensus Proposition 1: Aurangzeb was neither a systematic persecutor nor a saint

The evidence does not support either the Pakistani hagiographic portrait or the Indian demonic one. He was a complex political actor operating within a specific historical context — the pressures of imperial overextension, religious political contestation, and a changing geopolitical landscape. As Satish Chandra (2005, 18) writes: 'Aurangzeb was not a monster of intolerance, nor was he the enlightened, progressive ruler some of his admirers suggest. He was a man of his time and place — shaped by its possibilities and its limitations.'

Consensus Proposition 2: His policies were primarily political, not religious

The majority of Aurangzeb's most controversial actions — temple destructions, the Deccan Wars, the execution of Tegh Bahadur — follow a political logic of imperial consolidation and the suppression of rival power centres. They are consistent with Mughal imperial statecraft rather than representing a qualitative departure from it. Richard Eaton's work on temples, Muzaffar Alam's work on the Deccan, and John Richards' overall framework all support this conclusion.

Consensus Proposition 3: His personal piety was genuine but distinct from his governance

Scholars are largely agreed that Aurangzeb's personal religious piety — his Quranic memorisation, his austere lifestyle, his hand-sewn caps — was genuine and not merely performative. However, the equation of personal piety with governance choices is too simplistic. His administration included tens of thousands of non-Muslims in key roles; his fiscal policies followed pragmatic logic; and even his most 'religious' decisions (the jazz tax, the music ban) were qualified by extensive exceptions and inconsistent enforcement.

Consensus Proposition 4: He bears significant responsibility for the empire's decline

This is the area of greatest scholarly agreement across the ideological spectrum. The Deccan Wars were a strategic catastrophe that exhausted the empire's treasury, demoralised its military, and prevented effective administration of the north. Aurangzeb's centralising, orthodox impulses alienated powerful allies — particularly the Rajputs, who had been the backbone of Mughal military power — and his reign of nearly fifty years prevented the normal adaptation and renewal that succession typically brings. Historian Karen Leonard (1979) and others have documented how the empire began fracturing even before his death.

Consensus Proposition 5: The comparison with Akbar is partly a false dichotomy

Both Pakistani and Indian narratives construct Aurangzeb in implicit or explicit contrast with his great-grandfather Akbar — the emperor of 'Din-i-Ilahi' (a syncretic personal religion), the abolicioner of the jazz tax, the patron of interfaith dialogue. But as Harbans Mukhia (2004) argues, the contrast is partly constructed. Akbar's 'tolerance' was also a political strategy for managing a diverse empire; it was enforced when convenient and abandoned when not. And Aurangzeb's 'intolerance' was more selective and context-dependent than the contrast suggests.

Consensus Proposition 6: Nationalist historiography on both sides is seriously distorting

This is perhaps the most uncomfortable consensus proposition for an audience from the subcontinent, but it is the most firmly established. K.K. Aziz's analysis of Pakistani textbooks, Romila Thapar's extensive critique of communalist historiography in India, and comparative studies by international scholars all agree: both Pakistani and Indian nationalist historiographies of Aurangzeb are built on selective evidence, ideological agenda, and the deliberate suppression of inconvenient facts. Neither tradition prepares its students for historical thinking; both prepare them for political loyalty.

Consensus Proposition 7: The primary sources are richer and more complex than either narrative acknowledges

Modern archival work — particularly the systematic analysis of Mughal farmans, administrative orders, correspondence, and court chronicles — has revealed an Aurangzeb who was internally contradictory, politically pragmatic, and historically specific. The Ruq'at-i-Alamgiri (his personal letters), the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri (the legal compilation), and the Maasir-i-Alamgiri (a court chronicle) together reveal a figure of formidable intelligence who was aware of the contradictions in his own governance and struggled with them. This is not the portrait of a simple bigot, nor of a simple saint.

📜 Aurangzeb in His Own Words: A Remarkable Deathbed Letter

In early 1707, as he lay dying in Ahmadnagar, Aurangzeb dictated a series of letters to his sons. These are among the most remarkable documents in Mughal history — an emperor's self-assessment on his deathbed. One letter, addressed to his son Azam Shah, reads (in translation): 'I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the empire. My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognised his light... There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone but only the skin remains.'

These words — haunted, self-questioning, and deeply personal — are strikingly inconsistent with the portrait of a triumphant, self-righteous religious zealot. They suggest a man who was far more aware of his failures and contradictions than either hagiographic tradition is willing to acknowledge.

Source: Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. V (1924), pp. 231–232.

PART EIGHT: CONCLUSION — HISTORY AS A MIRROR

VIII. Conclusion: What Aurangzeb's Contested Legacy Tells Us About Ourselves

We have now surveyed a great deal of terrain. Let me bring it together with a few closing reflections.

First, the historical Aurangzeb. He was an extraordinarily capable and dedicated ruler who expanded the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent. He was personally pious, austere, and diligent. He was also a man who destroyed some temples for political reasons; who reimposed a discriminatory tax for a combination of fiscal, political, and ideological reasons; who executed a revered Sikh Guru under circumstances that combined political and religious threat; who conducted a catastrophically overextended military campaign in the Deccan that broke the empire's back; and who, in his final decades, contributed substantially to the imperial decline that would, within fifty years of his death, see the Mughals reduced to powerless figureheads.

He was not a saint. He was not a genocidal tyrant. He was a ruler of staggering complexity, operating in conditions of extreme political pressure, whose choices — some admirable, many questionable, some catastrophic — followed the logic of a particular kind of imperial sovereignty at a particular moment in history.

Second, the two nationalist narratives. Both Pakistani veneration and Indian demonisation of Aurangzeb tell us far more about the anxieties and aspirations of post-Partition nation-states than they tell us about the historical man. They are mirrors held up to the present, not windows into the past.

What does it say about our present that we still need a 17th-century emperor to be a saint or a demon? What present fears, wounds, and insecurities does he represent for us today?

Third — and perhaps most importantly — the Aurangzeb controversy is an object lesson in the dangers of what the philosopher of history Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) called 'the power of the archive': the power of those who control historical narratives to shape political reality. States, textbook writers, and political entrepreneurs who mine history for heroes and villains are not doing history — they are doing politics with history's costumes. And when those politics are built on a falsified past, the consequences are not merely academic: they fuel riots, justify violence, and prevent the reconciliation that deeply wounded societies desperately need.

Our task — as historians, as anthropologists, as scholars committed to the difficult, unglamorous work of evidence — is to resist this. To say: the past was more complex than your narrative. The people in it were more human than your ideology allows. And the first step toward a shared future is a shared willingness to sit with a complicated, uncomfortable, irreducibly human past.

"Aurangzeb was a man. Not a symbol, not a weapon, not a mirror for our present fears. A man — as brilliant, as flawed, as contradictory as any human being who has ever held enormous power. Treating him as a man, rather than a myth, is not a small thing. It is, perhaps, the beginning of historical maturity."

— Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, Audrey Truschke (2017), Stanford University Press — paraphrased from the conclusion

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY & FURTHER READING

• Ali, M. Athar. 1968. The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Alam, Muzaffar. 1986. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

• Aurangzeb. Ruq'at-i-Alamgiri [Letters of Aurangzeb]. Translated by Jamshid H. Bilimoria. London: Luzac & Co., 1908.

• Aziz, K.K. 1993. The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan. Lahore: Vanguard Books.

• Bhimsen, Saxena. Nuskha-i-Dilkusha. Translated by Jadunath Sarkar. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society, 1936.

• Chandra, Satish. 2005. Aurangzeb: The Man and His Times. New Delhi: National Book Trust India.

• Chandra, Satish. 2007. Medieval India: From Sultanate to the Mughals. Vol. II. New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications.

• Eaton, Richard M. 2000. 'Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India.' Frontline 17 (25): 62–70.

• Eaton, Richard M. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• Fenech, Louis E. 2001. 'Martyrdom and the Sikh Tradition.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 121 (2): 251–268.

• Habib, Irfan. 1963. The Agrarian System of Mughal India. Bombay: Asia Publishing House.

• Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Leonard, Karen. 1979. 'The Hyderabad Political System and Its Participants.' Journal of Asian Studies 30 (3): 569–582.

• Maddison, Angus. 2007. Contours of the World Economy 1–2030 AD. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Mukhia, Harbans. 2004. The Mughals of India. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

• Richards, John F. 1993. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Saqi Must'ad Khan. Maasir-i-Alamgiri: A History of the Emperor Aurangzeb-Alamgir. Translated by Jadunath Sarkar. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society, 1947.

• Sarkar, Jadunath. 1912–1924. History of Aurangzib. 5 vols. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar.

• Thapar, Romila. 2000. 'Communalism and the Writing of Ancient Indian History.' In Interpreting Early India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.

• Truschke, Audrey. 2017. Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth. Stanford: Stanford University Press / Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India.

• White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.