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‘Aurangzeb is a Severely Misunderstood Figure’

Anuradha Raman

[This email interview with Audrey Truschke, Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, was published in The Hindu on September 14, 2015. We are republishing it for its continued relevance.]

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Anuradha Raman: The present Bharatiya Janata Party government believes Mughals are not part of India’s history. Your book is about how Sanskrit, sought to be made mainstream by the government, flourished under the Mughals. How do we reconcile the two?

Audrey Truschke: We don’t reconcile the two perspectives. Rather, we ask two key questions. One, who is on firmer historical ground in their claims? Two, what are the political reasons for the BJP wanting to erase the Mughals (or at least most of the Mughals) from India’s past? The bulk of my work concerns the honest excavation of history. The Mughals are a significant part of Indian history, and Sanskrit is a significant part of the story of the Mughal empire. Those facts may be inconvenient for the BJP and others, but as a historian I do not temper my investigation of the past in deference to present-day concerns. However, I realise that history matters in the present, perhaps especially in modern South Asia. One present-day implication of my work is to point up the flimsy basis of the BJP’s version of India’s past.

AR: In an ironical way, as the present government fights to push Sanskrit into mainstream discourse, your work concentrates on the Mughals, whom the BJP dislikes, and their engagement with Sanskrit.

AT: The BJP only wants a certain version of Sanskrit in the mainstream. They no doubt love Kalidasa, but I cannot imagine the BJP endorsing students to read the Sanskrit accounts of the Mughals written by Jains in the 16th and 17th centuries. India has a great treasure in its Sanskrit tradition, but that treasure is not only classical poetry and the Indian epics, but also the immense diversity of Sanskrit literature.

AR: Who were the Mughal rulers under whom there was active exchange of Sanskrit and Persian ideas, in your account?

AT: Sanskrit flourished in the royal Mughal court primarily under three emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. However, we should not make the error of attributing Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry. Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood historical figure who has suffered perhaps more than any of the other Mughal rulers from present-day biases. There are two main reasons why Sanskrit ceased to be a major part of Mughal imperial life during Aurangzeb’s rule. One, during the 17th century, Sanskrit was slowly giving way to Hindi. This was a wider literary shift in the subcontinent, and even under Shah Jahan we begin to see imperial attention directed towards Hindi-language intellectuals at the expense of Sanskrit. Aurangzeb’s reign simply happen to coincide with the waning of Sanskrit and the rise of literary Hindi.

Second, as most Indians know, Aurangzeb beat out Dara Shikoh for the Mughal throne. Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a series of cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s and 1650s. Thus, from Aurangzeb’s perspective, breaking Mughal ties with the Sanskrit cultural world was a way to distinguish his idioms of rule from those of the previous heir apparent. In short, Aurangzeb decided to move away from what little remained of the Mughal interest in Sanskrit as a political decision, rather than as a cultural or religious judgment.

As a side note, let me clarify that while Akbar inaugurated Mughal engagements with Sanskrit, he did so for slightly different reasons than many people think. Akbar’s reputation is that he was open-minded and tolerant, almost a protosecular figure. This can be a misleading characterisation. Akbar was interested in Sanskrit for its political valence in his empire, not as some personal religious quest. Akbar also had no qualms about harshly judging perspectives that he viewed as beyond the pale. A good example is that he questioned Jain thinkers about whether they were monotheists because to be otherwise would mean being evicted from the Mughal court (Jains assured him that they believed in God).

AR: What was the interaction between the Mughal elites and Brahmin Hindus and Jain religious groups like?

AT: Brahmans, for example, assisted with Mughal translations of Sanskrit texts into Persian. The method was that Brahmans would read the Sanskrit text, verbally translate it into Hindi (their shared language with the Mughals), and then the Mughals would write down the translation in Persian. Jains and Brahmans alike assisted the Mughals with astrology. Brahmans cast Sanskrit-based horoscopes for the Mughal royal family. On at least one occasion, Jains performed a ceremony to counteract an astrological curse on Jahangir’s newborn daughter. My forthcoming book, Culture of Encounters, devotes an entire chapter to reconstructing the social history of links between Mughal elites and Brahmans/Jains.

AR: You argue that the ideology underpinning violence — such as what took place in the 2002 pogrom, in which more than 1,000 Muslims died, or the current intolerance towards them — erases Mughal history and writes religious conflicts into Indian history where there was none, thereby justifying modern religious intolerance. Is it correct to then deduce that there was no religious conflict in the court of the Mughals?

AT: No. First, there was plenty of violence in Mughal India. Violence and conflict are enduring features of the human experience and I would never suggest otherwise. Even under Akbar, violence was commonplace. A far trickier question, however, is, how much Mughal-led violence was religious-based or motivated by religious conflicts? Generally, the Mughals acted violently towards political foes (whether they were Rajput, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise was irrelevant). It is very difficult for many modern people to accept that violence in pre-modern India was rarely religiously motivated. In this sense, pre-colonial India looked very different than pre-modern Europe, for example. But we lack historical evidence that the Mughals attacked religious foes. On the contrary, some scholars have even suggested that modern “Western” ideas about religious toleration were, in part, inspired by what early European travellers witnessed in the Mughal Empire.

That said, there were limited instances when the Mughals persecuted specific individuals over religious differences. A good example is that Akbar sent a few of the Muslim ulama on hajj to Mecca, which meant that they were effectively exiled from the court. Some of these ulama were murdered on their way out of India.

AR: Is there a problem with a Marxist interpretation of history as is being argued now by the BJP government?

AT: Marxist history is limiting, in my opinion. This strain of thought tends to emphasise social class and economic factors in determining historical trajectories. Modern historians have a much wider range of approaches at their disposal that better situate us to understand other aspects of the past.

AR: Mughal history is such a contentious part of history in the Hindu nationalist imagination. How do you propose to shed light, and create space for a scholarly engagement with the period? It also comes at a time when there is a wave of revisionism in India.

AT: My approach is that of a historian. I seek primary sources from numerous languages and archives, read deeply in secondary scholarship, and attempt to reconstruct the most accurate vision of pre-colonial India possible. My work has plenty of present-day implications, but those come secondary and explicitly after the serious historical work. This approach is unappealing to many in modern India (and across the world). It is painstaking, requires specialist knowledge, can be slow, and often leads to nuanced conclusions. But there are also plenty of people, non-academics, who view what is going on in modern India with scepticism. For those who want it, my work offers a historically sound foundation for challenging modern political efforts to revise the past.

AR: What are the dangers of rewriting history?

AT: So far as the dangers of rewriting history and subscribing to narrow interpretations of specific texts, there are many risks. One is that we risk rising intolerance going forward, something already witnessed on both popular and elite levels in 21st century India. Another risk is that we cheapen the past. India has a glorious history and one of the richest literary inheritances of any place on earth — it would be unfortunate to constrict our minds to the point where we can no longer appreciate these treasures.

AR: You argue that “a more divisive interpretation of the relationship between the Mughals and Hindus actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947”, a legacy that the present Modi government appears to have inherited. But while the British positioned themselves as neutral saviours, who will emerge as the neutral saviours now?

AT: In the BJP vision, I believe that the new saviour is the BJP itself and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups that will restore India to its proper, true nature as a land for Hindus. This is an appealing ideology for many people, which is part of what makes it so dangerous. I maintain that India’s greatness is found in its astonishing diversity, not some invented, anachronistic, monolithic Hindu past. Part of the sad irony of the BJP’s emphasis on rewriting Indian history is precisely that India has a deep and compelling history, which so many seem intent to ignore.

[Courtesy: The Hindu, an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.]

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“A Caricature of ‘Aurangzeb the Bigot’ Serves Many Modern Political Interests in India”: An Interview with Historian Audrey Truschke

Majid Maqbool

[Audrey Truschke is an assistant professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her work focuses on the cultural, imperial, and intellectual history of early modern and modern India. Trushke’s book, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, released in 2017, is a historical reassessment of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, one of the most prominent figures of seventeenth-century India. Aurangzeb’s historical legacy is widely contested—in public discourse, the Mughal emperor is often seen as a tyrannical Muslim fanatic, who ordered the destruction of Hindu places of worship. However, Truschke is among several scholars who insist that this depiction of Aurangzeb is both misleading and ahistorical. “The historical Aurangzeb fails to live up (or down) to his modern reputation as a Hindu-despising Islamist fanatic,” she said in a recent interview.

Majid Maqbool spoke to Truschke over email. She discussed her book and its reception, and how some of the popular misconceptions surrounding the emperor came to be.

This interview was published in The Caravan magazine on 01 May 2017. We are republishing it for its continued relevance.]

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Majid Maqbool: What prompted you to write a biography of Aurangzeb?

Audrey Truschke: I gave an interview to The Hindu in September of 2015, in which I said a few short sentences about Aurangzeb. Those sentences were bland and non-controversial from a historian’s perspective, but they caused a significant stir among non-academic readers. That’s when I realised that scholarly analyses of Aurangzeb, buttressed by research and critical reading, had not penetrated the popular vision of Aurangzeb in recent decades. I decided to see if I could initiate—or at least make a dent—in that project. In short, the popular misconceptions and stereotypes about Aurangzeb inspired me to write a fresh biography about this crucial Mughal emperor.

MM: Why do you think Aurangzeb is still thought of as a fanatic Muslim ruler in popular discourse in India, despite contrary evidence such as the presence of Hindu nobility in his court?

AT: Many factors feed into the popular image of Aurangzeb as an iconoclastic, Hindu-hating Islamist. People like historical villains, and, as I discuss in the book, a more complicated vision of Aurangzeb is better history—but, for many, a less comprehensible personality. A negative portrayal of Aurangzeb is also part of India’s colonial legacy that has been embraced by many, especially by Hindu nationalists. Perhaps, a caricature of “Aurangzeb the Bigot” serves many modern political interests in India, above all benefiting those invested in stoking anti-Muslim sentiments. The past is rarely, if ever, only about the past. But when we allow modern interests to constrain and dictate our view of the past, then we are engaging in mythology that, however powerful, is not history.

MM: Of all the Mughal kings, what is it about Aurangzeb in particular that made it possible for him to be made into a villain? Former Hindu rulers destroyed temples as well, and other Mughals rulers are not as condemned in the popular imagination.

AT: All pre-modern kings—Muslim, Hindu, and otherwise—could be cast as villains if we emphasise certain parts of their lives and judge them by modern standards. That said, given contemporary ideas, some aspects of Aurangzeb’s life lend themselves to the model of a historical baddie, such as his success in territorial expansion, his long rule, and that the Mughal Empire fell apart shortly after his death. Aurangzeb’s piety is also an important factor that is cited as both evidence for and the origin of his alleged barbarism. In this regard, it matters that Aurangzeb was Muslim, a religious identity under heavy fire and suspicion in India today.

MM: At the time of the war of succession between Aurangzeb and his older brother Dara Shikoh, a large number of Rajput rulers and most Shia Muslim nobles supported the former. But over time, Dara came be considered the face of liberalism, and Aurangzeb, that of fanatic Sunni thought. How did this happen?

AT: For decades, Prince Dara Shikoh engaged in cross-cultural projects that strike most people today as rather liberal, such as translating some of the Sanskrit Upanishads into Persian. In reality, scholars have a more complicated view of Dara’s intentions in such projects, but such detail is often skimmed over in the public realm.

In large part, however, Dara Shikoh’s popular image stems from the fact that he never ruled. If Dara had taken the throne, he would have almost certainly engaged in behavior similar to that of other Mughal kings, including expansion wars, brutal sieges, periodic temple destructions, and more. Since Dara’s career ended as a basically court-bound prince, however, his career was notably blood-free (not counting the war of succession). It is easier to project what one wishes to see onto an absence, which is what Dara offers in many ways.

MM: Would you say that Aurangzeb’s actions, as a leader, were political and not religious? He became a ruler in 1658, but levied the jizya tax on non-Muslims only in 1679, only to suspend it later in 1704. He is also believed to have given grants to temples to gain the goodwill of the Hindu community. Was he trying to protect his kingdom?

AT: I have examined the standard, theological-based explanations for many aspects of Aurangzeb’s rule (for example, the jizya tax, limitations on building Hindu temples), and found them wanting. One major goal of a historian is to explain why things happened, and I think that political explanations often pack more punch than theological ones regarding Aurangzeb. However, I would not say that religion was absent from Aurangzeb’s life or his ruling strategies. In my book, I point to instances where I think Aurangzeb was, in part, motivated by religious considerations, although often these were not the religious considerations that most people have imagined.

MM: Could you explain these instances?

AT: I argue, for example, that Aurangzeb viewed moral policing—of both Muslims and Hindus—within the purview of a just Muslim king. Aurangzeb’s goal was not to convert all Hindus to Islam, a popular caricature of the emperor, but rather to apply a broader set of morals to everyone. I also argue that Aurangzeb may have had religious considerations in mind when destroying select Hindu temples. However, unlike the common idea that Aurangzeb destroyed temples in order to cripple Hinduism, I argue that Aurangzeb did so in order to, in his view, protect both Hindus and Muslims from what he judged to be the immoral teachers of particular temples.

MM: Your biography of Aurangzeb has received considerable attention in mainstream media in India. What reactions have you encountered since the book was released here? How has the book been received by other historians and intellectuals?

AT: The popular reaction to my book has been mixed. I receive a fair amount of fan mail, but I get more hate mail. From historians, the reaction has also been mixed, but in a different sense. Academics typically shy away from hateful discourse, but it is a myth that scholars agree with one another all the time. In fact, if anything, we disagree with alacrity. I have found some of the scholarly criticisms of my book useful, and I look forward to more to come on this front (unlike the popular press, the academic world is often a bit slower to digest and produce criticisms). No book is perfect, and if other scholars can identify some of the fault lines and weaknesses of Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, then we have a starting point for producing better research and more compelling arguments regarding this crucial and still poorly understood emperor.

[Majid Maqbool is a reporter and editor based in Srinagar, Kashmir. Courtesy: The Caravan, an Indian English-language, long-form narrative journalism magazine covering politics and culture.]