by ANUSHAY MALIK
Mughal princes Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh circa 1637
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur could not have known that the Mughal dynasty that he founded in India would come to be seen as a symbol of the Muslim or Islamic power in South Asia. In retrospect, he is seen in many ways much like his descendant, Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal emperor. Both are perceived as religious zealots out to convert the Hindus and wage jihad against them.
As American researcher and writer Audrey Truschke points out in her book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, rallies organised by the Hindu right wing in contemporary India hurl vitriol at both Babur and Aurangzeb, referring to the Indian Muslims as their descendants. She is right to point out that social media today is obsessed with Aurangzeb. One could add that the arguments between the Indians and the Pakistanis about his legacy also include a comparison between him and his great-grandfather Akbar — the latter is portrayed as a liberal emperor who was able to Indianise his rule and the former as the overly pious hardliner. As Truschke is at pains to point out in her very accessible book, that is hardly the case.
She uses a variety of sources to show us a picture in which Aurangzeb, often accused of having engaged in large-scale destruction of Hindu temples, left many temples in his territories untouched. For Truschke, his moves were about realpolitik and had reasons that could be religious but not necessarily Islamic. He, for instance, razed temples where some Brahmin priests were known to dupe the masses by giving them a skewed interpretation of the scriptures. In India’s syncretic society of the Mughal era, this would mean that both the Hindus and the Muslims could be affected by the teachings of these Brahmin priests. Technically, this is a religious reason for destroying temples but it does not show Aurangzeb as the Islamist bigot that the popular accounts would have us believe he was.
Similarly, the advice he gave to his sons about how to live a good and pious life included certain cultural practices that he knew to be of Hindu origin. In other words, in his personal life and in the decisions he took as a king, he was not as rigidly orthodox as his popular image suggests.
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