Aurangzeb

Muhi al-Din Muhammad, later known by his title Aurangzeb, was born on November 3, 1618, in Dahod, a town in present-day Gujarat, while his father Prince Khurram (the future emperor Shah Jahan) was campaigning in the region ^[1]. He was the third son of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, the empress whose tomb became the Taj Mahal. Anyone asking who was Aurangzeb should begin here, with a prince raised inside one of the wealthiest courts on earth yet shaped early by political insecurity.

His childhood included a period as a hostage. After Shah Jahan's failed rebellion against Emperor Jahangir, the young Aurangzeb and his brother Dara Shikoh were sent to their grandfather's court at Lahore in 1626 as guarantees of their father's conduct ^[2]. When Shah Jahan took the throne in 1628, the boys returned, and Aurangzeb received the education standard for Mughal princes: Quranic study, Persian and Arabic letters, calligraphy, and training in warfare and administration.

A famous early episode fixed his reputation for composure. In 1633, during an elephant fight staged before the court at Agra, an enraged elephant charged the fifteen-year-old prince. Rather than flee, he struck the animal with his lance and held his ground until help arrived, earning his father's praise and the title Bahadur, meaning brave ^[1].

Aurangzeb's apprenticeship in power came through provincial commands. Shah Jahan appointed him viceroy of the Deccan in 1636, when he was seventeen, and he spent much of the next two decades governing frontier provinces: the Deccan twice, Gujarat, Multan, and Sindh ^[2]. He led campaigns into Central Asia against the Uzbeks in 1647 and twice besieged Kandahar in attempts to wrest it from Safavid Persia, expeditions that failed but hardened his military experience ^[3].

His second Deccan viceroyalty, beginning in 1652, proved formative. He reorganized the revenue administration of the war-torn region with the help of the able minister Murshid Quli Khan and pressed campaigns against the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda ^[2]. Throughout these years his relationship with his eldest brother Dara Shikoh, the court favorite and heir apparent, curdled into rivalry. Dara was a philosophical eclectic drawn to Hindu and Sufi thought; Aurangzeb was an orthodox Sunni Muslim of austere temperament. The contrast between the brothers was as much political as religious, since each commanded factions at court ^[4].

The crisis broke in September 1657, when Shah Jahan fell gravely ill. Rumors of the emperor's death set all four of his sons in motion. Aurangzeb allied with his younger brother Murad Bakhsh, defeated the imperial army under Dara at the battle of Samugarh near Agra in May 1658, and then seized Agra fort, confining his recovered father within it ^[1]. He crowned himself in July 1658, taking the regnal title Alamgir, seizer of the world. Over the following years he eliminated his rivals: Murad was imprisoned and later executed, Shah Shuja fled to Arakan and disappeared, and Dara Shikoh was captured and put to death in 1659 on a charge of apostasy ^[4]. Shah Jahan remained a prisoner in Agra fort until his death in 1666.

Any honest accounting of Aurangzeb achievements must start with scale. Under his rule the Mughal Empire reached its largest extent, stretching from Kashmir in the north to the Kaveri basin in the south, and governing a population estimated at roughly 150 million people, a substantial share of humanity at the time ^[3]. The empire's revenues under Aurangzeb exceeded those of any contemporary state, and India under his rule was among the world's leading manufacturing economies, exporting textiles across Asia and Europe ^[5].

His conquests in the Deccan absorbed the last independent sultanates of the plateau. Bijapur fell to imperial armies in 1686 and Golconda, with its famed diamond marts, in 1687, campaigns the emperor directed in person after moving his court south in 1681 ^[2]. He also captured and executed the Maratha king Sambhaji in 1689, a moment when Mughal power in the peninsula appeared complete.

Aurangzeb was a systematizer as well as a conqueror. He commissioned the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, a massive compilation of Hanafi jurisprudence assembled by a board of scholars over several years, which became a standard legal reference in South Asia and was later consulted even by British colonial courts ^[6]. His administration issued detailed regulations on coinage, market conduct, and provincial governance. He built comparatively little, in keeping with his austerity, though the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, completed in 1673 and among the largest mosques of its era, and the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, a mausoleum for his wife Dilras Banu Begum, date from his reign ^[1].

No part of an Aurangzeb biography generates more argument than his religious policy. He reversed the accommodating style associated with his great-grandfather Akbar. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, a tax on non-Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier, a measure resented by many Hindus and cited by his critics ever since ^[4]. He issued orders in 1669 concerning schools and temples of what the decree termed recently built infidel institutions, and prominent temples at Mathura and Varanasi were demolished during his reign ^[3].

Historians disagree sharply about how to read this record. Some scholars emphasize that temple destruction was selective and often tied to political rebellion by temple patrons, that Aurangzeb also issued grants protecting temples and Brahmin communities, and that Hindus, particularly Marathas and Rajputs, served in his nobility in larger absolute numbers than under earlier emperors ^[7]. Others hold that his policies alienated key allies, pointing to the Rajput war that began in 1679 after the death of Raja Jaswant Singh of Marwar, and to the execution in 1675 of Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, an event that transformed the relationship between the Sikh community and the Mughal state ^[4].

His personal piety was never in doubt. He memorized the Quran, copied it by hand, knitted prayer caps to fund his own expenses, and banned music at court along with other practices he judged un-Islamic ^[1]. Whether that piety was the engine of his statecraft or a language through which ordinary imperial politics was conducted remains the central question of modern scholarship on his reign ^[7].

Aurangzeb's household reflected the dynastic customs of his line. His principal wife was Dilras Banu Begum, a Safavid princess he married in 1637; she died in 1657 shortly after childbirth, and he later honored her with the Bibi ka Maqbara mausoleum ^[1]. Other wives included Nawab Bai and Udaipuri Mahal. He fathered ten children who survived infancy, among them the future emperor Bahadur Shah I, and his daughter Zeb-un-Nissa, a poet whose later imprisonment by her father for suspected sympathy with a rebel brother became one of the sadder episodes of the family's history ^[2].

Contemporary observers, including the French traveler Francois Bernier who spent years at the Mughal court in the 1660s, described a ruler of plain habits, sharp intelligence, and deep suspicion ^[5]. Aurangzeb slept little, worked through mountains of paperwork personally, and distrusted delegation. Among the more reliable Aurangzeb facts is his refusal to draw on the treasury for personal comfort: he directed that his funeral be paid for from money he had earned copying Qurans and sewing caps ^[1].

His relations with his own sons repeated the pattern of his generation. He imprisoned his eldest son Muhammad Sultan for defecting during the succession war, and later confined Prince Muazzam for years on suspicion of intrigue with Golconda. His fourth son Akbar rebelled outright in 1681, allying with Rajput and then Maratha enemies before fleeing to Persia, where he died in exile ^[2].

The last twenty-six years of the reign were consumed by the Deccan. After Prince Akbar's rebellion, Aurangzeb moved south in 1681 and never saw northern India again. The conquests of Bijapur and Golconda removed organized states from the field, but the Marathas, fighting a mobile guerrilla war from hill forts across the western Deccan, refused to be finished ^[3]. The execution of Sambhaji in 1689 scattered Maratha leadership without destroying it, and the war dissolved into decades of sieges in which the aging emperor personally directed the reduction of fortress after fortress, often at enormous cost in men and treasure.

The strain told on the empire. The imperial camp, a moving city of hundreds of thousands, drained the countryside it passed through; revenue demands rose; and in the north, Jat, Sikh, and other rural revolts flared while the emperor remained absent ^[4]. Historians such as Jadunath Sarkar, who devoted five volumes to the reign, judged the endless Deccan war a wound that never healed, though later scholars have debated how directly it caused the empire's eighteenth-century decline ^[2].

Aurangzeb remained in the field into his late eighties, increasingly frail and, by the evidence of his last letters to his sons, weary and full of foreboding about the succession. He died on March 3, 1707, at his camp in Ahmednagar, the Deccan city now called Ahilyanagar, in his eighty-ninth year ^[1]. Following his instructions, he was buried in an open, unadorned grave at Khuldabad near Aurangabad, beside the shrine of the Sufi saint Zainuddin Shirazi, a striking contrast to the marble tombs of his ancestors ^[3].

Within a decade of his death the empire he had stretched to its limits began to fracture. His sons fought the customary war of succession, and the emperors who followed lost real control to provincial governors, Maratha armies, and eventually European trading companies. Many historians have treated 1707 as the hinge of Mughal decline, though the causes were larger than any one ruler ^[3].

His afterlife in memory has been as contested as his reign. Colonial era historiography, and Jadunath Sarkar's monumental History of Aurangzib in particular, painted him as a puritan whose bigotry wrecked Akbar's composite empire ^[2]. Nationalist politics in twentieth and twenty-first century South Asia sharpened the caricatures in both directions: villain in much of India, where a major Delhi road bearing his name was renamed in 2015, and an honored figure in parts of Pakistani historiography ^[8]. Recent academic work, notably Audrey Truschke's 2017 study, has argued for setting aside both poles and reading him as a ruler of his time, ambitious, legalistic, and inconsistent, rather than a man on religious crusade ^[7].

What endures beyond the argument is the record itself: the largest empire South Asia had seen since antiquity, a legal compilation used for centuries, the Badshahi Mosque, a vast archive of his own terse letters, and a bare grave open to the sky at Khuldabad. The distance between that grave and the Taj Mahal his father built measures, as well as anything can, the singular temperament of the man buried in it ^[1].