Aurangzeb, unreconstructed myth

This is a very disappointing book on a very important subject. Aurangzeb still awaits his historian

AURANGZEB: THE MAN AND THE MYTH   

Audrey Truschke

Penguin Viking

189 pages; Rs 399

A large part of the common understanding of Mughal history is dominated by what is best described as the “bad king Aurangzeb’’ theory of history. According to this theory, Aurangzeb, who was the Badshah from 1658 to 1707, is seen as a fanatical Muslim who through his bigoted policies brought about the downfall of the Mughal Empire. This very simplistic understanding of Mughal politics and its decline was first put forward by the historian Jadunath Sarkar and since then has been carried forward by proponents of Hindutva. But, as Audrey Truschke correctly notes, even Jawaharlal Nehru was not free from portraying Aurangzeb in similar terms.

This theory survives in spite of more sophisticated interpretations of the Mughal Empire — its ruling apparatus and its agrarian base. From the early 1960s scholars like Nurul Hasan, Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Athar Ali, Shireen Moosvi, Muzaffar Alam and Ruby Lal — to name the most important ones — have enriched the understanding of the Mughal economy and politics through their studies on the administrative system, the nobility, the various compulsions that the Emperors faced, their domestic space and of the agrarian system on which the entire imperial edifice rested. The popular understanding and imagination about the Mughal Empire persists in ignoring the findings of these outstanding scholars.

Ms Truschke tries to fill these lacunae by writing a short narrative account of Aurangzeb’s reign. But this is a most odd kind of narrative history. Since the time of Edward Gibbon historians have used the narrative form as an explanatory and an analytical device. But Ms Truschke narrates without offering any kind of explanation. To take one rather stark example, she writes, “In the second decade of his reign Aurangzeb began to alter his royal behaviour. He rolled back some of his court rituals with Hindu roots and withdrew imperial patronage from certain practices, such as music...These changes resulted in a more austere environment at Aurangzeb’s court...’’ She offers no reasons or explanations for this shift in policy and imperial orientation. Without such an explanation her account remains woefully inadequate — in fact it does not measure up to being a history.

Similarly, no explanations are offered for Aurangzeb’s momentous decision to move to the Deccan after 1679 — a journey from which he never returned to Delhi. Yet, the writings of some of the scholars mentioned above do offer an explanatory framework. The increase in the number of  mansabdars (Mughal bureaucrats) led to a severe shortage of jagirs (revenue assignments given to mansabdars in lieu of salaries) when the agrarian economy of North India was entering a period of crisis due to declining productivity. Aurangzeb needed more land and this was available in the Deccan. Once he was in the Deccan he encountered the problem of Maratha insurgency. Apart from quelling the Maratha rebellion in military terms, Aurangzeb also pursued a policy of winning them over by offering jagirs. This is one explanation for the remarkable rise in the number of jagirdars, especially Hindu ones, in the second half of Aurangzeb’s reign. That increase only served to further increase the jagirdari crisis. Aurangzeb was acutely aware of this as is evident from his quip: “ek anar sau bimar” (I have one pomegranate but a hundred patients). He was trapped in an insoluble problem the origins of which lay in the very structure and system of the Mughal Empire. Ms Truschke ignores these dimensions and writes of Aurangzeb as if he functioned in some kind of politico-economic vacuum save for the presence of certain rituals and Mughal imperial traditions.

Aurangzeb was no more or less cruel than his predecessors; he was a patron of arts and letters, including Hindu ones; he recruited a large number of Hindus into his nobility and gave some of them very important rank and position; his vast network of patronage included Hindus and non-Muslim religious orders and institutions; he was a pious and a simple man who was committed to notions of justice. Ms Truschke brings out all these aspects of his reign and personality and hopes that this alone will dispel some of the myths about him.

The problem is that to dispel hard-held myths backed by a powerful political and cultural dispensation one has to write with a little more verve than the dry-as-dust narrative that Ms Truschke provides. Most students of history would still prefer to read Sarkar on Aurangzeb for its prose even when they cannot accept the historian’s interpretation. Many of the points that Ms Truschke makes were made by Zahiruddin Faruqi in his book Aurangzeb and his Times (1935). The book does not feature in the bibliographical essay that Ms Truschke appends to her narrative.

This is a very shallow and disappointing book on a very important subject. Aurangzeb still awaits his historian.
 

The reviewer is professor of history and vice chancellor, Ashoka University