By Misbahuddin Mirza for TwoCircles.net
Over the ages, the fertile lands of India have constantly attracted wave after wave of peoples to migrate and settle on its vast lands. From the natives in the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, followed by the Harappans, then the Aryans, the Achaemenids, the Greeks, the Magadhans, the Scythians, the Parthians, the Huns, and finally the Muslims all made India its home and hearth. The two things common to all these groups was that they all made India their permanent home – living and dying here, and secondly, none of these groups transferred wealth out of India. Firaq Gorakhpuri, the great Urdu poet wrote about these successive waves of people that made India into the grand mosaic that it now is, as follows:
Sar Zamin-e-Hind par aqwaam-e-alam ke firaq
Qafile guzarte gae Hindusthan banta gaya
(In the lands of Hind, the caravans of people kept arriving, and India kept taking shape)
Fast forward to the British colonial period, and we see an abrupt departure from the tradition to settle on this land. The British came not to settle here, but to steal and ship all the wealth out of the country; tombstones of British civil servants who died in India unexpectedly due to disease mention of the sadness in dying in an alien land. The Persian term “Hindu,” was initially used simply as a geographical identifier, under which the colonial British lumped together all non-Muslim residents of India, to serve their nefarious divide-and-rule policy.
The British created this myth that people of the sub-continent before the Muslims’ arrival followed a single homogeneous, indigenous religion called Hinduism, which was always at loggerheads with an alien invading religion Islam. In this colonial narrative you had “good Muslims” like Akbar who had given up Islam and adopted “Hindu beliefs” such as daily worship of the Sun; and then you had the “terrible Muslims” like Aurangzeb who dared to follow his Islamic beliefs, although, he tried to be a good administrator to all his subjects. The ultra right wing Hindu groups in India adopted the colonial narrative of history, as it helped them unite the diverse Indian religions into a single entity, based on a perceived common enemy – the Muslims.
Audrey Truschke’s book “Aurangzeb: The life and Legacy of India’s most controversial king,” removes the hate-lenses from our eyes, so that we could see Aurangzeb for what he actually was. Using original Persian sources, Dr. Truschke shows us a ruler who had a mixed relationship with his subjects that largely stood independent of their religious beliefs. He appointed 50% more Hindu Rajas to his court then did the much touted Akbar. He granted lands and money for the building of Hindu temples.
Truschke writes, “In reality Aurangzeb pursued no overarching agenda vis-à-vis Hindus within his state. ‘Hindus’ of the day often did not even label themselves as such and rather prioritized a medley of regional, sectarian, and caste identities (e.g. Rajput, Maratha, Brahmin, Vaishnava). As many scholars have pointed out, the word Hindu is Persian, not Sanskrit, and only became commonly used self-referentially during British colonialism.”
Truschke points out that Aurangzeb was fluent in Hindi from childhood, and quotes the Italian traveler Niccoli Manucci about Aurangzeb “He was of a melancholy temperament, always busy at something or another, wishing to execute justice and arrive at appropriate decisions.” She also quotes Ishvaradasa, a Hindu astrologer, who wrote about Aurangzeb in Sanskrit in 1663 calling the king righteous (dharmya) and even noted that the King’s tax policies were lawful (vidhivat). Truschke’s point is not that Aurangzeb was just but rather that a wide variety of individuals, including “Hindus,” identified Aurangzeb’s pursuit of his vision of justice as crucial to his kingship.
She also quotes the following stanza authored by Chandar Bhan Brahman, a Hindu, Persian-medium poet in Aurangzeb’s employ:
O King may the world bow to your command;
May lips drip with expressions of thanks and salutations;
Since it is your spirit that watches over the people,
Wherever you are, may God watch over you!
She continues “Hindus fared well in Aurangzeb’s massive bureaucracy, finding employment and advancement opportunities. Since Akbar’s time, Rajputs and other Hindus had served as full members of the Mughal administration. Like their Muslim counterparts, they received formal ranks known as mansabs that marked their status in the imperial hierarchy and fought to expand the empire.”
Truschke quotes Aurangzeb’s February 1659 farman “You must see that nobody unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they might remain in their place and pray for the continuance of the Empire.”
Truschke concludes “I have argued that Aurangzeb acted according to his ideals of justice, commitment to political and ethical conduct (adaab and akhlaq), and the necessities of politics. Aurangzeb’s worldview was also shaped by his piety and the Mughal culture he inherited. He was not interested in fomenting Hindu-Muslim conflict – a modern obsession with modern stakes- but he was fixated on dispensing his brand of justice, upholding Mughal traditions, and expanding his grip across the subcontinent.”
I interviewed Dr. Truschke about her fascinating new book “Aurangzeb: The life and Legacy of India’s most controversial king.”
In your CV you mention that you can read Persian; I assume that means that you can understand what you have read in Persian too?
Yes, I can understand the Persian that I read. I say that I read Persian on my CV in order to clarify that I do not speak the language fluently. I also read and understand Urdu, although to a lesser degree. I do not know Arabic.
The list of seminars listed on your CV are so fascinating…. Actually, I had thought about researching and writing on a couple of those topics, thinking that I had come up with ‘novel and brilliant topics’ (e.g.: Akbar- Shah or Raja; Prithviraj Chauhan……); only to see those and many more topics already being researched/ written on by trained historians. I love hanging out with Islamic Numismatists at every opportunity; is there a way that amateurs like myself can sneak into any of these history-conferences?
That depends on the conference. Some conferences are open to all who wish to attend, especially smaller ones (such as the conference in Paris in early June of 2017 at which I presented on Prithviraj Chauhan). Larger conferences, such as the American Academy of Religion Annual Conference and the Annual Conference on South Asia require a fee in order to attend (although, anybody is welcome to pay that fee and come).
I know you described how you researched for this book – but, as you indicated there are tons of materials available on Aurangzeb waiting for patient, organized and persistent historians to discover. But, how does one find information on elusive figures like Prithviraj Chauhan, who, I thought there was precious little information about.
There are a lot of later accounts of Prithviraj Chauhan, but precious little historical information from his actual time. How do historians deal with this? One option is to change the sorts of questions we ask. For example, Cynthia Talbot’s The Last Hindu Emperor (2015) traces the development of stories surrounding Prithviraj over time, rather than trying to get back to the “real history.” Another option is to make better use of the sources that we have. Scholars, especially of earlier generations, sometimes had different ideas about what constituted a reliable source and how to read multiple sources with and against one another. Modern thinkers can often improve on earlier methods and findings.
Why did you choose to be a historian?
My original interest is in India, rather than in history at large. I studied Indian religions as an undergraduate and Indian languages, cultures, and histories as a graduate student. I eventually found that the best fit of my particular set of interests was within the discipline of history. Now I am deeply invested in reconstructing India’s past, to the best of my abilities.
You choose a rather large geographical area of specialization? Doesn’t that pose difficulties?
Yes. This comes up most frequently in teaching. I teach historical overview courses on South Asia, and my knowledge outside of North and Central India is comparatively weak. I do not know any South Indian languages, for example, and my grasp of, say, Nepali history, is tenuous. I remind my students repeatedly that it is insane to hire a single person to cover 5,000 years of history for about 1/5 of the world’s population. Imagine if we expected one person to cover the entirety of European history, with all of Europe’s different languages, cultures, empires, and so forth? Essentially, that I am asked to cover a large geographical area and temporal period is a problem created by the privileging of Western history in the Western academy.
What was your Ph.D on?
I wrote my PhD on Sanskrit and Persian literary encounters at the Mughal court. I later revised my thesis and published it as my first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court.
How long did it take you to write this book?
I wrote Aurangzeb rather quickly, in about two years. Once I settled on the topic, I realized that I had been thinking about Aurangzeb Alamgir for a decade and written very little about him, so I had done some of the leg-work in terms of analysis already. I deliberately set out to write a short biography, which accelerated the writing process.
When you started writing this book, did you have some information indicating that the allegations against Aurangzeb were either fictional or grossly exaggerated?
Yes. Historians have accepted for decades that Aurangzeb did not destroy thousands of temples nor did he commit a genocide against Hindus. In the course of writing Aurangzeb, I checked those claims and revisited the evidence upon which historians have come to such a consensus. But those parts of my book, while deeply controversial in the public eye, are actually pretty bland and standard in the view of historians of the Mughal period.
Did you face any difficulties during your research for this book – as in people putting hurdles in your way?
Not really. I disagreed with my first Indian publisher regarding how to best introduce Aurangzeb to a broad Indian audience, and, as a result, we decided to dissolve our contract. Penguin, who ultimately published Aurangzeb in India, has been hugely supportive of the book and its content.
How did you find the courage to write on a topic knowing that it was sure to invite ultra right wing radicals to make baseless and unreasoned attacks on you?
I did not write the book for the right-wingers. I wrote the book because I thought that there was a substantial group of educated Indian readers who think that there was more to Aurangzeb than they had been led to believe and who would appreciate a more historically-grounded approach to this complicated Mughal king. My fans are, wisely, often quieter than my critics. But I have received enough private messages and emails to be convinced that many have appreciated my efforts to bring calm, reasoned history to a broad readership.
What is the motivating/ driving factor in writing books on critically important topics of India’s history? Do historians like yourself feel that historians have a moral obligation to society to set the record straight – analogous to a physician’s Hippocratic Oath?
Some historians might cringe at that idea, actually. History as a discipline has many critical things to say about ideas of ultimate truth. But I think that most historians do not write in an environment where the very tenets of historical knowledge and analysis are under assault, both in popular thought and at a government level. I do subscribe to a set of professional ethics that demand, among other things, that I try to accurately reconstruct the past.
How does it feel joining the group of highly respectable historians like Romila Thapar, and Richard Eaton, who stand tall refusing to succumb to revisionists trying to create pseudo-history?
It feels like an honour and a privilege.
What is your next book about?
I am currently working on my third book on Sanskrit literary histories of Indo-Islamic political figures and rule, dating from the late twelfth through the early eighteenth centuries. I anticipate that this book will take a number of years to write.
Misbahuddin Mirza is a licensed professional engineer, registered in the States of New York and New Jersey and has written for major US and Indian publications.