Aurangzeb: Chronicle of a Downfall Foretold

GOD KNOWS!’ exclaimed Jahangir. He was in Ramgarh when a comet shaped like a harba (spear) appeared in the sky on 20 October 1618. His astrologers said it indicated weakness for kings and success for enemies.

Jahangir saw the comet three gharis before sunrise, a luminous vapour in the form of a pillar:

When it assumed its full form, it took the shape of a spear, thin at two ends and thick in the middle. It was curved like a sickle, and had its back to the south, and its face to the north… Astronomers took its shape and size by the astrolabe, and ascertained that with differences of appearance it extended over 24 degrees. It moved in high heaven, but it had a movement of its own, differing from that of high heaven, for it was first in Scorpio and afterwards in Libra. Its declination was mainly southerly. Sixteen nights after this phenomenon, a star showed itself in the same quarter. Its head was luminous, and its tail was two or three yards long, but the tail was not luminous. It has now appeared for eight nights; when it disappears, the fact will be noticed, as well as the results of it.

Shortly after, news arrived of the birth of a grandson:

On the eve of Sunday the 12th of the Ilahi month of Aban, in the thirteenth year of my accession, corresponding with the 15th Zi-l-Qada of the Hijri year 1027, in the 19th degree of Libra, the Giver of blessing gave my prosper­ous son Shahjahan a precious son by the daughter of Asaf Khan [Mumtaz Mahal]. I hope that his advent may be auspicious and blessed to this everlasting State.

This grandson was Aurangzeb.

Shahjahan arranged for a birthday ‘entertainment’ at Ujjain. The ‘day was passed in enjoyment at his quarters’, writes the em­peror. His private servants who had ‘entrée into this kind of parties and assemblies were delighted with brimming cups’. Shahjahan brought that ‘auspicious child’, along with offerings of a tray of jewels, ornaments and fifty elephants, thirty male and twenty female, and asked the grandfather to name the baby. ‘Please God, it will be given him in a favourable hour,’ said Jahangir. The favourable hour would be determined by astrologers. Seven of the elephants were sent to his private stud; the rest were distributed among officers. The value of the offerings accepted was 2,00,000 rupees.

The skies had not been silent when Dara Shukoh was born three years earlier. In March 1615, Jahangir was celebrating the tenth year of his accession with a feast and ceremonials in the ‘usual manner’.

On Sunday, 29 March, ‘when twelve gharis of the day had passed, it began from the west, and four out of five parts of the sun were eclipsed in the knot of the dragon. From the commencement of the seizure until it became light eight gharis elapsed’. Alms of all kinds, in the shape of metals, animals and vegetables, were given to fakirs and the impoverished to thwart the ill effects, for an eclipse was a premonition of misfortune.

On the night of 30 March 1615, Dara Shukoh was born ‘in the ascension of Sagittarius’. Jahangir named the boy Dara Shukoh with the ‘hope that his coming will be propitious to this State conjoined with eternity, and to his fortunate father’.

THE PORTENT

Both astral events were considered ominous by Jahangir. In retrospect, they might serve as metaphors. Dara Shukoh was eclipsed, but the Aurangzeb meteor burnt out the empire.

Aurangzeb believed in his horoscope, written at his birth, with total conviction. This horoscope had not only predicted every event that occurred in his life but also the disaster that would overwhelm the Mughal Empire after he was gone.

In 1695, twelve years before his death, he told his heir, Mirza Muhammad Muazzam (1643-1712), who succeeded him as Bahadur Shah, ‘Az mast hamah fasad-i-baqi!’

That is, ‘After me: chaos!’

The horoscope had been charted by Mulla Ala-ulmulk Tuni, a scholar and official in Shahjahan’s court who was raised to the title of Fazil Khan. The accuracy of his predictions is confirmed in a contemporary history, Ahkami-Alamgiri by Hamid-ud-din Khan Bahadur, later translated into English as Anecdotes of Aurangzib by Jadunath Sarkar.

Aurangzeb trusted Fazil Khan. He was the intermediary during his tense negotiations with Shahjahan after he had usurped power in 1658. Fazil Khan was promoted to the august position of vizier a little before his death in 1663. Aurangzeb had inher­ited a powerful tradition from his forefathers.

Christopher Minkowski writes:

Evidence from contemporary Persian chronicles makes it clear that the Mughal rulers employed Hindu astrologers, giving them the title of Jotik Rai, or in Sanskrit, Jyotisraja, king among jyotisas… Some evidence suggests that the Jotik [Rai] would travel with the emperor during military expeditions. It was the Jotik Rai’s job to cast the birth chart of members of the royal family according to the jyotisa system, to answer questions according to the prasna, the jyotisa version of catarchic astrology, in which a chart is cast for the moment that the question was asked, and to choose favourable moments to undertake activities, according to the jyotisa system of muhurta. These experts in the ‘astral sciences’ produced divination texts and advised their royal clients on daily routine as well as plans for life and for action, both personal and political.

THE CORONATION

Astrologers had the last word when Aurangzeb took the crown.

On 12 May 1659, Aurangzeb entered Delhi to the sound of drums, pipes and trumpets, fol­lowed by bejewelled, caparisoned elephants and cavalry, muske­teers, rocketmen and his servants flinging coins to the populace on either side. He then waited for twenty-four days: ‘The court astrologers were of opinion that Sunday 5th June 1659, was a most auspicious day, and all arrange­ments were made for Aurangzeb’s enthronement on that day,’ writes Jadunath Sarkar. They specified the time: three hours and fifteen minutes after sunrise.

Aurangzeb, with cool but calm eyes, arrived early in the morning on 5 June, seated on the loftiest elephant. All the treasures of the dynasty were on display inside the fort. The ceilings and the forty pillars of the Diwan-i-Am were draped in brocades from Gujarat, gold-and-silver cloth from Persia, embroidered velvet, European screens and gold tissue from China and Turkey. The court waited for a signal from the soothsayers.

The astrologers had declared 3 hours and 15 minutes from sunrise as the auspicious moment. The whole court anxiously hung on the lips of the astrologers, who keenly watched their [water] clocks and sandglasses. At last they gave the signal; the precious moment had arrived; the Emperor, who had been sitting dressed and ready behind a screen, entered the Hall of Public Audience and mounted the throne.

This was, technically, Aurangzeb’s second coronation. The first, in July 1658, a brief ceremony at Shalimar Bagh, was a neces­sary assertion of power in the vacuum left after Shahjahan had been dethroned. According to Muhammad Kambu, the astrolo­gers had identified 21 July 1658 as the auspicious day.

Astrologers determined the date and time for both crucial occasions. The emperor, who lived by the letter of Islamic law, often against the spirit of Islamic doctrine, in effect ignored the Quranic injunction in Surah Yunus, Verse 101: ‘Behold all that is in the heavens and on earth, but neither signs nor warnings profit those who believe not.’ Faith has its variations.

In 1658, Aurangzeb was realistic enough to stop short of claiming full sovereignty. The khutba was not read in his name. A painting, dated circa 1660, now in the St Petersburg Album, shows a young, olive-coloured Aurangzeb bathed in a shaft of heavenly light, seated on a cushion and facing two princes. There is a small box and a rudra veena at his side.

The pomp and circumstance of the second coronation and his persona as emperor belie the cul­tivated image of Aurangzeb as an abstemious ruler who disdained the glamour of a king and lived on the earnings of pious activities like sewing prayer caps. The jewel merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) saw Aurangzeb drink water from a rock crystal cup with a gold cover and saucer enriched with gems; the credulous were told that he never used vessels of gold and silver.

Fear of the unknown, however, made him an ascetic in 1665 when a ‘very large’ comet appeared for four weeks. Aurangzeb stopped eating meat, reduced his meals to a minimal amount of millet bread and water, and slept on the ground with only tiger skin as cover. A comet was a dangerous omen for kings.

Aurangzeb’s faith in astrology is confirmed by [François] Bernier, who was part of the royal entourage the previous year.

THE END

Aurangzeb feared that ‘the least de­viation from the strict and narrow path of Islamic orthodoxy’ would endanger his soul. He regarded ‘danger as the legitimate risk of greatness’. His debilitating flaw was a passion for micromanagement, robbing governors and generals of initiative and judgement, leaving them hesitant in any emergency. His suspicious nature crushed the latent ability of his sons. He was matchless in diplomacy, intrigue and secret manipulation but a cold intellectual who chilled the love of those who came near him.

Aurangzeb lacked sympathy, imagination, vision, elasticity in the choice of means and that warmth of the heart that atones for a hundred faults of the head. These limitations of his character under­mined the Mughal empire, so that after his death it suddenly fell in a single downward plunge.

In early February 1707, the eighty-eight-year-old Aurangzeb realised that his life was over. In his last letter to Azam Shah, he wrote:

I came alone and am going away alone. I know not who I am and what I have been doing… I have not at all done any [true] government of the realm or cherishing of the peasantry… I brought nothing with me and am carrying away with me the fruits of my own sins. I know not what punishment will fall on me.

A letter to Kam Baksh is soaked in similar despair: ‘I shall carry away with myself the fruits of all the punishments and sins that I have done… Set your feet within the limits of your carpet.’ A statement said to be written in his own hand and left under his pillow, now with the India Office Library in Britain, urges his sons not to slaughter mankind in pursuit of the throne but to share power. He proposed a formula. This being the Mughal dynasty, the sons ignored his advice.

His eleventh commandment was precise: never trust your sons, nor play favourites.

Aurangzeb summoned his heir, Bahadur Shah, in prison from 21 February 1687, for an audience after he was released on 9 May 1695. He justified his long years in confinement. They had been as salutary as prison had been to Prophet Joseph before he became ruler of Egypt: ‘In this hope I have in my lifetime entrusted to you Paradise-like Hindustan.’

Aurangzeb then revealed a startling fact to his son: every prediction made in his horoscope drawn by Fazil Khan ‘from the day of my birth’ had been ‘verified by actual experience’. The horo­scope was completely accurate. More: the horoscope had also forecast what would happen ‘after my death’.

There would be chaos after he was gone. Az mast hamah fasad-i-baqi!

Aurangzeb was brutally honest about the impending misfortune:

In that horoscope it is written that after me will come an emperor, ignorant, narrow-minded, overpow­ered by injuries, whose words will be all imperfect and whose plans will be immature. He will act towards some men with so much prodigality as almost to drown them, and towards others with so much rigour as to raise the fear of destruction. All these admirable qualities and praisewor­thy characteristics are found in your nature! Although I shall leave behind me a competent vazir [Asad Khan] who has come to the front in my reign and whom I have secured, yet what good will it do, as the four pillars of empire, my four sons, will never leave that poor man to do his work?

Many officials were secretly begging for his death now, he said, but once he was gone, they would be pleading before God for death to themselves. He advised Bahadur Shah ‘out of father­ly love’ not to be so salty that his subjects would spit him out of their mouths, nor so sweet that they would swallow him.

 (This is an edited excerpt from After Me, Chaos: Astrology in the Mughal Empire by MJ Akbar)