The Persistence of Aurangzeb

THE PAST HAS violently collided with the present in Nagpur. A movie about a dour, puritanical, Mughal tyrant who usurped power 300 years ago on the back of a regicidal bloodbath was the trigger for communal clashes. Indeed, politicians on both sides of the aisle discovered that Aurangzeb’s bloodstained legacy—brought to life in the Bollywood period drama—was still acidic enough to ignite Hindu-Muslim tensions.

But this piece is not about which political faction fanned the fires in Nagpur. Focusing on the momentariness of the opportunistic politics over Aurangzeb runs the risk of mistaking the symptoms for the disease. The real reasons lie in a decades-old expertly disguised intellectual machination. After Independence, Nehruvian historians, in the name of progressivism, secularised India’s history.

At its most extreme, this sleight of hand involved not just burying the Hindu roots of India’s ancient civilisational history but also going to the absurd length of denying the existence of Hinduism itself. The works of Romila Thapar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam are a study in how to take the Hindu out of the Indian.

While this may have been one prong of a rarefied academic experiment, the other focused on purging facts that testified to excesses committed by Islamic settler colonialists. At a practical level, this meant generations of Indians read school and college textbooks that exalted a fabled “composite culture” or a “Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb”. Detailed recommendations made in 1969 by the Committee on School Textbooks of the Government of India called for ‘’a creative and purposeful interpretation of history and a judicious selection of historical truths.”

Mughal emperor Akbar was portrayed as a beacon of Hindu-Muslim amity, ignoring that the monarch’s syncretic invention of Din-e-Ilahi—divine faith, as in considering all sects as one—was not widely accepted. Akbar’s son Jehangir was introduced as a colourful romantic, a far cry from the ruler who revived the monochromatic fanaticism that underpinned Mughal rule. His successor, Shah Jahan, was depicted as an aesthete. Few know that the Jama Masjid he built in Delhi included a rather miscellaneous arcade made of disparate columns from 27 demolished Hindu temples. Aurangzeb, famous for his violent religious inquisitions, was immortalised in Delhi’s power corridor where a road was named after him.

Not just the Mughals, but the chauvinism inherent in latter-day Muslim notables like Amir Khusrau, Shah Waliullah Dehlawi, his spiritual successor Syed Ahmad Barelvi, educationist Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Iqbal have been whitewashed.

This clinically sanitised historical narrative was bound to grate against the historical memory of crores of Hindus. India, unlike several Western democracies, has never had its own version of “coming to terms with the past.” In Germany, for instance, de-Nazification triggered a larger, societal introspection about the trauma inflicted by a rapacious regime. Today, in Germany, to glorify Hitler is a crime. In Russia, a city named after the homicidal commissar Stalin was renamed. In the US, names of institutions, especially schools, named after slave owners are being challenged. Whereas in India, Nehru spoke of the “soul of a nation, long suppressed”—but sadly, this “soul” was never allowed to step out of the shadow cast by an extremely dark era of colonisation.

It should go without saying that any meaningful endeavour ought to steer clear of holding the current generation of Muslims responsible for the deeds of their ancestors. But since there was little political will, India has not been able to exorcise the ghosts of the past. As BR Ambedkar pointed out, till a history of mutual animosities in the political and religious realms goes unconfronted, the Aurangzebs of yore will pose a serious obstacle to genuine and lasting Hindu-Muslim amity.

AurangzebIndian MuslimsMughalspoliticsReligious bigotrysecular identity