Why RSS is Right About Aurangzeb

THE RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH (RSS) is right. Aurangzeb is irrelevant to contemporary India.

Aurangzeb is the patron saint and ideological father of Pakistan. Pakistan was created not from love of Muslims but hatred of Hindus. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British collaborator in three-piece suits, was its midwife.

Aurangzeb institutionalised distance between Hindus and Muslims as an official virtue, reversing the social integration evident in the language and culture of daily life, like celebrating Holi and wearing the tika, which had become the new normal over the previous century and more. The British manipulated this distance, invested in differ­ences, and turned separation into policy with schemes like ‘Hindu water’ and ‘Muslim water’ at railway stations. They institutionalised rivalry through legislation like Separate Electorates, a form of electoral apartheid. A curved and spiked line took Separate Elector­ates to Partition, but the connection was all too apparent as was the intent.

Modern India cannot build its future with the flaccid and toxic paste of past bigotry. India is proof of our country’s ability to look ahead, instead of getting a poisonous stiff neck from looking back. India is now a rising star of the 21st century; while Pakistan has faded into the quagmires of the 19th not because the people are different but because the raison d’être of their nation-state is different.

Those who speak on behalf of RSS, even at the highest levels, do not enjoy the elasticity of individual predilections. They do not aspire to the culture of our politics. Discipline is the vehicle that carries forward practical decisions. RSS spokesmen do not enjoy the liberty of kneejerk innovations, an elastic relationship with events, or the freedoms taken by spokespersons of political parties. The more serious a subject, the greater the thought and discussion behind a taken position. You do not have to agree or disagree with RSS to accept this.

When the Prachar Pramukh of RSS Sunil Ambekar said, in the wake of violence over the grave of the sixth Mughal monarch, that Aurangzeb was not relevant to 21st-century India, and when the organisation’s powerful General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale advocated “a harmonious and organised Bharat” built on respect for the ethos of Indian culture, they were articulating positions that had been sieved through internal debate and discussion. Culture is never synonymous with faith, despite the efforts of the orthodox to synthesise the two. The majority of Indonesians and most Arabs share the same faith but not the same culture. Hindu and Muslim Indonesians speak a common Bahasa; Arab Christians speak Arabic.

The Quran says Allah has sent prophets in every language because God cannot discriminate against part of creation. We are all creatures of God if we believe in religion. As someone who could recite the holy book from memory, Aurangzeb knew the verse La qum deen o qum wa il ya deen: your faith for you, my faith for me; but refused to understand its meaning as that interfered with his prejudices.

So much murk has been injected into our discourse that it often needs a realign­ment of focus for a balanced perspective of the larger narrative. Take an example which has arguably done more to breed rancour than perhaps any other. In 1669, Aurangzeb imposed jizya, an iniquitous tax which caused outrage, protests, alienation and a disastrous disruption of the Mughal alliance with Rajputs.

It is equally relevant that for more than a hundred years, Mughal emperors had abolished this communal tax as antagonistic to the culture of the people and spirit of the empire shaped by Akbar. Akbar’s younger brother Muhammad Hakim mobilised the orthodox and led a serious uprising, accusing Akbar of apostasy. The rebels were pursued and defeated in Kabul by Raja Man Singh.

Ironically, jizya failed as a revenue model because corruption proved more pow­erful than prejudice. “In practice the jizya did not give Aurangzeb increased control over the powerful ulema. Numerous contemporaries railed against abuses in the jizya collection, to the extent that a huge percentage of jizya money never found its way past the pockets of greedy tax collectors,” writes Audrey Truschke, who is sympathetic to her subject. “Aurangzeb was impotent to halt such theft” (Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth).

In 1679, Aurangzeb ended jharoka darshan, in which he appeared twice or thrice a day, because of its Hindu origins; as was the tika or mark on the forehead, a familiar part of Mughal ritual while greeting Hindus. His orthodoxy included gender discrimination. Women were banned from visiting the shrines of Muslim saints.

The fact that he had to stop such activity means that they had been part of normal life for more than a century.

Aurangzeb’s apologists like Truschke argue that he should not be judged by the standards of the 21st century. Quite. Aurangzeb is guilty by the values of his own family, of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather: akhlaq and adaab, ethics and harmony. His father Shah Jahan celebrated Holi as Eid-i-Gulabi, or the pink Eid, and Aab-e-Pashi, the shower of flowers. Shah Jahan’s nobles sprinkled one another with rose water from specially designed metal bottles to the beat of drums, nagara, and marked the king’s forehead with colour in a display of tehzib-i-akhlaq, or etiquette of harmony.

Aurangzeb, disruptive in anything that did not conform to his narrow view, changed the official calendar from the Persian 12-month span beginning with Navroz in March to the rotat­ing lunar Arabic year even though, as advised by his officials, it affected revenue collection. There was a yawning gap between reality and the advertising. Aurangzeb’s admirers claim that he was a man of simple habits who lived off his earnings from copy­ing the holy book and sewing prayer caps.

This is nonsense. Aurangzeb lived and dressed like an emper­or. Bernier, who travelled in his entourage to Kashmir, writes that Aurangzeb wore “magnificent attire”: white delicate satin shirt, with silk and gold embroidery of the finest texture, an aigrette on the turban of gold cloth, diamonds of an extraordinary size, a topaz with the lustre of the sun, a necklace of immense pearls from neck to stomach. Nobles offered the king “gifts of extraordinary magnifi­cence sometimes for the sake of an ostentatious display, sometimes to divert the King from insti­tuting an enquiry into the exactions committed in their official situations or governments, and sometimes to gain the favour of the King”. It was business as usual. There was no saint sitting on the throne.

Aurangzeb’s devotees in Pakistan elide over the paradox that their 20th-century hero Jinnah was a Shia. Shias were abhorrent to Aurangzeb. He called them ghul-i-bayabani (corpse-eating demons) or batil mazhaban (apostates). When Aurangzeb claimed that his campaign against Bijapur and Golconda, which had Shia sultans, was a holy war, his Shaikh-ul-Islam or chief priest could no longer tolerate the bigotry and resigned. He was forced to accept Shia Persians in his armed forces because they were good soldiers but ordered them to adopt the Sunni form of namaz.

The people were with the liberal, inclusive Dara Shukoh, not the acerbic and insular Aurangzeb who had won the throne but failed to conquer hearts. Bernier describes the people’s reaction when Dara was beheaded after being defeated. They wept and wailed; and even Aurangzeb was seized by a touch of remorse after seeing the severed head of Dara, crying out that he had become a wretch.

Shah Jahan wanted Dara Shukoh as his heir, supporting his preferred heir in the wars of succession with state resources. Dara believed in wahd-al wujud, or unity of all be­ings. He built intellectual and emotional bridges with Hindu seers and savants. He helped Gosain Vithalrai, a religious leader of Gokul, obtain a land grant in 1643. His wide-ranging conversations with Baba Lal, the spiritual leader from Punjab, are recorded in painting and text. The range can be gauged from two examples. What is kingship for a faqir, asked Dara. Being aware of oneself, without a care, answered the mendicant.

Dara honoured Sanskrit as a source of knowledge. He was pa­tron of Banvali Das who adapted Prabodhacandrodaya (Moonrise of Enlightenment), an 11th-century Sanskrit play, into Persian as a text of Sufism; and sponsored the Persian translation of Advaita Vedanta works like Astavakragita (Song of Ashtavakra), Atma­vilasa (Play of the Soul) and the Bhagavad Gita. In the winter of 1656, he summoned a large group of Sanskrit scholars in Banaras to work on a Persian translation of the Upanishads, which was completed by July the following year. Dara gave the title and wrote the preface of Sirr-i-Akbar (The Great Secret), submitting that the Islamic concept of Tawheed, or the unity of God, was found in the Upanishad, which could serve as a virtual commen­tary on the “noble Quran”.

Dara’s eclectic challenge to orthodoxy included association with the Persian-speaking Armenian mystic Shah Sarmad who made India his home and preached that all faiths represented different routes to the God he loved. Sarmad claimed that he obeyed the Quran, but was simultaneously a Hindu priest, a Christian monk, a Jewish rabbi, and a Muslim. Dara addressed Sarmad as a guide and philosopher in the single letter on the subject that has survived. In 1661, or the third year of Aurangzeb’s reign, Sarmad was beheaded for heresy. He is buried in Delhi.

Dara took a question on behalf of his father-emperor Shah Jahan on the status of Hindus in the empire to the religious scholar Shaikh Muhibullah (1587-1648) in Allahabad. The answer is a definition of secularism in the 17th century: “…justice requires that the welfare of the people should be the concern of the administrative officers, whether the people be believers or unbelievers, for they have been created by God”. A government must treat all subjects equally. The Prophet of God had taken “the lead in being merciful to the righteous and the evildoers, the believers and the unbe­lievers” (The Indian Muslims, citing Maktubat-i-Shah Muhibullah Ilahabadi, Azad Library, Aligarh Muslim University).

The larger point is: Why should the decisions of 17th-century feudalism be visited upon the children of an egalitarian, demo­cratic 21st century?

Aurangzeb’s life ended, as I have detailed in my forthcoming book Astrology in the Mughal Empire, not in the triumph of a pious man on his way to heaven, but the despair of a disjointed, confused, dejected failure who had triggered the ruin of a majestic empire.

AurangzebHindus-MuslimsIndian historyMughalsreligious identityReligious intolerance