The pushback against Aurangzeb's demonisation

Like most people before the advent of officially sanctioned bigotry in the country, I knew the Aurangzeb in our textbooks as the last Mughal emperor before a series of eminently forgettable successors, until Bahadur Shah Zafar was deposed by the British empire after India's First War of Independence in 1857. Nothing more, nothing less.

All the portraits of the Mughal emperors, at least to me, seemed indistinguishable one from the other. Akbar, the great was often recalled in the image of Prithviraj Kapoor from Mughal-e-Azam – decades later Hrithik Roshan (Jodhaa Akbar) did not quite manage to replace that image at least in my mind. A young, romantic Akbar in love with his beautiful wife did not quite seem the same person who had tormented his son for being in love with another equally beautiful woman. So Prithviraj Kapoor was always my image of Akbar.

The image of Dilip Kumar, though, did not quite go down in at least my mind as Jehangir, and I always confused the portrait of his son Shah Jahan (holding a rose) with him.

But Aurangzeb is someone who was rarely picturised anywhere, if at all. Different actors played him in different films or television serials over the years but no one character ever immortalized Emperor Aurangzeb as Prithviraj Kapoor did Emperor Akbar.

So I was quite in sync with the statement of Imtiyaz Jaleel, MP from Aurangabad (recently renamed Sambhajinagar) of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), when he asked, "Where have all these pictures of Aurangzeb come from? So far, we hadn't seen any photos of him and did not even know what he looked like!"

The image of Dilip Kumar, though, did not quite go down in at least my mind as Jehangir, and I always confused the portrait of his son Shah Jahan (holding a rose) with him.

But Aurangzeb is someone who was rarely picturised anywhere, if at all. Different actors played him in different films or television serials over the years but no one character ever immortalized Emperor Aurangzeb as Prithviraj Kapoor did Emperor Akbar.

So I was quite in sync with the statement of Imtiyaz Jaleel, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) MP from Aurangabad (recently renamed Sambhajinagar), when he asked, "Where have all these pictures of Aurangzeb come from? So far, we hadn't seen any photos of him and did not even know what he looked like!"

That statement came about after Maharashtra saw much protest and several clashes between Hindutva groups and members of the Muslim community, who had suddenly managed to source pictures of Aurangzeb and upload them to their WhatsApp statuses or profile pictures.

Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis actually went so far as to describe these young rebels as 'Aurangzeb ki aulad' and, along with everything else happening with regard to the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi said to be built by Aurangzeb on the site of a temple, it became apparent that this time, fast running out of credibility on even communal issues like cow vigilantism or love jihad, the BJP has decided to make Aurangzeb the Enemy No. 1 across India.

But a strange phenomenon is happening, and not just in Maharashtra—a pushback against the BJP's demonisation of Aurangzeb.

Rajendra Prasad Tiwari, the mahant (chief priest) of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, has quite categorically stated that if Aurangzeb destroyed any temples, he did so only because the priests at that temple had supported his brother Dara Shikoh (who had studied Sanskrit in Varanasi and gifted several pattas, or land deeds, for those temples to the supportive priests).

Dara Shikoh was Shah Jahan’s heir apparent and garnered a lot of sympathy when he was killed by his younger brother for the throne. So Aurangzeb's destruction of the temples patronised by his murdered brother was a political move, rather than a religious one, said Tiwari.

In the same breath, the mahant pointed out that Aurangzeb had also provided land and funded several mutts and temples from his own treasury.

"Aurangzeb granted four–five bighas of land to the Jangamwadi Math (in Varanasi) and a grant from the royal treasury so that the Lingayat sect could carry out their worship of Lord Shiva and study Sanskrit texts," added the mahant.

"Aurangzeb's patta is still there with the mutt. When Yogi Adityanath visited the mutt in 2018 or 2019, the Jangamwadi mutt people told me he wanted the patta to be removed from there. This is a document of history. It cannot be removed from the historical record, or even from our memory, just because Adityanath desires so."

But maybe it is not just the Uttar Pradesh chief minister who wishes to alter history. The manner in which the government is dropping Mughal history from textbooks endangers other icons too—for example, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

"If you remove Aurangzeb from the history books, how will Shivaji, who singlehandedly stood between Aurangzeb and other Muslim dynasties in the South, be remembered as a brave warrior king?" queried one professor of history who wished to remain anonymous.

Removing the 'long-forgotten' Tipu Sultan from the history books, he said, makes it convenient to forget that the Marathas conspired with the British and the Nizam of Hyderabad to defeat him and, of course, they would also rather forget that it was Tipu Sultan who built and patronised the Srirangapatna Ranganathaswamy temple that has an image of the only reclining Lord Vishnu anywhere in the world.

All these facts defeat their binary focus on Hindus and Muslims as always hating each other, he added.

But as Muslim lads begin to recall Tipu Sultan again and unabashedly give him too pride of place on their WhatsApp statuses and DPs, Fadnavis and his party—who have been arresting these young men left, right and centre —are unable to do anything about Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who recently changed his DP on his Twitter handle to a portrait of Aurangzeb and took great delight in the frothing outrage of the BJP-RSS ecosystem over his reminder to them that Aurangzeb was a son of the soil.

And not just any soil. He was born of the soil of Gujarat, the very mitti (soil) from which Narendra Modi hails and who has declared Aurangzeb’s birth city of Dahod as a smart city, one of his pet projects since becoming prime minister.

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So Aurangzeb, those pushing back say, was born a Gujarati but died a Maharashtrian—he lies buried in an unmarked grave in Khuldabad, a few kilometres from Aurangabad, a city named after him as it had come up around his battlements.

Aurangzeb had camped there for 25 years before his death, trying to defeat the Adilshahi and Qutubshahi kingdoms of the Deccan, and a whole generation born there knew nought but Aurangzeb and his camp and buried him right there.

Now it is that unmarked grave that has also become a rallying point for the pushback. Aurangzeb’s forlorn grave, which has had no visitors in decades, perhaps centuries, is in marked contrast to his wife’s mausoleum, the Bibi ka Maqbara, a few kilometres away from his own in the same district.

Said to be a poor man’s Taj Mahal, the maqbara was built by her son for his mother; the prince, however, did not seem to wish to immortalise his father in the same manner.

As a result, even in modern India, the tourist department never gave that unmarked grave a second thought. Its caretakers have not even had enough money coming in from donors to beautify the grave.

But last week, the Bahujan Vikas Aghadi (BVA) chief Prakash Ambedkar visited this lonely grave, bowed before it, placed some flowers and lit some incense sticks on it. The BJP leadership was rendered speechless.

Months ahead of the crucial general elections in the country, how do they target the grandson of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the father of the Indian Constitution, without alienating a huge chunk of the Dalit and OBC (other backward classes) vote bank that Prakash Ambedkar brings to the table? So they are asking Uddhav Thackeray for an explanation instead!

The Shiv Sena (UBT) is in an alliance with the BVA, and Thackeray has been redefining his party’s Hindutva as one that can easily coexist with Muslims in the country. That has gained him a huge chunk of the Muslim voter base that the BJP now wishes to destroy.

But while Thackeray did not comment, like Ambedkar said he could speak for himself. "Why don't you ask the descendants of [King] Jaichand why they opened the gates of India to Aurangzeb's ancestors?" Ambedkar shot back, reminding the BJP that Aurangzeb had ruled over large parts of India for 50 years. Much of that rule, bar the empire building, was without any violence or conflict. That is more than can be said about Modi or the BJP today, he noted.

Combined with Tiwari's statement that Modi has destroyed more temples (in the Kashi corridor) in his nine years than Aurangzeb ever did in half a century, the BJP has been left with nothing more to do now than gnash its teeth in anger and frustration.