Bhimsen is distressed that landowners are exploiting the peasantry, there are defections to the Marathas, and lawlessness in the countryside. But there is little evidence in his book of the anti-Hindu policies attributed to Aurangzeb today.
The Mughal king Aurangzeb died in 1707 but he lives on in debates in India and Pakistan. In Indian popular imagination Aurangzeb is a fanatical bigot and a precursor to ISIS because he persecuted Hindus and destroyed their temples. Meanwhile, in Pakistan many view Aurangzeb favourably as a champion for Islam, while others lament Aurangzeb’s killing of his brother Dara Shukoh on the grounds that Dara—imagined as peaceable and tolerant—would have been a better king. Historians have analysed numerous sources from Mughal India to show that there was more to Aurangzeb than today’s caricatures. They argue that it is senseless to assess past kings as good or bad based on how tolerant or intolerant they were; in doing so we impose present-day vocabularies and moral judgments on the past and exacerbate communal violence. More importantly, binaries of tolerant/intolerant, good Islam/bad Islam are a product of colonial rule and have nothing to do with how people from the past saw themselves.
How then did Mughal kings and their subjects experience the world? By what standards of right and wrong did ordinary people judge themselves and their kings? A memoir penned in 1707 by Bhimsen Saxena, a Hindu subject of Aurangzeb, can answer these questions. Bhimsen’s memoir was written in Persian and is titled the Tarikh-i Dilkusha, which I translate here as a history that expands or warms the heart. Jadunath Sarkar’s English translation of the text captures Bhimsen’s straightforward way of writing. Bhimsen wrote from multiple vantage points. He was from a Hindu family who had served the Mughals for generations and grew up on stories of Mughal kings. He was a soldier and news-writer for Aurangzeb’s campaigns into the Deccan, which began in 1681, and offers us a rare eyewitness perspective. Finally, Bhimsen was often furious with Aurangzeb but remained deeply loyal to him. This capacity for both rage and devotion towards a king is key to understanding people from the Mughal past.
All Indian kings, regardless of whether they were Hindu or Muslim, were thought to be divinely ordained and in many cases, to have divine qualities themselves. We do not live in a world governed by kings. This means that as ‘modern’ people living in nation-states, we struggle with the idea of sacred governance. While Akbar is seen today as the opposite of Aurangzeb, both kings were sacred to their subjects in different ways. Akbar portrayed himself as a messiah and an embodiment of God while Aurangzeb, given to asceticism, portrayed himself as a servant of the divine. Aurangzeb, hero to some and villain to others in our times, was both and more to Bhimsen.
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Bhimsen begins the Tarikh-i Dilkusha by telling his readers that he is facing difficult times and in retirement wants to content himself with stories of old. Bhimsen has seen a great deal of devastation and war and writes that he is living in the Kaliyuga. This last and most destructive of the four ages outlined in Hindu theology is reflected in the physical and moral deterioration he has witnessed, for Kaliyuga is a time in which “firmness of heart, purity of deeds, and improvement of circumstances” cannot be found in either kings or their subjects. This foreboding note grows louder as we proceed through the text.
Aurangzeb first appears in the Tarikh-i Dilkusha as a young prince who was made the governor of the Deccan by his father Shah Jahan in 1636. Bhimsen does not mention ever meeting Aurangzeb but writes that his elders supported Aurangzeb during his struggle for the throne and were richly rewarded on Aurangzeb’s victory. After Aurangzeb proclaimed himself king in 1658, he set off in pursuit of his brother Dara Shukoh who he captured, paraded through the streets of Lahore, and beheaded. Because succession struggles in which brothers killed brothers were common, Dara Shukoh’s beheading is a matter of course: “His body was relieved of the burden of his head,” writes Bhimsen dourly, and does not follow this up with praise or blame. Although Dara Shukoh has been recast today as secular, tolerant, and humanistic—the opposite of Aurangzeb— he is irrelevant to Bhimsen.