The Hindu right, never too bright, wants to destroy Aurangzeb’s grave. Some have threatened kar-sevak action of the kind that demolished the Babri Masjid, not quite grasping the difference in size between the mosque and the earth-covered grave. It would have to be a limited-rampage, pop-up kind of kar-seva they organised, not likely to satisfy the crazed appetites of their constituents. Another smug mob burnt a poster of Bahadur Shah Zafar, blithely ignorant of any difference between the last Mughal and the sixth.
If pointed out, such errors are hardly likely to embarrass the Sangh and its followers, bone-headed certitude in the face of contradiction being a hallmark of right-wing politics across the globe. It may give the gravediggers a moment’s pause, however, to know that when it comes to destroying the graves of long-dead rulers to punish them for their sins, the Mughals have beaten them to it.
In March 1617, nearly two years before Aurangzeb was born, his grandfather Jahangir arrived in Mandu, now abandoned but long a strategic fort for whoever happened to rule this part of central India. Taking a leisurely tour of its various royal buildings, he stopped at the grave of Sultan Nasiruddin and began to fume. A century ago, this Nasiruddin had, it was said, poisoned his 80-year-old father, Ghiyasuddin. The old sultan had spent his long reign at great ease, having declared at its outset, “I have no desire to conquer territory. I want to spend the rest of my life in enjoyment.” Hunting and women were the twin passions that kept him amused for the 30-odd years he ruled from Mandu. All the while, perhaps, Nasiruddin fretted. “Twice he gave him poison,” writes Jahangir, “but Ghiyasuddin warded it off with an amulet against poison he wore on his arm.” The third time, the ageing king gave in: took off his amulet, asked God to forgive his son, drank the poison and died.
Also read: Babri Masjid, Aurangzeb’s Grave, What’s Next For Hindutva?
Incensed by Nasiruddin’s “hideous deed”, Jahangir wrote of how, some decades earlier, Sher Shah Suri had visited the site, been similarly roused and made his retinue strike Nasiruddin’s grave with sticks. Possibly feeling that he should go one step further than the Suri king who almost ended the Mughal dynasty, Jahangir began to kick at Nasiruddin’s grave, and ordered those with him to kick it too. But kicking was not satisfactory. Jahangir had the grave dug up. He thought he might burn Nasiruddin’s remains until it occurred to him that, “since fire originates with divine light, it would be a shame to sully that subtle essence by burning his filthy body in it”. Instead, he had the patricidal sultan’s “crumbling bones and decayed body thrown into the Narbada River”.
It is a puzzling image: such excess of emotion, such visceral anger at a man dead for 110 years. Both Jahangir and Sher Shah had difficult relationships with their fathers. In the one case, when he was an adolescent, Sher Shah left home in great anger at his father. Jahangir, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to leave Akbar’s side, no matter how much his father hoped he would lead armies to new conquests. Then, tiring of waiting for his chance at the throne, Jahangir rebelled and declared himself shah in Allahabad. There is even an unverified bit of court gossip that claims Akbar once accused his first-born son of trying to poison him.
Jahangir’s outsized anger at Nasiruddin now, the performative punishment of the crumbling sultan, was it also a public declaration of his ethics? I am not this. I am better.
Also read: What Would the Politics of Hindutva do Without Aurangzeb?
The mobs in Maharashtra accuse Aurangzeb of cruelty, intolerance and fanaticism. They wish to desecrate his grave, erase all trace of him from the world. Might one assume, then, that for themselves they claim kindness, acceptance, a dispassionate eclecticism? That may have been the kind of logic that spurred the (old) Indian state to anoint Aurangzeb its number one villain, after the British, against whom to posit the virtues of a newborn, secular nation. It was certainly the logic of the colonial state, which needed the Mughals to be unjust predecessors, all the better to argue for its own need to exist. But consistent, rational thought, no matter how self-serving, is a terrible handicap to a mob. “No one is as tolerant as a Hindu,” declared one member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, not pausing for the breath that might have let a little oxygen into his brain. “We won’t allow people who stand with Aurangzeb to live.”
Who knows why Jahangir destroyed Nasiruddin’s body and grave? He was prone to moments of unhinged fury. But also, he had every reason to be haunted by resentments and regrets about his own father, whom he did not kill but whose death his whole heart may not have mourned. The Hindu right’s clamour against Aurangzeb is more transparent: it thrives on threats of violence and Muslim baiting. Far from being haunted by grievances, it creates them, fresh and raw and pulsing with half-witted hate. And whether its proponents disturb a dead man’s sleep or not, it is us, the unfortunate living, who feel their poison coursing through our veins.
Parvati Sharma is the author of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal and, most recently, a biography of Akbar called Akbar of Hindustan.
