Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb was born on 3 November 1618 in Dahod, Gujarat, the third son of the future emperor Shah Jahan and his beloved consort Mumtaz Mahal, the woman for whom the Taj Mahal would later be built. He was a direct descendant of Timur through his father. At the age of eight he was sent as a political hostage to his grandfather Jahangir's court, an early and brutal initiation into Mughal politics. He grew into the most scholarly of the imperial princes, fluent in Persian, Chagatai Turkic and Hindustani, and capable of reciting the entire Quran and the major hadith collections from memory. He was also a trained calligrapher in the naskh style. At fifteen, when a war elephant rampaged through the imperial camp on 28 May 1633, he rode against it alone with a spear and earned the title Bahadur (brave). When chided for recklessness, he replied: "Death drops the curtain even on emperors; it is no dishonor. The shame lay in what my brothers did!" The remark, historians note, was already a public rebuke of his older brothers' caution.

From 1636 he served as viceroy of the Deccan, sharpening his military and administrative skills against the Bijapur and Golconda sultanates, and he was governor of Gujarat from 1645 to 1647 and of Multan and Sindh from 1648 to 1652. When Shah Jahan fell gravely ill in September 1657, four brothers fought a war of succession that Aurangzeb described as "victory or death, kingship or ruin." After defeating Dara Shikoh and the king of Marwar at Dharmat in April 1658, and then crushing Dara again at Samugarh in May, Aurangzeb imprisoned his father in Agra Fort. He executed Dara as an apostate and sent his severed head, in a box, to the old emperor. He tricked the youngest brother Murad Bakhsh into captivity and later had him executed; he drove Shah Shuja into exile in Arakan where he was killed in 1661. On 31 July 1658 he crowned himself in Delhi as Alamgir, "World-Seizer."

The first half of his reign continued the prosperity inherited from Akbar, and under his rule the Mughal economy briefly surpassed Qing China as the largest in the world, accounting for nearly a quarter of global GDP. But his religious orientation broke decisively with his predecessors. Shaped by the Naqshbandi reformer Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, he sought to make sharia the legal backbone of the empire. In 1663 he banned sati, the Hindu practice of widow self-immolation. In 1669 he ordered the demolition of Hindu temples across the realm; in 1675 he executed the ninth Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur in Delhi for refusing to convert. In 1679, after a century of suspension by his great-grandfather Akbar, he restored the jizya, a graduated poll-tax on non-Muslims of 13 rupees on the rich, 6.5 on the middle and 3.5 on the poor. He commissioned the vast legal compilation Fatawa-i Alamgiri to codify Hanafi jurisprudence as the empire's regulating body. Yet revisionist historians, notably Audrey Truschke and Richard Eaton, note that he employed proportionally more Hindus in the imperial bureaucracy than his predecessors and that the number of documented temple demolitions during his fifty-year reign was around fifteen, far below the figure asserted by modern Hindutva polemic.

From 1681, after his fourth son Akbar's rebellion drew him south, he marched to the Deccan and never returned to Delhi for the remaining twenty-six years of his life. He annexed Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, pushing Mughal control deeper into the subcontinent than any Muslim dynasty since the Tughluqs. He captured the Maratha king Sambhaji in 1689 and had him executed by the Bhima River, yet the guerrilla war never ended. To finance twenty-six years of southern campaigning he taxed the Hindustani peasantry into revolt: Jats around Agra rose in 1691, Bengal endured a massive uprising in the 1690s, and the Rajputs of Marwar and Mewar fought him through the Second Mughal-Rajput War. In his military camp he lived in remarkable austerity, sewing prayer caps and copying the Quran by hand, sustaining himself on the modest income these labours yielded rather than drawing on the imperial treasury. His private piety could not redeem the public ruin.

He died on 3 March 1707 at Bhingar near Ahmednagar, aged eighty-eight, with only 300 rupees on his person, all of which he instructed should be distributed in charity. His simple open-air grave at Khuldabad, beside a Sufi shrine, holds no marble dome and no inscription. In a final letter to his son Azam Shah, written two weeks before his death, he confessed: "I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing." Within three decades the empire he had stretched to its widest point was crumbling — sacked by Nadir Shah in 1739, eroded by the Marathas, and a century later swallowed entirely by the British East India Company. In India he is remembered as the destroyer of temples; in Pakistan as a model Islamic sovereign and national hero. Few rulers have produced so clean a fracture in collective memory across a single subcontinent.