The four sons of the Mughal Emperor , Shah Jahan, all laid claim to the throne when their father fell seriously ill in 1658. Each had considerable administrative experience and military skills, each commanded a considerable military force, and each had a loyal following. Dara Shikoh (1615-58), the eldest son, was resident at Shah Jahan's court as the designated heir; Shuja was Governor of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa; Aurangzeb governed the Deccan; and Murad was Governor of Gujarat and Malwa. Dara's forces were defeated by Aurangzeb, who occupied the imperial capital of Agra; and Aurangzeb took his own father prisoner. Shuja's army was routed in battle; and Murad was lured into a false agreement and taken prisoner. Dara eventually collected together another force, suffered defeat as before, and once again he fled; but soon he was betrayed by one of his allies, and handed over to his brother. Accused of idolatry and apostasy from Islam, Dara was condemned to death, and the sentence was carried out on the night of 30 August 1659, one year after Aurangzeb took over the Fort at Agra and assumed the throne. Aurangzeb delivered the head of his brother to their father.
Aurangzeb Alamgir ("World Conqueror"), whose reign lasted for forty-nine years until his death in 1707, conducted vigorous military campaigns to extend the frontiers of the vast Mughal empire which he had inherited. Both in the northwest and northeast, the imperial armies gained ground, but the losses, which were very considerable, drained the treasury. Already under his father, the revenue of the crops had been raised from a third to a half, and the extensive and interminably long military campaigns he waged required him to keep the peasantry heavily taxed. Some notable victories were likewise achieved in the Deccan. Aurangzeb retained Shahjahanabad as his capital, but after some two decades the capital, in a manner of speaking, shifted to wherever Aurangzeb would set camp during his long military campaigns, which in the Deccan alone lasted some 26 years and perhaps cost him his life. Aurangzeb's mobile army consisted of some 500,000 camp followers, 50,000 camels, and 30,000 war elephants; and when this gargantuan force moved, bands of Maratha guerrillas would strike the rear, attacking the stragglers and fleeing with booty.
A considerable part of Aurangzeb's energies were consumed in keeping his numerous opponents at bay, and he had to deal with the Rajputs, the disloyalty of his son Akbar, and the Sikhs, whose leader, Guru Tegh Bahadur Singh, was killed at Aurangzeb's command when he refused to convert to Islam. Neither could Aurangzeb forgive the Sikhs for having supported his brother and principal rival, Dara. The most effective opposition to his rule, however, came from the Marathas, whose chief, Shivaji, could not be contained. Only Shivaji's premature death at the age of 53, in 1680, appeared to offer the Mughal Emperor some relief, but that very year the Rajputs of Jodhpur and Mewar forged an alliance against Aurangzeb and declared themselves free from his sovereignty. The army that Aurangzeb sent under his son Akbar to subdue them was formidable, but the emperor had perhaps not reckoned with his son's traitorous conduct. However, Akbar, who had rather vainly declared himself the emperor, was compelled to flee to the Deccan, where he enlisted the help of Shivaji's son, Sambhaji. Aurangzeb decided to take to the field himself, and eventually drove his own son into exile in Persia, from where Akbar never returned. The Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda were also reduced to utter submission, and Sambhaji was captured in 1689 and tortured before being murdered.
Towards the end of his reign, Aurangzeb's empire began to disintegrate, a process which would be considerably accelerated in the years after his death, when "successor states" came into existence. Aurangzeb's harsh treatment of Hindus, and the reversal of the liberal religious policies of his predecessors, particularly Akbar, have been cited as principal reasons for the disintegration of his empire. [For a more detailed consideration, see the accompanying article on "Aurangzeb and the Encounter with Religion."] More likely, the peasantry was bled to death, and the system of political alliances established by Akbar was allowed to go to seed. The empire had become far too large and unwieldy, and Aurangzeb did not have enough trustworthy men at his command to be able to manage the more far-flung parts of the empire. Many of the his political appointees broke loose and declared themselves independent, and Aurangzeb's preoccupation with affairs in the Deccan prevented him from meeting political challenges emanating from other parts of the empire. Shortly after the death of Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire ceased to be an effective force in the political life of India, but it was not until 1857-58, when the Indian Rebellion was crushed and the Emperor Bahadur Shah was put on trial for sedition and treason, that the Mughal Empire was formally rendered extinct.
AURANGZEB: RELIGIOUS POLICIES :
The disintegration of the Mughal Empire followed rapidly after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. During his long reign of 49 years, Aurangzeb had done much to extend the frontiers of the empire he had inherited from his father, Shah Jahan, but the extensive military campaigns he conducted, particularly in the Deccan, created a severe financial drain on his resources. The burden of oppressive taxation fell on the peasantry, and political feudatories who owed their positions to Aurangzeb were constantly breaking loose from the emperor's control. But more often than not, it is the religious policies pursued by Aurangzeb that have been cited as one of the principal reasons for Aurangzeb's undoing, and among many Hindus the name of Aurangzeb evokes the same passionate hatred as do the names of Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad of Ghori. With the ascent of the Hindu right to political power in India, a great many people have been emboldened to further attack Aurangzeb. A brief consideration of Aurangzeb's policies, consequently, is in order, but not only to understand the nature of his reign, or the state of Hindu-Muslim relations in India over a period of time, important as are these questions; it is also imperative to ask questions about how our histories are written and how notions of 'minority' and 'majority' get constructed and become part of the political vocabulary.
A year after he assumed power in 1658, Aurangzeb appointed muhtasaibs, or censors of public morals, from the ranks of the ulema or clergy in every large city. He was keen that the sharia or Islamic law be followed everywhere, and that practices abhorrent to Islam, such as the consumption of alcohol and gambling, be disallowed in public. But he was at the outset faced with one problem, namely that the treatment he had meted out to his own father, subjecting him to imprisonment, was scarcely consistent with the image he sought to present of himself as a true believer of the faith. Accordingly, Aurangzeb sought recognition of his ascent to the Mughal Emperor's throne from the ruler of the holy places in the Hijaz, and he became a great patron of the Holy Places. He is reported as well to have spent seven years memorizing the Koran, and unlike his predecessors, his reign was marked by austerity. The monumental architecture that characterized the reigns of Akbar and Shah Jahan -- the Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, the Taj Mahal, Shahjahanabad, among others -- held little interest for Aurangzeb, and similarly the musicians who had adorned the courts of his predecessors were dismissed.
From the standpoint of Aurangzeb's Hindu subjects, the real impact of his policies may have started to have been felt in 1668-69. Hindu religious fairs were outlawed in 1668, and an edict of the following year prohibited construction of Hindu temples as well as the repair of old ones. Also in 1669, Aurangzeb discontinued the practice, which had been originated by Akbar, of appearing before his subjects and conferring darshan on them, or letting them receive his blessings as one might, in Hinduism, take the darshan of a deity and so receive its blessings. Though the duty (internal customs fees) paid on goods was 2.5%, double the amount was levied on Hindu merchants from 1665 onwards. In 1679, Aurangzeb went so far as to reimpose, contrary to the advice of many of his court nobles and theologians, the jiziya or graduated property tax on non-Hindus, and according to one historical source, elephants were deployed to crush the resistance in the area surrounding the Red Fort of Hindus who refused to submit to jiziya collectors. The historian John F. Richards opines, quite candidly, that "Aurangzeb's ultimate aim was conversion of non-Muslims to Islam. Whenever possible the emperor gave out robes of honor, cash gifts, and promotions to converts. It quickly became known that conversion was a sure way to the emperor's favor" (p. 177).
It can scarcely be doubted, once the historical evidence is weighed, that the religious policies of Aurangzeb were discriminatory towards Hindus, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims. Nonetheless, numerous inferences have been drawn from the literature which are not warranted by the historical record. Though many historians have written of conversions of Hindus, surprisingly little, if any, evidence has been offered to suggest how far the conversion of Hindus took place, and whether there was any official policy beyond one of mere encouragement that led to the conversion of Hindus. Then, as now, conversion would have been more attractive to the vast number of Hindus living under the tyranny of caste oppression, and it isn't clear at all how the kind of inducements that Aurangzeb offered -- if indeed he did so for the purposes of conversion, as Richards maintains -- are substantially different from the inducements that modern, purportedly secular, politicians offer to people in their electoral constituencies. And what of the popular representation of Aurangzeb as a ferocious destroyer of Hindu temples and idols? Hindu temples in the Deccan were seldom destroyed, notwithstanding Aurangzeb's extensive military campaigns in that area. True, in north India, some Hindu temples were undoubtedly torn down, but much work needs to be done to establish the precise circumstances under which these acts of destruction took place. The famed Keshava Rai temple in Mathura was one such temple, but here Aurangzeb seems to have been motivated by a policy of reprisal, since the Jats in the region had risen in revolt. Like his predecessors, Aurangzeb continued to confer land grants (jagirs) upon Hindu temples, such as the Someshwar Nath Mahadev temple in Allahabad, Jangum Badi Shiva temple in Banaras, and Umanand temple in Gauhati, and if one put this down merely to expediency, then why cannot one view the destruction of temples as a matter of expediency as well, rather than as a matter of deliberate state policy? Moreover, recent historical work has shown that the number of Hindus employed as mansabdars, or as senior court officials and provincial administrators, under Aurangzeb's reign rose from 24.5% in the time of his father Shah Jahan to 33% in the fourth decade of his own rule. One has the inescapable feeling that then, as now, the word 'fanaticism' comes rather too easily to one's lips to characterize the actions of people acting, or claiming to act, under the name of Islam. It is also notable that as a firm Sunni, Aurangzeb dealt as firmly with the Shia kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda as he did with the Hindus or Muslims. One can safely assert that Aurangzeb acted to preserve and enhance the interests of his own Muslim community, and restored the privileges of the Sunni ulema, but his actions with respect to the Hindus, Shias, and others are more open to interpretation.
Aurangzeb's Fatwa on Jizya [Jizyah, or Poll Tax] :
Much has been made of Aurangzeb's reimposition of the poll tax (jizya, or jizyah) on Hindus. However, as the text of the fatwa, which is seldom read, indicates, an exemption was provided for various classes of people, such as those who were indigent, without employment, unable to work on account of poor health, and so on. Moreover, the fatwa clearly shows that the amount was, far from being uniform, fixed according to a person's ability to pay. The statement that the jizyah was imposed as well on "the people of the Book" -- here doubtless a reference to Christians and Jews -- is particularly significant, since it suggests that there was no animus directed particularly against the Hindus. The translation below is by Anver Emon of the Department of History, UCLA.
Source:
Al-Fatawa al-Alamgiriyyah = Al-Fatawa al-Hindiyyah fi Madhhab al-Imam al-A‘zam Abi Hanifah al-Nu‘man (Beirut: Dar al-Ma‘rifah, 1973), 2:244-245.
Chapter on Jizyah
[Jizyah] refers to what is taken from the Dhimmis, according to [what is stated in] al-Nihayah. It is obligatory upon [1] the free, [2] adult members of [those] who are generally fought, [3] who are fully in possession of their mental faculties, and [4] gainfully employed, even if [their] profession is not noble, as is [stated in] al-Sarajiyyah. There are two types of [jizyah]. [The first is] the jizyah that is imposed by treaty or consent, such that it is established in accordance with mutual agreement, according to [what is stated in] al-Kafi. [The amount] does not go above or below [the stipulated] amount, as is stated in al-Nahr al-Fa’iq. [The second type] is the jizyah that the leader imposes when he conquers the unbelievers (kuffar), and [whose amount] he imposes upon the populace in accordance with the amount of property [they own], as in al-Kafi. This is an amount that is pre-established, regardless of whether they agree or disagree, consent to it or not.
The wealthy [are obligated to pay] each year forty-eight dirhams [of a specified weight], payable per month at the rate of 4 dirhams. The next, middle group (wast al-hal) [must pay] twenty-four dirhams, payable per month at the rate of 2 dirhams. The employed poor are obligated to pay twelve dirhams, in each month paying only one dirham, as stipulated in Fath al-Qadir, al-Hidayah, and al-Kafi. [The scholars] address the meaning of "gainfully employed", and the correct meaning is that it refers to one who has the capacity to work, even if his profession is not noble. The scholars also address the meaning of wealthy, poor, and the middle group. Al-Shaykh al-Imam Abu Ja‘far, may Allah the most high have mercy on him, considered the custom of each region decisive as to whom the people considered in their land to be poor, of the middle group, or rich. This is as such, and it is the most correct view, as stated in al-Muhit. Al-Karakhi says that the poor person is one who owns two hundred dirhams or less, while the middle group owns more than two hundred and up to ten thousand dirhams, and the wealthy [are those] who own more than ten thousand dirhams...The support for this, according to al-Karakhi is provided by the fatawa of Qadi Khan (d. 592/1196). It is necessary that in the case of the employed person, he must have good health for most of the year, as is stated in al-Hidayah. It is mentioned in al-Idah that if a dhimmi is ill for the entire year such that he cannot work and he is well off, he is not obligated to pay the jizyah, and likewise if he is sick for half of the year or more. If he quits his work while having the capacity [to work] he [is still liable] as one gainfully employed, as is [stated in] al-Nihayah. The jizyah accrues, in our opinion, at the beginning of the year, and it is imposed on the People of the Book (whether they are Arab, non-Arab, or Majians) and idol worshippers (‘abdat al-awthan) from among the non-Arabs, as in al-Kafi...The [jizyah] is not imposed on the idol worshippers from among the Arabs or from among the apostates, where they exist. Their women and children [are considered] as part of a single liability group (fi’). [In other words], whoever from among their men do not submit to Islam shall be killed, and no jizyah is imposed upon their women, children, ill persons or the blind, or likewise on the paraplegic, the very old, or on the unemployed poor, as is stated in al-Hidayah.
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