Who writes history, for whom, and why? Arguably, these are the questions – or the one, intertwined question – at the heart of Munis D Faruqui’s new interpretation of the life and times of Aurangzeb.In some ways, the question has straightforward answers. Who wrote this history? Faruqui the professional historian who has, by his own account, long wrestled with Aurangzeb as a subject and took the plunge eight years ago, scouring never-before-used primary sources to re-examine the life and legacy of the sixth Mughal. Who will read it? Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire is a scholarly work – both in what it does (bringing fresh evidence and interpretation to the table), and in what it avoids doing. Written in three parts – one on Aurangzeb’s life and rule, one on his harem and eunuchate, and one on his last days and posthumous memorialisation – Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir consciously avoids the lure of storytelling. Each part can be read alone; and Faruqui is clear he doesn’t want his book “mistaken for a conventional biography” nor does he intend to “delve into [Aurangzeb’s] psychology”. At the same time, this scholarly book isn’t meant for scholars only, as evidenced by its publication in the trade press, and as facilitated by Faruqui’s fluid prose.AdvertisementAlso Read | Aurangzeb casts a long shadow over us. But what about the British?And why did he write it? Because, as Faruqui notes, though Aurangzeb has long been a polarising figure in the history of the Subcontinent, he has inspired more wariness than curiosity among historians of the region. Ever since Jadunath Sarkar’s multi-volume history of Aurangzeb, published in the 1920s, scholars have “tended to tiptoe gingerly around this last Mughal king”. A century has passed since Sarkar wrote his account; a fresh perspective was long overdue.These are the simple answers but, as Faruqui’s book demonstrates, simple answers often disguise a world of contradiction and nuance. In another light then, who wrote this history? A scholar in the quiet of his study, yes, but also a man acutely aware that in writing about Aurangzeb, he will be forced out of the cloisters of academia into the Twitter trenches. “Some colleagues warned me it could damage my academic career,” he writes in his preface. In an interview, he says, “Many feared that I was opening myself to personal disparagement at best, physical violence at worst.” Warnings that would sound overwrought in other circumstances are perfectly understandable in the New India that has developed over the last decade. Faruqui doesn’t need to speculate on the kind of attack he might face: Audrey Truschke, his fellow historian, has faced constant and visible assault online, including threats of death and rape, since her own book on Aurangzeb was published in 2017.It is unlikely that Faruqui aims to convince these charming intellects, with their glazed eyes and smudged screens, nor that Truschke’s trolls will read beyond his name before condemning his work. Who then, outside the world of Mughal scholarship, is Faruqui writing for? I know of a young man who was reading Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth on the Delhi Metro when he was accosted by a bunch of goons. They demanded his name. The young man was afraid. He was Muslim; if the mob found out, he might not make it home. He gave them a Hindu name and the goons let him go – but not before delivering an aggressive lecture on his choice of reading material. Indeed, since its publication, Truschke’s book has transcended its subject and become a symbol of anti-Hindutva resistance; and this is almost entirely because Truschke chose to write an accessible, polemical defence of Aurangzeb, and made herself an accessible, polemical voice against anti-Muslim politics, a red flag to Hindutva trolls.AdvertisementDoes Faruqui have similar ambitions? Not that I can see. Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir is a more subtle, painstaking exercise. To the young man collared by a bullying mob, it offers no fitting replies. Take, for example, the question of jizya – a tax that Akbar abolished and Aurangzeb imposed, a 17th-century mandate that makes the right wing as apoplectic as its resentment of dissenting farmers not being taxed on their produce. The jizya was a discriminatory tax meant to humiliate Hindus, so the right rages. Faruqui’s argument is that Aurangzeb, beleaguered by money worries throughout his life as prince and emperor, imposed the jizya on those Hindus who were most enriched by the Mughal empire’s increasingly central role in a global economy flush with New World gold. It may or may not be coincidence that it is precisely this elite (“moneylenders and bankers, urban property holders, rural landholders… and peasants with substantial incomes”) that has long formed the core of the BJP’s support – but telling them that Aurangzeb was after their money not their faith is hardly likely to endear him to them. Nuance cannot soothe a grievance stoked aflame by political rhetoric.‘Predicaments of secular histories’ is a powerful essay by the historian Neeladri Bhattacharya, published 20 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which argues that while “secular” Indian historians had long written “for the public with a desire to shape public imagination”, the public remained largely immune to their good intentions, as “people’s conceptions of the past were very often shaped not by what historians wrote but by the popular tracts that circulated in the bazaar”. The divide has only grown more stark and the ground more slippery. The bazaar is now the internet, and propaganda carries the stamp of reputable publishing houses.Heaving themselves on the bent spines of our cultural institutions, self-styled experts declaim “what historians never told you”. The author of a recent biography of Babur, for example, claims he learned Persian to access the Baburnama in the original, going straight to the primary source to bypass potentially biased interpreters. It says a great deal about our collective indifference to historical method that neither his publisher nor his readers seem to care that the original Baburnama is in Turki. The indifference smells sweeter by other names – let’s call it the “decolonisation” of discourse; names that disguise the systematic destruction of our educational institutions and the devaluation of intellectual rigour into chest thumping.Why bother, then, to spend years in the archives, collecting notes, comparing accounts, to produce a text determined to avoid the emotional triggers on which populist histories thrive, a book that “does not seek to excoriate or to exonerate Aurangzeb” – at a time when excoriating Aurangzeb is shorthand for anti-Muslim terror and exonerating him a way of fighting back? Even if there hasn’t been much academic writing on the sixth Mughal for a century, it wasn’t just its fallowness that kept Faruqui in this field for nearly a decade. If anything, it was the overwhelming amount of public discourse on Aurangzeb (and its usually vile and often violent nature) that made him write: “This book is animated by a growing alarm and despair at such weaponising of a historical figure.”The weaponising has accrued over time, through propaganda of various kinds. Last year, a movie sparked retributive anti-Aurangzeb violence in Maharashtra. At the time, a young man from Nagpur said to me, after his city was engulfed in riots and Delhi’s news featured more Mughal programming than usual, “Everyone is talking about Aurangzeb, no one is talking about Nagpur.” For him, all the talk about the long-gone Mughal, even if well intentioned, was a distraction from anti-Muslim violence, not a solution to it. Given that today’s anti-Aurangzeb, anti-Mughal rhetoric is entirely political – meant to turn every Indian Muslim into a foreign invader, trigger violence, polarise votes – it’s a fair point. A historical figure weaponised for political ends can only, perhaps, be disarmed by political means. How’s a measured argument to do it?One answer may be that Faruqui isn’t writing to rebut contemporary discourse at all, but to explain it. History, after all, is only partly “what happened”; equally, or more, it is how facts were recorded, remembered and interpreted. The last and (to me) most compelling chapter in Faruqui’s book tells of the spate of memorialising literature that followed in the wake of Aurangzeb’s demise, itself the beginning of the end of the Mughal empire. Sensing this, or sensing, at any rate, their own declining fortunes and determined to revive them, a small “cabal” of Aurangzeb’s nobility began to compile or commission histories that “present ‘Alamgir’s reign as the golden age of the Mughal Empire, and something that should be recreated in the future”. Possibly the most successful of these was the Maasir-i ‘Alamgiri, which “underscores ‘Alamgir as a heroic and supreme Muslim ruler” and makes claims for “the subordination of Hindus during ‘Alamgir’s reign”.Later, colonial historians would use texts such as this to demonise Mughal rule and justify their own – a demonisation that seeped into modern India’s understanding of its past. Thus, one of the few things VD Savarkar and Jawaharlal Nehru agreed on was Aurangzeb’s badness. In sum, Faruqui argues, a small group of Aurangzeb’s scrabbling nobility, “in their determination to score political points against their opponents – almost always fellow Muslims – unleashed demons that ended up destroying their hero ‘Alamgir’s modern-day reputation”. (It is worth noting that Pakistan has more complicated takes on Aurangzeb than India: there, he is celebrated by the state but dissenting groups like “secular Pakistanis, Sufis, Shi‘ites, feminists, and Pathan and Sindhi nationalists… lambast ‘Alamgir whenever the opportunity presents itself.”)Every age, every polity, it seems, has built an Aurangzeb to suit its ends. Faruqui, too, presents a version of the beleaguered emperor, but not with rhetoric and emotion; he gives us, instead, a prodigious amount of dispassionate, meticulously collected detail, which transforms caricature into flesh and blood. We know the teetotaller, Faruqui presents the coffee addict (so much so, people sometimes brought him beans as tribute). We know the ambitious, fratricidal man who imprisoned his own father, Faruqui presents the ambitious, intelligent prince constantly harassed and humiliated by a suspicious, micro-managing Shah Jahan. We know the ruthless emperor, Faruqui presents the old man clinging to power, wracked with a sense of failure. We know the villain all too well. Faruqui offers a man who is less than sympathetic, a diminished man ruling a diminishing empire, a life that long outlives its own greatness and careens into something close to tragedy.you may likeAnd what of the religious bigot who oppressed Hindus? Faruqui’s research and analysis reveals a believing and practising Muslim whose reputation as an emperor (among Muslims and non-Muslims) rested not on his Muslim-ness but on his piety. While he lived, Aurangzeb became a “zinda pir”, a living saint. In the century after his demise, this saintliness was reinforced, in part through a tremendous production of portraits, both within and outside the Mughal court, often of “an old ‘Alamgir… bent in prayer or in kingly repose”. It is both counterintuitive and entirely believable – given our admiration of ascetic qualities, real or imagined, in our leaders – that Aurangzeb’s religiosity made him more palatable to his people than his liberal brother. In fact, writes Faruqui, Dara Shukoh was the more “divisive” of the two in his time.Like many of Faruqui’s arguments, this fuels both understanding and questions. It is very possible that Aurangzeb’s piety was one way in which he asserted his authority – claiming, that is, to be doing God’s will. But the question of what God might want from him was something that Akbar, too, wrestled with when he founded the Mughal empire. Akbar, too, cultivated a saintly persona; he, too, was widely admired, even worshipped, by his subjects – yet Akbar did not, eventually, choose any one God to obey; he created his own tenet, sulh-i-kul, “peace for all”. If Akbar built the Mughal empire on such non-religious foundation, why did his great-grandson need God to bolster his claims to it? Why was sulh-i-kul not enough? For that matter, why has unity-in-diversity had such a seemingly short shelf life? Must the most charismatic, controversial, courageous figures in history – like Akbar, like Nehru – inevitably yield to lesser individuals?Our present is not equipped – we lack the curiosity and the grace – to answer questions from our past. But our future might. That, at any rate, appears as another impetus for Faruqui’s writing. He does not claim the final word on his subject; rather he offers a glimpse of all that remains to be discovered and invites other scholars to explore other archives, dig out other histories of the man and his times. For himself, it may be that Faruqui answers the question of who writes history, for whom and why, with a how. By offering arguments that are both rigorous and open-ended, by adopting a tone that is both questioning and calm – by keeping his head, in other words, when all about him are losing theirs and quite likely to blame it on him – Faruqui has produced more than just a book on Aurangzeb, but a plea for critical, complicated thinking. As he writes in the last words of his conclusion: “We deserve nothing less.”Sharma is a Delhi-based author