222. The Downfall of the Mughals (Ep 3)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durumpil. Now, in this relay race through Mughal history, we are now at a point where the baton is passed to Aurangzeb. Can I just say, I mean, William, can we have a chat about how very divisive even that name is? Because first of all, we say Aurangzeb. Everyone knows him as Aurangzeb, which is his princely name. You know, we took great pains to say Khuram, who will soon become Shah Jahan. Well, you know, Aurangzeb doesn't stay Aurangzeb. He becomes Emperor Alamgir. Yeah. But people don't talk about him as Arlem Geo. They still give him almost as if it's a demotion or an insult to say, look, let's just carry on calling him Aurangzeb.

1:08Because there is such strong feeling, such a culture war, if you like, over that person, the name and the history. Absolutely. I mean, he is in many ways the most hated figure and the kind of most demonized figure in all of Indian history. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that. And the road that was named after him by the British in New Delhi, only I think three or four years ago was renamed after Abdul Qalam, a recent president. So there is no Aurangzeb Road in Delhi anymore. And a lot of this comes, I think, because although he has traditionally always been seen as this cruel and bigoted fellow who is held responsible for destroying temples, for killing one of the great gurus of the Sikhs, and we'll go into both those things in more detail in the course of this episode.

2:01In the way these things go, historians always react against the previous generation of historians' interpretation. And there has been an effort by people such as Audrey Trushka lately to, in some ways, re-guild his image, to say he wasn't as bad as people have always thought. And just the reaction to those, I mean, the backlash against that has been enormous, has it not? Exactly. And my own view is that he's certainly, I think, a more complex figure than his popular image as a sort of horned demon would make out. And you can find evidence that at certain times he did protect Brahmins. He did give some gifts to patronize Hindu and Jain institutions, that he did increase the number of Hindu noblemen at court, and that he would regularly, for example, consult with Hindu astrologers and physicians.

2:54I have read this material closely and looked at the revisionist views. But I think at the end of the day, he is a rather cold, ruthless and unpleasant character. He's hard to love or like even. You can't deny, I mean, and even the new histories do not deny the forced conversions, you know, the convert or die, the raising of temples to the ground, the introduction of the attacks for non-Muslims, the jizzy attacks, the heavier penalty on Hindu merchants than on Muslim merchants, all of those things. But what I do see in some of the newer works is, but that was the time. That's what people did. That's what it was like.

3:33Does that excuse it or explain it? Well, as we've seen in the series, it's not how Akbar behaved and it's not how Darshaqqa behaved. and my understanding I mean this is obviously a vast the Mughal Empire was in power from the time of Babur to B 'harashar Zafar which is the same time as sort of Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria it's an enormous sway the 300 years of history and many different things happened during that time but yeah he's a difficult character to like he's a curmudgeonly figure and there is a sense in which he closed a lot of the doors. My understanding of the Mughal Empire is that Akbar in particular found a way of bringing the Rajputs into the fold, and that it was, in many ways, a Rajput-Mughal joint endeavor.

4:24The Rajputs did very well out of it. When you go to Rajasthan, the great forts of Jaipur and Jodhpur are built at this time, and Bikhaner and many of the other Rajput centers, from the loot of other parts of India under the Mughals. So when you go to Bikonair, you see all the manuscripts taken from Ahmednagar in the Deccan. And by making the empire something which enriched the Rajputs and had the Rajputs in charge of the army, Akbar very cleverly created a joint venture, is how you describe it in modern language. And I think Aurangzeb did a lot to undo that. Also, I mean, on the spectrum of one to bastard, when you're horrible to your family, we've talked about this, there's a lot of slaughter of a family that goes on in the succession.

5:10But to me, and again, you know this history better than I do, but there's a level of cruelty and a reveling in cruelty with Aurangzeb and how he dispatches, first of all, Dara Shukka, who we talked about in the last episode, a spectacular humiliation and cruelty that goes on where he sits him, just for those of you who may not have heard the last episode, sits him and parades his son, his brother, his brother, who is the man who should be king and sort of puts him sitting the wrong way around on a dirty elephant in rags to be humiliated and then ultimately to be executed. It's a way in which he promises, I mean, this may not be exceptional, but promises to do a deal with his brother Murad and then has him either drugged and incapacitated, put in prison, and then also bumped off at a later date with his encouragement, if not by his hand directly wielding a sword.

6:02And there are also, I mean, And you mentioned Deigbado, and we'll come to that in a bit. But stories of the cruelty and torture that he employs, to me, are breathtaking. But I mean, are they exceptional? I mean, that's what I'm asking. No, and I would disagree with you on that. I think they're there and they're true. But I think that, you know, for example, Shah Jahan is every bit as bloody in his war of succession. One brother, two nephews, three cousins. I mean, it was a shopping list of murder with him. Exactly. What to me distinguishes Aurangzeb is that he manages to alienate the Hindu subjects and the Hindu allies.

6:36And for the first time, you get a major rebellion in Rajasthan, in Mawar and in Jaipur. And that is undoing, it seems to me very clearly, the cement which Akbar used to create the joint venture that was the Rajput Mughal project. And when you look at the big Mughal campaigns, often they're not Mughal troops that are conquering Bengal. They're under Man Singh or they're under Jay Singh or one of the leaders of Jaypur or Jobpur. And that comes to an end in Aurangzeb and the result is a disintegration. And the ultimate end for this is twofold, the rise of the Marathas, who we're going to talk about a lot in this episode.

7:19And then after that, the door is open to the East India Company. and a British for-profit corporation, the richest corporation in the world at the time, manages to exploit the disunity which exists in India at that time. And by borrowing money from Jain and Hindu moneylenders, it raises a largely mercenary army of 90 % Indian troops and uses that to conquer for the profit of the corporation. It's an extraordinary difficulty. So a thought experiment, and we should stop casting ahead, and I'm going to stop it in a second. But the thought experiment here is that if there had been no Aurangzeb, there may not have been a British conquering of India.

8:07I mean, would you go that far? Well, I know that our last guest, Supriya Gandhi, pushed back against this. But the classic thought experiment that has been aired many times is that if Dara Shukha had won the war of succession and had kept Hindus and Muslims together, not only would you not have had the rise of the East India Company and the fracturing which they exploit, but you wouldn't have had partition. And there is a very clear argument that you can make about that. It's unfashionable. Scholars today, such as Supriya, regard this in a sense as the orthodoxy to push back against. But I think there's a lot to be said for it.

8:45Well, let's dive in. Let's dive in. So, look, reminded you of the death of Dara Shukra. We should perhaps take up the reins then from the coronation of Aurangzeb, which takes place on the 31st of July 1658. It's not the only coronation he has, is it? It's one of two coronations that Aurangzeb has when he takes the name Arlemgir. I mean, tell us about this one on the 31st of July 1658 and why there were two. So I actually went out once to what was originally a beautiful mogul garden where he has this ceremony. and oh I've been a couple of times and the first time I came it was very very run down and you had to sort of you know cut your way through creepers of these old pavilions it's very different gardens we're talking about the gardens of paradise that were the once the pride of the Mughal absolutely and and there is still a gorgeous Shalimar gardens intact in Lahore that you and I have been to together spectacular with fountains and pavilions this was once very like that, but is today utterly run down.

9:50The British initially, or rather the East India Company initially used it as a headquarters when they were first in Delhi. And people like William Fraser and Charles Metcalfe, who I've talked about a lot of my books, used to live there with their girlfriends. Then it gets sort of abandoned. And now I went back a couple of years ago, it's now completely surrounded by these new Delhi suburbs of quite big, rich, new India housing, if you like. And the garden has been sort of badly restored and now is much more used than it was. It doesn't have that sort of deserted, overgrown feel, but it does have a sort of municipal feel it didn't used to have with swings and things where you can do press ups and that kind of stuff.

10:34I mean, at the time, Bernier, who we talked about a lot with Minucci, these two doctors at large, if you like, who are documenting the Mughal period, he did describe Chalamar as handsome and noble, although not to be compared with Fontainebleau, Saint -Germain or Versailles. A very Bernier description. But for him, that's high praise. As good as it can get. As good as it can get. It's not as good as we do. But Aurangzeb, I mean, do we know much about the way in which the coronation took place? I mean, was it greeted by cheering crowds who were herded in a bayonet? I mean, how does it work? No, I mean, he was clearly, one of the things that Bernier says is that he was clearly very unpopular.

11:13Darashukh had been in Delhi and was the local candidate, in a sense, to succeed his father. And people had seen his humiliation through Delhi. They're just, you know, reeling from that, which they don't like. And no one likes it. And it is the strong reaction of the Delhi crowd that leads Aurangzeb to dispatch and kill Darashukh. And it's possibly also why he chooses to get crowned at Shalimar, which is outside the town. That's an important point. It's a suburban garden, not within the walls. And he then settles in. And it's very important to recognize that Aurangzeb's reign is not one thing. He changes in the course of his life.

11:53And what is true at the beginning is not true at the end. And for a start, at the beginning of his reign, he's in the north and ruling from Delhi, occupying the peacock throne. His father is still effectively under not house arrest, but palace arrest in Agra. He and Jahanara are locked up on this gorgeous suite of rooms that he himself had built. And Shah Jahan can look out from his tower on the edge of Agra Fort and look at the gorgeous Taj Mahal, the memory of his wife. Well, can I share a story with you? I mean, this is one that guides tell. We don't often have guides. I think it was years and years ago.

12:32So I was fairly young. I don't think I was working at this point, but we did a tour of the fort and we were told sort of rather loftily, oh, these are the rooms in which the emperor was held by the awful Aurangzeb, who to torture him, the view is not exactly on the Taj Mahal, but what he did was he embedded the Koh-i-Noor. This is before I was even thinking about writing a book or even thinking about the Koh-i-Noor at all. He embedded the Koh-i-Noor into the window frame so he could only see the Taj Mahal reflected in the diamond that he could never touch, you know, just to make the cruelty even worse.

13:07But what it does go to show is just how detested, I mean, a cruel man is made sort of comedically cruel by that story. We know for a fact that the Koh-i-Noor was still attached to the peacock throne when Nader Shah took it in 1739. So it wasn't removed during Shah Jahan's life. And it would have been in the throne when Aurangzeb sat in it. And I think there's a very interesting sort of psychological view that you can take of Aurangzeb is that he was an unloved son. Yes. In the letters that Shah Jahan… Oh God, you sound like me. You sound like me doing a psychoanalysis. I'm going to sit back and enjoy you doing this because I agree 100%.

13:43Go on. Shah Jahan is writing to Aurangzeb in the Deccan. And Aurangzeb, as a young man, is fighting hard, trying to impress his father, trying to take on the enemies of the state. And he does very well. He takes over the states of Bijapur and Golconda, which the Mughals have been trying to get their hands on for 50, 60 years. Shah Jahan had failed and Aurangzeb succeeds. and you see the letters which survive from Shah Jahan to Aurangzeb, who far from congratulating him as a young man, he tells him that he hasn't done enough or he's failed. Yes, he's a bit rubbish. You know, you've let me down.

14:17And he particularly complains that he hasn't sent enough mangoes or enough grapes or enough pomegranates. Or that he's eaten some of the mangoes that should have been sent to him. And the bananas. It's just, you know, he attributes, even at his greatest moment, what should be Aurangzeb's greatest moment, he just undermines him. He makes him feel small. It is actually. It's abusive. It's a really horrible, toxic relationship. And he grows up the young man showing remarkable courage on the battlefield with this deely sense of duty and self-discipline, turns in the course of his adulthood into this rather sort of miserable man who ends his patronage of painting and music, although it goes on in the court around him, contrary to some accounts, and who ends ceremonies like Naaroz, which everybody enjoys, the New Year celebrations.

15:10He sits there copying out Qurans, stitching skull caps. Stitching prayer caps, yeah, with his own hand, and also praying sort of very visibly five times a day. And as you say, visibly being the word. These are public displays of piety. And also, what I found really very interesting is that he seeks to have the rubber stamp of Mecca. And he writes to the Sharif of Mecca a few times saying, you know what, I am now the legitimate emperor. And what he is told in return is, you know what, to turn against your father is not Islamic. And therefore, the Sharif doesn't give him what he wants. and he will refuse to give him what he wants until Shah Jahan dies and he tries again to try and woo the Sharif with gifts.

15:56It matters to him. Somebody in a parental figure has to tell the boy he done good and he's not getting it from the Sharif. He's praying as hard as he can. He's sending gifts to Mecca. It matters to him what they think of it. Or somebody, somebody tell him that he's done all right, but he's not getting it. He's not getting it. And the nettle we need to grasp, because this is, in a sense, one of the main accusations against him is this business of temple destruction. In popular discourse, Aurangzeb is believed to have destroyed hundreds of temples, including some very important ones in Matra and in Varanasi.

16:32And the answer is probably, and I've gone into this in some depth, that he destroyed far fewer than he is popularly reputed to. But he did destroy a lot. There's no question. And it's also true that he did support some temples and cash grants. But there's no equivalent, absolutely not, of the sort of mass. The patronage of his forebears. Yeah, the patronage that took place under Akbar. There's no question that you get, not only does Akbar himself give grants, but all his Hindu noblemen go on a massive temple building spree, the biggest since the 12th century. But that's not the case here. There is a mosque building that takes place.

17:12There's moss building, and also there's some retrenchment whereby a lot of the most holy idols, which are in, for example, Braj, the area associated with Krishna, are moved to Rajasthan. So the idol that's now in the city palace in Jaipur is said to be moved at roughly this period. The image of Krishna at Nadwara, which is one of the most holy pilgrimage shrines in India, is said to be moved at this time to protect it. So there is a basis for this reputation that he has. It's not a historical myth and no amount of revisionism can really change the contrast with the period of Akbar and the massive Hindu-Muslim project and the sense of these two peoples working together to attack common enemies in the decade.

18:00But also this desire to define yourself as something very different from the father who never loved you and never gave you any credit and didn't want you to take over. So, you know, whereas his forebears, they drank, they enjoyed music and opium. He bans all of this, wine's banned, hashish's banned. You know, he has this very austere reign, which does not look like anything else that came before. He does things like the public celebration of Naroz, which, again, we talked about his forebears having their weight in gold given them at the Persian New Year. And he just replaces it with Eid al-Fitr and says, no, we're not doing Naroz anymore.

18:41That's not the thing. There is a change in tone. There's no way you can get around that. Completely. But there's also discrimination. a nation. Because this thing about custom duties, you can trace it through that, that there is a two-tier apartheid economy. You know, that if you are a Muslim merchant, you don't pay custom duties anymore. But if you are a Hindu trader, you'll pay them and you'll pay them more than you ever did before. And what's interesting is that we know from foreign sources who haven't got a dog in the race, so to speak, that the laws which Akbar passed to protect Hindu holy things were rigorously enforced.

19:19So for example, there's a story in one of the Portuguese Jesuit travel writings of a party of Portuguese who go shooting peacocks, which is a Hindu holy bird. And they're arrested during the reign of Akbar because they've killed a peacock. They claim ignorance and eventually they get out of prison, but they are arrested because this law is enforced. If you kill a holy Hindu bird, you are put in jail. And so there's no sense anymore that the emperor is on your side if you're a Hindu. And there's a question of, I think, chicken and egg at this point, because some historians of Akbazrain, such as Odutrushka, make the point that a lot of this legislation, this Puritan legislation, ending Hashish, ending Nahoraz, imposing the Jizya tax on Hindus, happen after Aurangzeb has already faced massive defeats in the Deccan.

20:15And we need to talk about his Deccan campaign, because that's where a lot of his life is spent. Quite early on, he leaves Delhi and he goes down to the Deccan. And it is what he awakens there, the spirit of resistance that he provokes, that not only causes the first military defeats that the Mughals face internally, but also, in a sense, cause him to double down and begin to enact more and more anti-Hindu legislation. I was going to say, you know, if we're doing thought experiments, I mean, the Deccan campaigns, what are the years of the Deccan campaigns? Just to remind us. The Mughals have been campaigning in the Deccan since the period of Akbar.

20:52Jahangir and Shah Jahan both cut their teeth attacking these, what are called the Deccan sultanates. By that, we mean a set of different cities, Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda, which are independent states, rivals to the Mughals, many of them Shia, and many of them in touch with Shia Persia. We talked about the Safavids in an earlier episode. Often these guys are on the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend. They're enemies of the Mughals, who are Sunni, make an alliance, the two Shia forces, both in the Deccan area of India and in Persia. Aurangzeb leaves Delhi for the last time in 1679, and he never returns.

21:37He spends the whole of the rest of his life in the city called Arangabad after him. So, I mean, before we get to his departure, I mean, there's a date before that, which is of huge significance to Sikhs in particular, but Punjabis in general. And I would suggest, again, if we're doing thought experiments, this one might be a doozy. If you look at some of the history books, it will say the execution of Daegh Bahadur becomes one of the Sikh gurus. Now, the story behind it. So Daegh Bahadur was a very respected Sikh who has a deal of power, doesn't like what the Jizya tax is doing to his people. He talks about it and against it.

22:14He talks about religious freedom being very important. And then this pivotal moment happens when the Brahmins of Kashmir come to him and they say, look, we have been told that we have to convert. Aurangzeb has told us we have to convert to Islam or we will die. That's what's going to happen. Those are the choices that he's given us. And so what he does is he says, you know what, and this is the Sikh story that all Sikhs will be told, He says, no, over my dead body will that happen. And even though Sikhs are also critical of Hindus, they don't like their idolatrous worship. But he says, actually, because everyone should be free to worship in their own way, if he can convert me, then I will say, then he can convert you.

22:55But if he can't convert me, I'm going to make a deal with him that he's not going to be able to convert you. And he goes to Aurangzeb's court and presents himself and says, right, I believe in the right of others to practice their faith peacefully. if you can't do this to me and you shouldn't do this to me, then you can't do this to them. And in response, I mean, the stories vary in the barbarity of the treatment, but he's sort of kept prisoner. People he loves are tortured in front of him. He himself is tortured. And then he is finally executed for the temerity to stand up to Aurangzeb. And it is said to be in a place in Delhi where there is now a Gurdwara which has been built to commemorate it.

23:37He is now a guru of the Sikh faith. The date of his execution, 24th of November, is still commemorated as a day of a great hero. Now, again, factually, some of it has been questioned as to how long torture happened, but he was executed. Who was tortured in front of him, but he was executed. Where even he was executed, but he was executed. All of these things that stand, these are the things that are fought over. But as a result of this, Sikhs had an absolute visceral hatred of Aurangzeb. That survives to this day. To this day. I mean, you just mentioned his name and it makes people livid and furious.

24:18And they all will quote to you the martyrdom of Teogbahtra. But my thought experiment is this, that if that hadn't have happened, if he hadn't have turned the Sikhs against him, as violently as they turned against him after this, that when the East India Company or the British came in and sometimes recruited the Maharajas of princely states to be on their side because they claimed to be the people who eventually would put down Aurangzeb and his type, that may not have had as much traction as it goes on to have. I don't know. It's a thought experiment. Dismiss it if you like. But I'm just saying this is a seismic event And he is a huge bogeyman to Sikhs in particular, and, you know, Punjabi Hindus because the Kashmiri pundits were the ones who asked for his help as a whole.

25:04So what we should do perhaps is take a break now. And after the break, we will look at the group of people from the Deccan who are credited with rolling back the Mughal Empire and defeating Aurangzeb. And that is the Marathas led by their leader Shivaji Bonsly.

25:33Welcome back. So just before the break, William was telling us that these Deccan campaigns are absolutely central to what will become the legacy of Aurangzeb's rule. And let's talk, I mean, you mentioned his name a few times, Shivaji. Can you tell us who he was? Because he's otherwise known as the great Maratha in India. He's an enormous, bigger now under Mordi than ever before, I might suggest. Yes. I mean, when you go to Bombay, not only is the airport named after him, but the museum, which was previously the Prince of Wales, is also named after Shivaji now, as is the railway station, which was previously named after Queen Victoria.

26:11So he is the great hero of the Bombay region, and the Marathas, who are the people of that region, remember him as the person that liberated them from slavery. And I had always assumed that this was an entirely modern view, that it was a view of modern nationalism, probably dating from the 20th century, but that is not the case. and when you read 18th century and 19th century Maratha sources, even at that point, they see Shivaji as the liberator from Mughal oppression, and it's there from a very early period. So the Marathas are the peasants, but also the landowners who live on the west coast of India in the Western Ghats, those dramatic mountains that rise up from the Arabian Sea.

27:01Now, in the period before Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns, before he attacks the great Deccan sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, the Marathas are serving as guerrilla raiders under the leadership of the Bijapur and Golconda sultans. And it is ending the independent sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, who lived to a certain extent in harmony with the Marathas, that is the kicking of the hornet's nest, that Aurangzeb unwittingly unleashes these guys against him. and Shivaji Bosli is a charismatic Maratha Hindu warlord the British historians used to call him today he's regarded as the ultimate Hindu king who began launching attacks against the Mughal armies occupying in his view the Deccan and they use these guerrilla tactics they don't go straight up and attack army to army as the as it happened during the wars of succession and so on they attack the communication lines.

28:07We've seen it before, Toussaint-Liverture taking on the great French forces and the great imperial forces by just harrying the middle supply lines and everything else. It's very much that kind of thing. Before you go on about what they did, people were remarkably dismissive of them at the time, which they can look back and repent their words. They underestimated them. You've got a Mughal chronicler saying most of the men in the Maratha army are unendowed with illustrious birth and husbandmen, carpenters and shopkeepers are bound among their soldiery. And you've got a British Elizabethan traveller, Dr.