The Idea of India - 4

The wedding procession of Prince Dara Shukoh

Read also : The Idea of India ; The Idea of India-2 ; The Idea of India-3

 

Prince Dara

When in 1657, Emperor Shah Jehan fell critically ill, three of his sons declared themselves Emperor – Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad. Only one son – the eldest – remained true to him, nursing him by the bedside – Dara Shukoh.

Forgotten today by history, Dara was a great scholar and a secular prince with a modern outlook.  Along with the sciences and administration, Crown prince Dara Shukoh had studied the Vedas, the Talmud, the New Testament and the works of Sufi mystics, much to the consternation of orthodox Islamic clergy who rushed to support his younger and sterner brother Aurangzeb.

The battle for succession saw the Imperialists led by Dara, defeating Shuja but in turn being defeated by the combined rebel armies of Aurangazeb and Murad, partly by treachery. Soon after, Aurangzeb, whose name strangely meant `throne’s decoration’ turned to crush his youngest brother and former ally Murad and to imprison his father at Agra fort, before usurping the throne of India.

Dara himself was eventually brought to Delhi, a captive, much to the lament of the common people with whom he was popular. In the words of Francois Bernier, the French traveller, physician and writer, who was witness to the scene “everywhere I observed people weeping and lamenting the fate of Dara in the most touching language…” Rioting broke out soon after in the city and Aurangzeb put an end to the rightful claimant to the throne of Akbar and Shah Jehan.

Thus began the unravelling of the Empire.

The Moghul Empire had been formed as a confederacy – a secular compact between Muslim rulers with Hindu princes, with whose support the Mughals who traced their roots to Central Asia, ruled a land that had once again started believing it was one after being wrecked asunder by medieval wars.

Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur before his martyrdom

It was to be wrecked apart again, this time by bigotry. Aurangzeb, in the words of historian R.C.Majumdar, “tried to enforce strictly the Quaranic law, according to which it behoves every pious Muslim to ‘exert himself in the path of God’ or in other words to carry on holy wars (jihad) against non-Muslim lands till they are converted into the realms of Islam”. As Emperor, in the very first year of his reign, Aurangzeb banned music and dancing from his court, to be practised only in secret, in the homes of a few fun loving nobles! Wine and opium too were banished. Soon after, he imposed a hated tax, Jizia, on all non-Muslims, who accounted for most of his subjects. The state was from then on to be run according to the King’s views of what constituted religion and not on what was politic.

Revolts sprung up in many corners of the empire. The Sikhs in Punjab, whose holiest site – the Golden Temple - had been built on land gifted by Emperor Akbar, rose up in arms after their sixth guru Teg Bahadur was executed for his faith by Aurangzeb. The Rajputs, bound to the Mughal throne through matrimonial alliances, rose up in ferment. The ruler of Marwar, Jaswant Singh had died in battle fighting for Mughal India in a campaign in Afghanistan. Aurangzeb, who seemed to have coveted this strategic little principality, which sits astride the route to Gujarat, made Jaswant's grandnephew nominal ruler and took over the actual running of this desert state. Alarmed by this perfidy, the Sisodia Rajputs of Mewar joined the ever rebellious Rathore Rajputs of Marwar in turning the  land of Rajputana into a bloody battlefield against the Mughals.

But it was in the Deccan that Aurangzeb faced his biggest challenge – Shivaji Bhonsle followed by able sons, led the Marathas, warriors from the crags of the Western Ghats in a series of guerilla battles against the Mughals which drained the empire of men and money. Unpaid armies mutinied, nobles cast off their imperial chains and general lawlessness flourished, ultimately wearing out the man who had killed his own brothers for the Peacock throne.

The Emperor had not only broken his compact with his subjects, in a sense, he had broken with the idea of India as a secular nation. His death was a lonely and unsung one. In a letter to his son Azam, he wrote “I came alone and am gone alone. I have not done well to the country and the people, and of the future there is no hope.”

Aurangzeb’s successors inherited but a hollow shell of an empire, with fires raging on all sides. Their nobles were a divided house -  with Indian Muslim and Hindu nobles ranged on one side and freebooter emigre’ nobles from Central Asia and Persia on the other. Invasions with an eye on loot, by Persian king Nadir Shah and Afghan chief Ahmad Shah Abdali, weakened their rule further, leaving them at the end, rulers of but the city of Delhi and few districts surrounding it.

A far cry from the Empire of India, wrought as much by the march of armies as by the march of ideas and indeed a lesson to future rulers on the need to preserve the secular fabric of the continental nation state.

Continued : The Idea of India-5

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