Somebody threw the cudgel at her. And she picked it up. Audrey Truschke, who teaches South Asian history at Rutgers University in New Jersey, was promoting her first and forthcoming bookCulture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. It was almost two years ago, in the latter half of 2015. It was the same time when former President, APJ Abdul Kalam passed away. His death led to loud demands for renaming New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road in his honour. These demands also reignited the debate on Aurangzeb and other Mughal kings of India. When somebody asked Truschke — an expert on imperial, cultural and intellectual history of early modern and modern India —to write a biography of one of the many Mughal rulers, she chose Aurangzeb — the most controversial one.

Aurangzeb: the Man and the Myth, which was published in February, is a quick and readable take on the life, rule and legacy of the sixth Mughal emperor. Composed in eight chapters and close to 200 pages, this book can be read from lunch till dinner. Moreover, it is written in a very breezy language. However, the treatment of the subject matter is as serious as it can get. For starters, the author states that there is a “need to reclaim a fuller picture of him (Aurangzeb) as a prince and an emperor” (page 15) who “cannot be reduced to his faith” (ibid) as has been done in popular imagination in South Asia.

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In Indian collective memory, Aurangzeb is one of the cruellest kings ever. He is thought to have either converted or killed millions of Hindus while destroying or desecrating thousands of temples. He imposed jizya and tried to curb celebration of Holi and Diwali. He did away with syncretic royal practices like daily display of the king at balcony (jharokha darshan) and yearly weighing of the king in gold and silver to be distributed among the poor. He executed the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur. The list of Aurangzeb’s atrocities, real or perceived, is long.

Truschke, in her account of Aurangzeb, tries to set the record straight and contextualise the emperor’s actions. She writes that the popular belief in mass conversion or killing of Hindus during Aurangzeb’s reign lacks historical evidence. The number of temples razed is in dozens, not in thousands.

Moreover, temples were targeted mainly when they became the hub of anti-state activities. For example, Vishwanath temple at Kashi and Keshavdev temple at Mathura were destroyed in 1669 and 1670 respectively, more for political than religious reasons. Jizya was reinstated only after two decades of Aurangzeb’s rule. Grand celebration of Holi, Diwali, or Eid, Muharram and Nowruz were discouraged for reasons of public safety, order or morality. Religion, again, played little role in such considerations. The end of jharokha darshan had more to do with imperial strategy and less with puritanical obsession. And Guru Tegh Bahadur was decapitated because he was causing political unrest in Punjab.

Aurangzeb was brutal with his brothers too. He drove Shah Shuja out of India into Myanmar. Murad Baksh, Aurangzeb’s ally in the war of succession against Dara Shikoh, was imprisoned and executed on cooked-up charges. Delhi’s citizens were shocked at the public humiliation of Dara Shikoh, the crown prince, and his younger son before their beheading. Truschke counsels us against futile comparisons of contemporary liberal norms on treatment of political enemies and prisoners of war with those in the pre-modern period.

That is because everyone behaved the same way, either in India or France. Louis XIV — almost an exact contemporary of Aurangzeb — excelled his Indian counterpart manifold in his persecution of Huguenots. Back in India, Shah Jahan got one of his brothers and many cousins and nephews killed and imprisoned to stave off any challenge to his rule. Dara Shikoh is reported to have said that, had he won the battle at Samugarh (1658), he would have quartered Aurangzeb and have the four pieces hung on the four main gates of Delhi. The same Aurangzeb who put his father under house arrest chased one of his sons into Iran. The Thackerays and Yadavs of now are lucky to have been born in democratic India. The Mughals operated in a despotic world.

As despotism has little to do with familial relations and religious faith. The allusion that Marathas and Mughals were in a civilisational clash is pure fiction. Marathas under father and son, Shivaji and Sambhaji, employed many Muslim soldiers, generals and judges. They allied with Muslim dynasties of Bijapur and Golconda against Mughals. Sambhaji even gave refuge to Prince Akbar, the rebellious son of Aurangzeb, when the latter was shunned by Rajputs. Similarly, the number of Hindu courtiers and generals increased in the imperial state as hostility between Marathas and Mughals spiralled. In fact, as Truschke writes, Hindus during the Mughal period “often did not even label themselves as such (Hindus) and rather prioritised a medley of regional, sectarian, and caste identities” (page 17). The term Hindu “is Persian, not Sanskrit, and only became commonly used self-referentially during British colonialism” (ibid).

Aurangzeb was an expansionist. He was stamping imperial control and spreading his empire in all possible nooks and corners of the Indian subcontinent. While he was subduing Rajputs in Rajasthan, he was constantly harassing Ismaili Bohras of Gujarat. Likewise, while he was struggling to overpower the Maratha, Abdulshahi and Qutubshahi rulers in the Deccan, he was trying to quell the revolt by Afridi Pathans near Khyber Pass. Referring to a remark by Bhimsen Saxena, a chronicler of the period, Truschke informs that Aurangzeb was always on the run for “some heaps of stone”, which means one fort or another (page 115). In effect, Aurangzeb indulged in a classic case of imperial overstretch — a harbinger of disintegration of the empire. No wonder, the Mughal territory soon shrunk against Marathas and the British.

After having read the whole book, one is left with the feeling that Aurangzeb was not such a bad king as he has come to be considered. But then, why does he stoke such revulsion? It should be noted that public perception of Aurangzeb is little better in Pakistan. Writer Nadeem Shahid who wrote the popular play, Dara thinks that the seeds of Partition were sown when Aurangzeb won over Dara. Truschke obviously disagrees with such facile conclusions. Misrepresentation of Aurangzeb, she thinks, is due to various reasons. For example, a good number of contemporary historians are not well trained in Persian to read primary sources on Aurangzeb. It has become fashionable to work with British records, which were twisted for political reasons. According to Truschke, even Indian historians like Jadunath Sarkar, who has written multiple tomes on Aurangzeb, lacked historical rigour. Dipesh Chakrabarty, the postcolonial historian, makes similar complaints about Sarkar’s scholarship.

However, how should one judge Aurangzeb? There is little benefit raising the counter-factual question, “What if Dara had won?” Raison d’état can cause changes of 180 degrees. Donald Trump is the latest evolving example of this aphorism. The comparison of Aurangzeb with Akbar is apt, though it should be remembered that while Akbar was consolidating a fragile kingdom, Aurangzeb was expanding a well entrenched empire. The compulsions, which the two longest reigning Mughals faced, were different.

But Truschke’s suggestion that Aurangzeb’s conduct should be not judged on modern values like secularism, human rights and egalitarianism is problematic. Otherwise, slavery in the US or sati in India can equally be condoned. Aurangzeb, like any other king who ruled for as long as 50 years, had many shades to his reign. The problem lies in acts of omission and commission along with the spin and exaggeration imparted to them. Therefore, Aurangzeb, the man, lies buried in the distant past whereas Aurangzeb, the myth, keeps cropping up.

The reviewer is a doctoral student, Department of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi