Gujarat Polls: Why Twisting Aurangzeb’s Tale Is a Foolish Quest

Political sparring over Aurangzeb shows lack of understanding of the complex character of the Mughal ruler.

(Illustration: Lijumol Joseph/ The Quint)

For over three years now, when we expected our political leadership to follow accuracy as a duty if not a virtue, when they took to oratory, the reference to the contested circumstances in which Muhi-ud-din Mohammad Aurangzeb inherited the Mughal throne in Agra after Shah Jahan twisted out of context – and shape – leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It raises serious questions, not about Indian politics being a jungle out there, but about propriety, rules of the game and intellectual honesty.

History is About Facts

While it would be contentious to brand our political leaders as reckless folks who enjoy, by virtue of being politicians, the liberty to mangle facts, they must know that “history consists of a corpus of ascertained facts” but not the “surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation” or sheer falsehood.

Conventional wisdom suggests that politicians with little or no sense of history (leave alone cooked-up marks in university-level examinations) must first get their facts straight before “plunging into the shifting sands of interpretation” regardless of whether a politician’s reference to history is accurate or otherwise. While “facts are sacred, opinion is free.” Free yes, but they cannot – and must not, reflect malignancy of thought.

‘History Has Been Unkind to Aurangzeb’

In ‘What is History?’ celebrated British historian E H Carr said that there ought to be a philosophy of history. But our politicians seem to walk into the “Garden of Eden without a scrap of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history.”

In a recent review of Audrey Truschke’s biography of the sixth Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, my former colleague Akshaya Mukul writes that “It is history that has been unkind to Aurangzeb, painting him all in grey, a terrible ruler who undid the legacy of his great-grandfather Akbar, grandfather Jehangir and father Shah Jahan by razing temples and ordering mass murder of Hindus.”

Fear of Electoral Reverse?

While earlier generations of historians projected Aurangzeb as cruel and vain, more recent chroniclers of the emperor attributed to him a degree of piety, standard of morality, scholarship and austerity that would put to shame many of our politicians, including the recent crop who, when bereft of legitimate facts to counter other legitimate facts, often resort to fiction or the mere retelling of a mutilated sense of history refracted through a certain brand of politics.

When faced with the fear of electoral reverse or a sense that the wind might be blowing in a direction that’s different from a previously confident position, these politicians are quick to abandon certain “models” of socio-economic development for their original model of thought, allied with a base take on history, to achieve electoral targets.

History, in this narrow political scheme of things, is spun out with a specific agenda that, besides seeking to belittle opponents, is designed to divide.

Relying on Fiction

Indian politics, especially the kind that is unleashed during electoral campaigns, is a cesspool of lies and half-truths in which the practitioners dip their hands, expecting gains. Just as the historian and the facts of history are ‘necessary’ to one another, so is the relationship between a politician and the facts that he seeks to make use of.

Carr wrote that the “historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless”. Likewise, a politician who relies too much on fiction or distorted facts could face the danger of being relegated to a kind of history in which he could be described, in Carr’s words, “malign, senseless and hypocritical”.

Aurangzeb – modern history is unanimous in describing – was a complex individual. Passing sweeping judgements on him or using him to sharpen a communal divide or to spite a competing politician would only bring to sharp relief what American novelist Charles Simmons said: “Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.”

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