Author: Sunil Khilnani
Category: Nonfiction
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If that was the plan, it sorely backfired. Dynastic succession in the Mughal Empire was always a messy business; every son of a ruling emperor could stake a claim to the throne, but none could assume it was theirs. Dara’s bold intellectual project, coupled with his father’s indulgence, gave him an arrogant air and alienated the very courtiers whose support he would need when his father eventually ceded the throne. Some today might see Dara’s openness to different religions as a sign of a man ahead of his time. His contemporaries saw him as a man enamored of himself, and out of his depth.
François Bernier, the observant French physician who would later describe Dara’s abjection in the Delhi streets, noted how the prince’s self-regard left him politically isolated:
Over-confident in his opinion of himself, considering himself competent in all things and having no need of advisers. He despised those who gave him counsel. Thus it was that his dearest friends never ventured to inform him of the most essential things … He assumed that fortune would invariably favour him, and imagined that everybody loved him …
“Maybe he was a dreamer,” Ganeri says, laughing. “As all philosophers, he spent time thinking about ideas and not thinking about governance. He might have been better off thinking more about government and less about religious unity.”
* * *
The fear of seeing the Muhammadan religion oppressed in Hindustan if my brother Dara Shikoh ascended the throne, that of beholding the ruin of the kingdom, which I looked on as inevitable if my father’s reign had continued, by reason of his bad government: these are the only causes why I have always opposed myself strongly and without self-seeking to the attempts of everyone to supplant me.
Here was Aurangzeb, having taken over the empire, setting down his justification for posterity. The specter of cultural and religious dissolution combined with the threat of poor governance: its argumentation is not unlike the election manifestos (or dog-whistle politics) of many right-wing parties today. Then, as now, it was an appeal that worked—and one that Aurangzeb seemed entirely qualified to make. While Dara had spent his years of princely privilege seeking elective affinities between religions, his brother focused on building his military strength, expanding his political influence, and making ready to seize the throne. Faruqui describes Aurangzeb’s princely preparations:
He’s serving all around the empire. He’s in central India, he has two long stints in the Deccan, he’s in Gujarat, he’s in Multan, he’s part of the invasion of northern Afghanistan, he has two Kandahar campaigns—he’s all over the place. Inasmuch as our memory of Aurangzeb is of a zealot, it is largely derived from his years as an emperor as opposed to his years as a prince. But his [princely career] is when he really forges a personality as a general, administrator, and leader of men. He’s seen as one who cares deeply for the men who work under him.
Aurangzeb thought Dara was unsuited to rule because of his slight record in military campaigns, and because his dabbling in other religions veered dangerously toward apostasy. Aurangzeb’s latter concern was shared by other nobles, who wanted the Mughal state to move to a stricter interpretation of the Muslim law of sharia. Faruqui says, “If you look at Aurangzeb’s interactions with the Mughal nobles or people working at the Mughal court, you see him working extremely hard to build friendships, to cultivate loyalties among these groups. It’s not surprising that when the war of succession happens, many of these individuals throw their weight behind him.”
In the autumn of 1657, Shah Jahan fell seriously ill. Though he would eventually recover, his incapacity precipitated the military struggle for the throne. Its climax took place on the Plain of Samugarh near the banks of the River Yamuna, roughly sixteen kilometers east of Agra, in May 1658.
Dara had come from Agra to Samugarh by elephant, with a large army marching behind him. Yet some of the most influential nobles, whose religion he had arguably transgressed and who were skeptical of his leadership abilities, refused to send their troops to his aid. Many of his soldiers were conscripted butchers, barbers, and blacksmiths, a ragtag bunch largely unseasoned in battle. Dara’s anemic showings in previous campaigns could not have helped the poor men’s morale. Though fewer in number, Aurangzeb’s troops were hardened veterans; many of them had fought with him on his successful campaigns in the Deccan. When the two armies met, the battle was predictably brief.
By some accounts, Aurangzeb came close to being killed by one of his brother’s Rajput soldiers, but quickly recovered as Dara hesitated over strategy. When a rocket struck Dara’s howdah, an easy target, the prince dismounted his elephant so quickly that his troops read his haste as fear, and panicked. In three hours, Dara lost ten thousand men. His surviving conscripts deserted him, returning to Agra to plunder his palace. The prince became a fugitive, fleeing west toward Sindh, his fine silks replaced by a thin tunic and cheap shoes. The endgame was his betrayal by a Baluch chieftain called Malik Jiwan, who promised him protection but then delivered him to his brother.
And that’s how Dara Shikoh found himself moving through Delhi in tatters on a wretched, undersize elephant. At a show trial in Aurangzeb’s court, the gathered clerics and noblemen called nearly unanimously for his execution. On September 9, 1659, he was stabbed to death by a posse of slaves. His head was hacked off, according to some accounts, and presented to Aurangzeb; his body, unwashed and in the rags he’d been paraded in, was buried without ceremony somewhere in the grounds of his great-great-grandfather Humayun’s tomb compound, eight kilometers south of the Red Fort.
* * *
In old Delhi, away from the picnickers and tourists who nowadays visit Humayun’s Tomb, are the ruins of a seventeenth-century building. Over the years, this plot has been the residence of a Punjabi noble, a British knight, and several municipal schools. Today, the ruins are encircled by the campus of a government-run university. Yet behind a British classical façade with Roman pillars you can still find the outlines of a row of Mughal cusped arches. Fashioned from red sandstone, they’ve since been bricked in and whitewashed. This is what remains of the library built by Dara’s father for his adored, book-loving son. The marooned library is a fitting place in which to reconsider the great “what if?”—the alternative history that might have been had Dara ascended his father’s throne.
The idea that Dara Shikoh would have been an enlightened philosopher-king is tantalizing, but based on a misreading of his project. A man who believes he has grasped the deepest religious truths may prove to be a saint, a fool, or—if his belief coincides with absolute power—a tyrant. Had Dara become emperor, his evident arrogance and his absent political skills suggest that his reign may have led the Mughal Empire to an early, chaotic collapse. Yet his intellectual legacy stands out even without overblown counterfactuals.
By Mughal standards, Dara, who became known as the “ill-fated one,” was a failure, one of many princes who fell by the wayside in endless battles for dynastic succession. Yet after his death, his translations of the Upanishads and other Sanskrit works became a vital link not just between Islam and Hinduism, but between India and the West—introducing, for instance, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer to Sanskrit philosophy (in which he found, he would say, the greatest consolation of his life) and helping to spread its influence into Western thought.
So here’s another “what if?” What if Dara had never done that work? He might have been a more successful prince, even become emperor. But our minds would be narrower places today.
19
SHIVAJI
Dreaming Big
1627–1680
The warrior king Shivaji may have died more than three hundred years ago, but he’s still here to greet every arrival to India’s financial center, Mumbai. Fly into the city, and you land at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. Come by train, and you alight at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, the Victoria Terminus of old. Come by boat, and soon the major landmark may no longer be the triumphal Gateway of India, built to commemorate
George V’s 1911 visit. In the next few years, a statue of Shivaji, twice as big as the Statue of Liberty, is scheduled to be built on a rock four kilometers offshore.
Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra, is a city of migrants and mixing. It also has a fierce brand of native patriotism, which has often, in recent decades, turned violent. Competition for jobs is the great struggle in this and every other megacity of the twenty-first century. Among the most popular political parties here is the Shiv Sena, which claims to stand for the interests of the local Hindu Marathas. Its name means “Shivaji’s Army.” The party’s cadres, often lower- and middle-class “sons of the soil,” believe that too much of Mumbai’s wealth, and too many of its jobs, have been claimed by outsiders: North and South Indian migrants, the city’s cosmopolitan elites, and Muslims. The cadres see themselves as the true successors of Shivaji, the presiding hero of Mumbai and its state.
At a gym just opposite the local Shiv Sena office in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri East, young men spend much of the day bench-pressing and squatting and curling. It’s a low-tech place, with rudimentary equipment—no fancy digital trackers here. “This gym is basically for helping the poor and middle class, because it’s quite cheap,” says a young Maharashtrian named Alok. “It also helps you reduce weight quite a lot.”
The young men are Shivaji enthusiasts, and as they exercise you can almost imagine them as soldiers limbering up for battle. Yet their main concern, when we get talking, is work, not war. They want to move up from their jobs as security guards or gardeners—no easy task in this job-starved town. Some dream even bigger. “I want to give work to Indians,” says Alok. “I’ll create my own business, better infrastructure, schools. So for that I need, basically, cash—money to create…”
With nerve, skill, and wit, Shivaji defended his homeland and defied the Mughal Empire, becoming a potent symbol of Hindu resistance. When Alok and his friends think of him, it’s mainly as a defender of Hindu pride: the figure portrayed in statues, sword in hand, astride a springing horse. But there’s another aspect of his life, less known, that might speak to Mumbai’s youth: Shivaji was self-made. From relatively provincial, if not entirely humble, beginnings, he plotted, sweated, and traded up to glory. It’s a story the gardeners and security guards would like to make their own.
* * *
Much of Maharashtra sits atop the western Deccan Plateau, in sometimes rugged, unforgiving terrain. Earlier generations of inhabitants had to be ingenious to survive. Yet standing amid the ruins of one of its many hilltop forts, looking out across a spectacular landscape, you understand better their deep attachment to this land.
Xuanzang, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who traveled across India a thousand years before Shivaji lived, described the Maratha people as “proud-spirited and warlike, grateful for favors and revengeful for wrongs, self-sacrificing toward suppliants in distress and sanguinary to death with any who treated them insultingly.” Other early accounts portray Maratha societies as self-reliant and relatively egalitarian. Given the terrain, the rich were not very rich, and the poor, unable to till much from the soil, often joined militias. That gave them a living and a step up the social ladder.
These were Shivaji’s people. He was born in 1627 to Shahaji Bhonsle, a lower-caste Maratha fighter in the service of the Adil Shah, who ruled one of the major Muslim sultanates of the Deccan. Shahaji soon became an absentee father, moving south and starting a second family there. Shivaji was raised by his mother, Jijabai, whose devotion to him would become part of his myth.
Shivaji’s only brother died young, and Shivaji was still an adolescent when his distant father assigned him the administrative charge of a small domain around Pune, which was under the nominal control of the Adil Shah. But the teenager was too ambitious to be satisfied by administration: he began to build his own forces instead, leading them out to capture nearby forts and lay claim to the surrounding districts. It was a bold gambit. As James Laine, a professor of religious studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, puts it, “This teenage boy’s first political military gesture is mounting a campaign against forts that are the property of the Adil Shah, so he’s resisting his father’s employer.”
Laine wonders if Shivaji’s mother encouraged his rebelliousness. By the sixteenth century, bhakti devotional practices in the Deccan had softened some of the rigidities of caste, and some people even married across caste boundaries. Jijabai was a Yadava, a relatively higher caste than that of her Maratha Kunbi husband, and one that claimed descent from the god Krishna. Shivaji grew up absorbing her tales of ancestral glory, and perhaps her desire that her son recover the social position she had forsaken by marrying down. It’s said that the devout Jijabai foretold that her son would one day be crowned Chhatrapati, or “Lord of the Umbrellas” (a title with imperial resonances)—a prophecy she would just barely live to see come true.
It was an ascent like a lot of ascents in the mountainous western Deccan: possible only with planning, care, and effort. In a region full of enmities, Shivaji worked with anyone who could be useful to him, capturing territory along the way. One of his early annexations was a domain under the control of another Maratha Hindu chieftain—a detail worth noting, since today parties such as the Shiv Sena idealize Shivaji for antagonizing Muslims, not fellow Marathas. Yet Shivaji cultivated allies as needed and cut deals when expedient, in a world where friends and enemies were not defined by religion alone. “The political and military situation was complicated, and it’s very important to realize that this would not have been a battle between a Muslim force and an indigenous Hindu force,” Laine says. “The Hindu kings would have had Muslim soldiers; the Muslim kings would have had Hindu soldiers; they would have had allies across those boundaries.”
Seeing Shivaji in these terms—as a real historical person, with less-than-superhuman motivations, and fighting for something other than a pure religious ideology—can be a risky business. In 2004, after Laine’s book about Shivaji was published in India, about a hundred enraged Marathas ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, whose archivists had helped Laine conduct research among its invaluable collection of rare books and manuscripts. But it wasn’t only Maratha hard-liners who attacked the book. The state government had it banned. (The ban was later overturned by the Indian Supreme Court.)
The chauvinist ideal of Shivaji does not come from his own writings. He left no personal letters or diaries; like many warriors of his era and region, he was probably illiterate. Yet the glorification of his efforts began to take shape in his own lifetime, not least when he commissioned an epic Sanskrit poem about his feats for his coronation as Chhatrapati in 1674. A rich seam of Maratha literary sources, beginning with late-seventeenth-century ballads and later comprising chronicles known as bakhars, reinforced the image of Shivaji as a heroic figure. Many of those accounts feature a story that is regularly enacted by schoolchildren across Maharashtra today. In 1659, Afzal Khan, a particularly vicious anti-Hindu warlord, was dispatched from the court of the Adil Shah to subdue the restless young Maratha. Shivaji was summoned to a meeting at which he was expected to declare his fealty to the sultan, as his father had done. Antennae ever alert, he arrived secretly armed, with steel “tiger claws” hidden in his hands. As Khan, who had his own dagger at the ready, moved in to feign a greeting, Shivaji pounced, clawing Khan apart. In the mayhem that ensued, Khan’s head was chopped off.
Shivaji’s rise—or, as others prefer to see it, his defense of his Hindu homeland against Muslim invasion—now accelerated. Before long, he was in open revolt against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and had humiliated one of Aurangzeb’s most senior commanders. Then, in 1664, he captured and sacked the wealthy Gujarati city of Surat, the Mughal Empire’s most vital commercial port and its departure point for the hajj. (He returned in 1670 to plunder it, his treasury in need of replenishment.) In the earliest of the narratives praising Shivaji, a bakhar in the Marathi language dating from 1694, Aurangzeb is driven mad by Shivaji’s consta
nt nose-thumbing. “What is the solution?… What will I do to crush this pest?” Aurangzeb is made to groan as he stomps his feet.
The big showdown between the Mughal emperor and the Maratha upstart occurred not on the battlefield, but at Aurangzeb’s Agra court, in 1666. The previous year, one of Aurangzeb’s generals had dealt a partial defeat to Shivaji’s forces, and the Mughals now hoped to incorporate him into their empire. They thought they could buy him off in the way the emperor Akbar (16) had done two generations before with the troublesome Rajputs.
Shivaji saw advantages to the idea, so he journeyed to Agra in hopes of striking a deal. Once there, however, he was slighted and mistreated by Aurangzeb, who placed him under house arrest. Shivaji outwitted his captor, slipping away, the stories say, in a basket of sweets. (More likely, he slipped his guards some silver coin.) He then headed back to his hill forts—not to hide, but to announce himself as a new power.
Aurangzeb never forgot this humiliation. In his will, he recorded, “Negligence for a single moment becomes the cause of disgrace for long years. The escape of the wretch Shiva took place through carelessness, and I have to labour hard [against the Marathas] to the end of my life [as a result of it].” François Bernier, Aurangzeb’s French physician, observed on his departure from India in 1667 that Shivaji was mocking the Mughal Empire, “exercising all the powers of an independent sovereign.”
* * *
At the beginning of June 1674, roughly eleven thousand people climbed, or were borne, up a steep hill to Raigad Fort, Shivaji’s home base. They had come to witness his grand coronation. The event was four months in the planning, and reports from Dutch and British East India Company officers described the intense preparations. Sacred water and earth had been hauled up to the fort from as far away as the river Ganga; large halls were built; and Shivaji sourced diamonds, pearls, and jewelry from around the world. One Maharashtrian translator reported to a British official, “Sevagee is making a throne very magnificent on which he spends much gold and jewels.” An English trading officer described the throne’s design: “On each side of the throne there hung (according to the Moores manner) on heads of guilded lances many emblems of Government and dominion, as on the right hand were two great fishes heads of gould with very large teeth; on the left hand severall horses tailes, a paire of gould scales on a very rich lance head poized equally, an emblem of justice.”