‘Aurangzeb Alamgir and the Mughal Empire’ rescues the emperor from both praise and condemnation

Few historical figures in South Asia’s long and layered past provoke as much heat as Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth Mughal emperor who ruled for nearly half a century from 1658 until his death in 1707 at the age of 88. In contemporary India, his name has become a flashpoint: roads renamed, cities rechristened, textbook battles, passionate online disputes and most recently, violence broke out in Nagpur in March 2025 with demands to demolish his grave. Into this charged atmosphere, Munis D Faruqui steps in with a deeply researched and intellectual work that rescues Aurangzeb from both praise and condemnation, restoring him to the complexity of his life and times.

Looking in the archives

To some, he was a religious zealot who undid much of what Akbar had achieved. To others, he was a great Islamic ruler who has been unfairly vilified. Both sides often rely on the same evidence to reach very different conclusions, and neither properly analyses the primary or secondary historical sources. Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold takes a different approach, turning to the historical record and asking: what do the archives actually tell us about Aurangzeb? How did he govern, build and maintain power, and how did he understand his own role as emperor?

The answer, as it emerges here, is genuinely complicated. Faruqui draws on extensive archival sources, mostly in Persian, which include “officially sanctioned and privately written histories, administrative records, traveler accounts, hagiographies, biographical dictionaries, local and regional histories, collection of imperial and noble correspondence, and miniatures”. However, the two basic sources which he relies on and which have been, as he terms it, “barely utilised” are the Persian language collections of Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla (News Bulletins of the Exalted Court) and the now defunct Dastawizat (Az Ahd-i Mughliya or Documents from the Mughal Era) to challenge “the overcomplicated and mistaken plotlines that dominate our understanding of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire in the 17th and early 18th centuries.”

Rather than settling the debate over Aurangzeb, this book invites us to rethink it. Its central argument is that Aurangzeb was, in many respects, a typical Mughal prince and emperor of his age. Simple as it sounds, this challenges much of the existing writing on Aurangzeb and offers a fresh way of understanding him.

Since Sir Jadunath Sarkar published his magisterial History of Aurangzib across five volumes in the early 20th century, the dominant framework for understanding Alamgir has been one of religious bigotry, political illegitimacy, and civilisational catastrophe. Faruqui argues that Sarkar’s early assessments were relatively balanced, but by the fifth volume, shaped by the Hindu-Muslim tensions of the 1920s and his distaste for Muslim nationalist politics, he had arrived at a verdict that condemned Aurangzeb for making “a fusion between Hindus and Muslims impossible.”

“Most post-Sarkar scholars,” writes Faruqui “of the Mughal Empire have tended to tiptoe gingerly around this last Mughal king reinforcing Sarkar’s stranglehold over the study of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and his reign and essentially abandoning it to popular historians and untrained laypeople who often simply recirculate Sarkar’s views.” He offers the reader “a fresh interpretation of Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire in the late 17th and early 18th centuries,” challenging a framework that has long shaped both academic opinion and popular understanding. That framework has also been used by Hindu nationalists on one side and Muslim revivalists on the other to support their competing narratives.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, which deals with Aurangzeb Alamgir’s years as a prince and the early decades of his reign, is perhaps the most original and persuasive section of the work. Faruqui sets out to demolish the idea that Aurangzeb seized the Mughal throne through treachery, luck, and fratricidal violence against the “hapless humanist” Dara Shukoh. What he offers instead is a painstaking account of decades of preparation: the building of empire-wide networks of support, the cultivation of a loyal and diverse household, the accumulation of military experience across difficult postings, and the careful management of reputation.

Aurangzeb did not simply seize power; he “attained the throne, showing a meritocratic system of succession that valued stamina and strong leadership in the face of constant challenges.” Faruqui argues that he spent decades preparing for it. His first governorship of the Deccan, often overlooked by historians, was crucial. Faced with an unstable frontier, financial shortages, drought, and poor revenues, Aurangzeb learned the practical realities of governance. He dealt with banditry and local chiefs, supported Sufi shrines, encouraged trade, and repeatedly clashed with Shah Jahan over money. The emperor expected the Deccan to sustain itself financially, but it could not.

This gap between imperial ambition and economic reality would shape much of Aurangzeb’s later career. As a prince, Aurangzeb was almost always sent to govern the hardest, poorest, and most troubled territories, the Deccan twice, Gujarat, and Multan. He received inadequate financial support from his father, Shah Jahan, who kept him on a deliberately tight leash. Yet it was precisely these conditions that forced him to become an exceptional administrator and commander.

The household he built during this period is given real attention, which turns out to matter enormously. By the 1650s, he had assembled an unusually diverse retinue: Afghans, Dakhanis, Iranians, Marathas, Hindus, administrators, soldiers, diplomats, and financial officers. Iranians, Indian Muslims, Afghans, Marathas, Maharashtrian and Konkani Brahmans, Turks, Habshis, Dakhanis, Kayasths, and Gonds, including the English artilleryman John Lewes, who joined his service in 1654. Far from being the Islamic zealot of later reputation, the pre-emperor Aurangzeb employed large numbers of non-Muslims at every level of his household, and there is no evidence that conversion to Islam was ever a precondition for his service.

When the succession crisis came in 1657, that household was cohesive and battle-hardened in a way that Dara Shukoh’s wasn’t. His eldest brother had jagirs scattered everywhere and no equivalent institutional core. Aurangzeb’s men had fought together, been paid from the same campaigns, and built something like mutual loyalty. That, more than piety or theology, is what the book identifies as decisive.

What emerges is a portrait of a prince who, unlike his elder brother Dara Shukoh, largely avoided taking sectarian positions. He worked across ethnic and political factions and won the support of many nobles who were uncomfortable with Dara’s abrasive manner and his controversial engagement with Hindu thought. Aurangzeb was not simply lucky; he was a patient and politically astute strategist who spent decades building support and influence. When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657 and the war of succession began in earnest, Aurangzeb was simply the best-prepared candidate, militarily seasoned, financially flush from the Golkonda and Bijapur campaigns, and backed by a battle-hardened and deeply loyal household.

Faruqui states that, ironically, it was Dara Shukoh, the syncretic pluralist celebrated by later liberals, who was the divisive figure in his own time, alienating powerful nobles and taking religiously provocative positions, while Aurangzeb was the pragmatic coalition-builder.

A devout Muslim

The second major aspect of the book concerns the role of Islam in Alamgir’s reign, as the author refers to the sovereign. This is where Faruqui’s argument is most carefully and most necessarily nuanced. He distinguishes between three levels of Islamic influence in Alamgir’s governance: the personal-familial, the courtly, and the imperial.

Alamgir was deeply pious and exceptionally devout. He was the first Mughal emperor to memorise the entire Quran, beginning the task at the age of 43 and completing it over seven years. He abstained from alcohol, stopped wearing gold and silver, limited himself to four wives, gave up concubines, and abolished certain court rituals introduced under Akbar that he considered un-Islamic. These were not isolated decisions but part of a coherent moral vision of kingship.

This personal religiosity was visible and genuine. Faruqui is insistent that it must be disentangled from the charge of religious intolerance. At one point in the early 1700s, a Sunni nobleman named Muhammad Amin Khan requested that Shi‘ites be removed from imperial service because of their “heretical” religious views. Alamgir asked: “What connection have earthly affairs with religion? And what right have administrative works to meddle with bigotry? For you is your religion, for me is mine. … Wise men disapprove of the removal from office of able officers.”

The author is careful not to let “pious” slide into “zealot.”

The evidence Faruqui marshals is substantial: the reimposition of the jiziya in 1679, with its widespread exemptions, was primarily “to reward explicit loyalty and connection with the state apparatus attempting to assert a Mughal stamp upon emerging spaces of commercial enterprise.” The protest came from these wealthy commercial communities who had benefited most from the Mughal peace but were felt to be insufficiently loyal to the imperial system and the protest of the new taxes used a “language of economic hardship, not religious discrimination, highlights their view that they were being shaken down for money and that Islamic legalism was the blunt instrument deployed for the purpose.” Faruqui cites evidence from his archival sources on exemptions writing that it “often excused non-Muslims who served the Mughal state or its allies as well as women, children, the elderly, the poor, the infirm and disabled, the insane, and religious classes.”

The temple destructions, reprehensible as they were, were concentrated in areas of active military conflict with Maratha enemies and connected to specific strategic targets rather than constituting a general policy of religious cleansing; the doubling of customs duties on non-Muslim merchants was a fiscal measure; in the early decades of his reign, Alamgir confirmed madad endowments to non-Muslims and remitted taxes on temples; he ceremonially acknowledged Hindu religious holidays and met and honoured non-Muslim religious luminaries, including allowing Kavindracharya Saraswati, Dara Shukoh’s principal interlocutor in his Sanskrit translation projects, to continue living at court under imperial patronage.

He wrote to Rana Raj Singh of Mewar in 1658 that rulers must ensure that “men belonging to various communities and different religions should live in the vale of peace.” He may even have composed a poem in Hindvi asking Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesh to bless his recent accession. As the French traveller François Bernier observed in 1667, the Mughal emperor “permits ancient and superstitious Hindu practices; not wishing, or not daring, to disturb the Gentiles in the free exercise of their religion.”

Faruqui states that although Alamgir was often seen as anti-Shia, in the final decade of his life Alamgir his favourite rosary is said to have belonged to the first Shia imam, Caliph Ali. He also commissioned objects such as a sword, now in the possession of the National Museum of India, with an inscription noting that there was no hero like the fourth caliph of Islam, Ali, and no equal to his double-edged sword named Zulfiqar. Alamgir continued with efforts begun early in his reign to mark the tenth day of Muharram (Ashura), the most important day in the Shi‘ite calendar.

The more controversial decisions are subjected to careful contextual analysis. Faruqui’s framework shows Alamgir as a pragmatic, Islam-inflected ruler rather than an Islamic ideologue. He argues, with care and precision, how Alamgir changed course when Islam-based solutions proved counterproductive. What ultimately emerges is the portrait of a man who used Islamic ethics as a moral framework for administration, combating corruption, addressing poverty, and improving justice rather than as a weapon against non-Muslims.

None of this means that all of Alamgir’s policies were benign. One of the clearest examples of Mughal intolerance was the treatment of the growing Sikh community, whose independence challenged established authority. The execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur was a brutal act. Faruqui notes that it is absent from “the contemporary imperial sources available to us,” and uses this silence to explore how frequently Mughal authorities relied on threats, beatings, imprisonment, and at times, execution against those seen as disturbing public order. The suppression of the Jats and Satnamis was similarly harsh, as were the punishments of Muslims who were accused of upsetting social or religious sentiments.

The pattern that emerges is not of a ruler pursuing a systematic programme of forced Islamisation, but of an emperor responding, often brutally, to what he perceived as threats to imperial order. “Alamgir’s efforts to reassert Mughal power across northern India, religion alone did not determine which groups received Mughal slap-downs. Rather, Mughal efforts were shaped by fears of local instability and deference to the views of groups that were already accommodated within the Mughal imperial system.”

The ruler Alamgir, based on contemporary historical sources, emerges as distinct from the Aurangzeb of popular imagination. However, while Faruqui’s treatment of the jizya and the temple destructions is careful and contextual, based on the contemporary historical sources, given the present narrative surrounding the ruler, some readers will feel the book leans too much toward defending Aurangzeb.

Two chapters in Part II, on the imperial harem and eunuchate, are among the book’s most original contributions. Faruqui argues that Alamgir depended on these institutions more heavily than any previous Mughal emperor, with evidence hidden in administrative records rather than court chronicles. Senior Mughal women, Jahanara, Roshanara, and Zinat al-Nisa, were political actors with their own networks and strategies. Aurangzeb’s daughter Zinat al-Nisa oversaw the inner treasury, reconciled quarrelling sons, and managed the harem’s presence between Deccan and Shahjahanabad, becoming likely the second most powerful person in the empire by her father’s end. The eunuchate evolved from household staff into an intelligence and administrative corps that commanded forts, governed provinces, and filtered access to the declining emperor. Khidmatgar Khan III, arguably the most powerful eunuch in Mughal history, essentially ran the court in the 1690s and early 1700s. Faruqui’s point is clear: we've told this reign's history while ignoring two major institutional pillars.

Aurangzeb’s undoing

The third section of the book delivers the sobering truth: Aurangzeb's decision to personally lead Deccan campaigns from the early 1680s became his and the empire’s undoing. These campaigns were militarily inconclusive, administratively catastrophic, and financially ruinous. He spent 25 of his last years in the south, where early successes (Bijapur 1686, Golkonda 1687, Sambhaji's execution 1689) proved illusory as Marathas adapted and fiscal demands became unmanageable.

Using Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla court bulletins, Faruqui reconstructs an ageing emperor micromanaging things from a southern war camp while northern heartlands frayed, nobles went unpaid, and provincial governors built independent bases. His attempts to co-opt the Marathas failed either due to “an underlying insincerity to his wooing or a fundamental misreading of the value of Maratha support,” and the Mughal inability to build sustained alliances with non-Muslim southern populations. By February 1707, 40 days before death, 88-year-old Alamgir was nearly blind, in pain, suffering dementia, yet still working. The man who believed God chose him to restore the empire’s glory wrote that he felt abandoned by God and convinced of his inadequacy. The zinda pir (“living saint”), admired by Hindus and Muslims, died knowing he squandered what he had built.

The final chapter, on posthumous memory, is a fitting end. Faruqui documents the remarkable effort, unprecedented in Mughal history, to memorialise Alamgir after his death, an effort led not only by loyalist nobles but eventually extended to groups that had actively opposed him. After his death, a small circle of loyal nobles produced a cluster of texts, letters, and administrative manuals, designed to fix a reverential image of the emperor. Their motives were mixed: genuine loyalty, political rehabilitation, and score-settling with rivals.

The most influential of these texts, Musta’id Khan’s Maasir-i ‘Alamgiri, pushed a sharply sectarian reading of Aurangzeb as champion of Sunni Islam against non-Muslims and Shi’ites. That reading was not representative of contemporary views, which were considerably more varied. But it got taken up by colonial historians, and from there it fed into the nationalist historiography of the twentieth century, and from there into the present.

The consensus this memorialisation reflected, across Muslim and Hindu communities, about Alamgir’s greatness as a Hindustani ruler stands in sharp contrast to the vilification he suffers today. The chapters on memory and memorialisation are essential for understanding why Aurangzeb looks the way he does in modern historiography.

In Faruqui’s reading, Alamgir is neither the destroyer of Hindu civilisation nor the heroic defender of Muslim identity. Instead, he emerges as a complex and deeply human figure; an able and devout ruler, politically shrewd, personally austere, often severe but sometimes compassionate. For nearly 50 years, he held together one of the world’s greatest empires through determination, administrative skill, and the image of a pious ruler. Yet in the end, he watched it begin to dissolve because of decisions he could not bring himself to reverse.

This book is unlikely to end the debates around Aurangzeb Alamgir, especially in today’s politically charged climate in South Asia. What it does do is elevate the discussion. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the Mughal Empire, the historical roots of contemporary religious tensions, or the ways in which history is remembered and used.

By restoring complexity to a figure who has often been reduced to a symbol, Faruqui demonstrates the value of good historical scholarship. He reminds us that the past is rarely simple. It is more nuanced, more human, and more instructive than the narratives we often impose upon it.

The past will always remain contested. What historians like Faruqui achieve is not to end those contests, but to make simplistic and easy answers far more difficult to sustain.

Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold, Munis D Faruqui, Juggernaut.