THE EMPEROR WHO NEVER WAS
Dara Shukoh in Mughal India
SUPRIYA GANDHI
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2020
Copyright © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Cover art: Portrait of Dara Shukoh, mid-17th century, photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
978-0-674-98729-6 (cloth)
978-0-674-24391-0 (EPUB)
978-0-674-24392-7 (MOBI)
978-0-674-24390-3 (PDF)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Gandhi, Supriya, 1977– author.
Title: The emperor who never was : Dara Shukoh in Mughal India / Supriya Gandhi.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019032493
Subjects: LCSH: Dārā Shikūh, Prince, son of Shahjahan, Emperor of India, 1615–1659. | Princes—India—Biography. | Philosopher-kings. | India—History—1526–1765.
Classification: LCC DS461.9.D3 G36 2020 | DDC 954.02/57092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032493
CONTENTS
Note on Transliterations and Conventions
Introduction
1. Empire, 1615–1622
2. Dynasty, 1622–1628
3. Youth, 1628–1634
4. Discipleship, 1634–1642
5. The Chosen, 1642–1652
6. Mission, 1652–1654
7. Confluence, 1654–1656
8. The Greatest Secret, 1656–1657
9. Succession, 1657–1659
Conclusion
Dramatis Personae
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS AND CONVENTIONS
For ease and elegance, I have eschewed the use of technical diacritical marks for proper names and for Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and Sanskrit words. In most cases, I transliterate these in a manner approximating their pronunciation in South Asia. For specialists, the relevant terms and phrases can be reconstructed generally with little ambiguity. Today, Dara Shukoh’s name is most commonly transliterated and pronounced as “Dara Shikoh.” However, “Dara Shukoh,” which I employ here, more accurately reflects the name in seventeenth-century usage during the prince’s lifetime. I do retain “Mughal” for the dynasty to which Dara Shukoh belonged. Though anachronistic, the term for the great Indian dynasty is enmeshed in our historical vocabulary for the period.
INTRODUCTION
August 29, 1659
A judge takes his seat in the private audience hall of Delhi’s red sandstone fort. Only days ago Aurangzeb, the new emperor, had proclaimed himself ruler of Hindustan, choosing the title Alamgir, or “world-seizer.” The emperor is not physically present in the room, but his authority is palpable. Shadows flicker behind a latticed marble partition, through which imperial women listen to the proceedings, unseen. The trial is about to begin. A prisoner is dragged in, his hands and feet shackled. Dara Shukoh, elder brother of Aurangzeb, stands charged with apostasy.
The prosecutor is unrelenting in his cross-examination. “Dara Shukoh, tell us, are you a secret Sikh?” And then, “So you believe, frankly, Prince, that the Hindu faith is as valid as the Muslim faith?” Dara Shukoh eloquently defends his ideas. “Who cares which door you open to come into the light?” he asks. Finally, the prosecutor orders Dara to present his ring. Damning evidence. It is engraved with “Allah” on one side and “Prabhu,” a Hindu word for the divine, on the other. He snaps, “Prince Dara, it is unpalatably clear … that you strayed, long, long ago, from the pure path of Islam.” Shortly after the trial, Aurangzeb orders armed slaves to snuff out his brother’s life.
Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb were real historical figures. They were Muslim princes of an Indian dynasty founded in 1526 by their forefather, Babur. Toward the end of his life, Dara initiated a large project of engaging with what we might today call Hindu thought. The prince himself made a comparative study of Hindu and Islamic religious concepts and had the Upanishads, a collection of Hindu sacred texts, translated into Persian. He was killed in a struggle for succession that he lost to his younger brother, Aurangzeb. But there probably never was a trial. At least, the historical chronicles of the time do not speak of one. The scene described above comes from a 2015 theater performance staged in London, adapted by Tanya Ronder from a play written and directed in Lahore by Shahid Nadeem.1
Yet the trial has been so integral to the modern story of these two brothers. Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke, published in 2000, uses the trial of Dara Shukoh as an allegorical frame for his gritty novel about contemporary Pakistan. Akbar Ahmed’s 2007 play dramatizes the prince’s trial by drawing on the author’s earlier experience as a magistrate in Pakistan. Many historical novels about the Mughal Empire feature the trial. Even Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, historian of independent Pakistan, refers to a “political trial,” of Dara Shukoh, arguing that it “was meant to demonstrate to the orthodox that the empire had been saved from a revival of heresy.”2
The trial is a powerful motif because it transforms a story about seventeenth-century India into a narrative about today. It creates a dialectic between two opposing visions of Islam: Islam as zealous extremism, immediately familiar in our present context, and its counterpoint—Islam as Sufi antinomianism. But even without the supposed trial, the brothers’ clash is a story that addresses the deepest questions of who we are and how we got here.
The battle for succession between Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb is an origin myth of the subcontinent’s present, seen as a crucial turning point in the progression of South Asian history. But it is not a stable myth. Its tellings and retellings shift and settle into the subcontinent’s fault lines of nation and ideology.
According to one version, Aurangzeb’s victory over Dara Shukoh cleared the way for Muslim political assertion in the subcontinent. In his 1918 collection of Persian verse, Rumuz-i bekhudi, the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who also outlined an early vision for the state of Pakistan, pronounces judgment on the two brothers. For him, Dara Shukoh represented a dangerous shoot of heresy in the Mughal dynasty that needed to be uprooted: “When the seed of heresy that Akbar nourished / Once again sprang up in Dara’s essential nature / The heart’s candle was snuffed out in every breast / Our nation was not secure from corruption.3
Iqbal speaks glowingly of Aurangzeb, sent by God to save the Muslim community: “Divine Truth chose Alamgir from India / That ascetic, that swordmaster / To revive religion He commissioned him / To renew belief He commissioned him.” Aurangzeb here takes on an almost prophetic role. In fact, later in the same poem, Iqbal compares him to Abraham, a foundational prophet of Islam, who smashed stone idols in the Kaaba in order to foster monotheism.4
Later, after the new nation-state of Pakistan was born, Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi wove Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb into his story of the subcontinent’s Muslims. Like Iqbal’s account, Qureshi’s is teleological. Historical events lead inexorably to the present, all linked by a single thread. Aurangzeb’s victory over Dara becomes a crucial turning point in the march to a separate Muslim homeland. Qureshi says approvingly of Aurangzeb, “Character and ability overcame resources and numbers.… This was the hour of triumph for orthodoxy.”5
In a contrasting version, this fratricidal war is a tragedy. Its outcome becomes the reason South Asia’s nation-states now bristle with mutual hostility and i
ts societies suffer from religious violence. The columnist Ashok Malik expresses this view in his remarks on Dara’s killing, saying, “It was the partition before Partition … Dara Shukoh was killed on an August night 350 years ago, and with him died hopes of a lasting Hindu-Muslim compact.”6
Well before Malik and others who share his perspective, secular nationalists in the early twentieth century mourned the result of this seventeenth-century succession struggle. They saw Dara Shukoh as a premodern seeker of harmony between Hindus and Muslims. In 1910, the twenty-three-year-old future nationalist leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad defended Dara. The Sufi prince, he argued, was a “master of direct spiritual experience” for “in quest of the goal, he lifted away the distinction between the dervish monastery and the Meccan sanctuary.” In Azad’s view, Aurangzeb valorized reason over mysticism and set the stage for future discord between Hindus and Muslims.7
This origin story sometimes takes on another twist. In this version, Dara Shukoh is the singular exception in centuries of oppression under Muslim rule. We see this, for instance, in the case of the nineteenth-century Hindu reformer in the Punjab, Kanhaiyalal Alakhdhari. Alakhdhari denounced the Mughals and the Delhi Sultans, pronouncing, “for the last eight hundred years, the fate of India was as dark as the reflection in a mirror.”8 Yet, ironically, he relied heavily on Dara Shukoh’s Persian translations of Hindu texts to educate the Hindus of his time about their own traditions.9
This nineteenth-century attitude toward the prince continues to reverberate. ln 1990, the journalist Saeed Naqvi interviewed the Hindu nationalist leader Bhaurao Deoras. Naqvi pressed Deoras to acknowledge that, throughout history, Muslims had embraced or admired aspects of Hindu thought. He gave the example of Dara Shukoh: “Someone like Dara Shikoh. Now Hindus must accept him as a hero.”
“He is a hero,” Deoras acquiesced. “But the Muslim community did not permit him to live.”10 Ironically, for someone like Deoras, Dara is only redeemed by his untimely death. Had Dara lived to rule, like Akbar, no doubt he too would have been vilified.
In their multiple guises, Mughal royals like Aurangzeb and Dara Shukoh still inhabit today’s South Asia. Their names (particularly Aurangzeb’s) are regularly invoked in the public realm. Their personalities seem luminously transparent even when the details of their historical contexts remain shadowy. Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb are mythical characters. They were, of course, also historical figures. But they are mythical because they seem familiar enough to have always existed and because their story animates modern ideologies. If in myth, as Roland Barthes once said, “history evaporates,” myth also clads ideological structures in a narrative form.11
What we know of the two brothers is lodged in countless layers of accumulated historical memory. In Dara Shukoh’s case, although the prince prolifically documented his spiritual and intellectual explorations, the accounts and anecdotes related by others—his contemporaries and those after him—have been more influential in shaping his later image. Chronicles, from a victor’s viewpoint, written by Aurangzeb’s courtiers and partisans, list Dara’s heresies. Whisperings and tidbits of gossip make their way from oral tradition into colorful eighteenth-century writings. Early memoirs of European visitors to the Mughal court inform later, colonial narratives. Other colonial accounts often paint Aurangzeb as a brutal despot, in an effort to show that Indians could not effectively rule themselves.
The two brothers, together with their supporters, emerge as polar opposites: Dara as idealistic, naive, leading a motley band of wayward Sufis, naked ascetics, and Hindu pandits; Aurangzeb as austere, shrewd, ruthless, flanked by Muslim clerics, and helming a powerful army of the nation’s nobility. Needless to say, these images fail to capture the complexity and nuance of their lives and contexts.
Despite these oversimplified, anachronistic portraits of Dara Shukoh and his younger brother, often what is at stake is whether Dara Shukoh is remembered at all. Aurangzeb’s legacy persists far more vividly. In India, a politician breaks with his father’s party, and his opponents mockingly call him Aurangzeb. The connotations of this dog-whistle are immediately apparent. Nobody needs to explain that it signals both the politician’s lack of filial respect and his support among Muslim voters. Another politician demands to change the name of Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road, because this reminder of the Mughal emperor inflames a festering wound over his temple destructions, both real and alleged. Aurangzeb’s looming presence in modern South Asia overshadows that of his elder brother.
Remembering Dara Shukoh today—or erasing his memory—is a political act. In Pakistan, laments Shahid Nadeem, “Dara … has almost been wiped out from the history books.”12 In today’s India, the prince receives only inconsistent, sporadic commemoration. In 2017, the Hindu-nationalist- dominated municipal corporation of Delhi voted to rename a road, named for the British governor general Lord Dalhousie, after Dara Shukoh.13 This renaming served only to complete the erasure of Aurangzeb from Delhi’s public spaces. But when the four-hundredth anniversary of Dara Shukoh’s birth fell in March 2015, there had been no official recognition of the event by the ruling Hindu nationalist party. This was the sort of occasion, in a different age, where scholars and politicians would have feted the late prince as an early harbinger of secularism and pluralism.
In 2014, with the late storyteller Ankit Chadha, I began work on the script for a performance on Dara Shukoh’s life. It contained the incipient seeds of this book. When faculty at Ambedkar University put on a festival commemorating Dara Shukoh’s birth anniversary, Ankit performed the story as a dastan, a traditional form of Urdu storytelling, on the steps of a hybrid Mughal-British mansion where the prince himself had once lived.
For my collaboration with Ankit, I sifted ingredients for a story out of a polyphony of Persian and Hindi sources—a poem here, an anecdote there. I was keen that we avoid romanticizing the prince as a hapless do-gooder. Ankit advised me that a dastan should not sound like a history lesson. Together, we worked on developing a narrative arc that built up dramatic tension and condensed in miniature the complexities of Dara Shukoh’s life and times.
Before working on the dastan, I had already started another, longer, story. At first, I resisted writing a biography of Dara Shukoh, though I had earlier closely studied several of his writings. I had no wish to promote an outdated and flawed idea of history that privileges “great men.” Neither did I seek to step inside Dara Shukoh’s mind and try to ascertain his inner motivations. But I did want to explore his context in the court, along with the Mughal state’s workings, and the ideas surrounding him. I also wanted to investigate the other people—women and men, famous and forgotten—whose paths crossed his, and the material conditions that allowed him to rule and write his books. History is often too messy to enclose in the storyline of a single person. What follows is not a biography in a narrow sense of the word, though it follows closely the life and times of a single figure. Dara Shukoh and his writings are at the story’s center, but its focus is wider.
I use narrative to craft this book, because stories like Dara Shukoh’s that are constantly told and retold are never complete. They are always in need of new tellings. The tale’s barest contours are indisputable: Dara Shukoh was a Mughal prince in seventeenth-century India. Like most princes, he studied and wrote; but he threw himself into these activities more deeply than did most other royals. As was the case for princes in early modern empires, his succession to the throne was by no means assured. He had to stake his claim to the throne, and in the process he was killed.
But the argument is in the details. The particulars of Dara’s times and his own trajectory are so crucial to the story’s texture. The strands of Dara’s story are tightly woven into many others. We see this, for instance, in the ways the Mughal state negotiated its place among its Hindu-majority subjects; in how the court cultivated the support of a diverse and powerful nobility that bridged religious and ethnic fissures; in the patterns of Muslim learning and piety in circles associated wi
th the court, which did not reflect the stark divisions between Sufis and ulama seen in the modern day; and in the very vision of kingship that Mughal sovereigns and courtiers infused with so much wonder, awe, and mystery that few subjects would dare even conceive of their world without a supreme ruler. This was the context in which Dara Shukoh came of age and expected to rule.
The last biography of Dara Shukoh in English was first published in 1935. It was one of two important books on the prince to appear in India during the first half of the twentieth century.14 These were serious, weighty studies. Kalika Ranjan Qanungo, author of the biography, combed through historical chronicles to detail Dara Shukoh’s public life and military campaigns. Bikrama Jit Hasrat’s book, not a biography, as such, but a study of the prince’s writings, collates and describes the many works that Dara composed or sponsored. For Hasrat and Qanungo, Dara Shukoh symbolized a lost possibility of Hindu-Muslim concord that needed to be recovered. Qanungo writes, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that anyone who intends to take up the solution of the problem of religious peace in India, must begin the work where Dara had left it.” The two make their sympathies plain. Hasrat calls Aurangzeb “a stern puritan.”15 Qanungo declares, “The world has not become richer in any way by the long reign of Aurangzib; but it would have been certainly poorer without a Dara Shukoh.”16
The division of focus that these two books display is telling. One reconstructs Dara’s political life and the other examines his writings. Each, in its own way, suspects that for all Dara Shukoh’s talents and interests, the prince would not have been a capable ruler. He was too deeply immersed in spiritual affairs, they suggest. As this narrative goes, it was almost inevitable that, for the sake of the empire’s continuity, Dara would succumb to Aurangzeb’s ruthless ambition and political acumen. Bikrama Jit Hasrat ascribes purely transcendent motives to Dara’s “burning passion for knowledge,” and rejects any attribution of “political forethought” to the prince’s “theosophist” inclinations.17
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