Aurangzeb: The Gold Standard of ?Secular? History Writing in India

“The last of the so-called ‘Grand Mughals,’ Aurungzeb, tried to put back the clock, and in this attempt stopped it and broke it up.”—Jawaharlal Nehru

The gold standard of whether you are committed to secular history writing is whether you are prepared to stand for Aurangzeb—that dreaded Islamic bigot who destroyed almost all the temples within his reach[1] and brought back the full-scale profession of slavery and forced conversion into the state policy. The author Arun Shourie calls it as litmus test of a secular historian’s resolve. You pass this test and you are welcomed as an “eminent” historian by the coterie of Islamist-Marxist historians who have had near mafia-like grip over history-writing in India. The dissenters who dare to show Aurangzeb as he actually was and as he himself prided to be are just not good enough historians.

The understanding is if you can successfully defend a tyrant like Aurangzeb then you can easily defend other fanatics less zealot than Aurangzeb. The acts of Aurangzeb have to be, perforce, secularized.

A parallel project—not the focus of my present article though—is to show the rich ancient culture, traditions and heroes of pre-Islamic India into bad light so that a false equivalence could be created between inward-looking Dharmic traditions of India with the conversion-based ideology of Islam. This way can stand vindicated Marx’s observation that Hinduism was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society, and that India was never a country or nation—merely a stretch of land with peoples meekly and passively waiting for the next conqueror. Thus, the pre-Islamic India has been depicted as a discord-ridden land inhabited by jahil barbarians, and replete with inequities and oppression; the Islamic period has been depicted as one “in which the composite culture flowered, a period in which the policy of broad toleration was the norm, and such departures from it as took place were just the aberrations of individuals, aberrations which themselves can be tracked down to wholly secular causes.”

Well, let’s see how Marx-putras make out of Aurangzeb, the man who nicknamed himself as the ‘Seizer of the World’ (Alamgir) and remained true to it by seizing people’s world, soul, riches and their entire lives:

In the Marxist narrative, Aurangzeb was more sinned against than sinning [2].They say that he was not a bigoted fanatic but a pious and secular Muslim who read namaz 9 times (yes, there’re 9 namazs in Islam—5 mandatory and 4 optional) a day. He commissioned Badshahi Mosque at Lahore, which would remain the world’s biggest for 3 centuries, but chose himself to be buried in an unmarked grave. So pious that, during a campaign in Balkh, Aurangzeb dismounted and prayed when the time for namaz came amidst the battle. As if Islamic piety and bigotry could not go hand in hand!