Aurangzeb's Reign and Sectarian Policy
Aurangzeb took the Mughal throne in 1658 after a war of succession against his brothers, and reversed the settlement Akbar had built a century earlier. He imprisoned his father Shah Jahan in Agra fort, where he lived eight more years, and executed his elder brother Dara Shikoh — a scholar who had translated the Upanishads into Persian and argued for the common ground between Sufism and Vedanta — on a charge of apostasy, which made the succession a contest between two visions of the empire. His own was austere and orthodox. He was personally frugal, copied Qurans and sewed caps for his living expenses, banned music and wine at court, and appointed censors of public morals. He reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims in 1679, after 114 years, and reintroduced discriminatory customs duties. He ordered the destruction of some temples, notably at Mathura, Varanasi and Somnath — the scale is disputed, and he also issued grants protecting others, which complicates the picture without changing its direction. He executed the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in 1675. He extended the empire to its greatest territorial reach, annexing Bijapur and Golconda, and then spent his last twenty-six years in the Deccan fighting the Marathas, whose founder Shivaji had escaped his custody in a fruit basket. That war consumed the treasury, the army and the administrative energy of the state. He died in 1707 at eighty-eight, and the empire fragmented within a generation. He is the most contested figure in Indian history, read as a bigot who broke a plural empire or as an orthodox ruler whose real failure was strategic overreach in the Deccan. Both readings are now used as arguments about present-day India rather than about the seventeenth century.
- Year: 1658 CE
- Category: Governance
