Dara Shikoh

Dara Shikoh was Shah Jahan's eldest son and designated heir, and his defeat and execution by his brother Aurangzeb in the war of succession of 1657 to 1659 is the great counterfactual of Mughal history. He was a Sufi of the Qadiri order and a scholar who set out to show that Hindu and Islamic mysticism described the same reality: his Majma-ul-Bahrain, the Confluence of the Two Seas, matched the vocabulary of the Upanishads to that of Sufism, and he had fifty Upanishads translated into Persian as the Sirr-i-Akbar, the Greatest Secret. That Persian text reached Europe through Anquetil-Duperron's Latin version in 1801 and is how Schopenhauer read the Upanishads, which he called the consolation of his life. Dara was kept at court rather than given provincial commands, so when his father fell ill in 1657 he had the treasury and the capital but no army that had campaigned under him, while Aurangzeb had spent twenty years in the Deccan with the troops who would decide it. He was beaten at Dharmat and decisively at Samugarh in May 1658, fled across northern India losing followers at every stage, and was betrayed in Baluchistan by a chieftain whose life he had once spared. He was paraded through Delhi on a filthy elephant and condemned by clerics for apostasy rather than for rebellion, which allowed the execution to be framed as law. His head was sent to Shah Jahan, then a prisoner in Agra. Whether a Dara victory would have changed the empire's trajectory is unanswerable, but the case is made regularly in modern Indian politics by people who have use for one brother or the other. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Humayun's tomb. Aurangzeb ruled for forty-nine years and expanded the empire to its greatest extent. The Deccan wars that occupied his last quarter-century are usually identified as what exhausted it.

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