Aurangzeb by Audrey Truschke

Author:Audrey Truschke [Truschke, Audrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Overseer of Hindu Religious Communities

Protector of Temples

[Ellora] is one of the finely crafted marvels of the real, transcendent Artisan [i.e., God].

—Aurangzeb describing the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples at Ellora

Hindu and Jain temples dotted the landscape of Aurangzeb’s kingdom. These religious institutions were entitled to Mughal state protection, and Aurangzeb generally endeavored to ensure their well-being. By the same token, from a Mughal perspective, that goodwill could be revoked when specific temples or their associates acted against imperial interests. Accordingly, Emperor Aurangzeb authorized targeted temple destructions and desecrations throughout his rule.

Many modern people view Aurangzeb’s orders to harm specific temples as symptomatic of a larger vendetta against Hindus. Such views have roots in colonial-era scholarship, where positing timeless Hindu-Muslim animosity embodied the British strategy of divide and conquer. Today, multiple websites claim to list Aurangzeb’s “atrocities” against Hindus (typically playing fast and loose with the facts) and fuel communal fires. There are numerous gaping holes in the proposition that Aurangzeb razed temples because he hated Hindus, however. Most glaringly, Aurangzeb counted thousands of Hindu temples within his domains and yet destroyed, at most, a few dozen. This incongruity makes little sense if we cling to a vision of Aurangzeb as a cartoon bigot driven by a single-minded agenda of ridding India of Hindu places of worship. A historically legitimate view of Aurangzeb must explain why he protected Hindu temples more often than he demolished them.

Aurangzeb followed Islamic law in granting protections to non-Muslim religious leaders and institutions. Indo-Muslim rulers had counted Hindus within the Islamic juridical category of dhimmis since the eighth century, and Hindus were thus entitled to certain rights and state defenses. Yet Aurangzeb went beyond the requirements of Islamic law in his conduct toward Hindu and Jain religious communities. Instead, for Aurangzeb, protecting and, at times, razing temples served the cause of ensuring justice for all throughout the Mughal Empire.

Aurangzeb’s notion of justice included a certain measure of freedom of religion, which led him to protect most places of Hindu worship. Mughal rulers in general allowed their subjects great leeway—shockingly so compared to the draconian measures instituted by many European sovereigns of the era—to follow their own religious ideas and inclinations. Nonetheless, state interests constrained religious freedom in Mughal India, and Aurangzeb did not hesitate to strike hard against religious institutions and leaders that he deemed seditious or immoral. But absent such concerns, Aurangzeb’s vision of himself as an even-handed ruler of all Indians prompted him to extend state security to temples.

. . .

Aurangzeb laid out his vision of how good kings ought to treat temples and other non-Muslim religious sites in a princely order (nishan in Persian) that he sent to Rana Raj Singh, the Hindu Rajput ruler of Mewar, in 1654: “Because the persons of great kings are shadows of God, the attention of this elevated class, who are the pillars of God’s court, is devoted to this: that men of various dispositions and different religions (mazahib) should live in the vale of peace and pass their days in prosperity, and no one should meddle in the affairs of another.

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