On March 17, violent clashes erupted in Nagpur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra between Hindus and Muslims. While rumors about the alleged desecration of a copy of the Quran reportedly triggered the rioting, communal tensions were being built up for weeks by Hindu right-wing groups over the tomb of the 17th-century Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb.
Activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, fraternal organizations of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had staged agitations and threatened to demolish Aurangzeb’s tomb. “We’ve already planned and decided [how and when the demolition will be carried out] and it will surely happen,” a BJP minister in the Maharashtra government said.
Amid heightening tensions, rumors spread fast, and Muslims hit the streets. With the protests turning violent in some places, a curfew was imposed. Subsequently, Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis warned that his government would take action against those glorifying Aurangzeb.
Aurangzeb (1618-1707) was the longest-serving ruler of one of the most powerful empires in the world. Of all the Mughal rulers, he is the most controversial, variably known as a tyrant or religious bigot. He was likely the most unpopular Mughal ruler. Aurangzeb emerged as a villain in India’s early nationalist discourse of the 1880s and 1890s for actions like imposing the jizya tax on non-Muslims, destroying Hindu temples, and launching brutal expansionist wars amidst an agrarian crisis plaguing the country.
His tomb is located at Khuldabad, a nondescript place in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar town, formerly known as Aurangabad. The town was originally named after Aurangzeb but was renamed in 2023 after Sambhaji Bhosle, the second ruler of the Maratha empire whose battles with Aurangzeb cost him his life.
Aurangzeb was locked in long battles against the Marathas, and it was after he died in 1707 that the Marathas rose to eventually emerge as the dominant power in India for a few decades, even as the Mughal empire went into terminal decline.
The immediate trigger for the latest anti-Aurangzeb agitation was the recently released Hindi movie, “Chaava,” based on the life of Sambhaji, son of Maratha empire founder Shivaji, who epitomizes Marathi nationalist pride. The film depicts the Mughal emperor as a villain. Critics have accused the makers of the film of misrepresenting history. It is among a chain of Bollywood movies in recent years that have promoted Hindu right-wing narratives and hyper-nationalism.
However, drawing Muslim rulers into socio-political discussions is not new.
In the late 19th century, amid rising Indian nationalism, the Mughal versus Maratha binary was turned into a Muslim versus Hindu binary.
In an 1872 essay titled “Bharatbarsher Swadhinata O Paradhinota” (India’s Freedom and Subjugation), Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay argued that India was free under Mughal emperors Akbar and Shah Jahan but subjugated under Aurangzeb, who imposed an “alien faith” on India’s native people. Chattopadhyay is the composer of “Vande Mataram,” a war cry of India’s freedom struggle and national song in Independent India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP and its parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), consider Chattopadhyay to be the fountainhead of their brand of Hindu nationalism.
However, from the early 20th century, Indian nationalist leaders began to tone down the anti-Aurangzeb rhetoric to achieve Hindu-Muslim unity against British rule.
For example, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the renowned Marathi politician who had launched the Shivaji festival in Maharashtra in the 1890s, glorifying the Maratha ruler as a national hero for his battles against the Mughals, repositioned the festival by 1906. Tilak changed his tune to say: “Shivaji, who respected the religious scruples of the Mahomedans, had to fight against the Mughal rule that had become unbearable to the people.” In essence, Shivaji was fighting against misrule, not a religion, Tilak argued.
While Chattopadhyay and other pre-Independence nationalist leaders mostly singled out Aurangzeb for unleashing a rule of bigotry, contemporary Hindu nationalist leaders hold every Muslim ruler’s reign in its entirety as a “foreign rule,” as reflected in Modi’s oft-repeated remarks that India suffered slavery or subjugation of 1,200 years or 1,000 years.
Indian historians have traditionally considered India to have been under foreign rule since the advent of the British colonial power in the late 18th century. The top leaders of India’s freedom struggle, Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Jawaharlal Nehru held Mughals as integral to India, as they made India their home. Many have highlighted that unlike the British, the Mughals did not channel India’s wealth abroad.
Soon after Modi’s rise to the helm of Indian polity and governance in 2014, his government renamed Aurangzeb Road in New Delhi as Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road after India’s late scientist-turned-president.
Since then, Aurangzeb has dominated India’s political discourse in many ways, particularly with leading Hindu nationalist politicians frequently bringing him up in their speeches to highlight historical “Muslim injustice against Hindus.”
The demolition, on Aurangzeb’s order, of two Hindu temples at Mathura and Kashi in North India is being repeatedly brought back to the discussion. The Hindu right-wing today demands that the Islamic structures standing on the land of the destroyed temples must now be pulled down and the original Hindu temples restored.
The resurgence of a ruler who died three centuries ago is part of what the Hindu right calls righting historical wrongs. In the discourse of the Hindu right-wing Aurangzeb represents not the ruler he was but the religious faith he professed. He represents, to them, a Muslim who exemplifies religious intolerance.
However, setting the Maratha-Mughal rivalry into a Hindu-Muslim binary is historically wrong. History shows that it was under the command of a Hindu Rajput royal, Jai Singh I, that Aurangzeb’s army defeated the Maratha ruler Shivaji in 1665. Shivaji, on the other hand, had some Pathan (Afghan) Muslims in his army. The Mughals were Uzbek Muslims who had long-running rivalries with the Pathans, while many Rajput kings joined the Mughals in the wars against other Rajput kingdoms or other Hindu rulers like the Maratha empire.
In medieval India, conflict between rulers often involved religion, as rulers tended to use religion to solidify their claim to power. There are many examples of Hindu kings who were devotees of a particular deity destroying temples dedicated to other Hindu deities worshipped by rival rulers.
Indeed, some historians have shown Aurangzeb also protected and patronized some Hindu temples. In a 2015 essay, historian Harbans Mukhiya highlighted that Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur, a Rajput noble, had destroyed mosques and built Hindu temples in their stead in the 1658-1659 period. Yet, he became one of Aurangzeb’s highest-ranking officials and the Mughal emperor worked with him for the next 20-odd years until Singh died in 1679.
Another example of how history is complex rather than linear is that Sambhaji’s son, Shahu, who was in Mughal captivity for 18 years after Aurangzeb killed his father, made a pilgrimage to Aurangzeb’s tomb on foot before launching his battle for succession of the Maratha empire.
Amid growing demands from the VHP, the BJP, and the RSS for the demolition of Aurangzeb’s tomb, the RSS has sought to downplay the controversy, with a spokesperson saying that Aurangzeb is “not relevant today.”
However, Adityanath, the BJP chief minister of north India’s Uttar Pradesh, shot back soon after that glorifying “invaders” amounts to treason. In Hindutva lingo, the word “invader” is a reference to the Mughals and is synonymous with Muslims. Adityanath was reaffirming Aurangzeb’s relevance to contemporary Hindutva politics.
The fact remains that it is the RSS family of organizations that have kept Aurangzeb relevant for the past decade of Hindu nationalist rule in India, to be articulated and used as a punching bag in what appears to be their proxy war against Muslims.
Their intent is evident: Muslims in present-day India should feel guilty for the deeds of emperors professing Islamic faith who ruled centuries ago; and out of that guilt, should silently accept the intolerance and violence that Hindu nationalists subject them to. Under this framing, Hindus, presumably, have no deed of the ancient and medieval Hindu kings to feel guilty about.