On 7 June 1633, Shah Jahan indulged in one of his favourite pastimes: watching two huge male elephants engage in combat. The spectacle was usually performed near the banks of the Jamuna and viewed from a balcony built into the emperor’s palace in Agra. At one point on this occasion, the two beasts had grappled with each other directly below the emperor’s balcony, preventing him from seeing the action. So he and his three eldest sons – Dara Shukoh, Shuja‘ and Aurangzeb – went down to the ground level, mounted horses and rode out to have a closer look. Noticing the newcomers, one of the elephants suddenly wheeled, trumpeted loudly and charged the nearest figure in sight, which happened to be the fourteen-year-old Aurangzeb. ‘The lion-hearted youth,’ records a chronicler of Shah Jahan’s reign:
with the greatest courage and intrepidity did not stir from his post; but as soon as the elephant approached, he galloped at it and rose up in his stirrups and hurled his spear with his whole strength against its forehead. The monster, smarting from the wound, again rushed furiously to the attack; and the steed of that ‘bold knight on the battlefield of valor’ being struck in the flanks by the elephant’s trunk rolled over from the violence of the shock. The instant Prince Aurangzeb fell from his saddle on to the ground, he sprang nimbly up, and stood sword in hand, ready to strike.2
In the midst of the confusion – the dust, shouting, fireworks, rockets, smoke – the other elephant, seeing his opponent otherwise preoccupied, seized the opportunity to resume the fight, thus sparing any more drama for the prince. By this time Shah Jahan himself had rushed to the scene, where he warmly embraced his son, relieved to find him unharmed.
The event seared deep into the memory of the amazed onlookers. It was also the first time that the court’s chroniclers would pay significant notice to Shah Jahan’s third son. In fact, the scene was twice memorialized in miniature paintings, the first one made within a few years of the event and included in the Padshahnama, the emperor’s official chronicle [see Fig. 17].3 In both images, Aurangzeb is depicted steadying his horse while driving his spear into the brow of the charging tusker, revealing the prince’s steely courage in the face of grave danger. By contrast, his elder brother Dara Shukoh – later his sworn enemy – is seen watching the action from a safe distance. The painting affords an early glimpse into the contrasting characters of the brothers.
A year later, Shah Jahan gave Aurangzeb a mansab of 10,000, his first position in the Mughal hierarchy. A year after that, in 1635, he was sent off on an imperial campaign to capture and punish the rebel chieftain Jhujhar Singh Bundela. Although the sixteen-year-old prince held only nominal command of the army, the experience gave him his first direct exposure to military strategy, logistics and operations. At the conclusion of this successful campaign he proceeded south to Burhanpur, the seat of government for the Mughal-controlled Deccan. Unlike the older provinces to the north, which had been under imperial administration since the days of Akbar, the Mughal Deccan lay on the cutting edge of a rapidly moving frontier that faced three venerable sultanates: the quickly disintegrating Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmadnagar in the north-western Deccan, and two strong and hostile kingdoms to the south, the ‘Adil Shahi kingdom of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahi kingdom of Golconda. In early 1636 Shah Jahan marched down to the ancient stronghold of Daulatabad to oversee the empire’s forward operations against these three states. Whereas the sultan of Golconda submitted to a show of force and agreed to become a tributary vassal of the Mughals, Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah of Bijapur resisted. On reaching a military stalemate, in mid 1636 the two parties concluded an agreement whereby Bijapur would acknowledge the Mughals as overlords but would not be a tributary vassal like Golconda; the two states would divide between them the remaining territory of the kingdom of Ahmadnagar, now formally extinguished; and neither side would try to lure the other’s officers into its service.
Having concluded the treaties with the two states, the emperor returned to Agra, leaving Aurangzeb in Burhanpur to govern the Mughal Deccan and to see that the treaty’s terms were properly carried out. The governor, still only eighteen years old, soon acquired a taste for extorting as much as he could from Golconda while remaining technically within the terms of the 1636 treaty. He was also eager to annex territory from previously unconquered states in the region, such as Baglana, a strategically important strip of land along the lower Tapti valley. In early 1638 the prince, having obtained his father’s permission to pursue this forward policy, sent an army into the region, overwhelming the mountain strongholds of Salhir and Mulhir. He then annexed the whole territory into the empire, absorbed its former rulers into Mughal state service and added Baglana’s annual revenue of 400,000 rupees to imperial coffers. The ease with which Aurangzeb accomplished this operation might explain his imagining, much later in life, that conquering the rest of the Deccan would be just as manageable.
Another omen portending Aurangzeb’s future operations in the Deccan, which would occupy the last twenty-five years of his life, was the ability of the most talented Maratha commander in the region to elude his grasp. This was Shahji Bhonsle (1594–1664), whose father had been the right-hand man of Malik Ambar, the Ethiopian ex-slave who for two decades had fended off Jahangir’s repeated attempts to annex the Nizam Shahi kingdom of Ahmadnagar. After Ambar’s death in 1626 and the surrender in 1633 of Daulatabad (the kingdom’s capital since 1610) to the Mughals, it was Shahji who picked up the pieces of the crumbling state of Ahmadnagar. This he did by finding and crowning as sultan an eleven-year-old remnant of the Nizam Shahi house, for whom Shahji acted as chief minister and commander-in-chief, or peshwa. With 12,000 troops under his command, he managed to recover a number of forts in the old Nizam Shahi territory, boldly running a guerrilla operation against both Bijapur and the Mughals. In 1639 Aurangzeb managed to track down and kill Shahji’s first cousin, a former Nizam Shahi officer who had taken to banditry. But he had no such luck with Shahji himself, who by then had abandoned the Nizam Shahi cause and enlisted with Bijapur.
In May 1644 an unexpected event drew Aurangzeb from his posting in the Deccan to the imperial court at Agra. His eldest sister Jahanara, Shah Jahan’s favourite daughter, had suffered severe burns when her dress caught fire from a candle in Agra fort, and for weeks her life hung in the balance. As all her siblings were full brothers and sisters born of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, the entire royal family responded with affection and concern. Aurangzeb’s elder brother Shuja‘ reached Agra from his post as governor of Bengal, while his younger brother Murad arrived from his as governor of Gujarat. These three brothers had all been governing large provinces and commanding armies. By contrast the firstborn son, Dara Shukoh, had only briefly governed the Punjab in 1635–6, but since then remained in Agra. It seemed to all that, as the emperor’s favourite son, he was being kept at court and groomed to succeed Shah Jahan [see Fig. 19]. This was certainly clear to Aurangzeb, who harboured a growing hostility towards Dara. The feeling, moreover, was mutual.
At some point, while the family poured out its sympathy and prayers for the ailing Jahanara, Dara invited his father and brothers to see his newly built mansion in Agra. ‘As it was the summer season,’ records a contemporary source:
an underground room had been constructed close to the river … Dara conducted Shah Jahan and his brothers to see how the room looked. Muhammad Aurangzib sat down close to the [only] door leading in and out of the room. Dara seeing it winked at the Emperor, as if to say ‘See where he is sitting.’ His majesty said, ‘My child, though I know you to be learned and hermit-like, yet it is also needful to maintain one’s rank … What necessity is there for you to sit down in the path by which people pass, and in a position below and behind your younger brother [Murad]?’ Aurangzib replied, ‘I shall afterwards tell you the reason of my sitting here.’ After a short time he rose on the plea of performing his mid-day prayer, and went back from the place to his own house without taking the Emperor’s permission. When the Emperor heard of it he forbade him the Court, so that the Prince was debarred from the audience for seven months.4
More so than Aurangzeb’s youthful encounter with the elephant, this vignette speaks of the poisonous relations between Dara and Aurangzeb. The eldest son’s knowing wink to their father suggests his privileged status at court, from which the younger brother would soon be expelled for more than half a year. Upon recovering from her burns, Jahanara, the family peacemaker and coolest head, asked Aurangzeb to explain his strange behaviour in the underground room. His reply: he feared that Dara, taking advantage of that unguarded, confined space, might shut the door and dispatch all his brothers by way of ensuring his path to the throne. When Jahanara conveyed this explanation to their father, the emperor summoned Aurangzeb and showered him with favours. But this did nothing to heal the rift between the two brothers, whose relationship had now reached an impasse. Convinced that he and Dara could not be at court at the same time, Aurangzeb approached the prime minister and begged to be posted elsewhere. The minister intervened and the emperor obliged, reassigning him to Gujarat, which he governed from 1645 to 1647.5
Meanwhile, Shah Jahan began acting on the grandiose title ‘Second Lord of the Conjunction’ that he had given himself. Vaguely associated with millennialism, the title also alluded to his dynasty’s esteemed ancestor Timur, allegedly the ‘Lord of the Conjunction,’ and to his vast empire. Shah Jahan therefore aimed to re-establish some sovereign connection with Timur’s Central Asian empire, or at least the part of it south of the Oxus – Balkh and Badakhshan – that had belonged to Babur’s patrimony. This was the context for the invasion mentioned in the previous chapter. Although Uzbek Turks had dominated the region since expelling Babur in the early sixteenth century, by the 1640s they were engulfed in a civil war that, in Shah Jahan’s view, invited outside intervention. Short of reclaiming Balkh and Badakhshan by outright annexation, the emperor hoped at least to reduce the region to tributary status. So in 1646 he put his youngest son, Murad, at the head of an army of 50,000 troops that marched over the Hindu Kush Mountains and occupied the city of Balkh. But the young prince soon grew tired of the country’s harsh terrain and begged permission to return. When his father refused, he abandoned his command and returned to India in disgrace, leaving his leaderless army behind.
India, 1680–1707
To rescue the crippled Central Asian campaign, the emperor then called on Aurangzeb, who reached Balkh in May 1647. By that time, however, nearly half of Murad’s troops had also abandoned the mission, leaving the several Mughal garrisons in Badakhshan and Balkh severely undermanned. Nonetheless, upon learning that a powerful Uzbek force had crossed the Oxus and was pressing on into Mughal-occupied territory, Aurangzeb marched north-west to meet it. When the two armies engaged, the Uzbek commander personally witnessed the Mughal prince’s cool courage amidst fierce combat, as recorded in a widely circulated anecdote:
While the Mughal army was fighting desperately with the vast legions of Abdul Aziz Khan, King of Bukhara, the time for the [noon] prayer [zuhar] arrived. Disregarding the prohibitions of his officers, Aurangzeb dismounted from his elephant, knelt down on the ground, and deliberately and peacefully went through all the ceremonies of the prayer, in full view of both the armies. Abdul Aziz on hearing of it cried out, ‘To fight with such a man is to ruin one’s self,’ and suspended the battle.6
As winter approached and his army faced starvation owing to local grain scarcities and uncertain supply lines from India, Aurangzeb hastily arranged a peace with the Uzbeks and headed south. By late October his army reached the steep and icy passes cutting through the Hindu Kush range. Although he and his forward units safely reached Kabul before the heavy snows began, the treasure-escort, the supplies and thousands of troops and animals were not so lucky. Between Bamian and Kabul, especially while negotiating the 3,000-metre Shibar Pass, the army lost 5,000 men and as many animals – all buried under the snow. When the snow melted the next spring, piles of bones emerged along the pathways.7 In the end, the Mughals’ two-year campaign accomplished nothing beyond displaying the emperor’s vanity. But it did consume forty million rupees, nearly seven times the cost to build Shahjahanabad, and eight times the cost of the Taj Mahal.
The failed Uzbek campaign was soon followed by a crisis with more formidable rivals, the Safavid rulers of Iran, over the strategic stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Having changed hands five times since Babur captured it in 1522, this strategic outpost was seen by each empire as vital for protecting its frontier. In early 1649 a Safavid army again laid siege to the garrison. Determined not to lose it again, the emperor called on Aurangzeb to lead an army of 50,000 to defend the fort. But by the time he arrived that March, it had already fallen, so the prince was ordered to retreat. With Mughal honour now at stake, Shah Jahan devoted the next three years to building up a huge army to mount a second attempt. In May 1652 60,000 troops, again under Aurangzeb’s command, arrived before the fort with substantial siege artillery. This time, however, the prince was let down by his incompetent artillerymen, who either blew up their cannon with overloaded powder or fired cannonballs that sank harmlessly into the fort’s mud walls. Worse was the interference of Shah Jahan, who had moved up to Kabul to oversee the siege, but whose proximity only enabled him to hector his son about his handling of military operations. With no progress to account for the effort, the emperor ultimately ordered a retreat, and the frustrated prince had to march from Kandahar back to Kabul. En route he received letters in which the emperor challenged his son’s military competence, asserting that if he had considered the prince capable of taking the fort, he would not have ordered the retreat. With that swipe, Aurangzeb was instructed to return immediately to the Deccan and take up a second posting there as governor. Compounding his bitterness, Aurangzeb learnt that back in Agra Dara Shukoh, instead of showing support for the Mughal effort at Kandahar, mocked his younger brother, making his failure an object of ridicule.8
But the emperor was still not ready to concede failure. In 1653 he ordered a third and final attempt to recover the fort, this time sending Dara to lead the effort, even though his eldest son had never yet led a major military operation. But that didn’t prevent him from boasting that he would easily take the fort within a week, and perhaps even continue westwards and conquer Herat as well. An army of 70,000 men was mobilized, accompanied by a host of heavy artillery, 150,000 kilos of powder and 30,000 cannon balls, some of them weighing up to fifty kilos. But this expedition, lasting from April to September 1653, failed spectacularly. A contemporary account of the campaign portrays the prince as stubborn yet easily swayed by flattery, abusive when thwarted, prone to the use of magic for guidance, insensitive to the suffering of his own troops, and thoroughly incompetent as a commander.9 In all, the three Kandahar expeditions had cost 120 million rupees, which was more than half of the empire’s entire gross annual revenue, or twenty-four times the expense of building the Taj Mahal.10
These costly failures only deepened the rift between Aurangzeb and his father. But it had not always been that way. When the sixteen-year-old accompanied the army sent to pursue the rebel Jhujhar Singh and from Bundelkhand, he wrote his father glowing letters of the region’s picturesque scenery – its forests, large artificial lakes, hills, wild game, and so on. Shah Jahan was so affected that he made a diversion from his march in order to join the young prince, and together the two made a sightseeing tour of the region’s waterfalls and other natural sites.11 Later, the emperor was genuinely puzzled by Aurangzeb’s strange behaviour in Dara Shukoh’s underground room in Agra, apparently unaware of the extent of the brothers’ mutual animosity. The prince’s subsequent banishment from court certainly strained the father–son relationship. Nonetheless, the emperor understood that, of his four sons, Aurangzeb was the ablest commander, which explains his reluctance to give high commands to the other three. The failed second siege of Kandahar, however, marked something of a turning point. In the same letter in which he blamed Aurangzeb for the siege’s failure, the emperor advised the prince that he was being deprived of his lucrative jagirs in Multan and upper Sind, that his salary was being reduced by 1.7 million rupees, and that – as if to rub salt in his wounds – Dara Shukoh would command the third siege at Kandahar, for which purpose he would receive additional large and fertile jagirs in Gujarat.12 En route to taking up his second posting as governor of the Deccan, Aurangzeb stopped in Delhi for several days, in the course of which he visited his brother Shuja‘ in the garden of their sister Jahanara’s estate. Here the brothers arranged that Aurangzeb’s son Muhammad Sultan would marry Shuja‘’s daughter, thereby cementing an alliance between the emperor’s second and third sons.13 It seems that Aurangzeb was already anticipating a post-Shah Jahan era, for which isolating Dara politically was a first step.
From Delhi Aurangzeb continued down to the Deccan, but instead of taking up his position in a new capital deeper south in the Mughal Deccan, he lingered for nine months – from January to October 1653 – in the old provincial capital of Burhanpur. The reason for the delay was an affair of the heart. Notwithstanding that he was thirty-five and already had several wives and children, Aurangzeb now had his first and only truly romantic relationship, so far as we know. The object of his affections was a young girl of uncommon beauty named Hira Bai Zainabadi, a Hindu slave and singer, skilled in music, who was kept in the household of his maternal aunt’s husband. One day the prince happened to notice her as she was strolling, unveiled, by the banks of the Tapti near Burhanpur. He was immediately smitten. In the course of the walk, we are told, Hira Bai:
saw a mango tree laden with fruit. Without considering the respect due to the Prince, she ran forward joyfully and playfully, and leapt up on the tree and plucked a fruit. This movement was a heart-robbing one and it robbed the Prince of his self-control and his virtue … By begging and imploring he obtained possession of her from his indulgent aunt and with all his asceticism and purity he gave his heart to her and used to fill a cup of wine with his own hand and give it to her.
It is stated that she too one day put a cup of wine into the Prince’s hand and urged him to drink it. Though he begged and prayed, she had no pity on him and the Prince was helpless, and was about to drink it, when the sly girl drank it off herself, saying: It was to test your love and not to make your palate bitter with the liquor full of evil.14
Those months in Burhanpur were surely among the most carefree in Aurangzeb’s life – hunting antelope, riding about on horseback, climbing Daulatabad’s fort, visiting the caves of Ellora – probably with Hira Bai at his side. We know, too, that word of the prince’s dalliance with the singer reached the emperor, who in May 1653 sternly reprimanded his son for his personal conduct. In reply, Aurangzeb protested vehemently that ‘the reports recently laid before Your Majesty are a tissue of lies’, and asked rhetorically, ‘how could I sink to such a depth?’.15 Inevitably, Dara Shukoh seized on the salacious rumours swirling through the court, saying, ‘See the piety and abstinence of this hypocritical knave! He has gone to the dogs for the sake of a wench of his aunt’s household.’16
Within a year, however, the girl died, which plunged Aurangzeb into a state of anguish and heartbreak. But the affair would have its after-effects. Niccolao Manucci, a Venetian mercenary who lived in India from 1653 to 1708 and enjoyed close ties to the court, wrote that, long after the girl’s death, Aurangzeb ‘was accustomed to say that God had been very gracious to him by putting an end to that dancing-girl’s life, by reason of whom he had committed so many iniquities, and had run the risk of never reigning through being occupied in vicious practices’.17 In short, Aurangzeb never forgot his brief but doomed affair with Hira Bai. Nor did he forget her snatching that glass of wine from his willing lips. For she had tested and nearly destroyed his self-control, an attribute that as emperor he would consider absolutely essential for maintaining his grip on power.
From Burhanpur, Aurangzeb moved down to Kirki, the new Mughal provincial capital which the prince renamed Aurangabad, after himself. The next four years he devoted to restoring Mughal administration, as it had fallen into a sorry state since his first governorship in the Deccan. Under a series of corrupt imperial officials, revenues had fallen steeply, cultivators had abandoned their villages, and arable land had lapsed into jungle. This was compounded by problems of security. In his communications with his father, the prince repeatedly stressed that, unlike the empire’s interior provinces, or coastal provinces such as Gujarat or Bengal, the Mughal Deccan faced two powerful and rich sultanates, Golconda and Bijapur. Though technically at peace with them since the treaty of 1636, both were hostile and dangerous, requiring substantial troops to keep them in check. But he could collect only a third of the assessed revenue, and in some parts only a tenth, as a result of which the central treasury had to subsidize much of the province’s administrative expenses. Yet the emperor, convinced that the province should be self-supporting, and loath to maintain such subsidies, ordered his son to reclaim the lands of unproductive jagirdars. Aurangzeb complied, which only led the dispossessed nobles to intrigue in court against him, persuading the emperor that his son had been enriching himself at their own expense.
Matters did stabilize, however, after Aurangzeb appointed as his revenue minister Murshid Quli Khan, an Iranian migrant who had joined Aurangzeb’s staff as paymaster during the Balkh campaign. Whereas revenue assessment in the Deccan had traditionally been calculated simply by counting the number of cultivators’ ploughs, the new minister applied the Mughals’ zabt system of revenue assessment and collection. Murshid Quli Khan oversaw teams of surveyors and assessors who went into the villages, measured the land and prepared detailed records on the basis of which accurate revenue assessments could be made. The minister himself reportedly joined his men, dragging measuring chains across fields with his own hands.18 As a result, under Aurangzeb’s administration villagers regained confidence in the honesty of the government, and as agriculture began to flourish, revenue increased. Yet these administrative successes did not end the prince’s feuds with his father. Rather, their quarrels simply shifted to matters of foreign policy. Aurangzeb had always favoured an aggressive posture towards the two remaining Deccan sultanates, Bijapur and Golconda, but felt constrained by the 1636 treaty, which had stabilized Mughal relations with both states, and which the emperor was committed to honouring. Moreover, since Mughal ambassadors to those states reported directly to Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb felt cut out of diplomacy that he regarded as properly belonging in his own domain. But in 1656 events in both states provided the prince with rationales for invading and annexing them, if only his father would sanction such initiatives.
The first to feel Aurangzeb’s pressure was Golconda. The prime minister of that kingdom was another Iranian immigrant, Mir Jumla (d. 1663), who had amassed such immense wealth as a gem-merchant that he raised and commanded his own armies, which roused the intense jealousy of his master, the sultan. Upon learning that the sultan sought to ruin him, Mir Jumla made overtures to Aurangzeb about defecting to Mughal service, which the prince warmly welcomed even though the 1636 treaty had banned such intrigues. When the sultan imprisoned Mir Jumla’s son on account of improper behaviour in court, Shah Jahan sanctioned Aurangzeb’s request to invade if that son were not released. But by the time the sultan set Mir Jumla’s son free, Aurangzeb had already sent a Mughal army to invade and plunder Hyderabad, near Golconda fort. The prince now begged his father for permission to annex the southern quarter of the kingdom (extending south to the Palar River), on the grounds that that enormous area had formerly been the jagir of Mir Jumla, who had recently defected to Mughal service. He also played upon his father’s well-known weakness for jewels, portraying Golconda as a land awash with diamonds and buried treasures, ripe for the picking. In this effort he was helped by Mir Jumla, who presented Shah Jahan with the world’s largest diamond, the celebrated Koh-i-Noor.19 At the same time, Golconda’s agents in Delhi, knowing that Dara would do anything to deny his brother the glory of annexing Golconda’s territory, lobbied Shah Jahan, through Dara, against annexation. But the emperor’s greed, as Aurangzeb correctly calculated, trumped any scruples he might have had. So he approved the annexation.
The year 1656 also proved momentous for Bijapur, the most powerful remaining Deccan sultanate. Because the treaty of 1636 had confirmed his northern frontier with the Mughals, Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah was free to send his armies deep into the south, conquering and annexing territory belonging to the scattered and disunited former vassals of the once-mighty Vijayanagara empire, as described in Chapter Four. These included Ikkeri and Bednur in the western peninsula, Bangalore and Mysore in mid-plateau, and the entire Kaveri valley eastwards to the Bay of Bengal, together with the stronghold of Jinji near the Coromandel coast. But Bijapur would not enjoy these new possessions for long. Aurangzeb had planted Mir Jumla in Delhi with a view to tempting the emperor with ever more diamonds and other jewels in both Golconda’s and Bijapur’s southern territories. In November 1656 the prince’s opportunity arrived with the news of Muhammad ‘Adil Shah’s death, followed by rumours that his eighteen-year-old son was not of legitimate parentage and was therefore barred from lawfully succeeding as sultan. Welcoming such rumours as a gift from heaven, Aurangzeb immediately requested permission to invade and annex the whole of Bijapur on the grounds that it had no legitimate sovereign. Upon receiving his father’s sanction, he besieged the former Bahmani capital of Bidar, then under Bijapur’s rule, and when it fell in March 1657 he moved on to Kalyana, the other formidable stronghold defending Bijapur’s northern frontier. That fort surrendered in August. Seeing that nothing was likely to stop him from besieging and possibly capturing Bijapur’s capital itself, Dara Shukoh, driven by a seething jealousy over his younger brother’s successes, managed to persuade his father to call off the invasion. Bitterly aware that this was all Dara’s doing, Aurangzeb had no choice but to pull back. The stage was set for a decisive moment in Mughal history.