In his personal habits, ‘Alamgir was notoriously austere and abstemious – traits which converted into a religious sensibility that was pious to the point of puritanical. When he was a prince, some regarded this as an affectation fashioned to mask a secret ambition to power.75 During his struggle to win the Peacock Throne, his piety served to distance him both from the lavish indulgences of his father – whom one modern historian calls a ‘glorified jeweler’76 – and the religious adventurism of his elder brother Dara. Further defining his religious posture were the events surrounding his actual accession to supreme power. This was because the crisis of 1657–9 was not a typical Turko-Mongol, or even Mughal war of succession in which the princes and their armies engaged in an armed struggle over a vacant throne. The problem this time was that Shah Jahan had not died, even though it was widely believed when war broke out that he already had, or that his death was imminent. By November 1657, just two months after he fell ill, the stricken emperor had fully recovered. By that time, though, military orders had already been issued, armies had been mobilized, one son had already crowned himself, and another would follow suit a month later. The customary machinery for replacing a deceased sovereign having been set in motion, the inevitable struggle had to be played out to the full, until the drama’s final curtain would come down with a new emperor formally installed on the Peacock Throne.
For his part, Prince Aurangzeb had left the Deccan for Delhi genuinely believing that Shah Jahan was at the point of death, if not already dead. But, by the time he reached Agra and found his father in good health, what had begun as a war of succession – he had already defeated Dara’s armies twice – suddenly became an act of usurpation, and the usurpation of another person’s land or property is prohibited in Islamic law.77 For a man professing strict observance of that law, the newly crowned emperor suddenly found himself in an untenable position, the more so when experts on canon law refused to sanction his seizure of power since the lawful sovereign, his own father, was still living. In this circumstance Aurangzeb solicited the opinion of ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the former qazi of Patan, Gujarat, who obligingly decreed that since Shah Jahan was physically unfit to govern (despite evidence to the contrary), the throne was virtually vacant. Aurangzeb’s accession as ‘Alamgir had therefore not violated Islamic law. As a reward for this valuable hermeneutic service, ‘Abd al-Wahhab was made the empire’s chief qazi; he would go on to become one of the most corrupt chief judges in Mughal history.78
The nature of ‘Alamgir’s rise to supreme power – a bloody usurpation accompanied by the elimination of his brothers and the confinement of his father – had far-reaching consequences. Notwithstanding ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s whitewashing of the process, the emperor craved legitimacy in the eyes of the wider Islamic world, for which purpose he sought the blessings of the guardian of the holiest shrines in the Muslim world, the Sharif of Mecca.79 In 1659, shortly after his grand coronation, he sent a considerable sum of money to the Sharif, to be distributed to the needy there. But to his dismay, the authorities in Mecca turned down his gift for the same reason his own jurists had initially rejected his claims to the throne – that he could not legally be sovereign as long as his father was still alive.80 Undeterred, several years later he sent gifts valued at 660,000 rupees to the Sharif.81 Finally, in 1666, shortly after Shah Jahan had died, the Sharif sent ‘Alamgir a belated congratulations on his accession, together with a sacred relic – the broom and some dust from the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina – which the emperor received with much solemnity.82
‘Alamgir’s relations with his family also influenced his religious posture. During and after the hard-fought succession struggle, it became politically necessary to magnify the differences between himself and Dara Shukoh. In contrast to his elder brother, whom he publicly portrayed as a deviant backslider whose execution was justified partly on religious grounds, Aurangzeb projected himself as a correct Muslim. With Shah Jahan he ratcheted up this posture still higher. In bitter written exchanges with his father, confined to his palace in Agra, the new emperor self-righteously posed as the champion of Islam, stressing that Dara had usurped power and promoted Hinduism during their father’s illness. He even claimed that his own victories at Dharmat and Samugarh demonstrated divine sanction for his enterprise.83 Accordingly, soon after his coronation he ceased participating in courtly functions that conflicted with his understanding of Islam, such as celebrating the Persian New Year’s Day (Nauruz), patronizing music and art, appearing at the jharokha at sunrise, applying tika on the foreheads of subordinate kings, or having himself weighed against gold or silver on his birthday. His abstention from music appears to have been a personal matter that was not imposed on others.84 Other measures, such as prohibiting gambling or consuming alcohol, were intended to extend beyond the court, but they were blatantly ignored even by his closest courtiers.85
To the wider public, meanwhile, he sought to justify – or perhaps atone for – his violent path to power by presenting himself in the guise of a pious and beneficent ruler in the mould of a sultan of Delhi such as Iltutmish or Muhammad bin Tughluq. He ordered that the Islamic confession of faith not appear on Mughal coins, lest the sacred words be intentionally or inadvertently defaced. He replaced the public celebration of the Persian New Year (Nauruz) with that of ‘Eid al-Fitr, the feast that ends the fasting in the Muslim month of Ramazan. And he established the office of public censor (muhtisib), an official charged with enforcing fairness in the marketplace.86 He also ordered the abolition of custom duties previously levied on Muslim merchants, leaving in place those imposed on Hindu traders.87 However, local authorities in Gujarat largely ignored the order and, even when it was briefly enforced, Hindu merchants simply arranged for complicit Muslims to handle their goods for them.88 Referring to non-Muslim religious practices performed in public, the French physician François Bernier, who visited India during ‘Alamgir’s first decade of rule, noted that, once in power, ‘the Great Mogol, though a Mahometan, permits these ancient and superstitious practices; not wishing, or not daring, to disturb the Gentiles [Hindus] in the free exercises of their religion.’89 Around 1688 an Englishman travelling through India contrasted what he perceived as the official tolerance during ‘Alamgir’s reign with the intolerance then prevailing in his own country.90
On the other hand, in 1679 ‘Alamgir issued an order reinstating the discriminatory jizya tax, effectively a property tax levied on all non-Muslim males except those in imperial service. The order for this tax, which had never been imposed by a previous Mughal ruler and was only occasionally collected by the Delhi sultans, was definitely carried out. Considering the timing of the decree, it has been suggested that the emperor felt the need to make some dramatic move to rally the empire’s Muslims around major political and military initiatives then being contemplated for dealing with deteriorating affairs in the Deccan.91 Ever since 1663 Shivaji had flagrantly defied Mughal authority, and by the late 1670s, with both Bijapur and Golconda often colluding with the new Maratha kingdom, the emperor’s Deccan policy lay in shambles. The order for the jizya tax was followed directly by a full-scale invasion of the plateau. To the juridically minded emperor, moreover, non-Muslims living under Mughal rule were, in a narrowly legal sense, a protected population (dhimmi) who were obliged to pay this tax to compensate for not serving in the state’s armed forces. Curiously, though, to the contemporary Hindu writer Bhimsen, it was not the tax itself that was offensive; rather, it was the corruption of the venal officials who had been recruited from the lower ranks of the Muslim clergy to collect it.92
In any event, ‘Alamgir himself would not have seen the imposition of the jizya tax as politically destabilizing, given the evidence that throughout his reign he scrupulously avoided letting religious considerations threaten the empire’s political stability. On one occasion he referred to his chief qazi the question of whether captured Hindu rebels should be treated differently from captured Muslim rebels. The qazi decreed a light punishment for Muslim rebels, but release for Hindus if they converted to Islam. ‘Alamgir, however, returned the decree, ordering that a different ruling should be found, so ‘that control over the kingdom may not be lost’. Accordingly, the qazi and his learned advisers returned a new judgment, that all the prisoners should be executed regardless of their religion, a decision the emperor accepted.93 On another occasion, a Sunni Muslim petitioned the emperor for a post as imperial paymaster on the grounds that the two existing paymasters were both Shi‘i, and that appointing him would bring sectarian balance to the office. Irritated by the request, ‘Alamgir replied:
What connection have earthly affairs with religion? And what right have administrative works to meddle with bigotry? ‘For you is your religion and for me is mine’ [Qur’an 109:6]. If this rule [suggested by you] were established, it would be my duty to extirpate all the [Hindu] Rajahs and their followers. Wise men disapprove of the removal from the office of able officers.94
After all, Rajputs, Marathas, Brahmins, Jains, Kayasthas and other non-Muslims were essential for running the empire’s vast administrative and military systems. This much is seen in the significant increase in the number of Hindus serving in ‘Alamgir’s mansabdari corps. Under Shah Jahan, Hindus comprised less than a quarter (22.4 per cent) of all nobles holding a rank of 1000 zat or higher. By the last years of ‘Alamgir’s reign that figure had risen to nearly a third (31.6 per cent) of the total.95
In keeping with the Mughal and Delhi sultanate precedent of viewing non-Muslim monuments within their sovereign domain as deserving of state protection, ‘Alamgir supported temples with cash or land grants. He once ordered officials in Benares to punish miscreants who had been harassing Brahmins in charge of that city’s Hindu temples.96 And he described the temple complex of Ellora, which he visited in the 1650s, as ‘one of the marvels of the work of the true transcendent Artisan [God]’.97 But his treatment of temples patronized by, or associated with, state enemies was another matter. Muslim sovereigns since the late twelfth century, and Hindu rajas since at least the seventh, had looted, redefined or destroyed royal temples of enemy kings as the normal means of detaching defeated rulers from the most prominent manifestations of their former sovereign authority, thereby rendering such rulers politically impotent.98 For the Mughals, temples formerly patronized by enemy kings became state property once that king had been defeated and his former territory annexed to the empire. However, if a Hindu patron of such a temple rebelled against the state, both he and the temple were liable for punishment. Such a principle would explain ‘Alamgir’s destruction of temples in Kuch Bihar (north of Bengal) after local rajas there defied Mughal authority in 1661. The same principle accounted for his destruction of the Vishvanath Temple in Benares in 1669: people related to that temple’s patron were believed to have facilitated Shivaji’s escape from Agra, and hence were state enemies. Similarly, the Keśavaḍeva Temple in Mathura, which had been supported by imperial grants and was therefore considered state property, was destroyed in 1670 in the wake of a serious Jat rebellion in the region that claimed the life of the city’s commandant and patron of its congregational mosque. Moreover, three Brahmins in Mathura had harboured the son of Shivaji shortly after the latter had escaped detention in Agra. In 1679–80 ‘Alamgir ordered the destruction of prominent temples in Rajasthan – including Khandela, Udaipur and Jodhpur – once it was established that they, too, had been associated with anti-state rebels.99
How, then, did non-Muslims view ‘Alamgir and his actions regarding religion? Among Rajputs, representations of the emperor could vary enormously, even at the same court. At the Sisodiya court at Udaipur, a text composed just before the rebellion of 1679–81 portrays ‘Alamgir as benevolent towards Rana Raja Singh, the raja of Mewar. However, another text, composed during the rebellion while the Sisodiya elite had retreated to the hills and Mughal troops were occupying their capital, vilifies and demonizes the emperor, portraying him as representing a community perennially in conflict with Hindus. But then a third text, completed at the same court shortly after the suppression of the rebellion and the normalization of Mughal–Sisodiya relations, depicts ‘Alamgir as a benevolent ally of the Sisodiya ruler, whom the emperor appreciated and rewarded.100 Clearly, such varied representations depended on specific historical contexts. Similarly, in today’s more religiously polarized climate it is widely believed that Krishna images were forcibly removed from the Braj heartland to Rajasthan in the 1660s and 1670s owing to ‘Alamgir’s alleged iconoclastic zeal. Contemporary evidence, however, suggests that the images were moved not because of the emperor’s alleged iconoclasm but because of insecurity due to local Jat uprisings and threats by sectarian rivals to appropriate them for themselves – conflicts that the emperor himself is said to have mediated.101
Taking a much wider perspective, ‘Alamgir’s India – unlike South Asia in the colonial and post-colonial eras – appears to have been conceptually integrated even while culturally diverse. This much is seen in the memoir of Bhimsen, who portrays the India of his day, the late seventeenth century, as filled with the great cities of the ‘heaven-protected’ Mughal empire as well as with the seven famous rivers and the seven sacred centres of Hindu mythic geography. At the symbolic centre of that seamlessly interwoven realm, and holding it together conceptually, stood ‘Alamgir, sacred king and heir to the spiritual charisma of his Timurid ancestors.102 Bhimsen describes an incident during the monsoon of 1697 when the Bhima flooded its banks at ‘Alamgir’s camp at Machnur, drowning many people and bringing its waters to within a metre of the emperor’s tent. With the whole camp plunged in a state of distress, the emperor wrote a prayer on a slip of paper and cast it on the river’s surface. The water immediately subsided and, records Bhimsen, ‘the prayer of the God-devoted Emperor was accepted by God, and the world became composed again’.103 What actually happened on that day we will never know with certainty; but Bhimsen’s memoir suggests how Indians of ‘Alamgir’s own time interpreted the meaning of the great flood of 1697.104
Similarly, in 1672 a peasant uprising, the Satnami revolt, broke out in Narnaul (in modern Haryana), in the course of which a prophetess appeared proclaiming that she could use spells to raise an invisible army. When the uprising took an alarming turn, the emperor dispatched a large force with banners on which he wrote prayers and magical figures with his own hand. Fighting magic with magic, ‘Alamgir was seen by his contemporary subjects as having bridged the spiritual and mundane worlds. Indeed, he was popularly known as ‘Alamgir zinda pir, ‘Alamgir, the living saint.105 It was even believed that he was capable of making himself invisible whenever he wished, and could instantly appear in Mecca and converse with the Prophet Muhammad. ‘From this cause,’ noted Manucci, ‘the people revere him, and hold him in the greatest respect.’106 Indians of his day assessed the spiritual status of their leaders by their observed actions. On one occasion, the emperor spent a week in Gulbarga paying respects to the shrine of the Deccan’s most renowned Sufi shaikh, Muhammad Gisudaraz, and conversing with reclusive Sufis there. For Bhimsen, the emperor’s behaviour was salutary and redemptive, as would be expected of a sovereign perceived as connecting the divine and earthly worlds. By contrast, Shivaji’s plundering of the town of Jalna, home of a spiritually gifted holy man named Jan Muhammad, was in Bhimsen’s view a reckless act unbefitting a proper sovereign, and the probable cause of the Maratha king’s untimely death.107
Such contemporary observations highlight a fundamental tension between two opposing conceptions of Mughal sovereignty – the one that ‘Alamgir had inherited, and the one that he would promote. By his Indo-Timurid forebears he was bequeathed the identity of a sacred king, a lustrous persona that his father had assiduously cultivated and that his subjects now invested in him. It was also a persona that ‘Alamgir occasionally and strategically adopted, as seen in the several episodes cited above. But notwithstanding his popular reputation as a ‘living saint’, ‘Alamgir came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by impersonal law – namely, the shari‘a of Hanafi Sunnis – administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal system. At the same time, the emperor took dramatic and very public steps to place himself beneath that law. In 1675 he proclaimed that anybody in the empire with a legal claim against him could appeal to specially appointed judicial officials who were sent to every city, province and neighbouring territory of the empire precisely to hear such claims.108
It was not only the emperor’s puritanical character that led him to embrace such a sweeping agenda for himself and for the empire.109 Nor was it just the political necessity of distancing himself from his bitter rival Dara Shukoh who, lacking military competence, had wrongly imagined that embracing the Timurid ideology of sacred kingship would elevate him to the Peacock Throne. ‘Alamgir’s goal of replacing his dynasty’s tradition of sacred kingship with an impersonal judicial state actually preceded the War of Succession. Formative in his thinking were the years 1645 to 1647 when, while still a prince, he was sent to govern Gujarat, a province then seething with Shi‘i or quasi-Shi‘i millennial movements. One of these, the Mahdavi, was initiated by a fifteenth-century charismatic leader, Muhammad Jaunpuri (d. 1505), who had professed to be the Mahdi, a figure who in Shi‘i thought will return at the end of the millennium to restore the world to order. When Prince Aurangzeb reached Ahmedabad, he was met by a body of anti-Shi‘i and anti-millennial Sunni clerics who, determined to mobilize the new governor’s power to suppress a sect they regarded as heretical, arranged to have the Mahdavi leader interrogated in open court. When that leader provoked the Sunni clerics with militant language, Aurangzeb expelled him and his followers from the city.110 Soon thereafter, Aurangzeb had to deal with a more openly Shi‘i group, the Isma‘ili Bohras. This was a prosperous merchant community in Gujarat whose leader, or da‘i, provided spiritual direction for the community until the expected Shi‘i messiah, or imam, would (re)appear at the end of time to cleanse the world. Again, urged on by vehemently anti-Shi‘i clerics, Aurangzeb presided over a religious interrogation in which his Sunni clerics levelled serious charges against the Bohra da‘i, such as the claim that the sect’s veneration of the Prophet’s son-in-law ‘Ali amounted to idolatry. Under intense pressure by the clerics, the da‘i ultimately confessed to all the charges and was executed.
As a consequence of his experience governing Gujarat and collaborating with its Sunni clerics in suppressing millennial movements, the prince came to appreciate the use of judicial power not just for dealing with such phenomena – throughout his reign, he persecuted Gujarat’s Isma‘ili Bohras – but for maintaining public order generally. This, in turn, had several consequences. First and most immediately, once he became emperor, ‘Alamgir drew into his inner ruling circle some of the most powerful anti-Shi‘i clerics with whom he had cooperated while governor of Gujarat and the Deccan. During his second governorship of the Deccan (1652–9), he had made Qazi ‘Abd al-Wahhab, a member of an old family of qazis in northern Gujarat, his legal expert (mufti); thereafter he became one of the emperor’s closest and most powerful advisers. This was the same man who issued the judgment legitimizing the prince’s seizure of the Peacock Throne, for which he was rewarded by being made the empire’s supreme judge (qazi al-quzat), a post he held until his death in 1675. For forty of ‘Alamgir’s forty-nine years as emperor, Gujarati clerics held the highest positions in the imperial judiciary. All were anti-millennial and anti-Shi‘i.111
Throughout ‘Alamgir’s reign, socio-religious movements of the sort he had earlier confronted in Gujarat repeatedly broke out – some of them Shi‘i-based, some not – to most of which he and his judiciary had the same response: investigate, interrogate, then either rectify with persuasion or suppress with fines or violence. Such encounters informed his efforts to place the entire edifice of the Mughal state on a footing that privileged impersonal law above the sacred king. Visually, ‘Alamgir’s support of the clerical establishment was symbolized by the most ambitious monument he ever patronized: Lahore’s splendid Badshahi Mosque (1671–3), for more than three centuries the largest mosque in the world [see Fig. 18]. But a more telling move was his sponsoring the codification and promulgation of the Hanafi Sunni legal code in a single, massive and authoritative compendium: the Fatawa-i ‘Alamgiri. This comprehensive manual of Islamic jurisprudence, which took a team of nearly fifty scholars eight years to complete (1667–75), streamlined procedures and standardized rulings in what had previously been a chaotic judicial environment. Before its publication, a welter of law books had produced confusion and conflicting rulings by local judges across the empire.112 The new manual also sought to harmonize the law as applied by India’s qazis with the legal norms established by Hanafi jurists of the eighth century. Most importantly, its compilation and dissemination placed the empire under a comprehensive legal code intended to supplant the mystery and majesty of a sacred sovereign. Indeed, the importance ‘Alamgir attached to this project compares with the priority his father had given to building the Taj Mahal, except that Shah Jahan’s already world-famous tomb and ‘Alamgir’s Fatawa-i ‘Alamgiri reflect sharply opposing visions of kingship. If the former portrays Shah Jahan as the resplendent sovereign of a sacred realm, the latter reveals ‘Alamgir as the pious, would-be patron of a judicial state.
Given the widespread use of Islamic law by diverse communities in ‘Alamgir’s India, the emperor’s aim of standardizing that legal tradition and using it as a basis of Mughal sovereignty made a certain sense.113 In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the shari‘a in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination.114 The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, ‘the brahmin, the khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi’s court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason’.115 And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India’s ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word shari‘a as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather, it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of ‘legal’.116 Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. ‘Alamgir’s project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.
However, the Timurid ideology of a sacred sovereign, conspicuously invoked by the emperor’s nearest predecessors Shah Jahan, Jahangir and Akbar, could not easily be abandoned. It was too deeply ingrained in the culture of the empire’s subjects, despite their various ethnic or religious identities. For generations, such an ideology had conferred an aura of legitimacy on Mughal emperors. Consequently, by enshrining law and empowering the judiciary while playing down the Timurid notion of sacred kingship, the emperor was sawing off the branch on which he sat, for his authority rested on being accepted as a sacred king.117