‘Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood figure’
- “Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a series of cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s and 1650s.” Painting shows the marriage procession of Shikoh. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Source: National Museum, Delhi
- Audrey Truschke
- Aurangzeb. Photo: CC 3.0 SA
Scholar Audrey Truschke says we should not make the error of attributing Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged bigotry
In an email interview, Audrey Truschke, Mellon
postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford
University, shares with Anuradha Raman the experiences of writing her book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, to be published in February 2016, and argues forcefully in favour of acknowledging diversity in India.
The
present Bharatiya Janata Party government believes Mughals are not part
of India’s history. Your book is about how Sanskrit, sought to be made
mainstream by the government, flourished under the Mughals. How do we
reconcile the two?
We don’t reconcile the two
perspectives. Rather, we ask two key questions. One, who is on firmer
historical ground in their claims? Two, what are the political reasons
for the BJP wanting to erase the Mughals (or at least most of the
Mughals) from India’s past? The bulk of my work concerns the honest
excavation of history. The Mughals are a significant part of Indian
history, and Sanskrit is a significant part of the story of the Mughal
empire. Those facts may be inconvenient for the BJP and others, but as a
historian I do not temper my investigation of the past in deference to
present-day concerns. However, I realise that history matters in the
present, perhaps especially in modern South Asia. One present-day
implication of my work is to point up the flimsy basis of the BJP’s
version of India’s past.
In an ironical way, as
the present government fights to push Sanskrit into mainstream
discourse, your work concentrates on the Mughals, whom the BJP dislikes,
and their engagement with Sanskrit.
The BJP only
wants a certain version of Sanskrit in the mainstream. They no doubt
love Kalidasa, but I cannot imagine the BJP endorsing students to read
the Sanskrit accounts of the Mughals written by Jains in the 16th and
17th centuries. India has a great treasure in its Sanskrit tradition,
but that treasure is not only classical poetry and the Indian epics, but
also the immense diversity of Sanskrit literature.
Who were the Mughal rulers under whom there was active exchange of Sanskrit and Persian ideas, in your account?
Sanskrit
flourished in the royal Mughal court primarily under three emperors:
Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. However, we should not make the error
of attributing Aurangzeb’s lack of interest in Sanskrit to his alleged
bigotry. Aurangzeb is a severely misunderstood historical figure who has
suffered perhaps more than any of the other Mughal rulers from
present-day biases. There are two main reasons why Sanskrit ceased to be
a major part of Mughal imperial life during Aurangzeb’s rule. One,
during the 17th century, Sanskrit was slowly giving way to Hindi. This
was a wider literary shift in the subcontinent, and even under Shah
Jahan we begin to see imperial attention directed towards Hindi-language
intellectuals at the expense of Sanskrit. Aurangzeb’s reign simply
happen to coincide with the waning of Sanskrit and the rise of literary
Hindi.
Second, as most Indians know, Aurangzeb beat
out Dara Shikoh for the Mughal throne. Dara Shikoh had been engaged in a
series of cross-cultural exchanges involving Sanskrit during the 1640s
and 1650s. Thus, from Aurangzeb’s perspective, breaking Mughal ties with
the Sanskrit cultural world was a way to distinguish his idioms of rule
from those of the previous heir apparent. In short, Aurangzeb decided
to move away from what little remained of the Mughal interest in
Sanskrit as a political decision, rather than as a cultural or religious
judgment.
As a side note, let me clarify that while
Akbar inaugurated Mughal engagements with Sanskrit, he did so for
slightly different reasons than many people think. Akbar’s reputation is
that he was open-minded and tolerant, almost a protosecular figure.
This can be a misleading characterisation. Akbar was interested in
Sanskrit for its political valence in his empire, not as some personal
religious quest. Akbar also had no qualms about harshly judging
perspectives that he viewed as beyond the pale. A good example is that
he questioned Jain thinkers about whether they were monotheists because
to be otherwise would mean being evicted from the Mughal court (Jains
assured him that they believed in God).
What was the interaction between the Mughal elites and Brahmin Hindus and Jain religious groups like?
Brahmans,
for example, assisted with Mughal translations of Sanskrit texts into
Persian. The method was that Brahmans would read the Sanskrit text,
verbally translate it into Hindi (their shared language with the
Mughals), and then the Mughals would write down the translation in
Persian. Jains and Brahmans alike assisted the Mughals with astrology.
Brahmans cast Sanskrit-based horoscopes for the Mughal royal family. On
at least one occasion, Jains performed a ceremony to counteract an
astrological curse on Jahangir’s newborn daughter. My forthcoming book, Culture of Encounters, devotes an entire chapter to reconstructing the social history of links between Mughal elites and Brahmans/Jains.
You
argue that the ideology underpinning violence — such as what took place
in the 2002 pogrom, in which more than 1,000 Muslims died, or the
current intolerance towards them — erases Mughal history and writes
religious conflicts into Indian history where there was none, thereby
justifying modern religious intolerance. Is it correct to then deduce
that there was no religious conflict in the court of the Mughals?
No.
First, there was plenty of violence in Mughal India. Violence and
conflict are enduring features of the human experience and I would never
suggest otherwise. Even under Akbar, violence was commonplace. A far
trickier question, however, is, how much Mughal-led violence was
religious-based or motivated by religious conflicts? Generally, the
Mughals acted violently towards political foes (whether they were
Rajput, Muslim, Hindu, or otherwise was irrelevant). It is very
difficult for many modern people to accept that violence in pre-modern
India was rarely religiously motivated. In this sense, pre-colonial
India looked very different than pre-modern Europe, for example. But we
lack historical evidence that the Mughals attacked religious foes. On
the contrary, some scholars have even suggested that modern “Western”
ideas about religious toleration were, in part, inspired by what early
European travellers witnessed in the Mughal Empire.
That
said, there were limited instances when the Mughals persecuted specific
individuals over religious differences. A good example is that Akbar
sent a few of the Muslim ulama on hajj to Mecca, which meant that they were effectively exiled from the court. Some of these ulama were murdered on their way out of India.
Is there a problem with a Marxist interpretation of history as is being argued now by the BJP government?
Marxist
history is limiting, in my opinion. This strain of thought tends to
emphasise social class and economic factors in determining historical
trajectories. Modern historians have a much wider range of approaches at
their disposal that better situate us to understand other aspects of
the past.
Mughal history is such a contentious
part of history in the Hindu nationalist imagination. How do you propose
to shed light, and create space for a scholarly engagement with the
period? It also comes at a time when there is a wave of revisionism in
India.
My approach is that of a historian. I seek
primary sources from numerous languages and archives, read deeply in
secondary scholarship, and attempt to reconstruct the most accurate
vision of pre-colonial India possible. My work has plenty of present-day
implications, but those come secondary and explicitly after the serious
historical work. This approach is unappealing to many in modern India
(and across the world). It is painstaking, requires specialist
knowledge, can be slow, and often leads to nuanced conclusions. But
there are also plenty of people, non-academics, who view what is going
on in modern India with scepticism. For those who want it, my work
offers a historically sound foundation for challenging modern political
efforts to revise the past.
What are the dangers of rewriting history?
So
far as the dangers of rewriting history and subscribing to narrow
interpretations of specific texts, there are many risks. One is that we
risk rising intolerance going forward, something already witnessed on
both popular and elite levels in 21st century India. Another risk is
that we cheapen the past. India has a glorious history and one of the
richest literary inheritances of any place on earth — it would be
unfortunate to constrict our minds to the point where we can no longer
appreciate these treasures.
You argue that “a more
divisive interpretation of the relationship between the Mughals and
Hindus actually developed during the colonial period from 1757 to 1947”,
a legacy that the present Modi government appears to have inherited.
But while the British positioned themselves as neutral saviours, who
will emerge as the neutral saviours now?
In the
BJP vision, I believe that the new saviour is the BJP itself and
affiliated Hindu nationalist groups that will restore India to its
proper, true nature as a land for Hindus. This is an appealing ideology
for many people, which is part of what makes it so dangerous. I maintain
that India’s greatness is found in its astonishing diversity, not some
invented, anachronistic, monolithic Hindu past. Part of the sad irony of
the BJP’s emphasis on rewriting Indian history is precisely that India
has a deep and compelling history, which so many seem intent to ignore.
