Why we should oppose the Aurangzebing of Aurangzeb

By Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Dated: 9/1/2015 1:24:16 AM

He is not in fact being executed by the act of renaming a road - he is being brought to life again.

Aurangzeb was a despot.
He not only imprisoned his ailing father, the Fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan , but had all three of his brothers the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja and Murad, murdered. 'Murdered' is to put it mildly.
Both confident and insecure, Aurangzeb then went on to ensure his hegemony as the Sixth Emperor by having Dara's son Sulaiman, imprisoned and poisoned in a slow and tortuous procedure that made the future Crown Prince mad before death claimed him.
He also set an example to all dissenters by having the free-thinking mystic Sarmad beheaded at the Jama Masjid, Delhi, for blasphemy, the Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur executed for objecting to conversions and the leader of the Maratha Confederacy, Sambhaji, caught and killed for just being what he was.
Apart from what he did to those he felt were a threat to him, Aurangzeb presided over a Hindustan where Hindus and Sikhs were not just second class citizens but a scared and persecuted people.
Contemporary historians have tried to see Aurangzeb in a more nuanced light than those who documented his tyrannical rule in sharp terms. His later years, they say, were sublimated by a measure of self-pity and even remorse. And he remained personally austere. For his own personal expenses he is said to have sewn caps and calligraphed copies of the Quran.
Contrasting sharply from his father's architectural marvel, the Taj Mahal, Aurangzeb's own open-air grave is an austere affair, in a courtyard of the shrine of a sufi saint, in Khuldabad, near Aurangabad where he died. But no historian can explain away Aurangzeb's sadistic 49 years' rule.
That the British Raj wanted to feel and be seen as a successor of the Mughals as a royal genre, is clear. The Viceroy's House , now Rashtrapati Bhavan, facing the Purana Qila, was intended to be a new Fort, grander even, than the Red Fort. That city-planners should have named roads in Lutyens' New Delhi after the Mughal Emperors is no matter of surprise. With Babur, Akbar and Shah Jehan (Jehangir having been skipped in absent-mindedness) Aurangzeb got a road to him as well, a long and leafy road that connected other such roads and led to many important houses, official and privately-owned including Number Ten, that Mohammed Ali Jinnah owned.
Many have felt - and suggested - that Aurangzeb's unfortunate but hugely inspirational brother, the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, should have a road named after him in New Delhi. The syncretic Prince who had the Upanishads translated into Persian and wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain ("The Confluence of the Two Seas") on the subject of mystical and pluralistic affinities between Sufi and Vedantic speculation, fits seamlessly into the plural ethos of the Constitution of India. To have a road or public building named after him would be as natural in the capital of the Republic of India as naming roads after the Mughal Emperors was natural in Lutyens' time.
But not even the most ardent of Dara scholars and enthusiasts, whose number rises all the time, ever thought of suggesting that Aurangzeb Road be re-named, much less that it be re-named Dara Shukoh Road. That would be a most un-Dara thing to suggest, apart from being puerile history and childish civic planning..............

For complete article visit http://www.wire.in)

 

Video

The Gaza Crisis and the Global Fallout... Read More
 

FACEBOOK

 

Daily horoscope

 

Weather