How intolerant was Aurangzeb?

The Mughal emperor demolished temples but also protected Brahmin priests and granted them land. Hindu nobles in his court were infinitely more than Muslims in Modi’s Council of Ministers

At the inauguration of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor in Varanasi last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “Whenever an Aurangzeb comes along, a Shivaji rises… Invaders like Aurangzeb who put Kashi to the sword have long been relegated to the dark pages of history.” His speech was designed to rekindle the ire of Hindus against Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, on whose order a substantial portion of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple was brought down in 1669. A year later, he had Mathura’s Keshava Deva Temple demolished.

These two instances have been taken from historian Audrey Truschke’s list of temples the Mughal emperor razed during his reign. But Truschke also documents, in Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, evidence of Aurangzeb protecting Brahmin priests and gifting land to temples.

Modi will not tell Varanasi that Aurangzeb, in 1659, ordered the city officials to desist from interfering in the affairs of local temples. In 1680, he ensured protection to a Varanasi ascetic, Bhagwant Gosain, from harassment. In 1687, Aurangzeb gave uninhabited land on a ghat in Varanasi to Ramjivan Gosain to build houses for “pious Brahmins and holy faqirs”. To the Jangam, a Shaivite sect based there, he restored land unfairly confiscated from them.

Contrast Aurangzeb’s concern for Varanasi with Modi’s indifference to the disruption of the Friday congregational prayer of Muslims in Gurugram, which is 30 km from his residence. The above examples have been cherry picked from Truschke’s longer list of instances that demonstrate Aurangzeb’s regard for Hinduism and its followers.

Modi will not explain to Varanasi the contradictory strands of Aurangzeb’s religious policy because it would shatter the stereotype of Muslim rulers destroying temples and converting Hindus to Islam. The Hindu Right claims that 60,000 temples were demolished under the Muslim rule. Historian Richard M Eaton puts that figure to just 80. Eaton has been faulted for counting simultaneous destruction of temples in a city, as apparently happened in Varanasi during Shah Jahan’s reign, as one.

In a 2015 interview to me, Eaton said the precise number of temples desecrated in Indian history cannot be tallied, because the evidence from the past is like a jigsaw puzzle which has 30 to 50 per cent of pieces missing. A complete picture of the Muslim rule cannot be had, Eaton said, adding that his figure of 80 destroyed temples was based on indisputable evidence.

Numbers apart, Truschke is right when she says, “A historically legitimate view of Aurangzeb must explain why he protected temples more often than he demolished them.” Historians say Muslim rulers often but not always targetted temples when these became loci of political subversion. The Brahmins of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple were accused of facilitating Shivaji’s escape from Aurangzeb’s custody. The Mathura temple was patronised by Aurangzeb’s rival, Dara Shikoh.

Forget the past, were not military operations conducted against armed militants holed up in Amritsar’s Golden Temple in 1984? The same fate for the same reason befell Charar-e-Sharief in Kashmir in 1995. Both religious sites were extensively damaged. Even modern states do not tolerate subversion.

The portrayal of Aurangzeb as a zealot is contradicted by the presence of high-ranking Hindu nobles in his administration. Historian M Athar Ali calculated that Hindus constituted 22.5 per cent of all nobles under emperor Akbar. At the end of Aurangzeb’s reign in 1707, the 22.5 per cent ballooned to 31.6 per cent.

By contrast, Muslims constitute just 1.28 per cent of Modi’s Union Council of Ministers. Chandar Bhan Brahman and Raja Raghunath were among Aurangzeb’s most trustworthy and powerful ministers. The only Muslim minister in the Modi government oversees the relatively less important ministry of minority affairs.

The iconoclasm of Muslim rulers seems exceptional because the national movement imagined ancient India as the land of ahimsa and innocent of imperial violence. Yet we know that ruling dynasties such as the Pratiharas, Pallavas, Chandellas, Rashtrakutas, Pandiyans and many others raided temples, whisked away deities patronised by their rivals and, like Muslim rulers, would occasionally demolish temples.

Likewise, school textbooks do not narrate the story that Buddhism disappeared from India because its followers were hounded by Brahmins and their royal patrons. Buddhists were tortured, including having their tongues plucked out, and killed.  Monasteries were attacked and burnt down. Historian DN Jha’s Against the Grain and archaeologist Giovanni Verardi’s Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India furnish a long list of monasteries destroyed or turned into Hindu temples.

Verardi writes that when British surveyor Francis Buchanan reached Bodh Gaya in 1811, he found there just one surviving Buddhist, who listed sacred Buddhist spots appropriated by Hindus in that district. Given Hindutva’s refusal to compromise on the Babri Masjid site in the past, the current joint Hindu-Buddhist control over the Mahabodhi temple complex is emblematic of injustice rather than gracious accommodation.

Suppressed histories explain why Modi can so easily weaponise the memory of Aurangzeb to harvest votes. Yet his electoral triumphs will neither make India into a Vishwa Guru, or teacher of the world, nor frighten China into retreating from territories India claims as its own. It seems Modi’s solace lies in taking vengeance on rulers who died centuries ago.

The writer is a senior journalist

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