There have been countless entries on Aurangzeb being a tyrant, of him breaking Mughal ties with Sanskrit, of him being a temple destroyer or eroding the multiculturalism of the country. Scholar Audrey Truschke’s upcoming book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court , dispels this myth, citing Aurangzeb as a misunderstood figure. Murad Ali Baig doesn’t quite agree with Audrey’s opinion. In his words, Aurangzeb was “a stubborn, vengeful, vindictive person,” and his latest book Ocean of Cobras traces the life of Aurangzeb’s elder, oft-forgotten brother Dara Shikoh and their battle of succession for their father, Shah Jahan’s throne.
You’ve written on subjects — a lot of diverse subjects.
It’s a matter of following your heart. You have to believe that you cannot be a master of it all; you’ll have to believe that you’re always on a quest to learn, and if the learning is exciting, eventually you might become quite good. I was a student of History who drifted into advertising, marketing, driving tractors and ploughing fields… what’s that got to do with learning history? I had a wonderful teacher, Mohammed Amin, who had a passion for it, and made Mughal characters come to life. And I later realised that what was probably the most significant event in Mughal history was the battle of succession among the sons of Shah Jahan. It was not only the battle for the throne, but for the very soul of India. Because Dara was an eclectic, he was a person who believed in all faiths. He was so liberal-minded that he was a scholar of Sanskrit. He did the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit into Persian, the first translation of 59 of the Upanishads and wrote a book called The Mingling of the Two Oceans to show how the Quran and the Brahma Sutras had so much in common. And it was this heresy that Aurangzeb eventually used against him and had him beheaded. The battle between Dara and Aurangzeb dates back to their childhood — they seemed to be almost star-crossed. I even got their horoscopes cast and found that they were indeed star-crossed.
How important were horoscopes to this book and the battle?
The Mughals believed in omens and premonitions. The title Ocean of Cobras has not been chosen just to shock people — it's chosen because of a very strange event of a whole flood of cobras in Bengal that had caused a great deal of concern to Shuja, Shikoh’s brother, who was the governor of Bengal. He sent a message to the soothsayers who looked into this. The Hindus said ‘oh snakes are very auspicious; it means many treasures’, while the Muslim stargazers had other points of view. It’s a story with lots of nuances — 80 per cent of the story is historically accurate. The fiction part is the narrator — I’ve invented a palace eunuch who fought for both Dara and Aurangzeb, and in the process you get both the characters sketched out, but you also learn about their life in court and the lives of the princesses, which very few people know of.
Dara Shikoh was known to be liberal-minded. If he had won the battle, would it have changed a lot for India?
In my opinion , it would’ve made a dramatic difference. In the time of Shah Jahan, Dara was able to study Sanskrit because there was a liberal atmosphere. But after Aurangzeb won, he created a tremendous hardening not only between Hindus and Muslims, but even between Sunnis and Shias. Now, if Dara had won, of course there’s a question, would Dara, who was a pampered prince, been tough enough to manage such a turbulent empire? It’s a question to which I don’t know the answer. Aurangzeb was down to the last 200 of his soldiers and he had the legs of the elephant chained so it wouldn’t retreat. And when Dara was betrayed by one of his own generals, he was made to get down from his elephant. Once people saw that the howdah was empty, they shouted ‘Dara is dead’, and his army turned and ran. If Dara had won, as he should have and nearly did, Hindu-Muslim relations would’ve been enormously better than they were in Aurangzeb’s time. I don’t think Aurangzeb was as bad as he is made out to be. He actually tried to be just to all his subjects but he was not a pleasant man. Even his 11 children used to tremble when they were in his presence. But he was a beautiful man in many ways.
Dara’s betrayal shares roots with the Mahabharata where Drona is betrayed in a similar fashion…
Betrayal has been a part of the history of many wars in India and in other countries. Look at the Battle of Bosworth; it was entirely because of betrayal. Aurangzeb, surprisingly, used betrayal and treachery unashamedly, but he always punished the traitors.
Research must’ve been a tough task. How did you sort what needed to go in and what had to be left out?
Six years. Fortunately, Mughal history has been quite well-written about. Some of the main sources — I have to confess that I haven’t gone through the Persian sources but there are some excellent translations — were thanks to people like Jadunath Sarkar, Muzaffar Alam, Francois Bernier, and also Babur’s memoirs. The writers were mostly Europeans because most of the artillery was done by them. The Mughals and the Rajputs (the most important part of the fighting arm of the Mughals) had no access to information in the palace, but they used to rely a lot on street gossip. One has to take their rather colourful accounts with a large pinch of salt. Having a Master’s degree in History, I think I knew what was exaggerated and what seemed probable, and in the form of a novel, I could take certain liberties in terms of giving my own spin to it.
