Aurangzeb - Dara Shikoh

Aurangzeb – Dara Shikohtc "Aurangzeb – Dara Shikoh"

August 29^th was intensely hot in Delhi.  The small female elephant on which he rode was covered with dust.  He was himself dressed in filthy coarse cloth with a stained and torn turban loosely tied on his head.  His fourteen-year son sat next to him holding tightly to his arm.  Both father and son sat quietly in the howdah as the elephant walked slowly through the streets of Delhi with Nazar Beg, the slave-soldier watching from behind with his sword drawn.  As they passed through the streets of Delhi, people would give a cursory glance at the pathetic sight and then quickly turn their eyes away.  They were deeply saddened by the spectacle because the man on the elephant was known and beloved by them, but they did not dare to show any emotion openly.

The little procession finally arrived at the prison, and father and son were taken to their cell.  The heat was even more cloying inside the thick walls of the prison. They barely slept that night, their bodies dripping with perspiration, and through the next day there was little change in the foul-smelling air.  The young boy wept quietly, but the father made no sound as he stared blankly at the barren floor of the cell.

Then, towards evening, father and son heard some shouting in the streets outside, and suddenly there was the rush of footsteps in the hall outside the cell.  The door was unlocked and Nazar Beg with two other guards came into the cell.  The young boy, terrified, hugged his father. Nazar Beg pulled the boy away from his father, raised his sword and plunged it into the body of the boy’s father. Nazar Beg and the other guards then proceeded to hack the body to pieces.  The year was 1659.  The man’s name was Dara Shikoh; prince of the realm, the eldest son of Shah Jahan whom everyone had thought would be the successor to Shah Jahan.

But there were still to be even greater indignities, even beyond Dara Shikoh’s death.  By order of his brother, Aurangzeb, the pieces of the corpse of Dara Shikoh were ordered to be paraded through the streets of Delhi on a small female elephant and to be entombed in a vault under the dome of the tomb of Humayun, while the head of Dara Shikoh was ordered to be delivered in a box to the imprisoned Shah Jahan.  Not long afterwards, two other brothers, Shuja and Murad, were also eliminated (the former by an overdose of drugs, the latter by a planned murder). Aurangzeb’s triumph was complete. Of the four brothers whose common mother was Mumtaz Mahal in whose memory Shah Jahan had built the Taj Mahal, only one survived, Aurangzeb, Alamgir I (the ‘world conqueror’).

Fate was hardly kinder to Aurangzeb himself nearly half a century later.  Jadunath Sarkar comments:

The last years of Aurangzeb’s life were unspeakably gloomy.  In the political sphere he found that his lifelong endeavour to govern India justly and strongly had ended in anarchy and disruption throughout the empire. A sense of unutterable loneliness haunted the heart of Aurangzeb in his old age.

For over twenty years he had pursued his Deccan conquests while the empire overall underwent inexorable decay and decline in wealth and spirit.  Personal tragedy surrounded his life on all sides.  It is as if the ghosts of his father and three brothers were wreaking a terrible vengeance.  In his last letter, he comments:

Old age has arrived and weakness has grown strong; strength has left my limbs.  I came alone and am going away alone.  I know not who I am and what I have been doing…. I brought nothing with me into the world, and am carrying away with me the fruits of my sins.  I know not what punishment will fall on me.  Though I have strong hopes of His grace and kindness, yet in view of my acts, anxiety does not leave me.

Finally, on a Friday morning early in 1707, while reciting the Muslim Confession of Faith (the Kalimah or Shahada) in the early morning he breathed his last, eventually to be buried in the Deccan near Daulatabad, far from the splendour and majesty of the Mughal courts in Delhi or Agra.

Dara Shikoh’s execution, though to a large extent due to political reasons because he was the oldest prince and favoured by Shah Jahan for succession, was also especially cruel and vicious because Aurangzeb and the ‘ulama’ had accused him of betraying the ‘religion’ (din) of Islam.  Like his great grandfather, Akbar he had wanted to understand the many spiritual traditions around him.  He had read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, studied Yoga, learned some Sanskrit, worked with Hindu pandits and sadhus, and generally tried to make connections between Islam and its environment in South Asia. But many among the ‘ulama’, encouraged by Aurangzeb, concluded that these efforts threatened the ‘religion’ (din) of Islam.

Extract from Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, May 2001.  ‘Religion as understood in Hindu Culture and the West’.