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History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c45.s7: §9. Aurangzib's early bigotry.

History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c45.s7

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§9. Aurangzib's early bigotry.

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Aurangzib began his attack on Hinduism* in an insidious way. In the first year of his reign, in a charter granted to a priest of Benares, he avowed that his religion *forbade him to allow the building of new temples*, but did not enjoin the destruction of old ones. During his viceroyalty of Gujrat, 1644, he had desecrated the recently built Hindu temple of Chintaman in Ahmadabad by killing a cow in it and then turned the building into a mosque. He had at that time also demolished many other HINDU TEMPLES in the province; these were probably new constructions. An order issued early in his reign has been preserved in which the local officers in every town and village of Orissa from Katak to Medinipur are called upon to pull down all temples, including even clay huts, built during the last 10 or 12 years, and to allow no old temple to be repaired.

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∗ All the authorities on Aurangzib's temple demolition are collected together in Appendix V, and no separate reference to them will be given by means of footnotes.

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§10. His destruction of Hindu temples.

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Next, he took a step further, and in the 12th year of his reign (9th April, 1669) he issued a general order "to demolish all the schools and temples of the infidels and to put down their religious teaching and practices." His destroying hand now fell on the great shrines that commanded the veneration of the Hindus all over India,—such as the second temple of Somnath* built by the pious zeal of Bhimadeva soon after the destruction of the older and more famous one at the hands of Mahmud of Ghazni, the Vishwanath temple of Benares, and the Keshav Rai temple of Mathura, that ‘‘wonder of the age’’ on which a Bundela Rajah had lavished 33 lakhs of Rupees. And the governors of the provinces had no peace till they could certify to the Emperor that the order of demolition had been carried out in their respective provinces.

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∗ The Somnath temple, formerly of wood, was built of stone by Bhimadeva, and fully restored by Kumarapala (r. 1143-74). It was

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The holy city of Mathura has always been the special victim of Muslim bigotry. It was the birthplace of Krishna, the most popular of the ‘‘false gods’’ of India,—a deity for whom millions of ‘‘infidels’’ felt a personal love. The city stood on the king's highway between Agra and Delhi, and its lofty spires, almost visible from the Agra palace,*—seemed to taunt the Mughal emperors with lukewarmness in ‘‘exalting Islam and casting infidelity down.’’ Aurangzib’s baleful eye had been directed to the Hindu Bethlehem very early. He had appointed a ‘‘religious man,’’ Abdun Nabi, as *faujdar* of Mathura to repress the Hindus.

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[^]: often sacked by the Muhammadans, particularly in 1297 and 1394,—the last attack being very destructive. (Bombay Gazetteer, vol. I. pt. 1. 169, 189-190, 205, 223.)

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∗ ‘‘Among others was destroyed the great temple of Mathura, which was of such a height that its gilded pinnacle could be seen from Agra.’’ (Storia, ii. 154.) For iconoclasm at Mathura under Sikandar Lodi, Elliot, iv. 447.

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On 14th October, 1666, learning that there was a stone railing in the temple of Keshav Rai, which Dara Shukoh had presented to it, Aurangzib ordered it to be removed, as a scandalous example of a Muslim's coquetry with idolatry. And finally in January 1670, his zeal, stimulated by the pious meditations of Ramzan, led him to send forth commands to destroy this temple altogether and to change the name of the city to Islamabad. Ujjain suffered a similar fate at the same time. A systematic plan was followed for carrying out the policy of iconoclasm. Officers were appointed in all the sub-divisions and cities of the empire as Censors of Morals (muhtasib), to enforce the regulations of Islam, such as the suppression of the use of wine and bhang, and of gambling. The destruction of Hindu places of worship was one of their chief duties, and so large was the number of officers employed in the task that a "Director General" (darogha) had to be placed over them to guide their activity.

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How strictly the imperial orders were enforced we can see from the fact that even in remote East Bengal and Orissa, on the extreme frontier of the empire, the local officers sent their men round to pull down all the temples and smash all the images within their jurisdictions. In June 1680, the temples of Amber, the capital of the loyal State of Jaipur, were broken down.

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Neither age nor experience of life softened Aurangzib’s bigotry. When an old man of over eighty, we find him inquiring whether the Hindu worship, which he had put down at Somnath early in his reign, had been revived through the slackness of the local governor, and, again, telling one of his generals to take his own time in destroying a certain famous temple in the Deccan, as “it had no legs to walk away on.” In 1674 he confiscated all the lands held by Hindus as religious grants (wazifa) in Gujrat. [Mirat, 305.]

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§11. Jaziya or poll-tax on non-Muslims.

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For permission to live in an Islamic State the unbeliever had to pay a tax called JAZIYA,* which means substitute money, i.e., the price of indulgence. It was first imposed by Muhammad, who bade his followers “fight those who do not profess the true faith, till they pay jaziya with the hand in humility.” (Quran, ix. 29.) The last two words of this command have been taken by the Muslim commentators to mean that the tax should be levied in a manner humiliating to the taxpayers. As the scholars and divines of the time informed Aurangzib, the books on Muslim Canon Law lay down that the proper method of collecting the jaziya is for the zimmi to pay the tax personally; if he sends the money by the hand of an agent it is to be refused; the taxed person must come on foot and make the payment standing, while the receiver should be seated and after placing his hand above that of the zimmi should take the money and cry out, "O, zimmi! pay the commutation money."

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∗ For the jaziya, Hughes, 248; Encyclopædia of Islam, i. 1051-1052; Elliot, i. 476; Barani’s Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, 290. For the rate and manner of levying, Br. Mus. MS. Or. 1641, 65b—66b; Mirat-i-Ahmadi, 313-314 (followed by me); Ishwardas, 74; Storia, ii. 234. For its imposition by Aurangzib, M.A. 174, Khafi Khan, ii. 255, 278-279, 377-378. In the 37th year of his reign (1693) a sanad was issued exempting the Christians [of Agra] and their priests from the capitation tax. (J.A.S.B. 1912, p. 328.)

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Women, children below fourteen, and slaves were exempted from the tax; blind men, cripples and lunatics paid only when they were wealthy; monks were untaxed if they were poor, but if they belonged to rich monasteries the heads of these religious houses had to pay. The impost was not proportioned to a man's actual income, but the assessees were roughly divided into three classes according as their property was estimated at not more than 200 dirhams ("the poor"), between 200 and ten thousand dirhams ("the middle class"), and above ten thousand ("the rich"). Money-changers, cloth-dealers, landowners, merchants, and physicians were placed in the highest class while artisans,—such as tailors, dyers, cobblers, and shoemakers were counted as "poor". This last class paid only when their professional income left a margin above the cost of maintaining themselves and their families. Beggars and paupers naturally escaped the tax.

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§12. Rates of jaziya.

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The rates of taxation were fixed at 12, 24 and 48 *dirhams* a year for the three classes respectively,—or Rs. 3 1/3, Rs. 6 2/3 and Rs. 13 1/3. On the poor, therefore, the incidence of the tax was at least 6 per cent of the gross income; on the middle class it ranged from 6 to 1/4 p. c., and on the rich it was always lighter even than 2 1/2 per thousand. In violation of modern canons of taxation, the *jaziya* hit the poorest portion of the population hardest. It could never be less than Rs. 3 1/3 on a man, which was the money-value of nine maunds of wheat flour at the average market price of the end of the 16th century. (*Ain*, i. 63.) The State, therefore, at the lowest incidence of the tax, annually took away from the poor man the full value of one year's food as the price of religious indulgence. Secondly, all Government officials were exempted from the tax, though they were the wealthiest members of their respective classes in society.

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Under the early Muslim rulers of India, the *jaziya* had been levied on all Hindus except the Brahmans,—who had been spared by the politic and conciliatory system introduced into Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim. Firuz Shah in his old age withdrew the privilege and the Brahmans were taxed like other unbelievers.* The wise statesmanship of Akbar abolished the tax and removed an invidious badge of degradation from the majority of his subjects (1564). A century afterwards Aurangzib reversed this policy.

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§13. Strict levy of jaziya; Hindu protest crushed.

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By imperial orders the jaziya was reimposed on the "unbelievers" in all parts of the empire from 2nd April, 1679, in order, as the Court historian records, to "spread Islam and put down the practice of infidelity." When the news spread, the Hindus of Delhi and its environs gathered together in hundreds and stood on the bank of the Jamuna below the balcony of morning salute in the palace-wall, and piteously cried for the withdrawal of the impost. But the Emperor turned a deaf ear to their plaintive wail. When next Friday he wanted to ride to the Jama Mosque to attend the public prayer, the whole road from the gate of the Fort to the mosque was blocked by a crowd of Hindu suppliants, whose number was swollen by all the shopkeepers and craftsmen of Delhi city and the cantonment bazar, out for a demonstration. The crowd did not disperse in spite of warning; and the Emperor after waiting vainly for an hour ordered elephants to be driven through the mass of men, trampling them down and clearing a way for him. The Hindu protest continued for some days, but in the end the Emperor's firmness triumphed and the subject people ceased to protest. A temperate and reasoned letter from Shivaji urging the impolicy of the new impost and appealing to Aurangzib to think of the common Father of mankind and the equality of all sincere beliefs in God's eyes, met with no better success. (Vide Appendix VI.)

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∗ Elliot, i.

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⁴⁷⁶ Afif's Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, 382. Akbar abolished it in March 1564 (Akbarnamah, tr ii. 316) and not in 1579 as Al Badayuni wrongly states (text, ii. 276.)

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In levying the *jaziya*, Aurangzib was deaf to the pleadings of pity and political expediency alike. In Mughal Deccan, particularly in Burhanpur, the tax could be realized only by force. But Aurangzib was inexorable and ordered the Prefect of the City police to chastise every defaulter. This had the desired effect, and a strict collector like Mir Abdul Karim increased the yield of the tax from Rs. 26,000 a year for the whole city to more than four times the amount in three months for half the city only (1682). When a minister wished to oust his rival from favour, he had only to complain that the latter had excused some Hindus from paying the poll-tax;* and the Emperor would plainly tell the lenient revenue minister, "You are free to grant remissions of revenue of all other kinds; but if you remit any man's *jaziya*—which I have succeeded with great difficulty in laying on the infidels, it will be an impious change (*bidat*) and will cause the whole system of collecting the poll-tax to fall into disorder."

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∗ Khafi Khan, ii. 278-279, 377-378.

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Again, when the enforced levy of this tax scared Hindu traders away from the Mughal territory in the Deccan and caused scarcity of grain in the camp of the imperial army, Aurangzib vetoed his general's proposal to suspend the *jaziya* in that locality. His soldiers might starve, but should he jeopardize his soul by violating the Quranic precept to take *jaziya* from the infidels?*

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An army of Muslim collectors and *amins*,—usually men of reputed scholarship and orthodoxy,—spread over the country to assess and realize the tax. So large was their number, that in 1687 an Inspector-General of *jaziya* was appointed to tour through the four provinces of the Deccan and see that these men did their work properly. (*M.A.* 297.)

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∗ *Anecdotes of Aurangzib*, §72. The authorities quoted in this and the previous paragraph seem to contradict Ishwardas, who says (111b) that the Emperor excused the *jaziya*, *sair* and other cesses at Haidarabad for one year after its conquest, because the governor had reported that the inhabitants could not pay the tax on account of their poverty, and that if the tax were levied the place would be depopulated. The relief, if given, was temporary and intended to make the place recover from the ravages of war and famine.

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