History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c86.s1: § 1. Character of Aurangzib : courage and coolness.
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c86.s1
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§ 1. Character of Aurangzib : courage and coolness.
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In the mediæval world, and nowhere more so than in India, the king was held responsible for the happiness of his people,[*] and with good reason. He was regarded as a superman, as an incarnation of the Deity or at least God's representative on earth; he was invested with unlimited, unquestioned authority and the entire property in the land; he was, except in Catholic Europe, the head of Church and State alike.
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Therefore, when towards the close of Aurangzib's reign all things began to go wrong, the contemporary historians,—Bhimsen and Khafi Khan,—turned to examine their Emperor's character. And yet, to all outer seeming, he had no moral defect which might account for the destruction of the empire and of public peace.
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Aurangzib was brave in an unusual degree. All the Timurids, till the days of his unworthy great-
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* Cf. Upon the king! Let our lives, our souls,
Our debts, our careful wives,
Our children and our sins lay on the king!
(Shakespeare's *Henry V.*)
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grandsons, had personal courage; but in him this virtue was combined with a coldness of temperament and a calculating spirit which we have been taught to believe as the special heritage of the races of Northern Europe. Of his personal fearlessness he had given ample evidence from the age of fifteen, when he faced a furious elephant unattended, to his 87th year, when he stood in the siege trenches before Wagingera. And further testimony was borne to it by the fact that two of his sons fell on the battle-field, which were the first examples of such death among the descendants of Babur. [Dil. ii. 166b. Character sketch 159a-160b; K. K. ii. 550; A. N. 1070—1096; M.A. 525—533.] His calm self-possession, his cheering words amidst the thickest danger, and his open defiance of death at Dharmat and Khajwa have passed into the famous things of Indian history.
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§ 2. Aurangzib’s learning and self-preparation.
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In addition to possessing constitutional courage and coolness, he had early in life chosen the perils and labour of kingship as his vocation and prepared himself for this sovereign office by self-reverence, self-knowledge, and self-control. Unlike other sons of monarchs, Aurangzib was a widely read and accurate scholar, and he kept up his love of books to his dying day. Even if we pass over the many copies of the Quran which he wrote with his own hand, as the mechanical industry of a zealot, we cannot forget that he loved to devote the scanty leisure of a very busy ruler to reading Arabic works on jurisprudence and theology, and hunted for MSS. of rare old books like the *Nehayya*, the *Ahiya-ul-ulum*, and the *Diwan-i-Saib* with the passion of an idle bibliophile. His extensive correspondence proves his mastery of Persian poetry and Arabic sacred literature, as he is ever ready with apt quotations for embellishing almost every one of his letters. In addition to Arabic and Persian, he could speak Turki and Hindi freely. To his initiative and patronage we owe the greatest digest of Muslim law made in India, which rightly bears his name,—the *Fatawa-i-Alamgiri** and which simplified and defined Islamic justice in India ever after.
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Besides book-learning, Aurangzib had from his boyhood cultivated control of speech and action, and tact in dealing with others; and even the dizzy eminence of the Peacock Throne and lordship over "nine hundred thousand horsemen" did not intoxicate him into losing the curb over his tongue, temper and heart for a single day during an exceptionally long life. As a prince, his tact sagacity and humility made the highest nobles of his father's Court his friends; and as Emperor he displayed the same qualities in a degree which would have been remarkable even in a subject. No wonder his contemporaries called him "the darvish in the purple." [M.A. 334.]
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∗ Printed in Calcutta in six volumes. For its composition, A. N. 1086-'87, M. A. 530.
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§ 3. Aurangzib's industry moral purity and simplicity of life.
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His private life,—dress, food and recreations,—were all extremely simple, but well-ordered. He was absolutely free from vice and even from the more innocent pleasures of the idle rich. The number of his wives fell short even of the Quranic allowance of four,* and he was scrupulously faithful to wedded love. The only delicacies he relished,—the reader will smile to hear,—were the acid fruit corinda (Carissa carandas) and a sort of chewing gum called khardali.
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His industry in administration was marvellous. In addition to regularly holding daily Courts (sometimes twice a day) and Wednesday trials, he wrote orders on letters and petitions with his own hand and dictated the very language of official replies. Four volumes of these, relating only to his last four years, are still extant and testify to his prodigious working capacity. The Italian physician Gemeli Careri thus describes the Emperor giving public audience (21 March 1695): "He was of a low stature, with a large nose, slender and stooping with age. The whiteness of his round beard was more visible on his olive-coloured skin. . . I admired to see him endorse the petitions [of those who had business] with his own hand, without spectacles, and by his cheerful smiling countenance seem to be pleased with the employment." [Churchill's *Voyages*, iv. 222.]
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∗ Dilras Banu died in 1657; Nawab Bai was relegated to a retired life at Delhi after 1660; Aurangabadi seems to have stayed with him till her death in 1686, so that Udaipuri (married about 1660) was his only companion (after Aurangabadi) for the last half of his life.
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Historians have observed that though he died in his 90th year, he retained to the last almost all his faculties unimpaired. . . His memory was wonderful: "he never forgot a face he had once seen or a word that he had once heard." All his physical powers retained their vigour to the end, if we except a slight deafness of the ear, which afflicted him in old age, and a lameness of the right leg, which was due to his doctor's unskilful treatment of an accidental dislocation.
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§ 4. His besetting sin of over-centralisation: its disastrous effects on the administration.
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But all this long self-preparation and splendid vitality, in one sense proved his undoing, as they naturally begot in him a self-confidence and distrust of others, a passion for seeing everything carried to the highest perfection according to his own idea of it,—which urged him to order and supervise every minute detail of administration and warfare personally. This excessive interference of the head of the State kept his viceroys and commanders and even "the men on the spot" in far-off districts in perpetual tutelage; their sense of responsibility was destroyed, initiative and rapid adaptability to a changing environment could not be developed in them, and they tended to sink into lifeless puppets moved to action by the master pulling their strings from the capital. No surer means than this could have been devised for causing administrative degeneration in an extensive and diversified empire like India. High-spirited, talented and energetic officers found themselves checked, discouraged and driven to sullen inactivity. With the death of the older nobility, outspoken responsible advisers disappeared from his council, and Aurangzib in his latter years, like Napoleon I. after the climax of Tilsit, could bear no contradiction, could hear no unpalatable truth, but surrounded himself with smooth-tongued sycophants and pompous echoes of his own voice. His ministers became no better than clerks passively registering his edicts.
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Such a king cannot be called a political or even administrative genius. He had merely honesty and plodding industry. He was fit to be an excellent departmental head, not a statesman initiating a new policy and legislating with prophetic foresight for moulding the life and thought of unborn generations in advance. That genius, though unlettered and often hot-blooded, was Akbar alone among the Mughals of India.
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Obsessed by his narrow ideal of duty and supremely ignorant of his real limitations of character,—and not out of political cunning, as Manucci suggests,—Aurangzib cultivated saintly austerities and self-abasement and went regularly and even ostentatiously through all the observances of his religion. He thus became an ideal character to the Muslim portion of his subjects. They believed him to be a living saint (Alamgir, zinda pir!) who wrought miracles; and he himself favoured this idea by his acts.*
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Politically, therefore, Aurangzib with all his virtues was a complete failure. But the cause of the failure of his reign lay deeper than his personal character. Though it is not true that he alone caused the fall of the Mughal empire, yet he did nothing to avert it, but rather quickened the destructive forces already in operation in the land. And these I shall examine now.