Aurangzeb

Early Life and Family

Aurangzeb — born Muhi al-Din Muhammad on 3 November 1618 in Dahod, Gujarat — was the third son of Emperor Shah Jahan and Empress Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj Mahal was later built. He received training in military command and administration as a young prince, serving as governor of the Deccan and Gujarat at various points and leading campaigns against the Sultanate of Golconda and in the Deccan more broadly during his father's reign. His personal style, marked by austerity and close adherence to Islamic religious practice, contrasted with that of his eldest brother, Dara Shikoh, who was known for interest in comparative religion and mysticism and was Shah Jahan's preferred heir.

The War of Succession

When Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in 1657, a war of succession broke out among his four sons — Dara Shikoh, Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb, and Murad Baksh. Aurangzeb, allied for a time with Murad, defeated the combined forces of Dara Shikoh and Jaswant Singh at the Battle of Dharmat in April 1658 and again at the decisive Battle of Samugarh in May 1658. Dara Shikoh fled but was later captured, tried on charges of apostasy, and executed in 1659. Murad Baksh was imprisoned and executed in 1661; Shah Shuja fled to Arakan, where he died. Shah Jahan himself was confined to Agra Fort, where he lived under Aurangzeb's control until his death in 1666. Aurangzeb was formally enthroned in 1658 and took the regnal title Alamgir, meaning "Conqueror of the World."

Religious Policy

Aurangzeb's religious policy departed from the relatively pluralistic approach associated with his great-grandfather Akbar. In 1679, he reinstated the jizya, a tax on non-Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished a century earlier. His reign saw the destruction of a number of prominent Hindu temples, including at Varanasi and Mathura, generally understood by historians as directed at sites with particular political or symbolic significance rather than a uniform, empire-wide campaign. Aurangzeb commissioned the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, a major compilation of Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence produced by a board of scholars over several decades, and restricted court patronage of music and certain other arts. Historians disagree over how to characterize this record: some point to documented instances of temple destruction and to the reinstated jizya as clear evidence of a decisive religious shift, while others, including more recent scholarship such as Audrey Truschke's work on Aurangzeb, note that he also issued land grants to a number of Hindu temples and continued to employ substantial numbers of Hindu nobles, including Rajput mansabdars, in his administration and army throughout his reign.

Conflict with the Sikhs

In 1675, the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi on Aurangzeb's orders after refusing to convert to Islam, an event Sikh tradition connects to his intervention on behalf of Kashmiri Brahmins facing forced conversion. The execution contributed to a hardening of Sikh identity under Tegh Bahadur's son and successor, Guru Gobind Singh, who in 1699 founded the Khalsa, a militarized Sikh order, setting the stage for sustained Sikh resistance to Mughal authority that continued after Aurangzeb's death.

Rajput Rebellion

In 1678, the death of Raja Jaswant Singh of Marwar without a surviving adult heir prompted Aurangzeb to attempt to bring the Rathore state under direct Mughal administration. When Jaswant Singh's posthumously born son, Ajit Singh, was smuggled out of Mughal custody by the Rathore noble Durgadas Rathore, war broke out between the Mughals and the Rathores of Marwar, with the neighboring Sisodia rulers of Mewar joining the resistance. The conflict, which continued intermittently for roughly three decades, was compounded in 1681 when Aurangzeb's own son, Prince Muhammad Akbar, rebelled and allied briefly with the Rajputs before the revolt collapsed and Akbar fled into exile in Persia. The Rajput war further divided Mughal military attention at the same time as the escalating campaigns in the Deccan.

The Deccan and the Marathas

Aurangzeb annexed the Deccan sultanates of Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, ending the Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi dynasties respectively and bringing the Mughal Empire to its greatest territorial extent, covering nearly the entire Indian subcontinent apart from its southernmost tip. These conquests drew him into a prolonged conflict with the Maratha kingdom founded by Shivaji, a war that lasted from 1681 until Aurangzeb's death in 1707 and is treated in detail elsewhere. From the 1680s onward, Aurangzeb governed from a vast mobile military camp in the Deccan rather than from Delhi or Agra, an arrangement that placed enormous and sustained strain on Mughal finances.

Personal Life and Patronage

Aurangzeb was noted by contemporaries for a personal austerity unusual among Mughal emperors: accounts describe him copying the Quran by hand and, according to widely repeated near-contemporary anecdotes, funding some of his personal expenses through the sale of these copies and of caps he sewed himself, in keeping with his preference for a self-sustaining, unostentatious lifestyle. Despite reduced court patronage of music and painting relative to his predecessors, his reign was not without major architectural projects: the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, completed in 1673, was among the largest mosques in the world at the time of its construction, and the Bibi Ka Maqbara in Aurangabad, built in the 1660s as a mausoleum for his wife Dilras Banu Begum, was explicitly modeled on the Taj Mahal built by his father.

Administration and Finance

Aurangzeb's long Deccan campaigns required continually expanding the number of Mughal nobles (mansabdars) entitled to revenue assignments (jagirs), while the pool of assignable land failed to grow at the same pace — a structural problem historians term the jagirdari crisis, which several scholars, including Satish Chandra, identify as a significant long-term cause of Mughal fiscal strain. Revenue demands on the peasantry increased over the course of his reign, contributing to periodic unrest in several provinces.

Death and the Decline of the Empire

Aurangzeb died on 3 March 1707 at Ahmednagar in the Deccan, at the age of 88, after a reign of nearly forty-nine years. Within decades of his death, the empire he had expanded to its territorial peak fragmented under the pressure of Maratha expansion, regional assertions of autonomy by Mughal governors, and renewed invasions from the northwest, including by Nadir Shah in 1739. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of his reign survive chiefly in two court chronicles: the Alamgirnama, covering roughly the first decade of his rule, and the Ma'athir-i-Alamgiri, compiled by Saqi Must'ad Khan after Aurangzeb's death and covering the full reign; Aurangzeb himself, for religious reasons, discontinued official court chronicling after 1668, leaving later administrative records such as the Akhbarat (court newsletters) as key sources for his final decades.