Few Mughal rulers have been subjected to as many competing historical portraits as Aurangzeb. For more than a century, historians have quarrelled over his place in Indian history, investing his reign with meanings that often reveal as much about their own intellectual and political worlds as about the emperor himself. Munis D Faruqui’s Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold belongs to this long historiographical conversation, though it seeks to move it in a different direction.
The book is best understood against the backdrop of Jadunath Sarkar’s immensely influential though deeply critical portrait of Aurangzeb in the five-volume History of Aurangzib (1912–24). Sarkar treated the emperor’s religious orthodoxy and statecraft as among the principal causes of Mughal decline. In his reading, Aurangzeb’s commitment to Islamic principles as a ruler progressively weakened the empire’s integrative capacities. Faruqui challenges this framework and argues that such interpretations were themselves shaped by the communal anxieties and political preoccupations of the early twentieth century.
Yet, Faruqui is hardly confronting an untouched Sarkarian edifice, ‘acknowledging the depth and meticulousness of his scholarship and drive to collect, decipher and interpret archival materials, and his ability to do all this in the face of great personal tragedies and other sadnesses’ (XI). Mughal historiography had moved considerably beyond Sarkar long before the present intervention. Historians such as Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra, M Athar Ali, Harbans Mukhia, Muzaffar Alam, Richard Eaton and Sanjay Subrahmanyam had already displaced the older explanatory model.
The first substantial challenge emerged from what came to be known as the Aligarh School of History, whose leader and mentor, Irfan Habib, redirected attention away from questions of religious motivation towards the structural foundations of Mughal power itself. Under Habib’s intellectual leadership, the Aligarh School concerned itself primarily with scholarly questions.
Athar Ali, under Habib’s mentorship, examined the composition and functioning of the Mughal nobility, while Habib foregrounded the agrarian and fiscal contradictions embedded within the imperial order. Together, they relocated the explanation for Mughal decline from the personal beliefs of Aurangzeb to broader institutional and socio-economic processes.
Faruqui shares their rejection of religious determinism but departs from them in assigning a more decisive role to the Deccan wars. In his account, the prolonged southern campaigns strained administrative structures, exhausted imperial resources and accelerated political fragmentation. Yet, his emphasis on military overstretch occasionally overshadows the deeper structural contradictions that historians such as Habib and Athar Ali regarded as indispensable to any understanding of Mughal decline.
A second revisionist tendency, associated with Muzaffar Alam, Richard Eaton and Audrey Truschke, has sought to rethink the relationship between Islam and Mughal governance itself. These historians reject the familiar image of Aurangzeb as a straightforward religious zealot and instead situate his actions within the political, intellectual and cultural universe of the Mughal world. This political approach is not academic. Unlike the Aligarh School, this body of scholarship has also engaged more directly with the ideological claims of the Hindu Right. Faruqui stands intellectually closest to this tendency, which is frequently as much a political intervention as an academic one.
For Faruqui, Islam functioned less as a programme of systematic coercion than as a moral and political vocabulary through which authority was articulated and exercised. Yet, in distancing himself from reductionist readings of Aurangzeb, he occasionally understates the independent significance of religious language, legal initiatives, and Islamic legitimacy in the emperor’s self-fashioning. At times, his interpretation leans so heavily towards political explanation that it moves beyond the position of some of the very historians with whom he is most closely aligned. More importantly, he not infrequently finds himself contradicting his own argument. Habib, whatever one’s disagreements with him, almost never suffered from this problem.
The distinction is significant because Habib’s achievement lay not merely in offering alternative answers but in relocating the centre of the historical enquiry itself. Faruqui’s originality lies elsewhere. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he makes extensive use of underutilised Persian archival materials and brings institutions such as the imperial harem and the eunuchate into sharper analytical focus. Still, Irfan Habib remains, in many respects, unmatched in his command of Persian sources for medieval Indian history. Comparisons between Habib and Faruqui are therefore meaningless, whether one considers the range of the former’s sources, the density of his scholarship, or his mastery over the Persian archive itself.
One of the book’s consequential interventions lies in the terrain it chooses to illuminate. The imperial harem and the eunuchate have rarely occupied a central place in Mughal historiography. More often than not, they have appeared at the margins, as curiosities of courtly life, subjects of anecdote, or colourful details in narratives otherwise concerned with emperors, nobles, revenue systems, and military campaigns. Faruqui insists that such neglect has obscured important dimensions of imperial governance. In his account, these institutions were not peripheral to the exercise of power but woven into its everyday functioning.
The significance of this shift becomes clearer when viewed against the larger historiography of the Mughal Empire. Sarkar’s concerns were fundamentally moral and political. The Aligarh historians, particularly Habib, Chandra and Athar Ali, redirected attention towards structures, institutions, agrarian relations, fiscal systems and the composition of the nobility. Faruqui does not reject either framework. Rather, he seeks to alter their hierarchy of importance. The result is a portrait of Aurangzeb that resists both condemnation and rehabilitation. He emerges neither as the stock villain of nationalist historiography nor as a ruler awaiting exoneration from modern scholars. Instead, he appears as the sovereign of a sprawling and extraordinarily complex imperial order whose workings become intelligible only when neglected institutions, underutilised archives, and the transformative consequences of the Deccan campaigns are examined together.
Whether one agrees with all of Faruqui’s conclusions is, in some ways, secondary to the scale of the undertaking itself. More than a century after Jadunath Sarkar completed the final volume of his monumental History of Aurangzib, Faruqui has produced what is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious reinterpretations of Aurangzeb in recent decades. Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold is simultaneously a biography, a study of institutions, an intervention in debates on imperial decline, and a reflection on the uses and abuses of history in contemporary South Asia.
Yet revisionist histories are rarely free from the pressures they seek to expose. If Sarkar’s Aurangzeb bore the imprint of the communal anxieties that shaped the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century, Faruqui’s Aurangzeb occasionally appears marked by a different urgency: the desire to rescue the emperor from the distortions generated by contemporary political discourse. This is neither surprising nor necessarily objectionable. Historians write within history; they do not stand outside it.
The point is not to question Faruqui’s scholarship, which is substantial, but to recognise that historiography itself possesses a history. Every generation revisits the past through the lens of its own concerns. The difficulty arises when present political contests, however subtly, begin to determine historical emphasis. At such moments, the line separating historical revision from historical correction can become difficult to discern.
Jadunath Sarkar remains the book’s principal interlocutor, sometimes even its principal adversary. Few historians today would defend Sarkar’s portrayal of Aurangzeb as the architect of India’s civilizational decline. Yet, the magnitude of Sarkar’s scholarly achievement remains undeniable. Faruqui is entirely justified in observing that Sarkar’s interpretation hardened over time, particularly under the shadow of the communal politics that intensified during the 1920s. Even so, one occasionally senses that Sarkar serves less as a historical interlocutor than as a necessary foil against which the revisionist argument is staged.
This creates a curious impression. The repeated emphasis on the communalised dimensions of Sarkar’s conclusions risks obscuring a larger historiographical reality: Mughal history had already travelled a considerable distance beyond Sarkar before the present book appeared. Several generations of historians had questioned, revised, modified, or abandoned many of his central assumptions. The real significance of Faruqui’s work, therefore, lies not simply in refuting Sarkar, but in extending a much longer conversation about power, institutions, legitimacy and imperial decline within the Mughal world.
One reason this book will remain difficult to ignore is the nature of the archive on which it rests. Much recent writing on Aurangzeb, including some works aimed at a wider readership, has depended heavily upon translated materials, familiar citations, and well-trodden documentary terrain. Faruqui proceeds differently. His reconstruction of the late Mughal world is grounded in a sustained engagement with Persian sources, particularly the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla (News of the Exalted Imperial Court) and the Dastawizat (Az Ahd-i Mughaliya) collections. The labour behind the book is immediately apparent, and much of its originality derives from the author’s determination to return to materials that have either been neglected or only selectively utilised by previous historians.
Yet every archive carries within it its own silences, assumptions and habits of seeing. The Akhbarat are among the richest documentary records available to historians of the Mughal period. At the same time, they emerged from one of the most elaborate bureaucratic information systems in the early modern world. They recorded political life with remarkable regularity, but through the categories, priorities, and anxieties of the imperial state. Their value is therefore inseparable from their limitations. Faruqui recognises this problem, but there are moments when these documents seem to function primarily as a corrective to the narrative chronicles rather than as historical artefacts requiring interrogation in their own right. The question is not whether the Akhbarat reveal something new. The more interesting question is whether they reveal new realities or simply bring previously obscured dimensions of elite statecraft into sharper focus.
This larger methodological issue becomes particularly visible in Faruqui’s treatment of the harem and the eunuchate.
Drawing upon documentary evidence rather than inherited assumptions about courtly life, he demonstrates that these institutions exercised a political influence considerably greater than historians have generally acknowledged. The argument is persuasive precisely because it is grounded in sources that earlier historians either overlooked or treated as peripheral.
Historical recovery often carries its own temptations. Once an institution has been neglected for generations, the discovery of fresh evidence can encourage historians to assign it a significance that exceeds what the sources themselves can securely bear. There is little doubt that imperial women and eunuchs played a more consequential role in Mughal politics than earlier scholarship was willing to concede. Whether they occupied quite as central a place in the functioning and survival of Aurangzeb’s regime as Faruqui suggests remains an open question, one that future scholarship will undoubtedly revisit.
The issue extends beyond the harem and the eunuchate. Throughout the book, there is a discernible tendency to relocate historical agency away from familiar actors and towards institutions that have traditionally remained outside the principal field of vision. This is often intellectually productive.
Some of the book’s most stimulating insights emerge precisely from this shift in perspective. Yet there are moments when the correction threatens to become a displacement. Nobles, military elites, provincial governors and fiscal structures occasionally recede from view as newly recovered institutions move to the forefront of the narrative.
The larger challenge, perhaps, is not one of replacement but of integration. Mughal power was sustained through a dense web of interacting institutions, interests and relationships. The recovery of what has long remained marginal undoubtedly enriches our understanding of the centre. The task is to understand how the two were connected. Faruqui’s book succeeds admirably in forcing that question back into the historiographical conversation.
Few subjects in Indian historiography have generated as much heat as the question of religion under Aurangzeb. For more than a century, the debate has oscillated between competing certainties. In one, Aurangzeb appears as the embodiment of intolerance, the ruler whose religious commitments undermined the empire’s political foundations. In the other, he appears primarily as a victim of later political mythologies, burdened with meanings that reveal more about modern India than about the seventeenth century. Faruqui is dissatisfied with both positions. His concern is not to absolve Aurangzeb, nor to condemn him, but to restore him to the political and intellectual world in which he actually operated.
From this perspective, Islam appears less as an instrument of coercion than as a moral and political framework through which authority was understood, exercised, and justified. Much of the book’s strength lies in demonstrating how inadequate the older explanatory models have become. Yet the effort to move beyond reductionist explanations occasionally generates difficulties of its own. Religion in the Mughal world was never merely instrumental, nor was it simply another administrative resource available to the state. Aurangzeb’s self-fashioning as a ruler, his legal initiatives, and his cultivation of Islamic legitimacy were not decorative additions to governance but part of the language through which power itself was articulated.
Faruqui is undoubtedly right in insisting that religion alone cannot explain the reign. Yet the effort to escape reductionism occasionally produces its own form of compression, diminishing the explanatory significance of forces that were plainly important to Aurangzeb and his contemporaries. The difficulty is not that religion occupies too little space in the narrative. Rather, it sometimes appears less consequential than the historical actors themselves seem to have believed it to be.
A comparable issue arises in the book’s treatment of imperial decline. One of Faruqui’s central contentions is that the most enduring consequences of Aurangzeb’s reign emerged not from religion but from the Deccan wars. The argument is developed with considerable force. The prolonged southern campaigns strained administrative capacities, weakened imperial authority, and accelerated processes that contributed to the eighteenth-century fragmentation.
There is much to recommend in this interpretation. But there are moments when the Deccan campaigns begin to shoulder an exceptionally large explanatory burden. A remarkable variety of historical developments are drawn into their orbit. The crisis of the mansabdari system, regional fiscal transformations, changing patterns of commerce, environmental pressures, and evolving political identities occasionally appear less like autonomous historical processes than as consequences of military overstretch. Historians such as Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, and M Athar Ali sought the roots of Mughal decline in structural contradictions embedded within the imperial order itself. Faruqui’s emphasis on the Deccan enriches that discussion considerably, but it may not fully account for the complexity of the transformation he seeks to explain.
Among the most rewarding sections of the book is the chapter on Aurangzeb’s memorialisation. Here, Faruqui moves beyond the politics of the seventeenth century to examine the emperor’s afterlife in public memory. The picture that emerges is considerably more complicated than contemporary political discourse would suggest. Aurangzeb continued to be remembered positively across different regions and communities well into the eighteenth century, even as its politics were very problematic, like the 1980s Muslim politics. This alone makes the chapter an important contribution to the study of historical memory in South Asia.
At the same time, the chapter points towards an even larger problem. If Aurangzeb’s reputation was once far more varied and unstable than it appears today, through what historical processes did that plurality harden into the more familiar modern image? How did a figure remembered in multiple and often contradictory ways become transformed into one of the most polarising symbols in contemporary historical consciousness? The book raises these questions with considerable force, even where it does not seek to answer them fully.
The reservations noted above should not obscure the scale of Faruqui’s achievement. Few recent works on the Mughal Empire combine such archival depth with an equal willingness to revisit assumptions that have long become part of historical common sense. More importantly, the book demonstrates that Aurangzeb remains an unresolved historical problem rather than a settled verdict. The vast Persian archives of the Mughal world continue to reveal complexities that resist easy classification and ideological certainty.
If Jadunath Sarkar shaped much of the twentieth century’s understanding of Aurangzeb, Faruqui has ensured that future historians will have to revisit many questions that once appeared settled. That, ultimately, is the measure of the book’s significance. It matters not because it resolves old debates, but because it compels historians to return to them with fresh evidence, new questions, and a sharper awareness of how much remains unresolved.
Sadaf Fatima read for her BA and Master’s at Lucknow University and successfully defended her MPhil. and doctoral dissertations at JNU. She is the Joint Editor of the 105-year-old journal Urdu Adab published by Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind), and presides over its Academic wing.
