A controversial comment by a Maharashtra Samajwadi Party MLA who happens to be a Muslim, has kicked up a row among political circles. The MLA, Abu Asim Azmi on March 3, was reported to have said that India flourished during the reign of the Moghul emperor Aurangzeb with a GDP of 24%. He added: “For Aurangzeb, it was all about power and wealth, religion has nothing to do with it, and I don’t believe he was a cruel ruler.” All hell broke loose, with the Maharashtra assembly unanimously passing a resolution suspending him.
In the light of these developments, it is about time that we take a relook at Aurangzeb and his record as a ruler. There were different phases in his career during his long reign. His first twenty years were spent in overthrowing the Deccan kingdoms, and crushing rebellions. He demolished Hindu temples and imposed taxes on his Hindu subjects. After that, he retired from military operations and concentrated on administration within the country. Curiously enough, in a reversal of his earlier behavior, he employed more Hindus in his administration than any previous Mughal ruler. (Re: Audrey Truschke: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King. Stanford University Press). Describing his last years in the 1680s, the historian Dr. Percival Spear (who based his research on original contemporary records) wrote: “The subtle and ruthless politician became an ascetic and a sage according to Muslim estimation, spending long hours in prayer, fasting, and copying the Koran, and pouring out his soul in agonized letters. …The Mughal ogre of popular historians was in fact both a most able statesman and a subtle and highly complex character.” (Re: A History of India. Volume Two. Penguin Books. England. 1965). In his last letter to his sons, he wrote: “I came as a stranger and I leave as a stranger.”
Reports of Aurangzebe’s ascetism travelled abroad. It inspired the famous English author John Dryden to write a play in 1675 entitled Aurang-zebe, which was staged at the Royal Theatre in London that year. It explored the different dimensions of his character – ambition, political intrigues and beyond all, love and affection.
The above observation is not meant to whitewash Aurangzebe’s cruelty. But let us remember that other rulers of the past times, belonging to the Hindu religious community, were equally cruel and destructive in their policies against religious minorities. For instance, in the seventh century, the Hindu king of Bengal, Shashanka invaded Bodh Gaya in Bihar, and brought down the Bodhi Druma, the sacred tree under which Gautama prayed to attain spirituality and become Buddha. He demolished Buddhist shrines in Bengal, as described by the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang who was visiting Bengal at that time.
Maratha military pride
The other dimension that is being added to the present debate is the issue of Maratha self-assertion against Moghul aggression. While moving the resolution for Abu Asim Azmi’s suspension in the Maharashtra assembly, the state minister Chandrakant Patil said that Azmi’s statements were “an insult to Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj.” Sambhaji was Sivaji’s son, and ruled Maharashtra from 1681 till 1689, when he was executed by Aurangzeb.
To go back to history, in the face of Aurangzeb’s ruthless offensive against the Deccan kingdoms, Shivaji’s descendants failed to retain their old well-knit Maratha empire which broke up. Their soldiers, bereft of their emperor and lacking any effective military leadership to conduct a war, dispersed in different directions in India seeking ways to survive. Toughened by their military training , some of them began raiding territories of other states and plundered homes. One such instance is their invasion of Bengal in 1741-42 under the command of the Marathi brigand Bhashkar Pandit, when they unleashed a reign of terror there. They came to be known as `borgis’ in Bengali parlance. Fear of them was invoked by mothers to put their crying babies to sleep, by singing a lullaby warning them that unless they sleep, `borgis’ would snatch them away. A blow-by-blow account of the atrocities committed by these Marathi `borgis’ is available from a manuscript written by a contemporary Bengali poet Gangaram entitled Maharashtra-Purana at around 1751. (It was published later in a book form in Calcutta in 1806).
A few years later, Bengal’s then ruler Nawab Alivardi defeated Bhashkar Pandit in a battle in Midnapur, forcing him to flee to forests. In order to avenge the defeat, the then Maratha ruler Raghuji Bhonsla invaded Bengal with his soldiers, unleashing yet another wave of terror on the common citizens. The warfare continued for a decade till 1751, when an ageing and tired Alivardi signed a pact with the Maratha `borgis,’ that allowed them to take possession of Cuttack (which is now a province of Orissa, but at that time was under the suzerainty of the nawab of Bengal). Under the pact, Alivardi also pledged to send every year Rs. 12 lakhs to the Maratha ruler. (Re: Dineshchandra Sen – Brihat Banga. Vol. II. 1935.)
Renewal of Maratha-Bengali association
In an ironical twist of history, almost one hundred and fifty years later, the Marathas and the Bengalis encountered each other in the early decades of the twentieth century. This time however, it was a friendly encounter. They were tied together in a close solidarity of national unity to fight the British colonial power. The Maratha leader Balgangadhar Tilak initiated Shivaji Utsav in 1894, recalling the valour of Shivaji in order to inspire the younger generation to imbibe his spirit in the course of the anti-British struggle. His call reverberated beyond Maharashtra and reached Bengal. A Maratha nationalist Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar who was domiciled in Calcutta got in touch with the Bengali revolutionaries and forged an alliance. This led to the emergence of an all-India leadership which came to be known as Lal-Bal-Pal trio – Lala Lajpat Rai from Punjab, Balgangadhar Tilak from Maharashtra and Bipin Pal from Bengal.
Soon after, Rabindranath Tagore composed a poem Shivaji Utsav in 1904-1905 , praising him as a hero who should not only be worshipped but whose brave acts should be replicated by the young generation of Bengalis in the national movement. Thus, Rabindranath tried to cleanse the Bengali mind of its tendency to stereotype Marathas as invaders, and he persuaded them instead to forget the past `borgi’ atrocities, in the interest of forging national unity. It is significant that Rabindranath composed this poem at a time when Bengalis were rising in a nationalist upsurge against the British colonial conspiracy to divide Bengal. Inspired by his poem, young Bengalis came out in the streets celebrating Shivaji Utsav.
Need to check demonizing some historical characters and glamorizing some others
While recounting these past episodes in our history, we should understand that they took place at certain junctures of socio-political developments. In the course, some rulers earned fame, like Ashoka and Akbar. But then, to take the case of Ashoka, he became an apostle of non-violence and peace only after he led an invasion of Kalinga in 260 BC, which resulted in the massacre of innocent citizens. Witnessing it, he suffered remorse and converted to Buddhism. So, his conversion had to be at the cost of thousands of lives which became victims of his initial ambition to extend his Mauryan empire. In the case of Akbar, it was only after he conquered the various parts of India and established suzerainty over them, he could afford to be tolerant and accommodate the religious minorities in his administration, and abolished jizia and other taxes on Hindus. In an attempt to bring together Hindus and Muslims under one eclectic canopy, he invented the concept of Din Illahi – a concept which we need to revive today. .
Some other rulers earned notoriety, like Aurangzebe, and his successors, the British Viceroys. All through the ages, rulers in India, irrespective of their religious denominations, had followed a dual style of administration that suited their immediate needs – a policy of military suppression of opponents, accompanied by the distribution of a few loaves of social benefits for the rest of the people. At certain junctures, some of their administrative measures drew popular approval (like the British ban on suttee, and encouragement of widow-remarriage ). At some other juncture, they alienated their subjects by bringing in measures, like the proposal to partition Bengal in 1905, which roused a mass movement that ultimately forced the colonial rulers to reverse the decision.
We can discern a single thread that runs through the mode of administration of the rulers, whether in the past or today – greed for “power and wealth” the term used by the MLA Abu Asim Azmi.
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016).
