Aurangzeb: The Last Great Mughal Emperor and His Legacy

Aurangzeb, who ruled as the emperor Alamgir from 1658 to 1707, was the sixth Mughal ruler of India and the last to command the empire at the height of its power. He seized the throne in a bloody war of succession, pushed Mughal rule deep into southern India and spent the last quarter-century of his life at war in the Deccan. His religious policies and his role in the empire’s decline make him one of the most debated figures in South Asian history.

Early life and career

Aurangzeb was born on 3 November 1618 at Dahod in Gujarat, the third son of Prince Khurram, later the emperor Shah Jahan, and Mumtaz Mahal, for whom the Taj Mahal was built. As a boy he spent time as a hostage at the court of his grandfather Jahangir after his father’s failed rebellion.

He gained experience early. In 1636, aged about 17, he was appointed viceroy of the Deccan, the plateau of central and southern India, and he later served in Gujarat, Multan and on unsuccessful campaigns to Balkh and Kandahar in the 1640s and 1650s. A second term as governor of the Deccan from 1653 gave him a power base, an army and a detailed knowledge of the southern sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda.

He was known for personal austerity and devotion to Sunni Islam. This contrasted with his eldest brother, Dara Shikoh, a scholar who translated the Upanishads into Persian and was their father’s favourite.

The war of succession, 1657-1659

In September 1657 Shah Jahan fell gravely ill, and rumours spread that he had died. All four of his sons moved to claim the throne: Dara Shikoh at court, Shah Shuja in Bengal, Murad Bakhsh in Gujarat and Aurangzeb in the Deccan.

Aurangzeb allied with Murad. In April 1658 they defeated an imperial army at Dharmat, near Ujjain, and on 29 May 1658 they routed Dara at Samugarh, near Agra. Aurangzeb then besieged Agra Fort, cut off its water supply and forced his father’s surrender in June. Shah Jahan spent the remaining years of his life confined in the fort, where he died in 1666.

Aurangzeb soon had Murad arrested; he was executed in 1661. Aurangzeb was first enthroned in Delhi on 31 July 1658, taking the title Alamgir, and held a formal coronation in June 1659. He defeated Shah Shuja at Khajwa in January 1659, and Shuja later fled to Arakan, where he disappeared. Dara was beaten at Deorai near Ajmer in March 1659, betrayed by an Afghan chief who had sheltered him, paraded through Delhi and executed on charges of apostasy in August 1659.

Expansion and revolts in the north

The first half of the reign was spent largely in northern India. Mughal armies took Chittagong from the kingdom of Arakan in 1666, ending a centre of slave raiding in Bengal. Campaigns into Assam enjoyed early success, but the Ahom kingdom defeated a Mughal fleet at Saraighat in 1671 and kept its independence.

On the north-western frontier, Pashtun tribes rose in revolt from 1667, and Aurangzeb campaigned there in person in the mid-1670s. Nearer the capital, Jat peasants around Mathura rebelled in 1669, and the Satnami sect revolted in 1672.

In 1679, after the death of Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar, Aurangzeb tried to control the succession to his state. War followed with the Rathors of Marwar and the Sisodias of Mewar. His fourth son, Prince Akbar, sent against them, rebelled in 1681 and fled south to the Marathas. The Rajput war damaged the alliance with Rajput rulers that had supported the empire since the time of Akbar the Great.

Religious policies

Aurangzeb aimed to rule according to Islamic law as he understood it. He sponsored the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, a large compilation of Hanafi legal rulings. He withdrew imperial patronage from court music, stopped the custom of appearing daily at a palace window before crowds, and appointed censors of public morals.

In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, a poll tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier. He ordered the destruction of several major temples, including the Vishvanath temple in Varanasi in 1669 and the Keshava Deva temple in Mathura in 1670. In 1675 the ninth Sikh guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi.

The picture is not one-sided. Aurangzeb also issued land grants to some Hindu temples and religious figures, and the share of Hindus, especially Marathas and Rajputs, among the high Mughal nobility rose during his reign. Historians therefore disagree on how far his actions were driven by piety and how far by politics, such as punishing rebellious regions or rewarding loyal ones.

The Deccan wars

Conflict with the Maratha leader Shivaji began in the 1660s. Mughal forces under Raja Jai Singh forced him to accept the Treaty of Purandar in 1665, but Shivaji escaped from Agra in 1666 after a humiliating reception at court. He was crowned king in 1674, as described in Shivaji’s coronation, and his state survived his death in 1680.

In 1681 Aurangzeb moved south to deal with the Marathas and with his rebel son Akbar. He never returned to the north. His armies conquered the sultanate of Bijapur in 1686 and the sultanate of Golconda in 1687, bringing almost the whole subcontinent under nominal Mughal rule. In 1689 Mughal troops captured Shivaji’s son and successor, Sambhaji, who was executed after refusing to submit.

Victory did not follow. The Marathas, led by Rajaram and later by his widow Tarabai, fought a mobile war of raids and fort defence. Aurangzeb spent years besieging hill forts, often taking them only to see them lost again. The cost in money and manpower was enormous, and Mughal nobles struggled to collect revenue from the lands assigned to them.

Government, court and character

Aurangzeb was a hands-on ruler who read reports from across the empire and wrote many orders himself. Hundreds of his letters survive, giving historians an unusually direct view of his concerns, from military details to the conduct of his sons. He kept his sons under close watch, having seen how his own generation had fought for the throne, and he imprisoned his eldest son, Muhammad Sultan, who had briefly joined Shah Shuja during the succession war.

The empire’s administration rested on the mansabdari system, in which nobles held ranks and were paid through jagirs, assignments of land revenue. As the empire expanded into the Deccan, many new nobles, including Marathas and Deccanis, were admitted to the ranks. There was not enough productive land to go round, and the resulting shortage of good jagirs, known as the jagirdari crisis, caused discontent among the nobility. Many historians see this as a key structural weakness of the late empire.

Aurangzeb was also a builder, though on a smaller scale than his father. The Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, completed in 1673, was one of the largest mosques in the world, and the Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) in the Red Fort at Delhi was built for his private use. The Bibi Ka Maqbara in Aurangabad, a tomb for his wife Dilras Banu Begum, was built under his son Azam Shah and is often compared with the Taj Mahal.

He lived simply by imperial standards. According to tradition he earned money for his personal needs by copying the Quran and sewing caps, and his final instructions asked that his funeral be paid for from those small earnings.

Death and succession

Aurangzeb died on 3 March 1707 near Ahmednagar, at the age of about 88. In letters written near the end of his life he expressed regret and anxiety about his rule. He was buried at Khuldabad in a plain grave open to the sky.

His death set off another war of succession, won by his son Muazzam, who reigned as Bahadur Shah I until 1712. Within a few decades provincial governors had become independent, the Marathas dominated much of India, and the Persian ruler Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1618, 3 November: Aurangzeb is born at Dahod, Gujarat.
• 1657, September: Shah Jahan falls ill; the war of succession begins.
• 1658, 29 May: Aurangzeb and Murad defeat Dara Shikoh at Samugarh.
• 1658, 31 July: Aurangzeb is first enthroned as Alamgir.
• 1659, August: Dara Shikoh is executed in Delhi.
• 1679: The jizya is reimposed; war with Marwar and Mewar begins.
• 1681: Aurangzeb moves to the Deccan permanently.
• 1686-1687: Bijapur and Golconda are conquered.
• 1689: Sambhaji is captured and executed.
• 1707, 3 March: Aurangzeb dies near Ahmednagar.

Legacy and debate

For a long time, especially in histories shaped by British colonial writers and by Jadunath Sarkar’s influential multi-volume study, Aurangzeb was portrayed as a bigot whose intolerance caused the empire’s collapse. Many Indian nationalists and Hindu-nationalist writers have shared this view, while some Pakistani and Muslim writers have presented him as an ideal pious ruler.

More recent historians, such as John F. Richards and Audrey Truschke, stress the context: the strains of governing a vast empire, the competition among nobles for land revenue, the cost of the Deccan wars and the political motives behind many religious decisions. Most agree that he was hard-working, able and personally frugal, and that his rule expanded the empire while weakening its foundations.

Why it matters

Aurangzeb’s reign marks the high point and the turning point of Mughal power. The empire was never larger, yet by his death it was overstretched, and its decline opened the way for the Marathas, regional states and eventually the British East India Company. Debates about him still shape public arguments in India and Pakistan today.