The study of technological developments in India between 800 and 1200 CE has been closely tied to broader historiographical debates about the character of early medieval Indian society and economy. Historians such as D. D. Kosambi, R. S. Sharma, B. D. Chattopadhyaya, Burton Stein, and Irfan Habib have approached the period from different perspectives, but they broadly agree that technological change must be examined within the larger processes of agrarian expansion, regional state formation, and the growth of artisanal production. Unlike the dramatic technological revolutions associated with early modern Europe, technological change in early medieval India was largely incremental and cumulative. Yet these gradual transformations played a significant role in expanding the productive capacity of the economy and integrating regional societies into wider networks of trade and exchange.
One of the most important technological foundations of early medieval economic change was the widespread use and refinement of iron technology, particularly in agricultural implements. The significance of iron in the agrarian expansion of the subcontinent had already been highlighted by D. D. Kosambi, who argued that the diffusion of iron tools facilitated the clearing of forests and the extension of cultivation into new regions. R. S. Sharma later developed this insight further in his influential work Indian Feudalism, where he linked the spread of iron ploughshares and axes to the establishment of new agrarian settlements, particularly in eastern India and the Deccan. According to Sharma, the proliferation of land grants to Brahmanas and religious institutions often led to the colonisation of forested areas, a process that depended materially upon the availability of iron tools for clearing land and cultivating heavy soils. The increasing use of iron ploughshares enabled cultivators to work dense alluvial soils more effectively, thereby expanding the agricultural frontier and increasing the production of surplus.
While Sharma interpreted these developments within a broader framework of feudalization and ruralisation, later historians such as B. D. Chattopadhyaya have emphasized the regional diversity of these processes. Chattopadhyaya has argued that the expansion of agrarian settlements was not simply a result of top-down land grants but also involved complex interactions between local communities, political authorities, and ecological conditions. Technological change—particularly the use of iron tools and improved cultivation techniques—played a crucial role in enabling these transformations. The spread of agriculture into forested and marginal regions fundamentally altered the landscape of early medieval India, contributing to the emergence of new villages, local markets, and regional political centres.
Closely connected with agrarian expansion were developments in irrigation technology, which allowed cultivators to stabilise agricultural production in environments subject to seasonal rainfall variability. Early medieval inscriptions and literary sources refer to several devices used for lifting water from wells and rivers. Among these was the araghatta, a mechanical water-lifting device consisting of a rotating wheel fitted with a chain of earthen pots that raised water from wells through continuous motion. The araghatta appears in both textual descriptions and iconographic representations and seems to have been widely used in northern India. Other water-lifting devices included the shaduf, a counterbalanced lever mechanism, and the charasa, a leather bucket raised by animal power. Such devices enabled irrigation from wells and small reservoirs and were particularly important in semi-arid regions where rainfall was unreliable.
In South India, irrigation technology reached a particularly sophisticated level during the period of the Chola dynasty. Large artificial tanks and reservoirs were constructed to collect monsoon water and distribute it to agricultural fields through canals and sluice systems. These irrigation works were often managed collectively by village assemblies, which organized the maintenance of embankments and the regulation of water distribution. Burton Stein has emphasized that such irrigation systems were central to the functioning of the Chola state and to the prosperity of the Kaveri delta. The technological complexity of these hydraulic systems illustrates the close relationship between engineering knowledge, local institutional organization, and agricultural production.
Metallurgical technology also reached notable levels of sophistication during the early medieval period. India had long possessed an advanced tradition of iron and steel production, and this expertise continued to flourish between the ninth and twelfth centuries. One of the most remarkable products of Indian metallurgy was crucible steel, commonly known as wootz steel. This high-carbon steel was produced by heating iron with carbonaceous materials in sealed crucibles, allowing the metal to absorb carbon and acquire exceptional hardness and flexibility. Wootz steel was widely exported to West Asia, where it became famous for its use in the manufacture of high-quality blades. Medieval Arabic writers frequently praised Indian steel for its superior quality, and the material eventually became associated with the celebrated Damascus swords of the Islamic world.
The production of such steel required considerable technical knowledge, including control over furnace temperatures, fuel composition, and cooling processes. As Irfan Habib has emphasized in his studies of medieval Indian technology, the manufacture of wootz steel demonstrates the existence of highly specialized metallurgical skills among Indian craftsmen. These techniques were transmitted through artisanal traditions and often remained confined to particular regions or communities.
Metalworking extended beyond iron and steel to include the production of copper and bronze objects. The casting of bronze sculptures in South India reached extraordinary levels of technical and artistic excellence during the Chola period. Using the lost-wax casting method, artisans produced bronze icons of remarkable elegance and precision. The creation of such sculptures required detailed knowledge of mould preparation, alloy composition, and casting techniques. These bronzes not only served religious purposes but also testify to the sophisticated metallurgical practices of early medieval India.
Another area in which technological skill was prominently displayed was architecture and construction, particularly in temple building. The early medieval centuries witnessed a remarkable proliferation of monumental temples across the subcontinent. Builders developed advanced techniques for quarrying, transporting, and shaping large stone blocks, as well as for constructing complex superstructures. The temples of Khajuraho, Bhubaneswar, and Thanjavur represent some of the most impressive examples of early medieval architecture.
The Brihadisvara temple at Thanjavur, constructed in the early eleventh century under Rajaraja I, stands as a striking example of engineering skill and architectural planning. Built largely of granite—a material not readily available in the immediate vicinity—the temple required the transport and assembly of massive stone blocks. Scholars have suggested that long earthen ramps may have been constructed to raise these blocks to the upper levels of the temple tower. Such projects required not only technical expertise but also the mobilization of large numbers of skilled artisans and labourers.
Technological developments were equally important in the sphere of textile production, which remained one of the most important sectors of the Indian economy. India had long been renowned for its cotton textiles, and early medieval artisans continued to refine the techniques of spinning, weaving, and dyeing. Vijaya Ramaswamy has shown that textile production relied upon highly specialized craft communities whose skills were transmitted through hereditary training. Indian artisans developed sophisticated dyeing techniques using vegetable dyes to produce textiles of vivid colours and intricate patterns. Techniques such as resist dyeing and block printing were widely practiced in western India, while weaving centres in Gujarat, Bengal, and the Deccan supplied both domestic markets and overseas trade.
Maritime technology also played an important role in sustaining long-distance trade during the early medieval centuries. Indian shipbuilders constructed large ocean-going vessels capable of navigating the monsoon routes of the Indian Ocean. Many of these ships were built using the technique of sewn-plank construction, in which wooden planks were stitched together with coir ropes rather than fastened with metal nails. This technique allowed ships to remain flexible and resilient during long voyages. Knowledge of monsoon wind patterns enabled merchants to undertake regular voyages linking Indian ports with those of Southeast Asia, China, and the Middle East. Such maritime connections contributed significantly to the circulation of goods, technologies, and cultural influences across the Indian Ocean world.
Despite these achievements, historians have debated the broader implications of technological change during this period. R. S. Sharma once argued that the early medieval economy exhibited signs of decline in long-distance trade and urban activity, partly due to the rise of feudal structures. In contrast, scholars such as B. D. Chattopadhyaya and Irfan Habib have suggested that while certain regions may have experienced economic contraction, others witnessed significant growth and technological development. Habib has emphasized that technological innovations in medieval India were often gradual refinements within established craft traditions rather than sudden breakthroughs. The absence of large-scale mechanization should therefore not be interpreted as technological stagnation; rather, it reflects the specific social and economic conditions under which technology developed.
In conclusion, the centuries between 800 and 1200 CE witnessed significant technological developments in agriculture, irrigation, metallurgy, architecture, textiles, and maritime activity. These developments were closely connected to the expansion of agrarian production, the growth of craft industries, and the increasing integration of India into wider networks of trade and exchange. As historians such as Kosambi, Sharma, Chattopadhyaya, Stein, and Habib have demonstrated, technological change in early medieval India cannot be understood in isolation from the social structures and economic processes that shaped it. Instead, technology formed an integral part of the evolving relationship between society, environment, and production in early medieval South Asia.
References
Chattopadhyaya, B. D. The Making of Early Medieval India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Habib, Irfan. Technology in Medieval India c. 650–1750. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2008.
Habib, Irfan. Medieval India: The Study of a Civilization. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007.
Kosambi, D. D. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1956.
Ramaswamy, Vijaya. Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Sharma, R. S. Indian Feudalism. New Delhi: Macmillan, 1980.
Stein, Burton. Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Among the many historical events that have shaped the religious and emotional universe of Islam, few have exercised the enduring influence of the tragedy of Karbala. For the Shiʿa, Karbala is not merely an episode in early Islamic history; it is the central moral drama that defines their worldview, their ritual life, and their collective memory. To say that Karbala is the DNA of the Shias is therefore not merely a metaphorical flourish. It reflects the profound manner in which the narrative, symbolism, and ethical message of Karbala permeate Shiʿi theology, ritual practice, historical consciousness, and political imagination.
The Historical Moment
The event of Karbala occurred in 680 CE (61 AH) when Imam Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, the grandson of the Prophet Muḥammad, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Umayyad ruler Yazid ibn Muʿāwiya. Ḥusain’s refusal was not a mere political rebellion but a moral protest against what he perceived as the corruption of the Islamic polity. Accompanied by a small group of family members and companions, he was surrounded by the forces of the Umayyad governor of Kufa on the plains of Karbala in present-day Iraq. On the tenth day of Muḥarram—ʿĀshūrāʾ—Ḥusain and his companions were killed after days of thirst and siege, while the surviving women and children were taken captive.
While the immediate historical significance of Karbala was limited in military or political terms, its symbolic power proved immense. The death of the Prophet’s grandson under such circumstances was perceived by many as a moral catastrophe for the Muslim community. Among the Shiʿa, however, the event came to represent the eternal struggle between justice and tyranny.
Karbala as Moral Archetype
For the Shiʿa, Karbala functions as a moral template that transcends time and place. Imam Ḥusayn is not remembered merely as a historical figure but as the embodiment of resistance against injustice. His stand is interpreted as a conscious act of martyrdom intended to preserve the ethical integrity of Islam. In Shiʿi devotional literature, this moment becomes the paradigmatic example of the Qurʾanic injunction to “enjoin good and forbid evil.”
Thus Karbala is not simply remembered, it is constantly reinterpreted. Every generation is invited to ask: who is the Ḥusain of our time, and who is the Yazid? The story becomes a moral grammar through which contemporary events are understood. This interpretive flexibility explains why the symbolism of Karbala has been invoked in various historical struggles, from medieval sectarian conflicts to modern political movements.
Ritual Memory and Collective Identity
If Karbala is the genetic code of Shiʿi identity, its rituals are the mechanisms through which that code is transmitted from generation to generation. The annual commemoration of Muḥarram, culminating in the rituals of ʿĀshūrāʾ and Arbaʿīn, constitutes one of the most elaborate cycles of religious mourning in the world.
Majālis (mourning assemblies), mars̱iya poetry, noha recitations, taʿziya passion plays, and processions serve not merely as acts of remembrance but as reenactments of the tragedy. Through these rituals, believers are emotionally and spiritually transported to Karbala. The participants become witnesses to the suffering of Ḥusain and his companions, and in doing so they renew their allegiance to his cause.
This ritualized memory creates a powerful sense of community. The Shiʿa across different cultures, whether in Iran, Iraq, South Asia, Lebanon, or the diaspora, share a common emotional vocabulary rooted in Karbala. The lamentations of Muḥarram thus function as a cultural and religious adhesive binding together disparate communities.
Karbala in Shiʿi Theology
The theological significance of Karbala lies in its connection to the doctrine of Imamate. In Shiʿi belief, the Imams are not merely political leaders but divinely guided authorities who safeguard the true interpretation of Islam. The martyrdom of Imam Ḥusain therefore represents the suffering of legitimate authority at the hands of illegitimate power.
Over centuries, Shiʿi scholars developed a rich theology of martyrdom centred on Karbala. The martyrdom of Ḥusain is understood as redemptive in a spiritual sense: his sacrifice awakened the conscience of the Muslim community and ensured that tyranny would never go unchallenged. This idea is captured in the famous maxim often attributed to Shiʿi devotional tradition: “Every day is ʿĀshūrāʾ and every land is Karbala.”
Cultural and Literary Expressions
The narrative of Karbala has generated an immense literary and artistic tradition. Persian, Arabic, and Urdu literatures are replete with elegiac poetry commemorating the tragedy. The mars̱iya tradition of Lucknow, perfected by poets such as Mir Anis and Mirza Dabeer, elevated the story of Karbala into one of the most sophisticated forms of classical Urdu poetry.
Similarly, the dramatic performances of taʿziya in Iran and South Asia transformed the narrative into a form of sacred theatre. Visual arts, calligraphy, and shrine architecture, especially at Karbala and Najaf, have also been profoundly shaped by this tradition. Through these mediums, the story of Ḥusayn has been woven into the cultural fabric of Shiʿi societies.
Karbala and Political Consciousness
Karbala has also played a significant role in shaping Shiʿi political thought. The symbolism of resistance embodied in Imam Ḥusain has frequently been invoked during periods of oppression. In modern times, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 famously mobilized the imagery of Karbala, portraying the struggle against tyranny as a reenactment of Ḥusain’s stand against Yazid.
Yet the political interpretation of Karbala is not uniform. For many believers, the lesson of Karbala lies not in revolutionary activism but in moral steadfastness and spiritual resistance. The event thus accommodates a spectrum of interpretations ranging from quietist piety to militant opposition.
Conclusion
To describe Karbala as the DNA of the Shiʿa is to recognize that it functions as the foundational code from which Shiʿi identity derives its meaning. It shapes theology through the doctrine of martyrdom, ritual through the commemorations of Muḥarram, literature through elegiac poetry, and politics through the symbolism of resistance.
More than a historical memory, Karbala is a living narrative. It provides a moral compass that continues to guide the ethical and spiritual life of Shiʿi communities across the world. Through centuries of repetition in ritual, poetry, and collective memory, the message of Imam Husain: resistance to injustice and fidelity to truth, remains embedded in the very cultural and spiritual genome of the Shiʿa.
“Muharram is the month in which justice rose up against oppression, and truth confronted falsehood.”
Culture has been one of the most central and debated concepts in the social sciences, history, and anthropology, used to explain how human societies organise life, produce meaning, and transmit values across generations. At its most comprehensive level, culture refers to the socially acquired ways of life of a group of people, their beliefs, customs, norms, values, knowledge systems, institutions, artistic expressions, and everyday practices. It is not biologically inherited but learned and shared. This holistic understanding was classically articulated by EB Tylor , who defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Tylor’s definition has remained influential because it captures culture as an integrated totality rather than a set of isolated traits.
Culture manifests itself in both material and non-material forms. Material culture refers to tangible objects produced and used by human beings, ie., tools, technologies, buildings, monuments, clothing, utensils, books, machines, and works of art. Roads, dams, temples, mosques, forts, factories, railways, and digital devices all belong to this sphere. In the Indian context, historians have shown how material culture reveals patterns of production, power, and social organisation: from Harappan urban planning and Mauryan pillars to Mughal architecture and colonial infrastructure. Yet material culture is never merely physical. A monument such as the Taj Mahal is not only marble and geometry but also an expression of imperial authority, aesthetic sensibility, religious symbolism, and historical memory. Thus, material culture is always embedded in non-material meanings.
Non-material culture consists of abstract elements such as beliefs, values, norms, customs, language, symbols, emotions, and ideas. Religion, kinship, caste, moral codes, rituals, festivals, and social institutions belong to this realm. Sociologist Emili Durkheim conceptualised such shared beliefs and practices as the collective conscience, arguing that they bind individuals into a moral community and provide social cohesion. In India, this insight has been particularly useful in understanding the social role of ritual, pilgrimage, festivals, and collective religious practices, which function not only as expressions of faith but also as mechanisms of social integration.
Cultural heritage refers to those aspects of culture that societies value and consciously preserve. It may be tangible, viz. monuments, manuscripts, artefacts, historic buildings, or intangible, such as oral traditions, music, dance, rituals, festivals, local knowledge systems, and traditional skills. Indian scholars and institutions have long emphasised the importance of intangible heritage, especially in a society where much cultural transmission historically occurred through oral traditions rather than written texts. Folk songs, epics, storytelling traditions, craft knowledge, and culinary practices are crucial repositories of historical experience and social memory.
Culture is also deeply shaped by social hierarchy and power. Distinctions between elite or “high” culture and popular or folk culture reflect unequal access to education, leisure, and cultural capital. Classical music, courtly literature, and fine arts have often been associated with elites, while folk traditions, oral epics, and local rituals have been rooted in everyday life. In the Indian context, scholars such as NK Bose highlighted how popular and folk cultures are not residual or inferior forms but dynamic systems that adapt creatively to social change, often mediating between tradition and modernity.
Critical perspectives have drawn attention to the relationship between culture and material conditions. Karl Marx argued that culture forms part of the ideological superstructure shaped by economic relations. This insight was powerfully adapted to Indian history by DD Kosambi, who viewed culture as a product of historical material conditions and social formations. Kosambi demonstrated how religious forms, myths, and cultural practices in India could be historically analysed in relation to changes in modes of production, class relations, and social structure. His work marked a decisive shift away from viewing Indian culture as timeless or purely spiritual, grounding it instead in historical processes.
At the same time, interpretive approaches have emphasised culture as a system of meaning. Clifford Geertz described culture as webs of significance through which human beings make sense of the world. In the Indian context, scholars such as AK Ramanujan extended this interpretive sensitivity to folklore, oral traditions, and classical texts, showing how multiple cultural logics coexist and how meanings shift across contexts, regions, and languages. Ramanujan’s work underscored the plurality and layered nature of Indian culture, where “many pasts” and “many traditions” operate simultaneously.
A key analytical distinction in sociological thought is between ideal culture and real culture. Ideal culture consists of norms, values, and ideals that a society holds up as goals, articulated in religious doctrines, moral codes, constitutions, and textbooks. Real culture refers to actual practices in everyday life. In India, this distinction has been particularly useful in understanding religion and social reform. Sociologist MN Srinivas, through concepts such as Sanskritisation and dominant caste, showed how ideals derived from textual or elite traditions are selectively adopted, adapted, or negotiated in lived social practice. The gap between ideal prescriptions and social realities thus becomes a key site for historical and sociological analysis.
Culture in India has also been examined historically through its long-term continuities and transformations. Historian Romila Thapar has emphasised that Indian culture cannot be understood as a monolithic or unchanging entity. Instead, it has been shaped by historical interactions, debates, contestations, and reinterpretations—whether in religious traditions, political ideologies, or social institutions. Similarly, Irfan Habib has drawn attention to the material and social bases of cultural forms, linking intellectual and cultural developments to agrarian structures, state formation, and class relations.
When applied to India, therefore, culture cannot be reduced to a single set of values or practices. Indian culture represents a vast, plural, and evolving civilisational continuum shaped by regional diversity, linguistic plurality, religious traditions, and historical encounters. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kutch to Arunachal Pradesh, each region and community articulates culture differently through food habits, dress, rituals, festivals, art forms, and social norms. Culture here is best understood not as a fixed essence but as a historically produced and continuously negotiated way of life.
Culture is not merely a list of customs that people consciously follow. It is deeply internalised through socialisation from birth and shapes modes of thinking, perception, and emotional response. This is why cultural dispositions often persist even when people migrate or live outside their place of origin. Ultimately, culture operates at two interrelated levels: the level of everyday lived practices that give continuity to social life, and the level of higher cultural achievements like art, literature, philosophy, science, and architecture, that reflect a society’s intellectual and creative capacities. Together, these dimensions make culture a living, dynamic system through which human societies, including India’s richly diverse society, understand themselves and the world around them.
Indian historians working within a materialist and social-historical framework, most notably RS Sharma,BNS Yadav, and DN Jha, have argued that the emergence and consolidation of feudal social relations in early-medieval India (c. 600–1200 CE) brought about deep and long-lasting transformations in Indian culture. These changes were not merely political or economic but penetrated religious life, social organisation, ideology, and everyday cultural practices.
Central to their interpretation is the argument that the growth of land grants to brahmanas, temples, and secular intermediaries fundamentally altered the material basis of society. As land revenue was increasingly alienated from the peasantry and transferred to feudatories, villages became more self-sufficient, markets declined in many regions, and social relations grew more localised and hierarchical. This economic decentralisation produced what R. S. Sharma described as a “ruralisation” of Indian society, and this shift had significant cultural consequences.
One of the most visible cultural changes was the enhancement of brahmanical ideology and ritual dominance. As land grants endowed brahmanas with economic power, they also strengthened the authority of Sanskritic norms, ritual practices, and textual traditions. Sharma and D. N. Jha both emphasised that this period witnessed the consolidation of caste hierarchies, the sharpening of social inequalities, and the increased marginalisation of lower castes and untouchable groups. Cultural practices increasingly reflected graded inequality: access to education, religious knowledge, and prestigious rituals became more restricted, while ideas of purity and pollution were more rigidly enforced.
Feudalism also reshaped religious culture. The decline of urban centres and long-distance trade reduced the social base of heterodox traditions such as Buddhism and Jainism in many regions. In their place, Puranic Hinduism, devotional cults, and temple-centred worship expanded. Sharma argued that temples functioned not only as religious centres but also as economic and cultural institutions, controlling land, labour, and surplus. Temple rituals, festivals, and myths reinforced feudal values such as loyalty, hierarchy, and divine sanction of social order. Kings were increasingly portrayed as divinely ordained protectors of dharma, mirroring the hierarchical relations of feudal society.
Another major cultural transformation lay in the shift from a relatively open, urban-based culture to a more closed, localised village culture. B. N. S. Yadav, in particular, stressed that early-medieval culture became regionally segmented. With weakened inter-regional exchange, cultural life became more dependent on local elites and landed intermediaries. This encouraged the growth of regional languages and literatures, even as Sanskrit retained its prestige as the language of authority and sacred knowledge. Thus, feudalism simultaneously strengthened classical Sanskritic culture and fostered vernacular traditions tied to local power structures.
Feudal social relations also influenced intellectual and literary culture. Sharma and D. N. Jha both noted a relative decline in scientific and rational traditions that had flourished in earlier periods, accompanied by a greater emphasis on religious texts, commentaries, genealogies, and mytho-historical narratives. The composition of Puranas, dynastic chronicles, and religious commentaries reflected the cultural needs of a feudal society: legitimising land rights, lineage claims, and social privileges. Knowledge became more conservative and repetitive, often reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than questioning them.
Cultural attitudes towards labour and production also changed. In earlier periods, artisans and traders had occupied an important place in urban culture. Under feudalism, as Sharma argued, manual labour was increasingly devalued in ideological terms, even though it remained central to production. The cultural prestige of the peasantry and artisans declined, while rent-receiving elites, the brahmanas, landlords, and feudatories, were elevated. This ideological devaluation of labour found expression in texts that glorified land ownership and ritual status rather than productive work.
D. N. Jha further pointed out that feudal culture reinforced patriarchal norms. Women’s roles became more tightly regulated, especially within elite households, and practices such as child marriage and restrictions on women’s mobility gained stronger ideological support. Cultural ideals increasingly emphasised female chastity, obedience, and domesticity, reflecting the concerns of landed, lineage-based elites anxious about inheritance and social control.
Taken together, the works of Sharma, Yadav, and Jha suggest that Indian feudalism produced a culture marked by hierarchy, localisation, ritualism, and ideological conservatism. Culture during this period increasingly served to legitimise unequal social relations, sanctify land control, and naturalise caste and gender hierarchies. At the same time, it also generated rich regional traditions, devotional practices, and vernacular literatures that would shape Indian culture for centuries to come. Thus, feudalism did not simply arrest cultural development; it restructured culture in accordance with new material and social realities, leaving a deep imprint on the subcontinent’s historical trajectory.
Dara Shukoh occupies a singular and paradoxical position in Mughal history. He has attracted a remarkably diverse historiography, shaped as much by historians’ intellectual predispositions as by the politically mediated nature of Mughal sources. Early colonial and nationalist writers, most notably Sir Jadunath Sarkar, framed Dara through a stark moral opposition with Aurangzeb, portraying him as a tolerant, humanistic, almost proto-secular prince tragically eliminated by religious orthodoxy. This binary, though influential, flattened the political realities of Mughal succession and transformed Dara into a symbolic counter-figure rather than a historically situated actor. A crucial corrective was offered by Kalika Ranjan Qanungo, who rejected romanticisation and insisted on judging Dara as a political figure. Qanungo acknowledged Dara’s intellectual sincerity and cultural brilliance but emphasised his lack of administrative training, military competence, and political tact. For him, Dara’s failure stemmed not from religious heterodoxy but from an inability to convert cultural authority into political power. Later scholarship, especially that of M Athar Ali, shifted attention to the structural logic of Mughal politics—factional alignments, noble interests, command over resources—rather than personal belief. More recent cultural-intellectual studies by Supriya Gandhi have further nuanced this picture by situating Dara within Mughal traditions of knowledge production, translation, spiritual kingship, and elite piety. Taken together, these approaches move us away from moral binaries and toward an understanding of Dara Shukoh as a historically grounded prince whose intellectual ambitions collided with the unforgiving constraints of early modern imperial power.
As the eldest son and acknowledged heir-apparent of Emperor Shahjahan, Dara enjoyed unparalleled paternal favour. Yet this intimacy proved politically debilitating. Though appointed subahdar of Punjab and Allahabad, he governed these provinces largely through deputies and remained mostly at court, thereby missing the sustained provincial and military apprenticeship traditionally expected of Mughal princes. Qanungo was particularly sharp on this point: Dara, shielded from adversity, never acquired the discipline of command or the capacity to negotiate power under pressure. Unlike Aurangzeb, whose long tenures in the Deccan forged military authority and noble alliances, Dara remained dependent on imperial favour rather than personal networks. Temperamentally reflective and intellectually inclined, he was ill-suited to the aggressive calculus of succession politics. Compounding this was an arrogance born of privilege; Dara repeatedly alienated senior nobles such as Mirza Raja Jai Singh, Shaista Khan, and Khalilullah Khan by humiliating them and disregarding courtly norms. For example, he would derogatorily call Jai Singh as “Dakhini Bandar”. In a polity where kingship depended on managing egos and forging consensus among elites, such behaviour proved fatal.
In stark contrast to these political limitations stood the coherence and ambition of Dara’s intellectual and spiritual vision. His intellectual world was anchored in Qadiri Sufism. Introduced by Shah Jahan to the celebrated mystic Miyan Mir, Dara later became a devoted disciple of Mulla Shah Badakhshi. While Sufi devotion was not uncommon in the Mughal household—Jahanara Begum shared similar inclinations—Dara alone sought to systematise and textualise mystical experience. His works, including Safinat-ul-Auliya and Sakinat-ul-Auliya, compiled hagiographical and doctrinal material on Sufi saints and traced chains of spiritual authority; Risala-i Haqqnuma explored metaphysical truth and ethical conduct; and Hasanat-ul-Arifin assembled aphoristic sayings of Sufi masters. These were serious intellectual interventions, not ornamental exercises in piety. Yet, as Qanungo perceptively observed, Dara confused spiritual authority with political legitimacy, assuming that metaphysical depth could compensate for deficiencies in administration and military command.
This intellectual ambition reached its most original expression in Dara’s comparative theological works, above all Majmaʿ-ul-Baḥrain (“The Confluence of the Two Seas”). Far from being a plea for vague tolerance, the text is a sustained metaphysical argument that Sufi notions of divine unity (tawḥīd) and Vedantic concepts of ultimate reality (brahman) converge at a deeper, esoteric level. Dara approached Hinduism not as a collection of popular rituals but as a philosophical tradition whose highest articulation lay in the Upanishads. He consistently distinguished between external religious forms and inner truth, arguing that conflict arose when surface practices were mistaken for ultimate meaning. His engagement with Hinduism was thus elite, text-centred, and philosophical rather than devotional or populist. Importantly, Majmaʿ-ul-Baḥrain did not advocate the fusion of religions; it sought instead to reveal a shared mystical grammar underlying distinct traditions.
This vision culminated in Dara’s Persian translation of the Upanishads, titled Sirr-i Akbar (“The Greatest Secret”). In the introduction, Dara advanced his most daring claim: that the Qur’anic Kitab al-Maknun, the “Hidden Book,” referred to in Islamic scripture, was none other than the Upanishads. To Dara, these texts contained the primordial articulation of monotheism, later reaffirmed and clarified by Islam. The project was explicitly pedagogical and imperial. By translating the Upanishads into Persian, Dara sought to make them accessible to Muslim scholars and integrate Indian metaphysics into the Persianate intellectual world of the Mughal elite. As Supriya Gandhi has shown, translation in the Mughal context functioned as a mode of sovereignty, a way of claiming India’s intellectual past and embedding Mughal authority more deeply in the subcontinent.
Dara’s pluralism must be distinguished carefully from Akbar’s doctrine of ṣulḥ-i kul. Akbar’s ṣulḥ-i kul was primarily political and administrative, a principle of universal peace designed to stabilise empire and secure loyalty across religious communities. Dara’s version, by contrast, was metaphysical and intellectual. It did not emerge from the necessities of governance but from a conviction that all true religions shared a single esoteric core. Where Akbar tolerated difference to rule effectively, Dara sought to interpret difference away at the level of ultimate truth. Further, Akbar’s sulh e kul was a rejection of religion, Dara’s sulh e kul was belief that there is truth in all religions. This distinction is crucial, for it reveals why Dara’s vision, however sophisticated, lacked the institutional mechanisms that made Akbar’s policy durable.
Dara’s conception of sovereignty extended beyond texts into culture, art, and architecture. He was a passionate patron of music, painting, and calligraphy, arts viewed with suspicion by Aurangzeb. The celebrated Dara Shukoh Album, presented to his wife Nadira Banu Begum, reveals him not merely as a patron but as an aesthete of remarkable sophistication; its later defacement and anonymisation after his execution mirror his systematic erasure from official memory.
Architecturally, Dara commissioned the tomb of Nadira Banu in Lahore, the shrine of Miyan Mir, the Dara Shukoh Library in Delhi, the Akhun Mulla Shah Mosque, and the Pari Mahal complex in Srinagar—structures that embody a synthesis of Persianate form, local traditions, and spiritual symbolism, reflecting his belief that architecture could serve as a medium of ethical and metaphysical expression.
Contrary to later assumptions, Dara’s engagement with Hindu, Sufi, and even Jesuit traditions was not exceptional within Mughal practice. Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan had all patronised non-Islamic scholars and ascetics. Qanungo was emphatic that religion was not the decisive factor in Dara’s downfall; the charge of kufr functioned largely as a post-facto political justification. What doomed Dara was his failure to command armies, build durable noble alliances, and inspire confidence in moments of crisis. Aurangzeb’s subsequent erasure of Dara from chronicles and the uncertainty surrounding his burial site underscore the politics of memory, yet even Aurangzeb complicates the stereotype of sectarian vengeance by arranging marriages between his children and Dara’s descendants and maintaining certain Sufi affiliations himself.
Dara Shukoh thus represents not a martyr to tolerance but a failed experiment in metaphysical kingship. He imagined a Mughal sovereignty grounded in spiritual insight, philosophical synthesis, and cultural refinement. As Qanungo perceptively argued, such ideals could enrich empire but could not sustain it. In a polity where authority rested on military command, revenue extraction, and elite consensus, Dara’s intellectual capital proved insufficient. His enduring significance lies not in what he ruled, but in what he attempted to imagine: an empire in which Islam and Hinduism were not merely accommodated but philosophically reconciled. That this vision failed tells us less about its nobility than about the unforgiving logic of early modern imperial power.
The historical relationship between India and Afghanistan must be approached as a history of shared spaces rather than of bounded territories. Long before the emergence of modern political borders, Afghanistan functioned as India’s principal north-western gateway, linking the subcontinent with Central Asia, Iran, and the Mediterranean world. The Hindu Kush was never an absolute barrier; instead, its passes—Khyber, Bolan, and Gomal—structured movement and exchange. Ancient Indian geographical imagination conceptualised this zone as part of the Uttarāpatha, the northern route of commerce and communication, suggesting a spatial order defined by circulation rather than enclosure.
This connectivity was already firmly in place in the ancient period. Regions corresponding to present-day eastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan—above all Gandhāra—were deeply embedded in the political and cultural world of early India. Gandhāra, with centres such as Taxila, functioned as a major intellectual and commercial hub, where Vedic, Buddhist, Iranian, and Hellenistic traditions intersected. The incorporation of Afghanistan into the Mauryan Empire in the third century BCE marked a decisive moment in this shared history. Ashokan inscriptions discovered at Kandahar, composed in Greek and Aramaic, reveal both the reach of imperial authority and the cosmopolitan character of the Indo-Afghan region. These inscriptions also indicate that Afghanistan lay at the crossroads of multiple cultural worlds, rather than on the margins of any one of them.
In the centuries following the Mauryas, the Indo-Afghan space became a crucial segment of the trans-Asian trading network conventionally described as the Silk Road. While often imagined as a single route, the Silk Road consisted of multiple, intersecting corridors, many of which passed through Afghanistan, linking India to Bactria, Sogdiana, China, and the Iranian plateau. Afghan cities such as Balkh, Bamiyan, and Kapisa emerged as nodal points where Indian merchants, Central Asian traders, and itinerant monks converged. Through these routes flowed not only silk and spices, but also ideas, artistic forms, technologies, and religious traditions.
The Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Kushan polities ruled across Afghanistan and north India as a single political and economic continuum, reinforcing these connections. Under the Kushans in particular, Afghanistan occupied a central place in a vast empire that stretched from the Gangetic plains to Central Asia. Buddhist monasteries along the Silk Road—most famously at Bamiyan—were sustained by Indian patronage and merchant wealth, and they played a decisive role in transmitting Buddhism from India into Central Asia and China. As scholars such as Romila Thapar have noted, these developments challenge later civilisational boundaries by revealing an ancient world in which Afghanistan was integral to India’s religious and commercial life.
These ancient patterns of movement and exchange laid the groundwork for the medieval and early modern Indo-Afghan relationship. Dynasties that later ruled India—the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Timurids—emerged from Afghan and Trans-Oxanian contexts already shaped by centuries of interaction with the subcontinent. The Indo-Persian political culture that developed from the thirteenth century onwards drew upon this inherited geography of routes, markets, and shared cultural idioms. Historians such as Irfan Habib and Muzaffar Alam have emphasised that the political vocabulary and administrative practices of medieval India cannot be understood without recognising Afghanistan’s role as a connective zone rather than a point of rupture.
This longue durée of integration reached its most structured and explicit form under the Mughal Empire. The Mughal state itself was born out of the Indo-Afghan corridor, and Afghanistan lay at the heart of its political geography. For Babur, Kabul was his watan, a homeland that anchored his claims to legitimacy and sovereignty.
The medieval and early modern periods intensified these connections, culminating in the Mughal era, when Afghanistan assumed a position of extraordinary centrality in the political imagination and administrative structure of the Indian empire. The Mughal state itself was born out of the Indo-Afghan corridor. As pointed out above, Kabul was not a frontier possession but Babur’s watan, imbued with emotional, strategic, and cultural significance. Babur’s repeated oscillation between Kabul and Hindustan, described vividly in the Baburnama, reveals a political geography in which the Hindu Kush did not divide worlds but linked them. Kabul functioned as the hinge between Central Asian Timurid traditions and the Indian environment into which Babur inserted himself after 1526.
The Mughal Empire c. 1600
Under his successor Humayun too, control over Afghanistan, particularly Kabul and Qandahar, was essential to Mughal survival. The Afghan zone provided not only military manpower but also legitimacy rooted in Timurid and Chinggisid traditions. Humayun’s exile in Iran and subsequent return to India via Qandahar and Kabul further reinforced the role of Afghanistan as a political bridge rather than a periphery. Stephen Dale and Ali Anooshahr have convincingly shown that early Mughal sovereignty was transregional in character, resting on the ability to mobilise resources and loyalties across Central Asia, Afghanistan, and northern India.
This pattern continued and stabilised under Akbar. Kabul was incorporated as a suba within the Mughal administrative system, its governors often drawn from the highest ranks of the nobility. Far from being marginal, the province occupied a privileged position in the imperial hierarchy, frequently assigned to princes or trusted grandees. Akbar’s policy towards Afghan tribes was not merely coercive but integrative; Afghan nobles were absorbed into the mansabdari system and deployed across the empire. Iqtidar Alam Khan and M Athar Ali’s works on Mughal nobility demonstrate the extent to which Afghans remained a vital component of the imperial elite well into the seventeenth century.
Under the early Mughal rulers, the transregional sovereignty was institutionalised. Kabul not only became a Mughal suba, but was frequently entrusted to princes or senior nobles, reflecting its privileged status within the imperial order. Control over Kabul and Qandahar was vital not merely for defence but for maintaining access to the wider Central Asian world. The long contest with the Safavids over Qandahar underscores how deeply Mughal India remained embedded in an Indo-Afghan-Iranian geopolitical system. These struggles were accompanied by sustained diplomatic and cultural exchange, reinforcing a shared political culture across the region.
Social and economic ties further bound Mughal India and Afghanistan together. Afghan merchants operated extensively in Indian cities, while Indian traders from Punjab and Multan were active across Afghan markets, continuing commercial patterns that can be traced back to ancient Silk Road exchanges. Afghan soldiers, scholars, and Sufi figures circulated freely within the empire, sustaining what Richard Eaton and Nile Green have described as a mobile Indo-Persian cultural sphere. Afghanistan thus remained integral to the everyday functioning of Mughal India, not merely to its frontier defence.
The strategic importance of Afghanistan lay not only in its manpower but also in its role as the empire’s first line of defence against Central Asian and Iranian powers. The long contest with the Safavids over Qandahar illustrates this clearly. For the Mughals, Qandahar was less a distant fortress than a keystone of imperial security, linking Kabul to the Indus plains. The repeated transfer of Qandahar between the Mughals and Safavids during the seventeenth century underscores how deeply the city was embedded in the geopolitics of both India and Iran. Muzaffar Alam has shown that these conflicts were accompanied by intense diplomatic exchanges and cultural negotiations, further binding the Indo-Afghan-Iranian world.
Economically and socially, Mughal India and Afghanistan were closely intertwined. Afghan merchants operated extensively in Indian cities such as Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Burhanpur, while Indian traders—particularly from Punjab and Multan—maintained commercial networks in Kabul and beyond. Afghan soldiers, clerics, and Sufis circulated freely across the empire, contributing to what Richard Eaton and Nile Green have described as a shared Indo-Persian cultural sphere. Afghanistan thus remained integral to the everyday functioning of Mughal India, not merely to its high politics.
The later Mughal period did not sever these ties, even as imperial authority weakened. On the contrary, Afghanistan re-emerged as a decisive force in Indian politics in the eighteenth century. The invasion of India by Nadir Shah in 1739, culminating in the sack of Delhi, dramatically exposed the fragility of Mughal power. Yet Nadir Shah’s march into India followed long-established routes through Afghanistan, routes that had historically bound the two regions together. His intervention was not an aberration but a reminder of Afghanistan’s enduring role as the north-western axis of Indian politics.
In the aftermath of Nadir Shah’s death, his Afghan general Ahmad Shah Abdali—also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani—carried this legacy forward. Abdali’s repeated invasions of India, including the decisive Battle of Panipat in 1761, were not merely acts of external aggression but the assertion of a political order that once again spanned Afghanistan and northern India. The Durrani Empire, with its base in Kandahar and Kabul and its reach into Punjab and Delhi, echoed earlier patterns of Indo-Afghan imperial integration. As recent scholarship has noted, Abdali operated within a political culture familiar to Mughal elites, drawing upon shared norms of kingship, military organisation, and revenue extraction.
The Mughal period thus reveals the Indo-Afghan relationship at its most intimate and complex. Afghanistan was simultaneously homeland, province, military reservoir, and strategic buffer for the Mughal Empire. Its cities and passes structured the rhythms of imperial expansion, defence, and collapse. The later colonial transformation of this region into a rigid frontier, culminating in the Durand Line in 1893, represents a sharp rupture from this older history of fluidity and interdependence.
In conclusion, the Mughal experience compels us to rethink India–Afghanistan relations beyond the language of invasion or foreignness. From Babur’s Kabul to Abdali’s Panipat, Afghanistan was not outside Indian history but one of its constitutive spaces. Recovering this shared past allows us to see the Indo-Afghan world as a connected historical zone, fractured only recently by colonial boundary-making and modern geopolitics, and invites a reassessment of South Asia’s place within wider Eurasian historical processes.
Aurangzeb, Shivaji, and the Evolution of Historical Understanding: From Jadunath Sarkar to M Athar Ali
My talk today addresses two related questions. First, how should we understand Sarkar’s own approach to Aurangzeb and Shivaji? Writing under colonial rule and bearing knighthood, was he a “colonial historian”? Was he following a British template—belittling Aurangzeb as a fanatic while elevating Shivaji as a Hindu hero—much as Rushbrook Williams, in another context, contrasted Babur with Rana Sanga? Or was Sarkar simply extracting what he believed the sources compelled him to conclude? Second, what has changed in our assessment of Aurangzeb since Sarkar—what has modern research altered, corrected, or complicated?
There is little doubt that Jadunath Sarkar was among the tallest historians of his age, and one whose scholarly seriousness is beyond dispute. When he undertook Mughal history, he first equipped himself with the language of the sources. He did not rely on translated Persian texts; he built his arguments from what the primary sources revealed. He mastered Persian and the scripts in which Mughal documents circulated—including difficult hands such as khaṭṭ-i shikast. The Irvine Collection housed at the British Library contains materials painstakingly collected, acquired, and copied by Sarkar. He was perhaps among the earliest historians to work systematically with the Akhbārāt-i Dārbar-i Muʿallā, a rich set of Mughal news-reports and official documentation. Many documents acquired or copied by him later came to be housed at Sitamau. His collaboration with two major contemporaries—G. S. Sardesai for Marathi materials and Raghubir Singh of Sitamau—is now well documented, notably in K. C. A. Raghavan’s History of Men: Jadunath Sarkar, G. S. Sardesai, Raghubir Singh and Their Quest for India’s Past (HarperCollins, Noida, 2020), one of the best recent works for understanding Sarkar’s scholarly world.
At the same time, Sarkar’s intellectual formation belonged unmistakably to a particular moment. In one of his writings, Rudrangshu Mukherjee called Sarkar a product of his times, describing him as “the last representative of a long intellectual line that began with (Raja) Rammohan Roy,” a lineage that could hail British rule as a providential end to years of “Muslim tyranny.” Sarkar himself, in the second volume of his History of Bengal (Dacca, 1948), described British rule as “the beginning of a glorious dawn, the like of which the history of the world has not seen anywhere.” He also suggested that European success in India lay not primarily in perfidy or superior weapons, but in scientific temper and organisational ability.
More recently, Dipesh Chakrabarty, in The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2015), has described Sarkar as “a child of the empire” who embraced its highest abstract ideals and struggled to give Indian history a scientific and academic status, in opposition to what he saw as the shortcomings of popular history.
Sarkar’s productivity was extraordinary. He wrote extensively on the centuries preceding the “glorious dawn” of British rule: four books and 158 essays and addresses in Bengali; 17 books (some multi-volume) and around 260 research papers in English; and more than a hundred essays for newspapers and magazines. He also translated into English a number of Persian (and even French) documents (see Aniruddha Ray, Jadunath Sarkar, Paschim Banga Bangla Akademi, Kolkata, 1999, pp. 70–118). As A. L. Basham observed (“Sir Jadunath Sarkar, C.I.E.,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 90, 1958, pp. 222–23), Sarkar’s greatness lay especially in bringing to light a vast range of primary Mughal materials.
For the late seventeenth century—and for the political turbulence of that age—it is impossible to bypass Sarkar’s multi-volume History of Aurangzeb or his work on Shivaji Maharaj. In Sarkar’s framing, the reign of Aurangzeb was deeply marked by the emperor’s personal religious views and inflexible beliefs. Aurangzeb, for him, was an orthodox Muslim who pursued discrimination and persecution of Hindus; alienated communities, Sarkar argued, responded with resistance to the Mughal state. Alongside what he described as the “deterioration” in the character of the king and the nobility, Sarkar proposed that there was a discernible “Hindu reaction” visible in the Rathor, Bundela, Maratha, and Sikh revolts.
This emphasis on the individual—on personal character as the engine of historical causation—was in keeping with the historiographical temper of his age and aligns in important ways with what William Irvine had advanced in his work on the Later Mughals. In that framework, history turns on the moral and political qualities of individuals: Akbar builds empire because of tolerance; Aurangzeb presides over decline because of intolerance.
Yet Sarkar, precisely because he was a historian of substance, also acknowledged Aurangzeb’s strengths. He wrote of him:
“[Aurangzeb] was free from vice, stupidity or sloth. His intellectual keenness was proverbial…he took to business of governing with all the ardour which men usually display in the pursuit of a pleasure…His patience and perseverance were as remarkable as his love for discipline and order. In private life he was simple and abstemious like a hermit. He faced the privations of a campaign or a forced march as uncomplainingly as the most reasoned private…Of the wisdom of the ancients, which can be gathered for ethical books, he was a master.”
Alongside Aurangzeb, Sarkar’s Shivaji and His Times (first published in 1919) consolidated his reputation as a leading historian. It was not merely a political biography but also a sustained enquiry into Maratha society and government, with attention to economic and foreign policy. Sarkar also examined why Shivaji failed, in his view, to build a durable state. He highlighted the weakening effects of caste, criticised incessant aggressive warfare, and was sceptical of over-reliance on intrigue and diplomatic manoeuvre.
Sarkar also noted tensions within Maratha society: Shivaji’s experience of humiliation at the hands of Brahmins, despite his own devotion to Brahmanical defence and prosperity; their insistence on treating him as a Shudra; and the role of Balaji Avji, a Kayastha leader, whose own social experience stood at odds with Brahmanical dominance.
He was equally unsparing about economic policy. Sarkar pinpointed Shivaji’s repeated plunder of Surat as a strategy that frightened away wealth and trade, progressively impoverishing the city and drying up a potential source of resources. Revenues such as chauth and sardeshmukhi, he argued, could not serve as stable fiscal foundations.
As with Aurangzeb, Sarkar explored Shivaji’s personal life and ethical posture: free from vice, austere, devoted to religion and holy men, and yet, in Sarkar’s account, notably impartial—respecting Hindu and Muslim holy men alike. He also stressed Shivaji’s charisma as a leader of men. Despite being a devout Hindu, Shivaji had a number of Muslim commanders—Munshi Haider, Siddi Sambal, Siddi Misri, Siddi Halal, Nur Khan, and Daulat Khan—and he gave legal recognition to Muslim qazis within his dominion—details that sit uneasily with modern political caricatures.
If Sarkar’s Aurangzeb unsettled those who wished for an uncomplicated Mughal apology, Sarkar’s Shivaji disappointed many nationalists. As Chakrabarty notes, Sarkar’s readers could be deeply dismayed by his criticism of the Maratha hero; his “dispassionate assessments” refused to conceal darker episodes. He was explicit, for instance, about Shivaji’s acquisition of Javli through the killing of members of the Morey clan.
Was Sarkar, then, essentially writing as a British loyalist? Did he work with a communal template? The evidence is more complicated. Sarkar discomforted apologists on both sides. The more persuasive reading is that he was an empiricist working within the limits—and the habits—of the sources available to him. Raghavan captures this tradition neatly when he describes Sarkar as a judge rather than a lawyer: dispassionately viewing evidence and pronouncing judgement, not simply marshalling facts for a predetermined conclusion. Sarkar hunted down sources, translated them, and extracted embedded evidence; he integrated topography into narrative and analysed outcomes with a craftsman’s discipline. He also often offered counterfactual alternatives—what might have been done differently—most famously in his discussion of possible imperial choices in 1679 during the Rathor crisis.
Sarkar’s method can be illustrated in his use of parallel traditions: he observed that both the Sabhasad Bakhar (1697) and Persian Bijapuri histories used the term mulkgiri to describe raiding into neighbouring territories as a political ideal; Bhimsen, in the Nuskha-i Dilkusha, also used mulkgiri for Maratha raids under Shivaji and Sambhaji. Sarkar argued that Mughal mulkgiri spared co-religionists while Shivaji’s mulkgiri struck across Hindu and Muslim polities alike; he further claimed, on the basis of Sabhasad’s narrative, that Shivaji’s enterprises often amounted to plunder.
Such views—Aurangzeb’s “bigotry,” Shivaji’s “blemishes,” and the explanatory weight placed on personal character—continued to shape historical writing well into the mid-twentieth century. But by the 1950s and 1960s, Indian historiography underwent a notable shift: the centre of gravity moved from individuals to structures, from moral character to socio-economic processes, from rulerly intent to the mechanics of state and class.
In the decade after Independence, changes in method and new sources produced new perspectives. Harbans Mukhia has repeatedly noted that the publication of Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1961) made “the ruler and his personal predilections irrelevant” to historical explanation, shifting focus from the sovereign to a ruling class driven by the imperatives of revenue extraction. Around the same time, Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740 (1959) offered a new framework to explain decline—emphasising a deepening social crisis and stresses within the jagirdari system rather than the personality of the emperor. Even earlier, in the 1950s, Mohammad Habib’s short treatise on Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni had insisted that economic motivations—temples as repositories of wealth—often mattered more than religious zeal in episodes of plunder.
During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars associated with the Aligarh School advanced this transformation further. Iqtidar Alam Khan traced Akbar’s religious policies to the growth of a cosmopolitan nobility from the early 1560s, encompassing multiple ethnicities, religions, and origins. M. Athar Ali, in The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), extended and reworked arguments linked to Satish Chandra’s emphasis on systemic pressures and explored what he called a cultural and ideological failure linked to the inability to adapt modern science and technology. This was a different explanatory universe from Sarkar’s “Hindu reaction” thesis.
To be fair to Sarkar, such approaches were not available—indeed, scarcely imaginable—when he wrote. “All history is contemporary history”: the historian cannot fully escape the intellectual atmosphere of the age. Sarkar’s writing was, in many ways, true to his time.
History-writing is not static; it is a dynamic process, continually moderated by new questions, new methods, and the discovery of sources previously unknown. No historian can be held responsible for materials not yet found. Since Sarkar, the location of new evidence and the adoption of new interpretive frameworks have enabled historians to revise important aspects of Aurangzeb’s reign. Let me offer a few examples.
Sarkar used two farmāns issued by Aurangzeb—one to Rasikdas and another to Muhammad Hashim—relating to revenue collection, with the latter couched in the idiom of shari‘a and invoking categories such as khums and zakat, taxes not levied in India. Subsequent research showed that the “Rasikdas” farmān was, in effect, a standardised order sent to different provinces for different diwans. Later, Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi argued that these documents were not evidence of religious taxation but instructions on managing a crisis of revenue collection—better understood against the backdrop of agrarian distress, including themes discussed in Francois Bernier on peasant flight. Moosvi, in particular, read the Rasikdas farmān as a practical manual for revenue officials navigating multiple obstacles to collection.
Similarly, using sources not accessible to Sarkar, Irfan Habib argued that the outbreaks associated with Nanakpanthis (1665), Jats (1669), and Satnamis (1672) were not “Hindu revolts” but uprisings rooted in agrarian pressure and heavy taxation rather than religious discrimination. The Satnamis were indeed a religious sect—known popularly as mundiyas—but they were also agriculturists and petty traders; so too were the Jats of Mathura and the Nanakpanthis of Kashmir and Punjab. Their resistance, in this reading, was driven by the economic extraction of a regressive system. M. Athar Ali interpreted these upheavals as zamindari revolts shaped by jagir transfers that intensified exploitation: jagirdars pressed zamindars, and both together squeezed the peasantry—leading to rebellion involving superior right-holders and cultivators alike. This was a major departure from Sarkar’s framing, which—given the limits of his sources—had tended to translate conflict into a Hindu–Muslim axis.
The same pattern appears in the case of the Rathor rebellion of 1679. For Sarkar, it flowed primarily from Aurangzeb’s anti-Hindu and anti-Rajput posture. Let us examine the issue first through Sarkar’s account, and then through later evidence used by Athar Ali.
In December 1678, Maharaja Jaswant Singh died at Jamrup in Afghanistan. He left no surviving son: Prithvi Singh had died in 1675. Reports reached Aurangzeb that two ranis were expectant. Jaswant Singh was also indebted to the state; Aurangzeb ordered efforts to recover dues from the deceased raja’s property, as customary practice required. At the same time, pending a final decision about the succession, Aurangzeb waited for the birth of the child. Under the Mughals, the conferring of tika carried political-administrative meaning: it was the emperor’s recognition of a particular claimant as ruler of a territory.
After Jaswant Singh’s death, Rani Hadi, the chief queen, pressed for the tika to be conferred on her. But by Mughal succession practice, a widow could not receive it; and Hindu law, too, gave the widow no such standing. The Rathors thus lacked a candidate. When a son—Ajit Singh—was born, the situation changed: now there was an heir to the gaddi. Initially, Aurangzeb did not doubt Ajit’s legitimacy, as seen in the cancellation of the assignment of Pokhran to Askaran once news arrived that a son had been born. But the administrative difficulty remained: the tika could not be conferred on an infant. Aurangzeb therefore ordered Jodhpur to be included in the khalisa.
The Rathors resented this. Durgadas, son of Askaran Rathore, fled with Ajit Singh to Jodhpur. Rani Hadi protested that no bhumiya (zamindar) had ever been dispossessed from their watan. Why should Rathors—who had served the empire so loyally—be asked to leave Jodhpur at the moment the late raja’s ceremonies were still underway? Durgadas and Sona Bhati demanded the revocation of khalisa incorporation and asked that the tika be conferred on Ajit Singh. Their resentment was genuine, but the Mughal technical problem was also real.
Sarkar, while conceding the technical hitch—no tika for widow or infant—argued that Aurangzeb could have conferred the tika on Inder Singh, grandson of Amar Singh (Jaswant’s elder brother), a near blood relation, a seasoned commander in the Deccan with a mansab of 1500/1000. Aurangzeb, Sarkar suggested, did not do so because he wanted to deprive Hindus of a powerful centre that might resist his anti-Hindu policy. When protests intensified, Aurangzeb, Sarkar said, began doubting Ajit’s legitimacy, claiming he might be the son of a milk-woman or maidservant.
Later evidence complicates this story. Fortunately, the dispatches of the waqi‘a-nigar of Ajmer sent to the emperor survive in a two-volume manuscript in the Asafiya Library, Hyderabad; a transcript exists in our own library. These reports are written for the emperor’s eyes and provide near-contemporary, first-hand information about events in 1679–80. They were not discovered in Sarkar’s time. M. Athar Ali used these dispatches in his PIHC paper (Delhi, 1961) on the causes of the Rathor rebellion.
According to this evidence, Aurangzeb—taking account of Rathor reaction—cancelled the order of khalisa incorporation and conferred the tika on Inder Singh, reportedly for a consideration of 36 lakhs of rupees. Another claimant, Karan Singh, offered 45 lakhs but was rejected—suggesting that money alone cannot explain the decision. After Inder Singh’s appointment, Rathor resistance sharpened dramatically. Rani Hadi even petitioned Aurangzeb that if he wished temples destroyed, the Rathors would comply, but the appointment of Inder Singh must be revoked; she preferred khalisa incorporation to Inder Singh’s rule. Aurangzeb rejected this petition. She then took the extreme step of seeking clarification through the court of Qazi Hamid, who boycotted the petition.
Two questions arise: why was Inder Singh so unacceptable? Because Inder Singh belonged to the line of Amar Singh, whom Jaswant Singh’s family had earlier deprived and humiliated. Durgadas, other Rathor leaders, and the widows feared revenge and retribution if Inder Singh entered Jodhpur. These internal tensions were known to Aurangzeb, while Sarkar seems either unaware of them or does not foreground them. When Aurangzeb refused to withdraw the appointment, the Rathors declared they would not allow Inder Singh to enter. In short, the rebellion’s core issue was Inder Singh’s appointment, not khalisa incorporation per se.
This also exposes a weakness in Sarkar’s interpretation. If Aurangzeb truly wanted to weaken a “Hindu centre,” he could have named Ajit Singh—however doubtful in legitimacy—as raja, with an imperial administrator governing until the child matured. That would have pacified Rathor sentiment while ensuring Jodhpur remained politically dependent. Aurangzeb did not do so, arguably because he wanted Jodhpur to function effectively: the Rathors supplied excellent soldiers, and Jodhpur’s location on the Agra–Gujarat trade route made stable law-and-order strategically important. Sarkar thus misidentified the immediate cause: the bitterness of Durgadas, Sona Bhati, and Rani Hadi was directed primarily against Inder Singh. When the emperor held firm, the Rathors told the qila‘dar of Jodhpur, Iftekhar Khan, to depart—they were beginning rebellion.
All this brings us back to the larger question: was Aurangzeb as bigoted as Sarkar portrayed him? Modern research—from M. Athar Ali and M. L. Bhatia to Audrey Truschke—has often moderated the earlier picture and argued for a more nuanced emperor. Many scholars, from Sarkar and S. R. Sharma to Athar Ali, Bhatia, and Truschke, have approached this theme; some—Shibli Nomani, Sharma, and Sarkar—presented Aurangzeb as a bigot, while others offered more complex readings.
Importantly, Aurangzeb was not perceived by his contemporaries as a hard-core zealot in the manner later projected. Several contemporaneous historians—including Hindu writers such as Bhimsen (Nuskha-i Dilkusha) and Isardas Nagar (Futuhat-i Alamgiri)—do not construct him in that idiom. The “bigot” image hardens later, particularly from the late eighteenth century onward, and gains firmer footing in colonial and nationalist historiography.
The War of Succession, as we now recognise, was not fought on communal grounds or as a clash between Dara Shukoh’s tolerance and Aurangzeb’s supposed anti-Hindu ideology. Aurangzeb did not claim to be defending Islam in 1658, nor did he treat Islam as being threatened by Shahjahan or Dara. In the early years after accession, we do not see blanket discrimination against Hindus or Rajputs. Aurangzeb appointed Raja Raghunath Singh (a Khatri) as diwan of the empire—an appointment without close precedent since Todarmal’s death. He also appointed two non-Muslim subahdars to key provinces: Maharaja Jaswant Singh in Gujarat—despite his earlier opposition in the succession war—and Mirza Raja Jai Singh as viceroy of the Deccan, an office often reserved for princes of royal blood. If one insists on the language of discrimination, one must admit that in these years it often operated in favour of Rajputs, not against them. Promotions to Rajputs were not inferior to those given to other segments of the nobility.
A further restraint shaped Aurangzeb’s early policy: as long as Shahjahan lived, Aurangzeb could not afford to alienate powerful factions, because an alternative claimant remained available. The institution of monarchy had been compromised by the very manner of Aurangzeb’s accession; he therefore moved cautiously, aware that the precedent of imprisoning the emperor could legitimate future rebellions. He also had to fulfil commitments made during the war of succession and deliver on the expansionist promise that supported noble fortunes. Hence the early expeditions in multiple directions—many of which ended badly: Mir Jumla’s death in Assam, Shaista Khan’s humiliation in the Deccan, Jai Singh’s diplomatic success at Purandhar in 1665 followed by the loss of its fruits after Shivaji’s escape from Agra.
Military disappointments set off a chain reaction: the Yusufzai revolt (1667), Afridi revolt (1674), the Jat rebellion (1669), the Satnami uprising (1672), and Shivaji’s coronation. Aurangzeb’s political record, at best, was mixed. The weakening of monarchy demanded compensation from another source, and it is here that Aurangzeb’s emphasis on shari‘a idioms and clerical support must be located. He deployed it with such finesse that not only contemporaries but later historians could be misled. The failure of Prince Akbar’s rebellion—ending in flight—illustrates how far Aurangzeb succeeded, at least temporarily, in consolidating sections of the Muslim aristocracy behind the throne. It is in this context that measures like the imposition of jizya in 1679 acquire a political logic: why was it not imposed from 1658 onward, if the aim was purely theological?
Debating Aurangzeb’s leanings—religious orthodoxy or political pragmatism—one must ask whether he truly intended, as Sarkar suggested, the establishment of dār al-Islām in India, mass conversion, and annihilation of dissent, or whether, as Ishtiyaq Husain Qureshi, Shri Ram Sharma, and others proposed, he aimed at rigid adherence to shari‘a and the undoing of Akbar’s damage. Such portrayals struggle to explain empirical features of his reign—such as the increasing proportion of Rajput mansabdars and the prominence of figures like Raghunath Ray Kayastha as diwan-i kul, honoured by Aurangzeb and praised in the Ruqa‘at-i Alamgiri.
Aurangzeb did increase the visibility of the ʿulamāʾ and promulgate measures overtly aligned with sharīʿah norms; Khafi Khan remarks that he gave qazis extensive powers in civil administration, provoking jealousy among leading nobles. Prohibitions on intoxicants, restrictions on certain pilgrimages, discouragement of music and dancing, withdrawal of patronage from astrologers, and attempts to regulate taxation in sharīʿah terms all strengthened later claims that Aurangzeb was an orthodox champion—some even seeing in him the triumph of Sirhindi’s reforms. But the record also indicates the limits of such a reading: the ʿulamāʾ were state employees, the system was riddled with rivalries and corruption, enforcement was uneven, and Aurangzeb repeatedly subordinated clerical opinions to imperial authority—dismissing qazis and shaikh ul-Islams who resisted his political aims.
Even emblematic achievements such as the commissioning of the Fatawa-e Alamgiri can be read less as a radical break than as codification for guidance, while actual judicial practice still depended on individual qazi interpretations and the interplay of imperial edict and custom. In many respects, Aurangzeb’s policies continued Mughal precedent: clerics could be patronised, but they could not dictate the state.
The same caution applies to “early measures” often labelled religious: stopping tuladan and jharokha darshan, prohibiting wine, discouraging chahar taslim, banning astrology, restricting coloured garments, and banning music. Some historians, like R. P. Tripathi, even interpret certain actions—such as the music ban—as tied to austerity in a period of financial strain, especially when allowances of princes and princesses were curtailed.
At the rural level, policies around madad-i ma‘ash grants—mostly to Muslims—also intersected with political stresses. In the 1670s and 1680s Aurangzeb faced multiple zamindari crises; most zamindars were Hindus and many jagirdars were Muslims. To counter rural power, he could seek to strengthen Muslim landed presence and stabilise certain grants, making some permanent and hereditary—creating local counterweights to entrenched zamindari authority. Abul Fazl Ma’muri’s Tarikh-i Aurangzeb speaks of a jagirdari crisis—hama ālam bējāgīr mand—and of caution in promotions, with saved resources redistributed to consolidate support.
Jizya and temple destruction remain among the hardest issues. Jizya was discriminatory and humiliating; yet exemptions existed—Rajputs, Brahmins, and those in Mughal service among them—and it was graded by income. Some historians argue that its fiscal yield barely exceeded collection costs and that much was lost to corruption, while its symbolism mattered more than revenue. Temple destruction, too, is documented: orders in 1669 and again in 1679–80, including attacks on major shrines. At the same time, there is also extensive evidence of grants to Hindu religious institutions—temples, maths, Brahmins, pujaris—renewed land grants, donations such as ghee for temple lamps, gifts to Sikh institutions, and continued madad-i ma‘ash grants even to Nathpanthi yogis in places like Didwana and Nagor.
How do we reconcile destruction and patronage? One explanation advanced in modern scholarship is reprisal and politics rather than blanket iconoclasm—attacks linked to rebellion, local disloyalty, or political misconduct, while loyal and widely venerated institutions could be spared. In this reading, the destruction of Kashi Vishwanath, Keshav Dev at Mathura, and several Rajasthan temples is placed within local contexts of revolt, suspected collaboration, and shifting alliances. Jizya and selective temple destruction were discriminatory; yet the coexistence of grants and exemptions complicates any single-axis narrative.
Contemporary evidence is instructive here. Bhimsen, an eyewitness to the Deccan campaigns and a sharp critic of Aurangzeb’s strategy—especially the focus on fort-taking while Marathas controlled the countryside—does not build his critique primarily on religious grounds. He mentions jizya without rancour. Hindu writers such as Bhimsen, Isardas Nagar, and Sujan Rai Bhandari do not foreground religious persecution in the manner later historiographies do. This silence does not “prove” innocence, but it does suggest that the explanatory weight placed on religious policy in later communalised narratives may not align with the emphases of seventeenth-century observers.
Athar Ali’s broader caution is valuable: to judge the effects of Aurangzeb’s religious policy, one should not project the India of the nineteenth century—shaped by modern national and religious consciousness—onto the seventeenth. Loyalties to caste, clan, region, and master often overrode confessional identity. Moreover, policy prescriptions on paper could not always be implemented rigorously on the ground; temple destruction, in particular, could be negotiated, resisted, or locally adjusted, as official news-reports suggest. In the short term, the effects of religious measures may have been limited compared to deeper structural problems—fiscal pressure on peasantry, jagirdari stresses, and the strategic failures of the Deccan.
I have highlighted only some themes to show how Aurangzeb is assessed differently after Sarkar, and how our understanding of his reign has undergone a sea-change in recent decades. Does this mean Sarkar’s formulations stand diminished? Does it mean he wrote a communal history? Perhaps not. Sarkar was a historian working within the boundaries of the sources then known and the questions then considered central. As new sources were located and new perspectives developed, conclusions shifted—as they must. History can never be definitive or perfect; it reveals only what we ask of it, and depends upon where, and how, we seek our answers.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 