Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The review of Munis D. Faruqui’s Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold carried out sometime back by the Hindustan Times, Delhi edition, contains a number of factual inaccuracies and interpretative problems. Given the constraints of space, however, I shall confine myself to addressing only some of the most significant historiographical errors rather than cataloguing every shortcoming. Even a brief engagement with these issues, I believe, is sufficient to show that the review’s framing does a disservice both to Faruqui’s work and to the broader tradition of Mughal scholarship.
The first and most fundamental problem is the review’s attempt to position Faruqui in opposition to what is described as the ‘Aligarh School of History’, represented principally by Professor Irfan Habib. Such a framework is historically misleading. There is, in fact, no intellectual contest between Faruqui and the Aligarh historians on the question of Aurangzeb. If anything, Faruqui’s work should be understood as part of the long evolution of Mughal historiography that has unfolded over the past half century.
The review repeatedly invokes Irfan Habib as Faruqui’s principal predecessor, but this is difficult to justify. Habib’s seminal contributions lie in the study of agrarian relations, the Mughal economy, technology, historical methodology and the structural foundations of the Mughal state. He did not produce a sustained interpretation of Aurangzeb’s reign comparable to those of Jadunath Sarkar, M. Athar Ali or Satish Chandra. To compare Habib and Faruqui on Aurangzeb is therefore to compare scholars who addressed fundamentally different historical questions.
The more appropriate historiographical comparison is with M. Athar Ali and Satish Chandra. Athar Ali’s The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb transformed our understanding of the political composition of the Mughal ruling class, while Satish Chandra’s work on the jagirdari crisis and the later Mughal Empire shifted explanations of imperial decline away from moral judgements about Aurangzeb’s personality towards structural and institutional processes. It is precisely against these interpretations that Faruqui’s emphasis on the Deccan campaigns and on the political significance of the imperial household should be evaluated.
Faruqui does not reject the structural analyses of Athar Ali or Satish Chandra. Rather, he supplements them by drawing attention to dimensions of imperial politics that earlier scholarship had not examined in comparable detail. His extensive use of the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla, together with documentary collections such as the Dastawizat, allows him to reconstruct the workings of the imperial court, the harem, the eunuchate and the mechanisms of decision-making with a richness unavailable to earlier historians. These are additions to the historiography rather than repudiations of it.
The second problem is the review’s division of recent Mughal scholarship into an ‘Aligarh School’ and a supposedly more political revisionist school represented by Muzaffar Alam, Richard Eaton, Audrey Truschke and Faruqui. Such categories obscure more than they clarify. These historians differ considerably in their interests, methods and conclusions. Their common rejection of communal interpretations of Mughal history does not make them members of a single intellectual school, nor does it reduce their scholarship to contemporary political intervention. Faruqui’s work is first and foremost an archival and institutional study rooted in close engagement with Persian documentary evidence.
The review also places undue emphasis on Faruqui’s use of Persian sources, contrasting it with Irfan Habib’s command of Persian. Such comparisons are beside the point. Originality in historical scholarship is not measured by linguistic competence alone, but by the questions posed to the sources and the ways in which they are interpreted. Athar Ali, Satish Chandra, Muzaffar Alam and numerous other historians also worked extensively with Persian materials. Faruqui’s contribution lies not in the mere use of Persian sources but in his systematic exploitation of underutilised archival collections and the fresh historical questions he asks of them.
Another weakness is the review’s repeated insistence that Faruqui seeks to ‘rescue’ Aurangzeb from modern political distortions. This interpretation risks attributing motives rather than evaluating arguments. Faruqui’s central objective is to recover the complexity of Mughal governance and political culture through sources that have been neglected by earlier scholarship. Whether or not one accepts all of his conclusions, the book is fundamentally an exercise in historical reconstruction rather than political rehabilitation.
Finally, the review creates an unnecessary impression of conflict where there is, in reality, historiographical continuity. Modern scholarship on Aurangzeb has developed cumulatively. Jadunath Sarkar established the foundational narrative. Athar Ali and Satish Chandra transformed its explanatory framework by emphasising institutions, political structures and fiscal processes. Muzaffar Alam and others enriched our understanding of Mughal political culture and intellectual life. Faruqui extends this trajectory through a remarkable reconstruction of court politics based on previously underused documentary archives. His work belongs within this continuing conversation rather than outside it.
Faruqui’s book deserves critical scrutiny, and some of its arguments, particularly the relative weight assigned to the Deccan campaigns in explaining the transformation of the Mughal Empire, will undoubtedly stimulate further debate. Such debate, however, should proceed by comparing his interpretations with those of Athar Ali and Satish Chandra, whose works remain the principal reference points for any serious discussion of Aurangzeb’s reign. To construct instead a contest with Irfan Habib is to misidentify both the historiographical lineage of the subject and the real significance of Faruqui’s contribution.
The history of Mughal historiography is not a succession of mutually exclusive schools overthrowing one another. It is a cumulative enterprise in which each generation asks new questions of an expanding archive. Faruqui’s book is an important contribution precisely because it continues that process. It deserves to be assessed within that larger historiographical tradition, rather than through artificial oppositions that obscure more than they illuminate.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 