6.12 — The Mughal Ledger: What Was Built, What Was Destroyed

In 1669 Aurangzeb issued an order, recorded in the official court chronicle, directing the governors of all provinces to demolish the schools and temples of the infidels and to put a stop to their teaching and religious practices. The Vishwanath temple at Varanasi was destroyed that year and the Gyanvapi mosque built on the site. The Keshava Deva temple at Mathura was destroyed the following year and a mosque built there. The court chronicle, the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, records both as achievements.

In 1659, the same emperor issued a farman — a written order, which survives — to the officials of Varanasi, stating that in accordance with the holy law, long-established temples should not be demolished and that Brahmins and others living there should not be harassed, so that they might continue with peace of mind to pray for the continuance of the empire. Similar orders protecting specific temples, and grants of land and revenue to temples and maths, are documented from his reign in several places, including to the Someshwar Nath Mahadev temple, the Balaji temple at Chitrakoot, and Jain institutions.

Both of these are real. Both are Aurangzeb's own orders. Any account that gives you only one of them is not history.

This chapter writes out the ledger. It is the most politically contested subject in this volume, and the method is the one stated in Chapter 6.9: use the documents the rulers themselves produced, cross-check against archaeology and inscriptions, distinguish what is established from what is asserted, and refuse to round the answer toward either of the two comfortable stories.

Aurangzeb, on the record

He ruled from 1658 to 1707, having imprisoned his father Shah Jahan and killed his brothers — a succession by force that was normal in the dynasty and brutal even by its standards. Dara Shukoh, the brother he defeated and executed, had translated the Upanishads into Persian and argued for the underlying unity of Hindu and Islamic mysticism, and the contrast between the two brothers has been made to carry a great deal of symbolic weight ever since.

What is documented against him

The 1669 general order on demolishing temples and schools, quoted above from the official chronicle.

Specific major destructions, attested and archaeologically visible: Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi (1669), Keshava Deva at Mathura (1670), the Somnath temple's rebuilt structure, and temples at Jodhpur, Udaipur and elsewhere during and after the Rajput wars. In several cases a mosque was built on or from the site, which is the physical evidence.

Reimposition of the jizya in 1679, abolished by Akbar 115 years earlier. This was a religious poll tax on non-Muslims and it was a real fiscal and symbolic disability. The chronicler notes it was resisted, including by a crowd in Delhi that was dispersed by elephants.

Discriminatory measures: higher customs duties on Hindu merchants than Muslim ones; restrictions on public religious festivals; and a policy against the construction of new temples.

The execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, the ninth Sikh Guru, in Delhi. Sikh tradition holds that he was executed after interceding on behalf of Kashmiri Pandits facing forced conversion, and the execution itself is not in dispute. Chapter 6.14 covers what followed.

The execution of Sambhaji in 1689, Shivaji's son, who was captured, tortured over some weeks and killed. The manner of it is attested and it was intended as terror. It produced the opposite of the intended effect (Chapter 6.13).

The Rajput break. Aurangzeb's intervention in the Marwar succession in 1679 turned Rajasthan from the empire's most reliable military support into an enemy — destroying the settlement Akbar had built over a century.

What is documented on the other side

The farmans protecting temples, including the 1659 Varanasi order quoted above, and documented grants of land and revenue to Hindu and Jain religious institutions through his reign.

Hindu officers at the highest proportion in Mughal history. This is a counter-intuitive fact and it is well established by the historian Athar Ali's statistical work on the nobility: the proportion of Hindus, mostly Rajputs and Marathas, in the upper ranks of the Mughal nobility rose under Aurangzeb, from around 22 percent in Shah Jahan's reign to roughly 31 percent by the end of Aurangzeb's. He fought Hindu kings with Hindu generals and Muslim kings with Muslim ones, and his longest wars were against the Muslim sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda.

Personal austerity. He is documented as having refused to live on the treasury for personal expenses, copying Qur'ans and selling caps to fund himself — which is unusual for a Mughal emperor and which his defenders cite and his critics regard as irrelevant to his policies.

How to read the two lists together

The reconciliation is not that one list cancels the other. It is that Aurangzeb's policy was religiously motivated and politically applied.

He was personally devout and orthodox in a way his predecessors were not, and he made Islamic law a stated basis of policy in a way Akbar explicitly had not. That is real and it changed the character of the state.

And he was running an empire that could not be governed without non-Muslims, so protection orders, grants and appointments continued wherever they served the state's needs.

The temple destructions cluster in specific circumstances, which is the pattern Richard Eaton's survey found: temples associated with rulers who had rebelled or resisted, temples in newly conquered territory, and temples whose patrons had fallen out of favour. Mathura and Varanasi were both associated with disturbances. This is a political logic operating through a religious idiom, and it is not the same thing as a general campaign of extermination against Hindu worship — the great majority of temples in the empire were not touched.

But the political-logic reading can be pushed too far, and this book will not push it. The 1669 order is general in its terms. The jizya has no political explanation — it was fiscally counter-productive and administratively troublesome, and it was reimposed on religious grounds. Aurangzeb himself framed his policy in religious terms in his own documents, and taking a ruler at his word when he explains himself is a reasonable historical method.

The honest summary: a change of policy from co-option to religious assertion, real in its effects, applied unevenly because the empire's needs constrained it, and destructive both to the communities it targeted and to the state that adopted it.

Why the empire collapsed

Aurangzeb died in 1707 with the empire at its largest extent. It was effectively finished within thirty years and formally hollow by 1750. The causes are structural and the Deccan is where they came together.

1. The Deccan wars. Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-six years of his reign — from 1681 until his death — campaigning in the Deccan, personally, in the field. He conquered Bijapur and Golconda and never subdued the Marathas.

The cost was catastrophic. An enormous army in the field for a quarter of a century, in country that could not feed it, against an enemy that refused pitched battle and attacked supply lines (Chapter 6.13). The treasury was drained, the army exhausted, and the north was left under-governed for a generation.

2. The jagirdari crisis. Chapter 6.11 explained the mechanism. The nobility grew, each noble needed a revenue assignment, and the supply of assignable land did not grow to match. Conquered Deccan territory was war-ravaged and yielded little. So nobles received smaller jagirs, could not maintain their required troops, squeezed cultivators harder, and competed viciously for the better assignments. The historian Satish Chandra's work made this the central explanation, and it is widely accepted as at least a major factor.

3. Peasant and zamindar revolt. The revenue demand was heavy and the incentive on a temporary jagirdar was to extract the maximum immediately. Jat, Satnami and Sikh risings in the north, and the general breakdown of order in several provinces, all trace substantially to this.

4. The Rajput alienation, as above.

5. Succession. No rule of succession existed. Every transition was a war between princes, and after 1707 the wars were fought by nobles using princes as figureheads. Between 1707 and 1719 there were seven emperors.

6. Regional successor states. Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad became effectively independent under governors who continued to send nominal recognition to Delhi. These were often well-governed and prosperous — Bengal under Murshid Quli Khan and his successors was the richest province in India — and Chapter 6.16 shows what happened to them.

7. And then the invasions. Nader Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, massacred a large part of the population over one day, and took the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. Ahmad Shah Abdali invaded repeatedly from Afghanistan and defeated the Marathas at Panipat in 1761. Delhi's authority after 1739 was nominal.

The overall ledger

On the credit side

Political unification of most of the subcontinent for the first time since the Mauryas, with a common administrative system, currency and language of record.

Administration. The mansabdari and revenue systems were sophisticated and the British inherited their categories wholesale (Chapter 6.19).

Architecture of the first rank — the Taj, the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, the Jama Masjid, Lahore and Delhi as they were built.

Painting. Mughal miniature painting is a major world tradition and it fused Persian technique with Indian subject matter and European perspective learned from Jesuit-supplied prints.

Music. Hindustani classical music's development is inseparable from Mughal and pre-Mughal court patronage.

Language. Urdu, and the Persianised administrative vocabulary of every north Indian language.

Cuisine, garden design, textiles, and the general cultural synthesis that is visible in everything from Rajput painting to Sikh architecture.

And the economy at its height produced perhaps a quarter of world manufacturing output (Chapter 6.11).

On the debit side

Documented destruction of temples and religious institutions, especially but not only under Aurangzeb, with the physical evidence still standing at Varanasi, Mathura and elsewhere. Some of the losses are irrecoverable — buildings, images and in some cases libraries and traditions attached to them.

Legal and fiscal discrimination against non-Muslims where it was applied, especially the jizya, which was a statement about who belonged in the polity.

An extractive agrarian settlement. The state took a very large share of the crop, and the temporary nature of jagirs pushed extraction higher. The magnificence of the monuments and the condition of the cultivator are two views of the same revenue system, and European travellers — Bernier, Manucci, Tavernier — describe rural poverty alongside courtly wealth. Their accounts have their own biases and the general picture is corroborated by the Mughals' own revenue records.

Forced conversions occurred, and their scale is disputed. The bulk of conversion to Islam in South Asia was not by force — the geography of Muslim majorities, concentrated in Bengal and the west rather than around the centres of Mughal power, is the strongest evidence, and Richard Eaton's work on Bengal argues that conversion there followed agrarian expansion and Sufi settlement on the frontier rather than the sword. This does not mean coercion never happened; it means the standard "conversion by the sword" account fails on the map.

And no developmental investment. The state built palaces, forts, mosques, gardens and roads for military use. It did not build the institutions — property law, corporate forms, banking, schooling, technical development — that Chapter 9.5 identifies as necessary for what happened in Europe in the following century. This is a criticism that applies to nearly every pre-modern state, and it applies here.

What this means for the argument now

Two things are frequently said and both are wrong.

"The Mughals destroyed Indian culture." They destroyed specific things, documented above, and the loss is real and should be stated. They also patronised and created an enormous amount of what is now regarded as Indian culture — the music, the painting, the architecture, the language, the food. A civilisation of 150 million people is not destroyed by a dynasty that is producing the Ramayana in Persian translation at its own court, as Akbar's atelier did.

"The Mughals were a golden age of syncretism." Akbar's settlement was genuine and remarkable, and it was reversed. Aurangzeb's policies were discriminatory in intent and effect, and describing them as merely political is special pleading. The communities that suffered under them were not imagining it, and Sikh and Maratha history in the following chapters is unintelligible without it.

The evidence supports a third statement, which is less useful in an argument and closer to the truth: a foreign-origin dynasty that governed by co-opting Indian elites, produced a genuine and lasting cultural synthesis, extracted heavily from its cultivators, changed policy under its last great emperor toward religious assertion at real cost to its subjects and to itself, and then collapsed from fiscal and structural causes that had been building for decades.

Where this shows up in your life

In the daily news. Disputed sites at Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura are live legal and political matters in India, and the historical evidence about them is contested in courtrooms. Whatever one's view of what should happen now, the historical questions have answers that can be investigated, and confusing "what happened" with "what should be done about it" makes both harder.

In what you eat, hear, and look at. The synthesis is not a theory; it is in the biryani, the ghazal, the arch and the language.

And in a method. This chapter used the rulers' own orders on both sides, a statistical study of who actually held office, archaeology at the disputed sites, and the geography of religious demography. That is what checking a claim looks like, and Chapter 16.4 makes it general.

What the next page covers

The Deccan wars that broke the Mughal empire were fought against a state built by a man who never commanded a large field army and never lost his base. Chapter 6.13 covers the Marathas — how Shivaji built a state out of hill forts and light cavalry, what ganimi kava actually was as a military doctrine, how the state survived his son's execution, how the Peshwas expanded it to the gates of Delhi, and why it lost at Panipat in 1761 and then to the British.