Uses of the Conflict

The Bhartiya Janata Party’s vilification of the sixth Mughal emperor Aurangzeb seems to have reached a crescendo. Following the release of the Bollywood blockbuster Chhava, there has been a heightened hate campaign targeting Aurangzeb’s tomb. The film elaborately picturises the brutal killing of Shivaji’s son and the second Maratha ruler Shambhaji by Aurangzeb. BJP ministers and leaders including CM Devendra Fadnavis have subsequently endorsed the demand for removal of Aurangzeb’s tomb. The Mughal-Maratha conflict is important to the Hindu nationalist narrative of Indian history because it can be (mis)interpreted to bolster two important pillars of this narrative: the assertion of political Hinduism as an ideology and the othering of Muslims.

Like all ethnic nationalisms (e.g. Zionism), Hindu nationalism invokes a constructed past of lost Hindu glory at the hands of an external enemy and its eventual resurgence. The Mughal-Maratha conflict, occurring towards the end of the medieval “Muslim” period and at the dawn of the modern – a time period which Hindu nationalists associate with the Hindu renaissance – is conveniently situated. 

Read exclusively through the lens of the Hindu-Muslim binary, this conflict invisibles two important histories: the history of medieval anti-caste assertions and that of the Brahminical underpinning of Maratha rule. Both help bolster the Hindu nationalist narrative which thrives on downplaying caste conflicts in Indian society and generalizing the Brahminical social order without necessarily calling it so.  Let us see how well the key elements of this narrative hold up when examined against historical evidence and interpretations.

How Evil was Aurangzeb?

Aurangzeb has been a subject of Hindu nationalist popular histories ever since the nineteenth century. Certain aspects of his life and career lent themselves to the image of a bigoted and brutal ruler: war with his brothers and father, non-patronage of the arts, destruction of temples, imposition of the Jizya (tax on non-Muslims living under a Muslim king), and vast and bloody conquests.

Upon close historical inspection, these features of Aurangzeb’s life and career lend themselves to alternate explanations. Intra-family feuds were common among ancient and medieval rulers irrespective of religion. Aurangzeb was hardly an exception.

Temple destruction was not specific to Muslim rulers. It was common in warfare between Hindu kings in late ancient and early medieval India. Above all, temple destruction was more of a political act rather than a religious act. Prior to the birth of the secular state, divine kingship formed the basic of political rule. Demolishing the temple of the conquered ruler’s patron god was a way of demolishing the defeated king’s political legitimacy.

Aurangzeb’s detractors often ignore the fact that he gave the highest number of grants for maintaining Hindu temples. He himself was two-thirds Hindu by blood because Akbar, his great-grandfather, had married a Rajput. There were more Rajputs in higher echelons during his rule than that of any other Mughal, and he preferred Indian Muslims in his nobility over Turkish and Persian nobles. In other words, Aurangzeb Indianized the Mughal administration far more than any other Mughal ruler.

Why Aurangzeb Taxed and Conquered

Aurangzeb’s predecessors, in the course of their patronage of art and architecture, and fruitless wars to re-conquer the Mughal homeland in Central Asia, had left the empire on the verge of bankruptcy. Aurangzeb imposed not only jizyah but all possible taxes available to him in order to revive the financial strength of the empire. In doing so, he often employed religious rhetoric – much more than his predecessors – because alongside the ulema he had to contend with the increasingly popular purist stream of Sufism: the Naqshbandi.

Aurangzeb was not the first Mughal emperor to impose the jizya.  Akbar too has used this tax in the early years of his reign in order to stabilize the empire’s finances and abolished it when he no longer felt it to be necessary. Those were times before the arrival of secular class-based taxation, a time when all domains of life were enchanted by religion. Hence to view jizya as an exceptionally discriminatory tax would be anachronistic.

Aurangzeb’s zeal to conquer was hardly the result of brutish enthusiasm. His hands were forced by the needs of his empire. The revenue and administrative systems of the Mughal empire were based on jagirs – revenue districts administered by the Mughal bureaucrats (mansabdars). The grant of jagirs to mansabdars was an essential part of the system. By the time of Aurangzeb’s rule, the empire was beginning to run out of land to grant jagirs to new mansabdars and to the descendants of the old ones. Conquest of fresh land was essential.

How Glorious was Maratha Rule?

Far from being sworn enemies with Aurangzeb, Shivaji was a Mughal mansabdar at one point of time who, like several others, took advantage of the weaknesses of the Mughal empire to carve out independent kingdoms. Shivaji belongs to the class of rulers who built effective post-Mughal regional states, such as Asaf Jah Nizam-ul-Mulk (Hyderabad), Saadat Khan (Awadh), and Alivardi Khan (Bengal).

Among all of them, the Marathas came the closest to succeeding the Mughals as pan-India rulers, but they ultimately fell short. Defeat in the third battle of Panipat (1761) effectively ended their quest to control the Indo-Gangetic plains and the Punjab. Beyond the Deccan, the Marathas, like other rulers of the post-Mughal states often marauded in search of revenue. The historical memory of these brutal Maratha invasions continues to be etched in folklore.

Their use of the Hindu idiom in their quest for an independent kingdom does stand out. This was in fact quite similar to use of Islamic idioms by Muslim rulers.

Caste was a key factor behind the Maratha efforts to play up the Hindu idiom. Belonging to an agricultural caste, Shivaji and his successors struggled to obtain the sanction of local Brahmins.  The lack of clear religious sanction bothered them no end. Hence the Marathas richly rewarded Brahmins, to the extent of ceding substantial political control to a succession of Brahmin Prime Ministers – the Peshwas.

Maratha rule prepared the ground for an assertion of Brahmin dominance in the society and politics of the Deccan. This dominance morphed into social and institutional power of Brahmins under the British rule. This was the social context within which first Jyoti Rao Phule and later Babasaheb Ambedkar challenged the Brahminical caste order. Maratha rule was hardly glorious for Dalits, hence their celebration of their role in securing victory of the British over the Peshwas in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon. 

Were Marathas “Hindu Warriors”?

Does the use of Hindu idiom make the Marathas “Hindu warriors”? Not any more than the use of Islamic idiom makes Muslim rulers “Islamic warriors”. While the Sultans and Mughals often used the language of religious conquest to gain legitimacy within the Islamic world, all Muslim rulers in Delhi since Ala-ud-din Khilji maintained that conversion of non-Islamic faiths to Islam was not the objective of their rule.

Khilji wrote this into state policy and no one after him changed it. Political power, statecraft and governance were the key concerns of the Sultans and the Mughals, and it was no different for the Marathas.

History tells us that back then Shivaji’s descendants had no problem with Aurangzeb’s tomb or other Mughal monuments. There are records of Shambhaji Maharaj's son Shahu I, the fifth Chhatrapati of the Maratha Empire, visiting Aurangzeb's tomb to pay his respects and even commissioning a mosque in memory of Aurangzeb's daughter Zinat-un-Nissa (Begum Masjid of Satara).

The relationship between the Maratha and Mughal empires was not one of blind unmitigated conflict, it was much more nuanced where clashes coexisted with collaboration, and war did not permanently disrupt diplomacy.

Neither were the Mughals, and especially Aurangzeb as villainous as they are portrayed to be, nor were the Marathas as glorious. Both sought political power and used clever methods to attain the same. Their rhetoric, strategies and choices were guided by the possibilities and limitations of the early modern world. To make heroes and villains out of them today would not only be ahistorical but also reflect poor politics. Justice must be sought within the conditions of the present, and not through fanciful narratives of the past.