MJ Akbar
THE Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is right. Aurangzeb is irrelevant to contemporary India. Aurangzeb is the patron saint and ideological father of Pakistan. Pakistan was created not from love of Muslims but hatred of Hindus. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British collaborator in three-piece suits, was its midwife.
Aurangzeb institutionalised distance between Hindus and Muslims as an official virtue, reversing the social integration evident in the language and culture of daily life, like celebrating Holi and wearing the tika, which had become the new normal over the previous century and more. The British manipulated this distance, invested in differences, and turned separation into policy with schemes like ‘Hindu water’ and ‘Muslim water’ at railway stations. They institutionalised rivalry through legislation like separate electorates, a form of electoral apartheid. A curved and spiked line took separate electorates to Partition, but the connection was all too apparent as was the intent.
Building the future
Modern India cannot build its future with the flaccid and toxic paste of past bigotry. India is proof of our country’s ability to look ahead, instead of getting a poisonous stiff neck from looking back. India is now a rising star of the 21st century; while Pakistan has faded into the quagmires of the 19th, not because the people are different, but because the raison d’être of their nation-state is different. Those who speak on behalf of RSS, even at the highest levels, do not enjoy the elasticity of individual predilections.
They do not aspire to the culture of our politics. Discipline is the vehicle that carries forward practical decisions. RSS spokesmen do not enjoy the liberty of kneejerk innovations, an elastic relationship with events, or the freedoms taken by spokespersons of political parties. The more serious a subject, the greater the thought and discussion behind a taken position. You do not have to agree or disagree with RSS to accept this.
When the Prachar Pramukh of RSS Sunil Ambekar said, in the wake of violence over the grave of the sixth Mughal monarch, that Aurangzeb was not relevant to 21st-century India, and when the organisation’s powerful General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale advocated “a harmonious and organised Bharat” built on respect for the ethos of Indian culture, they were articulating positions that had been sieved through internal debate and discussion.
Faith and culture
Culture is never synonymous with faith, despite the efforts of the orthodox to synthesise the two. The majority of Indonesians and most Arabs share the same faith but not the same culture. Hindu and Muslim Indonesians speak a common Bhasha; Arab Christians speak Arabic.
The Quran says Allah has sent prophets in every language because God cannot discriminate against part of creation. We are all creatures of God if we believe in religion. As someone who could recite the holy book from memory, Aurangzeb knew the verse La qum deen o qum wa il ya deen: your faith for you, my faith for me; but refused to understand its meaning as that interfered with his prejudices. So much murk has been injected into our discourse that it often needs a realignment of focus for a balanced perspective of the larger narrative. Take an example which has arguably done more to breed rancour than perhaps any other.
In 1669, Aurangzeb imposed jizya, an iniquitous tax which caused outrage, protests, alienation and a disastrous disruption of the Mughal alliance with Rajputs. It is equally relevant that for more than a hundred years, Mughal emperors had abolished this communal tax as antagonistic to the culture of the people and spirit of the empire shaped by Akbar.
Akbar’s younger brother Muhammad Hakim mobilised the orthodox and led a serious uprising, accusing Akbar of apostasy. The rebels were pursued and defeated in Kabul by Raja Man Singh.
Ironically, jizya failed as a revenue model because corruption proved more powerful than prejudice. “In practice the jizya did not give Aurangzeb increased control over the powerful ulema. Numerous contemporaries railed against abuses in the jizya collection, to the extent that a huge percentage of jizya money never found its way past the pockets of greedy tax collectors,” writes Audrey Truschke, who is sympathetic to her subject. “Aurangzeb was impotent to halt such theft” (Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth).
Jharokha darshan
In 1679, Aurangzeb ended jharoka darshan, in which he appeared twice or thrice a day, because of its Hindu origins; as was the tika or mark on the forehead, a familiar part of Mughal ritual while greeting Hindus. His orthodoxy included gender discrimination. Women were banned from visiting the shrines of Muslim saints. The fact that he had to stop such activity means that they had been part of normal life for more than a century.
Aurangzeb’s apologists like Truschke argue that he should not be judged by the standards of the 21st century. Quite.
Aurangzeb is guilty by the values of his own family, of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather: akhlaq and adaab, ethics and harmony. His father Shah Jahan celebrated Holi as Eid-i-Gulabi, or the pink Eid, and Aab-e-Pashi, the shower of flowers. Shah Jahan’s nobles sprinkled one another with rose water from specially designed metal bottles to the beat of drums, nagara, and marked the king’s forehead with colour in a display of tehzib-i-akhlaq, or etiquette of harmony.
