Book: Decoding Aurangzeb: History as a Political Battleground
Author: Ram Puniyani
Publisher: Pharos Media
Year: 2026
Pages: 116
Reviewed by Dr. Khan Yasir
What memory is for man, history is for mankind. History must not be reduced to a mere record of kings, dynasties, and wars, for in its truest sense, history is an intellectual effort to understand the human past and to recognise how human beings across regions, cultures, and civilizations have shaped one another through cooperation as well as conflict. With an ethical approach, history becomes a discipline that cultivates empathy, self-reflection, and coexistence. An academic and critical historical inquiry discourages simplistic moral binaries by situating past events within their sociopolitical contexts, thereby enabling us to learn from the past without becoming its prisoners.
Yet history can also be transformed into an instrument of exclusion and hostility when selectively narrated for political ends. Unfortunately, India presents a troubling example of this phenomenon. Over the last century, and with increasing intensity in recent decades, the past has frequently been recast through communal lenses that reduce complex historical processes to a perpetual conflict between monolithic religious communities. Medieval India, in the words of Ram Puniyani, is often represented as “the narrative of glorious and brave Hindu kings versus evil and aggressive Muslim rulers.” (p. 104) And in this civilizational battle, rulers are judged almost exclusively through the prism of religious identity rather than the political and social realities of their time. Such narratives flatten historical complexity and encourage contemporary communities to inherit historical grievances that they neither created nor experienced. The result is what Puniyani aptly calls “the source/fountain of hatred,” where “the acts of Muslim kings, presented selectively, are made to reflect upon the present-day Muslims.” (p. 31–32)
It is within this turbulent intellectual and political climate that Decoding Aurangzeb: History as a Political Battleground must be situated. Spread across 18 essays of varying lengths, the volume interrogates the ways in which history is mobilised in present-day India to construct communal antagonisms. Puniyani describes this process as the propagation of a “jaundiced version of the past”, arguing that the prevalence of hatred towards ‘other’ communities is rooted in the versions of past shaped partly by colonial historiography and partly by communal reinterpretations of that legacy. (p. 13)
One of the major strengths of the book lies in its tracing of the genealogy of communal historiography to colonial knowledge production. According to Puniyani, British historians introduced a divisive framework in which the religion of the king became “the center of the narrative” (p. 19); moreover, their bias with regard to Muslim rulers and their civilizational contributions to India was ostensible. Puniyani points out two reasons for these biases. First, the British had to win over the loyalty of large sections of the population away from the Muslim rulers who had major empires. Second, they perceived Muslims as primarily responsible for the 1857 rebellion. (p. 20) Later communal historiographies inherited and amplified this colonial framework, Puniyani writes, “the present Muslim community is supposed to be representing the Muslim kings of the past, while the present Hindus are supposed to be inheritors of those who suffered victimization at the hands of Muslim kings.” (p. 21)
Puniyani’s essays repeatedly challenge what historians term presentism – the anachronistic tendency to judge the past through the invalid framework of the present. Advocating a contextualised reading of history, he insists, “Kings cannot be seen in isolation from the context of their times.” (p. 105) Past political actions, he argues, were shaped more by questions of power, territory, and statecraft than by religion or communal identity. For instance, Rana Sanga had invited Babar to India in order to combat Ibrahim Lodhi (p. 16), an alliance that underscores the political and strategic calculations of the age rather than any simplistic communal alignment.
It is this selective historical memory, according to the author, that underlies contemporary symbolic battles over roads, monuments and names. The “name changing game,” he remarks, is “part of the communal agenda of divisive nationalism” (p. 17), where figures such as Aurangzeb become sites of ideological contestation. Highlighting the ludicrousness of this divisive game, he wonders, “Even a road named after Emperor Akbar appears to be under attack by communal forces, while a road named after his commander-in-chief, Man Singh, may continue unchanged.” (p. 21)
Aurangzeb is the principal villain in contemporary communal historiography. As he observes, “The construction of Hindu communalism roots itself on demonization of Muslim kings and Aurangzeb seems to be leading the pack of such ‘villains’” (pp. 13–14). The author’s objective is neither to canonise nor to exonerate Aurangzeb. Rather, he seeks to challenge what he regards as a selective and decontextualised reading of the Mughal emperor’s life and policies. In his essays, Puniyani adopts a twofold strategy: first, he insists on situating Aurangzeb within the political realities of 17th-century kingship; second, he seeks to dismantle a number of popular myths surrounding the emperor, particularly those relating to fratricide, religious persecution, forced conversion, jizya, and temple destruction.
Aurangzeb’s fratricidal succession struggle is contextualised within the broader history of monarchy. Puniyani points out that such conflicts were hardly unique to the Mughal world. Comparable episodes can be found in the careers of celebrated rulers such as Ashoka and, in more recent times, even in the tragic royal events associated with Nepal’s monarchy. (pp. 14–15) Such violence was a feature of monarchical systems and not the product of a uniquely malignant personality. The issue, therefore, is not the moral innocence of Aurangzeb but the selective moral outrage directed towards him, while exempting similarly situated rulers from scrutiny.
The same applies to forced conversion: demographic history alone casts doubt on the claim, in Puniyani’s words, “If Aurangzeb and other Muslim kings were here solely for the goal of conversions, in the whole seven hundred years of their rule, most of the population would have become Muslim” (p. 15) which is simply not the case. He further asks why numerous Hindu officials occupying high offices in the Mughal administration retained their faith if conversion was indeed a central state objective as they would have been ‘ideal subjects for conversion’. (p. 15) To reinforce this argument, Puniyani draws upon the work of scholars such as Audrey Truschke, who notes that Aurangzeb employed more Hindus in his administration than any previous Mughal ruler, including Akbar. Likewise, citing the research of Professor Athar Ali, he points out that Hindus constituted approximately one-third of the Mughal nobility under Aurangzeb, leading Ali to describe Aurangzeb as a ‘master of alliances’. (p. 25)
Puniyani rejects the claim that Islam spread through the swords of Muslim kings. Instead, he identifies three main factors for conversion:
- Fair business practices of Arab traders in the Malabar region (pp. 20, 36, 103)
- Preaching and spiritual influence of Sufi saints (pp. 20, 98–99)
- Islam’s concept of equality, which attracted Hindus seeking to escape caste-based discrimination (pp. 15, 36, 103)
Puniyani’s views, though he does not cite him, echo the earlier work of Thomas W. Arnold, whose The Preaching of Islam remains an indispensable resource on this subject.
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