It is tempting to overstate this religious angle to the war of succession. Many modern writers perceive Aurangzeb’s rhetoric through twentieth-century lenses—as the overflowing of a frothing discontent with Dara Shukoh’s religious innovations.26 But surely Aurangzeb, too, realized that the Mughal state’s authority was only strengthened by its ability to absorb and include some of the subcontinent’s diversity, a legacy that his great-grandfather Akbar had left for his successors. Moreover, in contrast to the prince’s letter to Murad, the account of Shuja’s courtier Masum makes no mention of heresy at this stage of the succession struggle; neither do the reports of the event by Bihishti, in Murad’s entourage, or by Aqil Khan Razi, Aurangzeb’s close servant.
At the same time, we cannot wish away the language of religious war. In his preparation for battle, Aurangzeb overtly references a model of the righteous conqueror, which Shah Jahan also drew upon during his rule. Babur, the dynasty’s founder, was one example. But Shah Jahan appropriated and refashioned the image of a far older ancestor—Timur.
Years later, as an old man, Aurangzeb would recall the contributions of both Akbar and Timur in a letter to Bidar Bakht, his grandson. Ironically, Bidar Bakht was also Dara Shukoh’s grandson, born to Aurangzeb’s son and Dara’s daughter Jani Begam . Aurangzeb refers to Mughal India as a “piece of bread,” generously gifted to him and his forebears by Timur and Akbar.27
For now, though, the times demanded a warrior who waged a morally justifiable battle. The Mughals were no strangers to the rhetoric of takfir, the act of accusing other Muslims of unbelief. Such was the Safavid characterization of the Mughals after the last Qandahar war. Recall that Aurangzeb had also reviled Shia rulers in the Deccan as infidels.28 Denouncing Dara as an apostate or infidel fit into a larger pattern. But it did not necessarily reflect the prevailing consensus on the prince’s views and activities. Moreover, Aurangzeb, preoccupied as he was with the logistics of war, had neither the need nor the leisure to craft a full-fledged denunciation of Dara Shukoh’s religious proclivities.
Did he, though, invoke his brother’s “heresies” to galvanize support? Before joining up with Murad, Aurangzeb spent the month of March in Burhanpur preparing for battle. According to one history of Shah Jahan’s reign, Aurangzeb went with the scholar Shaikh Nizam to visit the Sufi Burhan-ud-Din Raz-i Ilahi, who also happened to be Aqil Khan’s spiritual teacher. Burhan-ud-Din, who was affiliated with the Shattari order, reportedly had a huge following. The Sufi had just come out of his house to perform his prayers. He was initially reluctant to sit down with Aurangzeb and Shaikh Nizam. Then, Aurangzeb managed to voice his complaints: “Dara Shukoh, crossing over from the religion of Islam, has stepped into the wasteland of error. Imitating the apostates who have abandoned divine injunctions, he has defamed Sufism, declared infidelity and Islam to be twin brothers—in this vein, he composed the Majma-ul-bahrain—rendered his great father helpless to rule, belted his waist in preparation for his false desire and to kill Muslims.”29
The author of this anecdote is one Sadiq Khan, who purportedly served Shah Jahan when the latter was a prince, during the Mewar expedition of 1614. But other accounts mention that Sadiq Khan was still alive in 1686. The history attributed to him is most likely the product of the late seventeenth century rather than of an earlier time.30 So it is by no means certain that Aurangzeb cited Dara Shukoh’s writings to rally influential figures to his side.
Whatever Aurangzeb thought of Dara Shukoh’s writings, in a letter to Rana Raj Singh, he went out of his way to extol religious harmony as the goal of great emperors. He pressed his own handprint onto the letter to show his sincerity and esteem for the rana. Rulers, Aurangzeb wrote, being shadows of God, ought to ensure that people of “different schools of thought and of variegated religious hues, are cradled in security and tranquility and pass their days in repose.” Aurangzeb’s flowery rhetoric signals his intent to get the Hindu rana’s support. But in his letter, the prince also commits to a philosophy of rulership in which he explicitly aligns himself with the tolerance of his Mughal forebears. Those bigoted kings who torment their subjects, declares Aurangzeb, actually ruin what God has created. Should Aurangzeb succeed in his enterprise—that is, if “the goal’s form, per the unanimous desire of the faithful, takes shape”—the prince’s illustrious ancestors would “illuminate the four corners of the inhabited world.”31
Aurangzeb had recently extracted considerable indemnities from the Adil Shahi rulers of Bijapur and was in a good position to launch a military campaign for the throne.32 Jaswant Singh of Marwar went to the province of Malwa with an army of Rajputs to intercept the opposition. For additional support, Shah Jahan and Dara had also sent the general, Qasim Khan, with another army. The actual battle was brief. On the twenty-fifth of April 1658, at Dharmat, southwest of the ancient city of Ujjain, Aurangzeb and Murad’s combined forces made easy work of the imperial armies. Jaswant Singh and Qasim Khan fled north.33
Masum was not an eyewitness observer to the battle at Dharmat, but he records these verses, which, according to him, involuntarily came to his lips when he heard accounts of the war:
The row of Rajputs, chain mail clad
With lance-heads, cleavers of air
Began the attack like crazed lions
On the Mughals, Indian sword in hand
Faces ablaze with the flame of enmity
Their chests stitched with the points of spears
By no means did they know the route to flight
For they knew no fear of battle …
They displayed such fighting in that battlefield
That Arjun and Bhim were put to shame …
The Musalman and Hindu mingled
Truth and falsehood united with each other.34
The battle at Dharmat was certainly not a fight between opposing armies of Hindus and Muslims. Masum’s description, though, differs from the modern narratives that view Mughal history primarily through the lens of Hindu-Muslim conflict. Notice how, here in these verses, Masum romanticizes the valiant Rajput warrior. His gesture evokes how the sacred-thread-wearing, idol-worshipping Brahmin became a trope in Persian poetry, often presented with positive connotations.
After his victory at Dharmat, Murad wrote a jubilant letter to his Sufi pir, Sayyid Jafar Shah of Gujarat. It relates that Murad met up with his illustrious brother and that together they fought an army of fifty or sixty thousand, which the enemy had brought, in the “heights of arrogance.” Such a battle “had not occurred in Hindustan for the last hundred years,” he writes. Murad reveals that both he and his brother Aurangzeb planned to stay in Ujjain for three days and then proceed to Agra. He beseeches his pir to pray for more victory. Evidently, Dara Shukoh was not the only Mughal prince to confide in and rely on his Sufi teacher.35
Jahanara made a last-ditch effort for peace, sending Shah Jahan’s envoy, Muhammad Faruq, to deliver her letter to Aurangzeb. To fight, she insists, was not merely a crime against one’s family; it went against religious values. Indeed, the two were inseparably linked. Dara’s alleged heresies do not figure at all in this correspondence.
The princess made sure to first dispel any doubts about the emperor’s health. She upbraided Aurangzeb for taking up arms against his own father, “whose satisfaction is the satisfaction and pleasure of God … and the Messenger.”36 There was no justification for fighting against Dara Shukoh either, she argued, for according to both sharia and custom, the elder brother should be regarded as a father. She also urged Aurangzeb to avoid spilling the blood of the Prophet’s followers during the blessed month of Ramazan. If he would only just halt and write down his grievances, the emperor would do his best to redress them.37
Aurangzeb ignored these sisterly appeals. Aqil Khan’s chronicle includes a reply to Shahjahan that Aurangzeb sent himself. The prince is concerned that his father has lost control over the reins of governance. Here, he lists a litany of Dara Shukoh’s wrongs, from his thirst for power to his attempts to sabotage Aurangze
b’s potential success in annexing Bijapur. Aurangzeb blames Dara Shukoh for sending Jaswant Singh to Malwa. He does not spare his ally, Murad, either. He complains that Dara had transferred Berar from his assignment to Murad’s, even though the younger prince, “having stepped over the line, became the perpetrator of a number of insolent and rude acts and the source of great shortcomings.”38 Notably, this long harangue against Dara Shukoh did not address the eldest prince’s religious proclivities. After the easy victory at Dharmat, Aurangzeb was emboldened to push further in his bid for the throne.
Back in Bengal, Sulaiman Shukoh and Jai Singh, unaware of the other happenings in the kingdom, awaited instructions from the court. Jai Singh, for his part, probably wanted to see which way the winds were blowing in the rest of the empire. A letter from Dara arrived, writes Masum. The kingdom is aflame, it reported. More details would be provided in an imperial decree. Until then, Dara instructed that a peace treaty be negotiated with Shuja as swiftly as possible. Then, Sulaiman Shukoh and the raja must make haste back to Agra.39
Shuja sent his minister Mirza Jan Beg to Jai Singh’s camp. For some days, the raja entertained him most graciously, serving up special delicacies to eat and drink, the likes of which “few people of Islam had seen,” writes Masum. The negotiations occasioned a perhaps uncommon instance of Hindu and Muslim nobility dining together, which, like intermarriage, could in many contexts serve as a social taboo.40 When Mirza Jan Beg returned to Shuja’s capital, Rajmahal, where Masum was based, he recounted the details of their feasts. Masum’s mouth watered. Jan Beg was kind enough to share with Masum some fruits that the raja had gifted him.41
Yet, with all his wining and dining, Jai Singh was deliberately stalling on his return to Shah Jahan’s court. For months, he had failed to capture Shuja, although both Dara Shukoh and the emperor had repeatedly instructed him to do so.42 Then, he kept Shah Jahan and Dara in the dark about his whereabouts and plans. The emperor had to order him to send an update.43 Now, after Dharmat, Dara sent him anxious missives, calling Jai Singh the emperor’s “greatest hope.”44 When he did not hasten, as requested, the prince and his father became desperate. They raised his rank again and sent him several edicts to come to Agra.45 Dara Shukoh now had to face the advancing troops of Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh with a severely depleted army.
Murad and Aurangzeb, with their combined forces, marched northward toward Ujjain. Dara went south to try to prevent Aurangzeb from crossing the Chambal River. But Aurangzeb bypassed him and forded the river. Dara then returned to Samugarh, east of Agra, and there waited for the coalition armies of Aurangzeb and Murad to attack.
It was the sixth of Ramazan, which fell that year on the seventh of the scorching month of June. That year, the summer was particularly oppressive, notes Masum, who heard a firsthand report of the war from his brother Muhammad Said, employed as paymaster for Sipihr Shukoh’s troops.46 Even at night, there was little relief; the moonbeams were like “rays of fire.”47 On the day, the imperial soldiers sat ready on their mounts. The sun beat down on their armor. Their horses wilted. Yet there was still no movement from the enemy. The army waited until evening. They had very little opportunity to rest.48
The Venetian fortune-seeker Niccoló Manucci was among the few firangis who claimed to have participated in the events. Many years after the dust had settled, while living in Madras as a wealthy merchant and go-between, Manucci penned an account of his time in India, which he sent to Paris for publication in 1700. Throughout his memoirs, Manucci frequently borrowed, without much in the way of acknowledgment, from earlier European writings. One of his main rivals was the immensely popular history of the civil war penned by the French physician François Bernier, which after its first appearance in Paris in 1670 became an immediate sensation across printing houses in Europe. But unlike Bernier, who only tended briefly to Dara as a physician at the very close of the drama, Manucci asserted even greater authority; at the age of twenty, he joined the service of Dara’s army as an artilleryman just in time to witness the events as they unfolded.49
At midnight, recalls Manucci, three shots were fired from the opposing side, signaling their readiness for battle. An hour later, Dara emerged to renew battle preparations. Manucci slipped away on his horse shortly afterward and explored the area. He noticed other riders—soldiers trickling across to join Aurangzeb’s camp.50 After sunrise the next morning, the coalition army advanced, fresh from their planned rest the previous day. Murad, assisted by Shaikh Mir, led the right wing. The prince rode an elephant, his seven-year-old son Izad Bakhsh seated with him in the howdah. On the left was Aurangzeb’s son, Muhammad Sultan, under the guidance of Aurangzeb’s trusted foster brother, whom he had recently given the title of Bahadur Khan. Aurangzeb, mounted on an elephant, took his position in the center behind the artillery. Zulfiqar Khan led the vanguard. Aqil Khan estimates that they had forty thousand cavalry in all.51
Facing them, the weary imperial troops stood in formation, with Dara Shukoh at the center, also on an elephant. Sipihr Shukoh led the right wing and Khalilullah Khan led the left. The Rajput warriors, Rao Satarsal of Bundi and Raja Rup Singh Rathore of Kishangarh, helmed the vanguard along with Dara Shukoh’s protégé, Daud Khan. The troops numbered about sixty thousand.52
A crucial battle in the subcontinent’s history was about to begin. Each side had a victory under its belt—in Bahadurpur and at Dharmat respectively. The side that would prevail at Samugarh had a good shot at securing the throne. But did this struggle for succession also reveal some deeper religious and sectarian rifts in the empire’s elite nobility? Some modern historians paint the following picture: The empire’s sharia-minded Sunni Muslims allied with Aurangzeb and Murad. They fought against a diverse army that included large numbers of Shias and Hindus on Dara Shukoh’s side. For instance, the modern historian Iftikhar Ghauri declares, “it was generally a war of the Sunni ideology on the forces of heterodoxy and infidelity led by Dara Shukoh.”53
But this was hardly the case; in fact, Dara did not have a significantly larger number of Hindu nobility fighting with him at Samugarh. Athar Ali’s painstaking research enumerating the seventeenth-century Mughal nobility disproves Ghauri’s assertion with solid empirical data. He shows that at the outset of the succession war, an almost equal number of Hindu nobles supported Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb—twenty-four versus twenty-one. And throughout his rebellion, Aurangzeb kept Iranian generals with their Shii sympathies on his payrolls.54
The pattern of support for Murad and Aurangzeb reflects their position as rebel princes, albeit powerful ones, challenging the reigning emperor. As Dara was based at the court as the emperor’s favored son and heir, he was understandably joined by a much larger proportion of the nobility’s highest echelons. For instance, of the uppermost tier of the nobility’s ranks—those allotted a cavalry of five thousand and above—five out of nine supported Dara Shukoh. Dara did have more Hindus from this category. They included the Rajputs Jaswant Singh and Rai Singh Sisodia as well as the Maratha officer, Maluji Bhonsle. In this rank were also some Shia nobles, such as Rustam Khan, Jafar Khan, and Khalilullah Khan. The strong Shia and Hindu presence in Dara Shukoh’s camp merely reflects the diverse composition of the elite nobility in Shah Jahan’s India.55
But just before Aurangzeb arrived at Samugarh, he had enjoyed the help of a high-ranking Hindu noble, Champat Rai Bundela. To Dara’s consternation, the Bundela royal enabled Aurangzeb to cross the Chambal River. Champat Rai, who had been resentful of Shah Jahan’s attempts to assert control over the Bundela Kingdom, seized this chance to get back at the Mughal state.56 The younger prince had also astutely cultivated ties with other disgruntled Hindu rulers. With Aurangzeb, at Samugarh, was the Malwa Rajput Indradyumna Dhandhera, whom the prince had recently freed from prison. His camp also boasted of at least ten Maratha nobles, with their respective troops; these included Jadu Rao and Damaji Deccani.57 Then there is the question of tacit support, even among those not present at Samugarh. Mirza Raja Jai Sin
gh, for instance, was no longer actively working for Dara Shukoh; neither had Raj Singh come to the eldest prince’s rescue. In fact, early in April, Aurangzeb had overtly wooed Raj Singh. He wrote him, boasting of the crushing defeat he inflicted on Jaswant Singh at Dharmat, and pressured him to send his son along with an army. For that, the prince offered a material reward in the form of land assignments.58 Indeed, as we shall see, loyalties evolved fluidly throughout the protracted struggle for succession. But the strong presence of Hindu support for Aurangzeb demonstrates that the allegiances of the nobility were not split along religious lines.
There are indications that Aurangzeb also enlisted some Muslim religious elites to join him in battle. It was not uncommon for religious scholars associated with the court to also engage in military action. Aurangzeb’s tutor Mulla Abd-ul-Qawi reportedly fought at Samugarh. There he attended to the prince’s stirrups, says a later biographical compilation of noblemen’s biographies, using a Persian expression to suggest his close association with Aurangzeb. Just before the battle, Aurangzeb promised him the rank of fifteen hundred cavalry.59 Shaikh Abd-ul-Aziz, a family member of Aurangzeb’s Sufi teacher Shaikh Abd-ul-Latif Burhanpuri, fought against Jaswant Singh at Dharmat. He sustained numerous wounds, for which he was rewarded with a horse and a rank among the nobility.60 Qazi Nizam Karhardawi, who had once served Dara’s stirrups in Qandahar, later joined Aurangzeb in the Deccan, taking his side in the struggle for succession.61 Abd-ul-Wahhab, the qazi of Patan in Gujarat, was also a supporter of the prince.62 These figures represent a mix of ulama and Sufis, most of whom had personal ties to Aurangzeb.
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