Traitors in the Shadows is a fascinating account of the life and times of Aurangzeb, the last great — and most controversial — Mughal emperor.
Traitors in the Shadows is a fascinating account of the life and times of Aurangzeb, the last great — and most controversial — Mughal emperor. His distrust of everyone, including perhaps himself, meant he led a complex life, but one most suited to the times of monarchies when palace intrigues were even more threatening than the wars to be fought for retaining or expanding an empire. There was no one Aurangzeb did not imprison — his father Shah Jehan, his sons at various times, his sister — and no brother he did not fight with and dispose of on his way to the top.
Students of history will probably know the story of Aurangzeb and how the Mughal empire disintegrated with his death, principally because he did not rule firmly on who should succeed him and, in fact, divided his empire into three parts. In the process, he set off a battle for succession to satisfy the ambitions of his sons of becoming an emperor like their father and his predecessors from Babur downwards. This genre of historical novels — this is the fifth in the series — could not have been an easy one to pursue. Cold history may have thrown up plenty of material and inspired it in parts. But it is in reconstructing those parts into a lively and dramatic whole that the skill of the writers comes out most, and the husband and wife duo of Diana and Michael Preston, who write under the penname of Alex Rutherford, has done a brilliant job of rendering a dramatic account.
While panegyric prose in praise of great empires must be easier to write, including the statistics in terms of the wealth in gold, elephants, horses, spices and thousands of subjects and millions of square miles of territories, to have to focus on the negative and bring out the details of why the empire collapsed must have been a complex job, even more convoluted considering the huge personal complexities of the emperor. On the one hand, the deeply religious Aurangzeb brought restrictions on people of other religions and ordered the destruction of temples and cancellation of religious festivals and imposed the dreaded jizya or tax on infidels again while on the other he also gifted lands to temples, employed Hindus as well as Shias liberally and ruled over his people at times with rare compassion.
The philosophy of Aurangzeb is best described in the epilogue, where in a letter to his general he writes — “When you have an enemy to destroy, spare nothing, rather than fail. Neither deception, subterfuges nor false oaths for anything is permissible in open war. Make use of every pretext in the world that you judge capable of bringing you success in your projects.” A personality like his would have defied even the greatest insights of the psyche as in Sigmund Freud. But then the times he lived in, the wars he fought and the tricks he played to keep his empire intact were so complex only a man without compunction could have plotted it all.
Even so, he is wracked by self-doubt at a time of his illness in old age, which enables the writers to bring out another facet of the character of a man so ridden by conflict that he could be nothing else but a bundle of contradictions. And yet he was a brilliant commander-in-chief who put down a son’s rebellion just by sowing discord between his Maratha allies and him. A few spies planted in the opposition camp, a few rumours imaginatively woven together and — voila — a war is won even before the infantry could march and the cannons roll on towards the planned battlefield.
The dynasty’s belief in taktya takhta (throne or coffin) may have driven Aurangzeb even more than his predecessors. In fact, his incarcerated father on his deathbed in the Agra fort had told his favourite sister Jahanara that they must give up the warrior code because it was causing the greatest threat from within. In fact, some of the best parts of the book are to do with the emotional relationship between Aurangzeb and Jahanara and their arguments over how their majority subjects in the Hindus must be ruled. This tormented emperor, however, never got over the memories of a father whom he believed never loved him nor of his beloved mother who lay in the Taj Mahal after her death in giving birth to Guharara to be able to think like a normal person.
In the manner of classic self-justification of the powerful, Aurangzeb tells himself that everything he has done is indeed necessary and, perhaps, even moral. It was in fretting over how his God would judge him that the emperor reveals his troubled conscience and appears mortal after all. “The art of reigning must be so delicate that a king must be jealous of his own shadow,” he had said.
Given the historical background of the savagery of the civil wars they fought, Aurangzeb may have been fortunate to die of old age. In the end, it was the march of time that got the cunning old fox, he who sat on the Peacock throne and wore the Koh-i-noor on his crown, both treasures to be pillaged by the Persian adventurer Nadir Shah soon after Aurangzeb’s death to signal the real end of the reign of the Moghuls.
