Aurangzeb Quotes

During Aurangzeb’s rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.

Aurangzeb’s contemporaries included such kings as Charles II of England, Louis XIV of France, and Sultan Suleiman II of the Ottoman Empire. No one asserts that these historical figures were ‘good rulers’ under present-day norms because it makes little sense to assess the past by contemporary criteria. The aim of historical study is something else entirely.

Aurangzeb was a man of his times, not ours.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

Akbar took Brahmins to task for misrepresenting Hindu texts to lower castes and hoped that translating Sanskrit texts into Persian would prompt these (in his opinion) arrogant leaders to reform their ways.

Great gaps occur in the history of the art, because most of the early work was ruined by the climate, and much of the remainder was destroyed by Moslem “idol-breakers” from Mahmud to Aurangzeb.

None but the Creator has knowledge of the future; If anyone says he knows it, do not believe him! —Baba Musafir (d. 1714), a Naqshbandi Sufi saint, speaking about the war of succession among Aurangzeb’s sons

The foundations built by Akbar and those after him were still strong but Aurangzeb committed the ultimate sin—he stayed on the throne too long. He was ninety by the time he died in 1707! Just as it happened with Ashoka and Feroze Shah Tughlaq

O King, may the world bow to your command; May lips drip with expressions of thanks and salutations; Since it is your spirit that watches over the people, Wherever you are, may God watch over you! —Chandar Bhan Brahman, a Hindu Persian-medium poet in Aurangzeb’s employ

Nothing succeeds like success.

For instance, detractors trumpet that Aurangzeb destroyed certain temples without acknowledging that he also issued many orders protecting Hindu temples and granted stipends and land to Brahmins. They denounce that he restricted the celebration of Holi without mentioning that he also clamped down on Muharram and Eid festivities. They omit altogether that Aurangzeb consulted with Hindu ascetics on health matters and employed more Hindus in his administration than any prior Mughal ruler by a substantial margin.

The Sanskrit Brihatsamhita, written perhaps in the sixth century, warns, ‘If a Shiva linga, image, or temple breaks apart, moves, sweats, cries, speaks, or otherwise acts with no apparent cause, this warns of the destruction of the king and his territory.’ Acting on this premise that religious images held political power, Hindu kings targeted one another’s temples beginning in the seventh century, regularly looting and defiling images of Durga, Ganesha, Vishnu, and so forth. They also periodically destroyed each other’s temples. Some Hindu kings even commissioned Sanskrit poetry to celebrate and memorialize such actions.

India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

For Aurangzeb, Raghunatha’s religious identity was irrelevant to his memorialized status as a great officer of the Mughal Empire.

[Ellora] is one of the finely crafted marvels of the real, transcendent Artisan [i.e., God]. —Aurangzeb describing the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist temples at Ellora

The king then ordered his officials: ‘You must see that nobody unlawfully disturbs the Brahmins or other Hindus of that region, so that they might remain in their traditional place and pray for the continuance of the Empire.

It makes little sense to assess the past by contemporary criteria. The aim of historical study is something else entirely. Historians seek to comprehend people on their own terms, as products of particular times and places, and explain their actions and impacts.

Later, when Aurangzeb ordered the decapitation of the naked fakir Sarmad, an Armenian Jew who had converted to Islam, the sage allegedly picked up his head and walked up the steps of the Jama Masjid. There he said a final set of prayers before departing to the heavens.

The decorative arms race finally caved in under the sheer absurdity of Augustus the Strong (1670–1733), the Elector of Saxony who, with money pouring in from his hideous porcelain factory and from defrauding the Poles (whose king through chicanery he had become), decided to go for broke. When many of his contemporaries were sharpening up and reforming their armies, he spent much of his revenue on mistresses, lovely palaces and daft trinkets. He was aided in this last aim by the services of the great Badenese goldsmith Johann Melchior Ding-linger, who blew astounding sums making such monstrosities as a giant cup made from a block of polished chalcedony, dripping with coloured enamels and metals and balanced on stag horns, or creating repulsive little statues of dwarves by decorating mutant pearls, or a mad but magnificent object called The Birthday of the Grand Mogul Aurangzeb in which dozens of tiny figures made from precious stones and metals fill the tiny court of the Mogul, itself made from all kinds of spectacular and rare stuff. This delirious thing (not paid for by Augustus for many years as the money sort of ran out when a Swedish invasion swept through a virtually undefended Saxony) simply ended the tradition. Looking at it today in the head-spinning Green Vault in Dresden, Dinglinger’s fantasy seems a long way from the relative, bluff innocence of a yellowy whale tooth in a little display box – but it was the same tradition endlessly elaborated. Aside

We ought to repress our feelings and live in harmony.

Aurangzeb Shah is a brave and powerful king’ (mardano aur mahabali aurangasahi naranda).

Aurangzeb was also a religious bigot, a man who could not tolerate people of other faiths. He destroyed Hindu temples and reimposed the hated jiziya tax on non-Muslims. When this tax was first announced, the Hindus of Delhi gathered in large numbers in front of the Red Fort to protest against it. The emperor set his elephants against them and many were trampled to death.

It is obvious that this ratio was considered special for a very long time. So when the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb wanted to praise his vassal Maharaja Jai Singh, he called him ‘Sawai’ (meaning that he was worth a quarter more than any other man).

When the news reached Delhi, Aurangzeb, though his face lit up with joy, was yet stirred to a speech of unusual chivalry. “He was a great captain and the only one who has had the magnanimity to raise a new Kingdom. My armies have been employed against him for nineteen years, and, nevertheless, his state has been always increasing.” (Orme).

Secular culture cannot be created by building domes on the walls of temples. There is no guarantee of peace if you follow Babar and Aurangzeb." "It is our good fortune that we saw the grand temple of Lord Shri Ram in our lifetime." “The temple was demolished by the invaders. Puja was going on in Gyanvapi Temple for hundreds of years but it was banned in 1993 by the UP government (SP) at that time.

While it is true that Aurangzeb is a more complex and pragmatic figure than some of his critics allow, the religious wounds Aurangzeb opened in India have never entirely healed, and at the time they tore the country in two.

My own view is that, while Aurangzeb is certainly a more complex figure than his detractors allow, and that it is true that early in his career he did protect Brahmins, patronise Hindu institutions and Hindu noblemen, and that he consulted with Hindu astrologers and physicians to the end, he was still an unusually cold, ruthless and unpleasant character, and his aggression and charmlessness did do much to undermine the empire he worked so hard to keep together.

['A]lamgir [Aurangzeb] came to formulate a very different model of sovereignty for himself and for the empire he ruled. In this new dispensation, the kingdom would be governed not by a charismatic, semi-divine king, but by a impersonal law -- namely, the 'shar'ia' of Hanafi Sufis -- administered by a reconstituted and vastly empowered judiciary guided by a reformed, thoroughly codified legal style. [...] In the courts of local judges in Gujarat, Hindu artisans, merchants and Brahmins commonly invoked the 'shar'ia' in transactions pertaining to buying, selling, renting and mortgaging property, or in pursuing litigation in law courts. Hindu women in particular used Islamic law in their attempts to resist patriarchal domination. The same held true further north. In the Punjabi town of Batala, writes the historian J. S. Grewal, 'the brahmin, the Khatri, the goldsmith and the Hindu carpenter frequented the qazi's court as much as the sayyid and the Muslim mason'. And in Malwa, the vast majority of attesters in court documents, excepting those dealing with Muslim marriages, were non-Muslims. While acknowledging religious difference, moreover, such courts did not draw legal boundaries around India's ethnic or religious communities. Significantly, the word 'shari'a' as used in local courts was not understood as applying to Muslims only, as it is today. Rather it carried the ordinary and non-sectarian meaning of 'legal'. Until the 1770s, when East India Company officials codified separate legal systems for Muslims and Hindus, Islamic law as it was administered in Mughal courts had functioned as common law. 'Alamgir's project of basing Mughal governance and sovereignty on a standardized codification of that law therefore built upon legal practices that, even though applied differently across the empire, were already in place in the Indian countryside.

My bestfran is a princess. That's right, Princess Maira. She's a descent of Aurangzeb, the Mughal emperor. I'll support her no matter what.

The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.

The unity and stability of the empire had been shaken up during the long and strong reign of Aurangzeb;

On Aurangzeb’s death his three sons fought among themselves for the throne. The 65-year-old Bahadur Shah emerged victorious. He was learned, dignified, and able. He followed a policy of compromise and conciliation, and there was evidence of the reversal of some of the narrow-minded policies and measures adopted by Aurangzeb. He adopted a more tolerant attitude towards the Hindu chiefs and rajas.

India, under Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, accounts for 27 per cent of the world economy.

the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent.

I wish you to recollect that the greatest conquerors are not always the greatest kings. The nations of the earth have often been subjugated by mere uncivilized barbarians, and the most extensive conquests have, in a few short years, crumbled to pieces. He is the truly great king who makes it the chief business of his life to govern his subjects with equity. —Aurangzeb,