The controversy over Aurangzeb’s tomb isn’t just about a monument; it’s about confronting a brutal past and rejecting the glorification of such figures in modern India – Vivek Gumaste
History is a contentious topic in India and is inextricably intertwined with our daily lives; it is never far from the surface, waiting to break out into the open at the slightest provocation. There are myriad historical monuments interspersed across the country—in cities, towns, and villages—that confront us daily and continuously remind us either of the evils of a different time or the grandeur of a bygone era.
One such monument is the tomb of Aurangzeb, located in Khuldabad near Sambhajinagar (previously known as Aurangabad) in Maharashtra, which has become the subject of a current controversy, even sparking deadly riots in Nagpur.
To comprehend the present controversy, we need to understand who Aurangzeb really was. Was he truly a great ruler worthy of veneration, as some claim, or was he an unapologetic tyrant and religious despot who should have no place of honour in modern secular India?
Aurangzeb was the sixth Mughal emperor, reigning from 1658 to 1707. While he expanded the Mughal Empire to arguably its greatest extent, his rule was marked by inhuman brutality, conservatism, and stark religious bigotry. I will highlight some of his crimes, so egregious and horrendous that anyone and everyone should feel embarrassed to defend him.
He was the epitome of religious intolerance. He reimposed jizya on Hindus, banned the celebration of the Parsi festival of Nauroz, prohibited the playing of music, and encouraged the forcible conversion of Hindus and Sikhs.
The persecution of non-Muslims was a prominent feature of his governance. In 1675, Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Guru of the Sikhs, was arrested by Mughal officials when he sought to protect 500 Kashmiri Pandits who were being forced to convert to Islam. To break his will, three of his disciples were cruelly tortured and killed before his eyes in a gruesome manner: one was cut in half by a saw, another was thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, and a third was chopped to pieces. But Guru Teg Bhadur did not relent. He was publicly beheaded in Chandni Chowk, and his severed head was paraded through the streets as an example to those who opposed forcible conversion.
This sadistic streak appears repeatedly in Aurangzeb’s life. Describing the brutal torture of the Maratha king Sambhaji (the subject of the recent film Chhaava), the great historian Jadunath Sarkar writes in History of Aurangzib (Orient Longman, 1912): “That very night, his eyes were blinded, and the next day, the tongue of Kavi Kalash was cut out. The Muhammadan theologians pronounced a decree that Shambhuji should be put to death on account of his having ‘slain, captured and dishonoured Muslims and plundered the cities of Islam.’ … The Emperor, seeing no chance of getting anything out of Shambhuji, consented to his death. After undergoing a fortnight of torture and insult, the captives were removed to the imperial camp at Koregaon, on the bank of the Bhima … and there they were put to a cruel and painful death on 11th March, their limbs being hacked off one by one and their flesh thrown to the dogs. … Their severed heads were stuffed with straw and exhibited in all the chief cities of the Deccan to the accompaniment of drum and trumpet.”
Aurangzeb’s ill deeds were not confined to targeting personalities alone; they had a broader intent—the annihilation of Hinduism as a whole. Accordingly, in September 1669, he ordered the destruction of the Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, the holiest of Hindu temples, and built a mosque over it. However, parts of the original temple were retained and remain visible even today—nearly 300 years after the end of Mughal rule and 75 years after a predominantly Hindu government was established—standing as constant reminders of the humiliation, hurt, and agony endured by Hindus. The present Kashi Vishwanath Temple was built by Rani Ahilyabai Holkar, the queen of Indore, in 1777, adjacent to the original site.
Aurangzeb also demolished another sacred Hindu site—the Kesava Deo Temple in Mathura—and replaced it with an Eidgah.
These acts of destruction committed by Aurangzeb are not fantasies conjured up by the Hindu right-wing, as some claim, but established historical facts, supported by irrefutable evidence.
Maasir-i-Alamgiri is an authorised account of Aurangzeb’s rule, written by Saqi Mustad Khan, a contemporary of Aurangzeb. It was completed in 1710, three years after Aurangzeb’s death, and later translated into English by Jadunath Sarkar, the renowned Indian historian. On page 55, Saqi Mustad Khan states: “It was reported that, according to the Emperor’s command, his officers had demolished the temple of Viswanath at Kashi.”
Even the rabidly anti-Hindutva historian Audrey Truschke—an otherwise enthusiastic cheerleader for Aurangzeb—is forced to acknowledge this crime in her book The Man and the Myth: “Aurangzeb brought the bulk of Benares’s Vishvanatha Temple down in 1669. … The Gyanvapi Masjid still stands today in Benares with part of the ruined temple’s wall incorporated into the building.”
To grasp the gravity of his crimes, let us summarise what Aurangzeb did. Here was a ruler who publicly beheaded the supreme spiritual leader of the Sikhs, tortured a popular king to death, and razed the holiest sites of Hindus to the ground. These are cardinal sins with no parallel. No other religion would have tolerated such atrocities had they been inflicted upon them. However, the prevailing narrative has long been that Hindu sensibilities can be trampled upon with no consequence.
Whatever supposed good deeds Aurangzeb may have done cannot absolve him of these gravest of crimes. One wonders whether there can be any limit to a human being’s diabolicality. Can such a person be worthy of veneration? That is the million-dollar question that all right-thinking Indians, including Muslims, need to introspect on.
Can present-day Muslims be held accountable for the misdeeds of medieval Muslim invaders? The answer is a categorical no—they are not guilty per se. However, when Muslims defend these historical atrocities and protest to preserve the status quo, they not only align themselves with the perpetrator but also with the vile deeds themselves. In effect, they knowingly and deliberately accept responsibility for the crimes of medieval Muslim invaders. It is this polarising activism and domineering mindset that has vitiated the socio-political climate, which makes them culpable in current times.
People who claim that Aurangzeb is no longer relevant or urge us to forget the past are making a fatal error—an oversight that will leave us vulnerable, making us easy prey for the same predatory forces that once sought to annihilate us. This is not paranoia. The exodus of Hindus from Kashmir, where they were driven out of their homes in a supposedly Hindu-majority India, the steady trickle of Hindus fleeing Pakistan, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh following Sheikh Hasina’s exit are constant reminders of the threats facing our pluralistic society—particularly the Hindus of the subcontinent.
It is therefore imperative that barbaric tyrants and religious bigots are not glorified, so that their memory does not encourage and perpetuate more evil.
What should be done with Aurangzeb’s tomb? This decision should be left to its custodians and the Muslim community. It is a test for the community to decide what they will choose: secularism in line with the pluralism of modern India or the religious bigotry and Muslim domination of medieval times.
However, one thing must be made clear—it can no longer remain a monument under the protection of the ASI, nor can it continue as a public monument to be exhibited and revered. – News18, 24 March 2025
› Vivek Gumaste is an academic and political commentator based in the USA.
Filed under: india | Tagged: aurangzeb, aurangzeb's tomb, hindu-muslim relations, indian history, reclaiming usurped temples |
BHARATA BHARATI 
Why Aurangzeb’s Grave Must Not Be Demolished – Reshmi Dasgupta – News18 – March 19, 2025
As Nagpur seethes over the future of Aurangzeb’s grave in Khuldabad/ Daulatabad/Aurangabad—now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar—it may be germane to remember that the sixth Mughal Emperor actually did not want his last resting place to be embellished or commemorated in any way. That, in fact, is the most telling reminder of how orthodox a Muslim he really was. It was the British Viceroy Lord Curzon who had Aurangzeb’s burial spot ‘beautified’.
Aurangzeb’s belief in the most austere form of Islam led him to decree that his grave be simple and unmarked, in a plot that he supposedly paid for by stitching skullcaps and copying the Quran rather than from state funds. His only concession to softer Islamic practices, probably, was that he bought that piece of land near the dargah of a 14th century Sufi saint of the Chishti order, Shaikh Zainuddin Shirazi, in the Tughlaq-era area called Rauza, rather than in Delhi.
The Rs 14 and 12 annas that Aurangzeb earned through his labour to finance his last resting place bought him a modest plot, three yards long and two yards wide. A red sandstone slab with a hollowed centre marks his grave but no inscription indicates its imperial occupant. Obviously, though, who the grave contained did not fade from public memory. Nearly 300 years later the Nizam of Hyderabad, under the benevolent eye of Lord Curzon, added marble decorations.
If anything, Aurangzeb’s idea for his final resting place appeared to be inspired by his older sister Jahan Ara. She famously preferred to go into incarceration with her father Shahjahan rather than continue as Padshah Begum (first lady of the Empire) when her brother usurped the throne. She passed away in 1681, some 26 years before her brother, and was buried in an open-to-the-sky grave near the dargah of the 13th century Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi.
The inscription she composed for her spartan grave seems to echo Aurangzeb’s own thinking:
Huwal Hayyul Al Qayyum
Baghair subza na poshad kase mazar mara
Ki qabr posh ghariban hamin gayah bas-ast
Al faqeera, Al faaniya Jahanara mureed
Khwajgaan e Chist, Bint e Shah Jahan
Badshah Ghazi Anar Allah Barhana
(He is the Living, the Sustaining
Let no one cover my grave save with green grass,
For this is the fittest mantle for the tomb of the lowly
The poor, the transient
Disciple of the Chishtiya order,
Daughter of Shah Jahan the Conqueror
May Allah illumine his proof)
Considering the vast amounts spent from the imperial exchequer to finance his father Shahjahan’s monumental marble ode to Mumtaz Mahal—mother of his 14 children, including Aurangzeb—the significant reduction in the number of similarly grand architectural projects thereafter is understandable. It could well be that Aurangzeb’s own overtly simple grave was meant to signal a ‘back to basics’ for the dynasty that seemed to have become far too grandiose.
Befittingly, the only large architectural project that Aurangzeb commissioned—and which was bigger than any similar edifice that his father built—is Lahore’s Badshahi Masjid. It totally dwarfs Shahjahan’s more aesthetically pleasing Jama Masjid in Delhi. The dimensions and muscularity of Aurangzeb’s huge Lahore mosque were perhaps meant to reassert the Islamic power of the Mughal empire that its sixth ruler had battled all his life to protect and expand.
That the only mausoleum Aurangzeb built was also for his wife, Dilras Banu—as his Shahjahan had done for Mumtaz Mahal—is significant too, inasmuch as it cost a fraction of what was spent on Taj Mahal. Completed in 1669, Bibi ka Maqbara cost precisely Rs 6,68,203 and 7 annas according to records though Aurangzeb had budgeted Rs 7 lakh. The Taj Mahal, originally called Rauza-i-Munawwara and completed in 1653 cost a whopping Rs 3.2 crore.
Aurangzeb, by all accounts, was as fond of his aristocratic Persian-origin Shia wife as Shahjahan was of his similarly pedigreed main consort. But even then, Aurangzeb was not willing to splurge on a grand maqbara for Dilras Banu by dipping into state finances. That he made a mausoleum at all for her instead of choosing a modest grave as he decided for himself possibly showed that he could be swayed by emotion too, in the very early days of his long reign.
Dilras Banu died a year before Aurangzeb killed his brothers and deposed his father to capture the Mughal throne and become the most austere and doctrinaire Islamic ruler that India had seen in a long while. And in hindsight it is pretty evident that he thought a far better use of the fabled riches of the Mughal Empire was to fund his unending—and ultimately doomed—campaigns to expand his empire, especially in the rebellious and fractious south.
This month’s agitations in Nagpur and political oneupmanship centred on the ‘removal’ of Aurangzeb’s grave in Khuldabad are probably not informed by knowledge of his views about his last resting place. But Akbaruddin Owaisi, the controversial MLA of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen from Hyderabad who had ratcheted up the controversy in May 2022 by offering a chadar and flowers at Aurangzeb’s grave, knew it would spark tension.
So did the suspended Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi who gratuitously asserted two weeks ago, “I don’t consider Aurangzeb a cruel ruler”, describing his battles with Shivaji as a struggle for power not communal, and insinuating that the superhit film Chhaava depicting Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj’s torture and death on Aurangzeb’s orders was “wrong history”.
What was the intention of such statements? Why did he drag Aurangzeb into a new controversy?
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