READ ALSO:

Aurangzeb Road gets Kalam's name

Aurangzeb's tomb in Khuldabad. (Getty Images photo)

A portrait of Aurangzeb. (Getty Images photo)

(Write to this correspondent at manimugdha.sharma@timesgroup.com)

NEW DELHI: A 17th-century dhrupad, now almost lost, celebrates the martial feats of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir . When Alamgir mounts his horse, it says, the whole world, the heavens and even the netherworld tremble. The author of the piece may have taken a lot of poetic liberties but the assessment of Aurangzeb's might wasn't entirely off the mark.The English learned this the hard way when they unwisely challenged the last Great Mughal and waged the Child's War. For the first and only time, the English faced extirpation and were literally brought to their knees by an Indian. A little later, when the emperor's ships Ganj-i-Sawai and Fateh Muhammed were looted by English pirate Henry Every, Aurangzeb forced Britain to conduct the first-ever international manhunt in recorded history, resulting in many arrests and five executions.Centuries later, when the English were the masters of the Indian subcontinent and were building its new capital, New Delhi, they named one of its major roads after the man who had almost thrown them out of India.On Friday, though, the Indian government decided to "right the wrongs of history" by renaming Aurangzeb Road after Dr APJ Abdul Kalam . A "bad" Muslim was replaced by a "good" Muslim. Not too long ago, Akbar the Great was the standard "good" Muslim, but now, even he has failed the Sangh Parivar's acid test of goodness - he is being pitted against the new Hindutva icon, Rana Pratap.The Parivar's street fighters carpet-bombed social media with Hindutva canards and their targets quickly changed from the Mughals to the Nehru-Gandhi family (Pandit Nehru was blamed for naming the road after Aurangzeb). And soon, businessmen, engineers, practitioners of Chinese alternative medicine, owners of sweet shops and garment factories were dismissing scholarly arguments of professional historians as "cheap propaganda of Leftists". Some members of Parliament also captured in 140 characters the life and times of a man who ruled India for nearly half a century and passed their verdicts on Twitter.Historians are upset at how quickly the government fell for the campaign. "The BJP and the larger Sangh Parivar was expected to do something like this. It is amazing how one MP made a demand and it was fulfilled within weeks when the government has been sitting on other, more pressing, needs of the country. There's already a wide gulf between popular perceptions about history and professional history, it's just been widened further under the Modi regime," says renowned historian Professor Harbans Mukhia.So what do historians really think about Aurangzeb? "The problem is most people look for simplistic explanations. Aurangzeb was like any other sovereign who ruled over a vast empire. There was variations in how he implemented his religious policy cross his empire. His imposition of jizya on non-Muslim subjects is often cited as an example of his bigotry. But Aurangzeb came to the throne in 1658, and he imposed jizya 21 years later, in 1679. Now, a fundamentalist didn't really have to wait for so many years to do something like that, did he?" asks Mukhia.Historian Rana Safvi, who has recently released her book, Where Stones Speak: Historical Trails in Mehrauli , the First City of Delhi, too points out that Aurangzeb was a complex character. "Despite being lauded for his personal courage and skills on the battlefield, he grew up under the shadow of his more spiritually inclined scholar brother Dara Shukoh, his father's favourite," she says.Sir Jadunath Sarkar, in his monumental five-volume work on Aurangzeb, described in great detail how his father Shah Jahan and eldest sister Jahanara-two people he loved and almost deified-always favoured Buland Iqbal or Dara and almost always neglected him. Shah Jahan even publicly humiliated him and stripped him of his viceroyalty of Deccan and his mansab when he was late in visiting his wounded sister and arrived in his military uniform.In 1645, the emperor, still displeased with his 27-year-old son, packed him off to the troubled province of Gujarat. Aurangzeb, himself born in Gujarat, ended the state of lawlessness in that province and brought tangible achhe din to the people there.His next assignment was to Balkh where, in a turbulent campaign, he stunned his Turko-Afghan enemies by offering namaz amid a hail of arrows and musket balls, forcing them to surrender. This made Aurangzeb quite a legend in the farthest corners of the empire and earned him the name, 'Zinda Pir'."He was hugely ambitious and very shrewd. He had formed alliances with Rajput chiefs and Irani noblemen amongst others to support him in his war of succession. Dara and other brothers didn't stand a chance," says Safvi. "Many of his unpopular orders, the ban on music and festivals and the levying of jizya were more economic in nature. But because of his own austere and orthodox faith, they were given a religious colour."But can a rechristened road actually change history? Says Mukhia: "History has seen healthy changes and only grown. But this sort of change thrust from above is dangerous and counterproductive. Soviet Union did that and imploded. India needs mature politics. Changing the road name is just a reflection of this urge to erase uncomfortable parts from history. But history has survived assaults, so both Akbar and Aurangzeb will live on-one in popular culture, one maybe only among historians."