Aurangzeb Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), the sixth Mughal emperor, has been widely reviled.

In India, people hotly debate his reign and often condemn him as a vile oppressor of many. Recent political attempts to erase Aurangzeb from the face of modern India — such as by renaming Aurangzeb Road in Delhi — have injected new life into the debates about this emperor.

But like most stories informed by history, there is an untold side to Aurangzeb as a man who strove to be a just, worthy Indian king and much more.

In a meticulously researched and captivating biography, Audrey Truschke brings forth new and lesser known aspects of the controversial Mughal emperor’s life.

Here are ten facts about Aurangzeb and his life from Truschke’s book that break myths surrounding him and his reign.



Get Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth here!

Audrey Truschke is assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Her teaching and research interests focus on the cultural, imperial and intellectual history of early modern and modern India (c. 1500–present). Her first book, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court investigates the literary, social and political roles of Sanskrit as it thrived in the Persian-speaking, Islamic Mughal courts from 1560 to 1650.