The
Moghul Saint of Insanity
6th Moghul emperor
From 1658 to 1707
Aurangzeb, the sixth Moghul emperor of India,
is the last one and the First to rock his empire into the cradle of ruin and
devastation. His reign from 1662 to 1707
marks the era of the Fall of the Moghul Empire.
This Puritan emperor sat high on the Throne of Tyranny, wielding the
weapons of zeal and hatred against all who didn’t fit the picture of His
Islam. Styling his Ambition as the Sword
of Islam, he destroyed idols and demolished the holy temples of the Hindus. He ascended the throne after killing all his
brothers, while his father Shah Jahan imprisoned by him inside his own palace,
still lived the life of seclusion and suffering.
Shah Jahan passed away three years after Aurangzeb’s first
coronation. Celebrating his 2nd
coronation the same year as his father’s death, Aurangzeb issued edicts harsh
and stringent. Banning music, levying
tax on the Hindus, waging war on the infidels, all these became cherished
pearls on the rosary of his ambition.
The venerable Shivaji, Aurangzeb’s foe and nemesis, challenged the
emperor’s zeal and tyranny for thirty-eight years before succumbing to an
untimely death. Sikhs in the Punjab
became the emperor’s life-long enemies, after he ordered their Guru Teg Bahadur
to be murdered most brutally. The Guru’s
son, the 10th Guru, Govind Singh, suffered persecution from the
hateful designs of Aurangzeb till the end of his life, losing all his sons in
the endless wars, rigged with defense and sedition.
The blood of hatred on Aurangzeb’s hands and within his
heart, tainted the whole fabric of his empire and of his own royal
household. The hurricanes of murders and
atrocities spread like wildfire in all quarters of the empire. Brutal killings in the name of Islam and
piety wearing the noose of self-righteousness, sprawled forth from Agra
to Deccan, and into the very heart of Rajasthan. His one and only love for his wife, Udaipuri,
sustained him through the floods of his own zeal and bigotry. And humbled him in the end! After forty-five years of Reign of Terror,
when he died, old and bewildered, his crumbling empire crumbled further against
the storms of riot and anarchy. Carrying
the burden of eighty-nine years, gilded with the colors of his own sins,
Aurangzeb literally hurled the legacy of the Moghuls into the mouth of an
abyss. Leaving the doors of India
wide open, to the delight and encouragement of the foreign invaders. The British, succeeding in expelling all
other, the Dutch, the Persians and the Portuguese.
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