Aurangzeb: Reign, Religious Policy, and the Limits of Empire
Muhi-ud-din Muhammad Aurangzeb (3 November 1618 – 3 March 1707), sometimes called Alamgir (“Conqueror of the World”), was the sixth and last of the so-called “Great Mughals,” ruling from 1658 to 1707. His reign of nearly fifty years saw the geographical apogee of Mughal territorial extent, with the conquest of the Deccan sultanates extending imperial authority to the southern tip of the Indian peninsula, but it also saw the structural exhaustion of the institutions that had sustained the empire under Akbar and Jahangir. Aurangzeb is the most controversial of the Mughal emperors, simultaneously celebrated as a devout Muslim ruler of exemplary piety and condemned as the architect of the empire’s long-term decline. The full trajectory of his reign is set in context on the Mughal Empire overview and examined in greater detail across the decline of the Mughal Empire, rise of the Marathas, and Mughal religious policies clusters.
Birth, Education, and Early Career
Aurangzeb was born on 3 November 1618 in Dohad, Gujarat, the third son of Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal. He was educated in Arabic, Persian, the religious sciences, and the military arts, and from an early age he cultivated the disciplined, austere personal style for which he was later famous. He served in his father’s military campaigns in the Deccan and on the northwest frontier, and by the time of the succession crisis of 1657 he was the most experienced and politically astute of Shah Jahan’s four sons. The wider setting of his early career is examined on the Mughal court and nobility page.
The Succession War of 1657–1659
The crisis of succession that brought Aurangzeb to the throne was the most violent in the dynasty’s history. Shah Jahan’s serious illness in September 1657 was the signal for a contest among his sons, of whom the eldest, Dara Shukoh, was the heir apparent and the most liberal, and Aurangzeb, the third, was the most politically and militarily able. The critical engagement of the war was the Battle of Samugarh (30 May 1658), at which Aurangzeb’s disciplined army defeated Dara’s forces, and Dara was eventually captured and executed in 1659. Aurangzeb’s second brother, Murad, was also executed after a brief imprisonment. The political context and the course of the war are examined in detail on the Battle of Samugarh page.
Imprisonment of Shah Jahan and Consolidation of Power
Following the Battle of Samugarh, Aurangzeb took his father’s place in Agra Fort and reduced the ailing emperor to formal captivity, a confinement that lasted until Shah Jahan’s death in 1666. The third surviving brother, Shuja, was defeated at the Battle of Khajwa in January 1659 and eventually took refuge in the kingdom of Arakan, where he died. The consolidation of Aurangzeb’s power in 1658–1659, including the elimination of his brothers, established the precedent for the violent successions of the Later Mughals. The institutional context of the succession is examined on the Mughal administration pillar.
Religious Policy: Restoration of the Jizya and the Destruction of Temples
The religious policy of Aurangzeb’s reign marked a sharp break with the syncretic practice of Akbar and the relatively tolerant personal rule of Jahangir. In 1668 the emperor ordered the destruction of a number of major Hindu temples, including the Keshav Dev temple at Mathura and the Vishvanath temple at Varanasi, both built under earlier Hindu rulers. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished in 1564, and a series of further orders restricted the construction of new temples and the public celebration of Hindu festivals.
The policy of temple destruction was selective, geographically limited, and often provoked by the specific political behavior of the communities in question, but its cumulative effect was to alienate the Hindu aristocracy, particularly the Rajput rulers of Mewar and Marwar whose loyalty had been the foundation of Mughal power in western India. The emperor also dismissed musicians and painters from the imperial atelier, reduced Hindu mansabdars in the higher ranks, and generally substituted a more austere, more strictly Sunni, and more exclusive court culture for the eclectic regime of his predecessors.
Conflict with the Rajputs
Aurangzeb’s religious and political actions provoked a series of Rajput revolts that progressively detached the great Rajput houses of Mewar and Marwar from the imperial system. The protracted war in Mewar (1679–1681) was eventually settled by a compromise that left the Rana in effective control of his kingdom. The war in Marwar (1679–1685) ended with the death of the loyalist ruler Indra Singh, the formal secession of Marwar from Mughal authority, and the alienation of a strategic region. The Rajput revolts are examined in detail on the Hindu-Muslim relations and rise of the Marathas pages.
The Deccan Campaigns and the Conquest of the Sultanates
The principal military preoccupation of Aurangzeb’s reign, after the consolidation of the north, was the conquest of the Deccan sultanates. The Adil Shahi kingdom of Bijapur was besieged and annexed in 1686, after a campaign of nearly two years, and the Qutb Shahi kingdom of Golconda fell in 1687. The two southern sultanates had been the principal political units of the Deccan plateau for nearly two centuries, and their destruction extended the formal sovereignty of the Mughal Empire to the southern tip of the Indian peninsula.
The Long War Against the Marathas
The conquest of the Deccan sultanates brought the Mughals into direct conflict with the rising power of the Marathas, the mobile and politically innovative confederacy that had been building under the leadership of Shivaji and his successors since the 1640s. The war that began in the 1680s would last, in various forms, for more than a quarter of a century and would consume the resources of the empire at a rate that the imperial treasury could not long sustain. Aurangzeb moved his court to the Deccan in 1681 and remained there for the rest of his life, conducting campaigns that captured individual fortresses but never subdued the Maratha countryside.
The Jat and Satnamit Revolts
The late 1670s and 1680s also saw significant agrarian revolts in northern India, the most important of which was the Jat uprising under Gokula and later his successor Raja Ram Jat, centered in the region of Agra and Mathura. The Satnami revolt in the same period, led by the religious community of the Satnamis, demonstrated the breadth of the disaffection that Aurangzeb’s religious and fiscal policies had produced.
Conflict with the Sikhs
The Sikh community of the Punjab, which had been founded by Guru Nanak in the early sixteenth century, was the third major source of rebellion in the later years of Aurangzeb’s reign. The execution of the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in 1675, had already turned the Sikh community into an organized opposition, and the subsequent militarization of the community under Guru Gobind Singh would, in the eighteenth century, produce the Khalsa state that would become one of the principal successor powers of the Mughal Empire.
Economy and the Mansabdari-Jagirdari Crisis
The territorial expansion of Aurangzeb’s reign was matched by a deepening structural crisis in the mansabdari-jagirdari system that had been the backbone of Mughal military administration since Akbar. As the number of mansabdars grew, the available jagirs (land revenue assignments) became smaller and less productive, and the practice of assigning multiple jagirs to a single officer produced a fragmentation that made effective administration impossible. The economic exhaustion of the empire is examined in detail on the economic decline of the Mughal Empire page.
Last Years and Death
Aurangzeb died on 3 March 1707 at Ahmednagar in the Deccan, at the age of eighty-eight. He was buried in a simple tomb at Khuldabad, near Aurangabad, in accordance with his stated wish that no elaborate mausoleum be erected. The simplicity of his burial was a deliberate gesture, in keeping with the austere, juridical style of rule he had cultivated throughout his reign.
Legacy
Aurangzeb’s legacy is the most contested of any Mughal emperor. To his admirers, he was a man of exemplary piety, of administrative integrity, and of prodigious personal courage, who brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent and refused to compromise his religious principles for political convenience. To his critics, he was the architect of the empire’s long-term decline, whose religious intolerance and fiscal rigidity broke the fragile consensus that Akbar had built and left the dynasty incapable of meeting the crises of the eighteenth century. The historiographical debate is examined across the decline of the Mughal Empire, Mughal religious policies, and economic decline clusters, and the long aftermath of his reign is treated in greater detail on the Later Mughals page that follows this one in chronological sequence.
Sources
- Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press, 2017).
- Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, 5 vols. (Longmans, 1912–24; reprint Oriental Books Reprint Corp., 1972).
- Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500–1750 (Permanent Black, 2012).