Kharara

The Rise and Fall of Aurangzeb: Empire, Piety, and the Unmaking of Mughal India – By Dr. Rahul S. Kharat Introduction Few figures in South Asian history provoke as much controversy, admiration, and condemnation as Muhyi al-Din Muhammad, better known to history as Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth Mughal emperor who ruled the Indian subcontinent from 1658 to 1707. To some, he remains the paragon of Islamic piety and administrative austerity, a ruler who lived simply, copied the Quran by hand, and sewed caps to earn his personal expenses. To others, he is remembered as a bigot whose policies of religious intolerance, forcible conversions, temple destructions, and the reimposition of the jizya tax fractured the syncretic fabric that his great-grandfather Akbar had so carefully woven. Still others view him primarily through the lens of statecraft: an emperor who inherited the largest and richest empire in the world and, through nearly fifty years of relentless warfare, administrative overreach,...