Religious Policies of Aurangzeb
The religious policies of Aurangzeb remain among the most debated aspects of Mughal history, standing in sharp contrast to the liberal architecture built by Akbar and cautiously preserved by Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Historians broadly fall into three schools of thought on the subject:
- Jadunath Sarkar, S.R. Sharma, and A.L. Srivastava consider Aurangzeb guilty of outright religious bigotry and persecution.
- Shibli Nomani, Zahiruddin Faruki, and Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi instead justify most of his actions as political expedients, rather than religiously motivated measures.
- Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali attempt a more “neutral” analysis of Aurangzeb’s actions, avoiding the polarised “for” or “against” framing that has often characterised the debate.
For analytical clarity, Aurangzeb’s religious measures may usefully be divided into two categories: minor, largely inconsequential ordinances, and major measures that amounted to formal “state” policy across the Empire.
Minor Ordinances
The following measures, taken in sequence, primarily reflect Aurangzeb’s personal Islamic piety and his broader zeal for social reform — with only the last of them touching Hindus directly:
- Aurangzeb forbade the kalima from being stamped on his coins, out of concern that the holy words might be desecrated underfoot or defiled by non-believers.
- Nauroz (the New Year’s Day of the Zoroastrian calendar) celebrations were formally abolished at court.
- Old mosques, long neglected, were ordered to be repaired, and imams and muezzins were appointed on a regular salary.
- A Censor of Morals (Muhtasib) was appointed to enforce Islamic law — checking practices such as the drinking of spirits, the use of bhang, gambling, and commercial sex.
- However, according to the Italian traveller Manucci, who spent many years in India, these regulations were flouted quite openly in practice.
- The ceremony of weighing the Emperor against gold and silver on his two birthdays (calculated according to both the lunar and solar calendars) was discontinued.
- The practice of jharokha darshan was discontinued after the eleventh year of Aurangzeb’s reign, since he considered it un-Islamic — the darshanias, in his view, effectively regarded their sovereign as an earthly divinity.
- Aurangzeb forbade the court musicians from performing at court.
- The musicians affected were nonetheless granted pensions, and the naubat (royal band) was retained. This was, in all likelihood, not an anti-Hindu measure — the musicians affected were primarily Muslim court performers such as Khushhal Khan and Bisram Khan.
- The nobility, in any case, did not stop listening to music: singing continued to be patronised by the ladies of the haram and by individual nobles, and it was during Aurangzeb’s reign that the largest number of Persian works on classical Indian music were composed. Aurangzeb himself was reportedly proficient in playing the Veena.
- In 1665, the Emperor instructed the Governor of Gujarat that Diwali and Holi should be celebrated outside the bazars of Ahmedabad and its parganas.
- The stated justification for this partial restriction on Holi was that Hindus “open their mouths in obscene speech and kindle the Holi bonfire in chaklas and bazar, throwing into fire the faggot of all people that they can seize by force and theft.”
- Jadunath Sarkar interprets this as essentially a police regulation with respect to Holi, but an act of bigotry where Diwali was concerned — though Sarkar overlooks the fact that there was no general ban on either festival across the Empire.
- This measure should be considered alongside Aurangzeb’s separate order banning Muharram processions in all provinces, issued after a deadly clash between rival processions at Burhanpur in January 1669. This, too, was fundamentally a “police regulation,” but unlike the Diwali–Holi order, it applied uniformly across the entire Empire rather than being confined to a single province.
Major Ordinances
The following measures, by contrast, appear to have been deliberately issued as formal state policy across the Mughal Empire, and touched the Hindu population directly:
Demolition of Newly Constructed Temples
- Shah Jahan had earlier employed a similar argument — targeting only “newly constructed” (taza sanamkhana) temples — but his measures had remained confined largely to the Banaras region.
- Aurangzeb’s orders, by contrast, were made operative across the entire Empire, and he further instructed that even old temples were not to be repaired.
- In 1670, a farman was issued ordering the demolition of all temples constructed in Orissa during the preceding ten or twelve years.
- Among the significant temples destroyed during his reign were the Vishwanath temple at Banaras, the Keshav Rai temple at Mathura, and the so-called “second temple of Somnath.”
- As early as 1644, while serving as Viceroy of Gujarat, Aurangzeb had already desecrated the recently built Chintaman temple at Ahmedabad by having a cow killed within it, before converting the building into a mosque.
Re-imposition of Jizya (1679)
- In 1679, Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya, a tax that had been abolished by Akbar many decades earlier.
- Jadunath Sarkar views this as a clear instance of bigotry, consistent with the pattern of temple destruction. Satish Chandra, however, links the measure instead to the unfolding Deccan crisis (involving Golconda, Bijapur, and the Marathas), arguing that Aurangzeb, facing a deep political emergency, sought to do something dramatic to secure the unwavering support of the Muslim community — particularly its orthodox elements. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that jizya was not reimposed immediately upon Aurangzeb’s accession, but only some two decades into his reign.
- It has also been suggested that the reimposition of jizya was motivated by financial necessity — but this explanation appears untenable, since the actual revenue generated by jizya was, in practice, quite insignificant.
Discriminatory Trade and Administrative Measures
- In 1655, orders were issued requiring Hindu merchants to pay a 5% customs duty on their goods, as against just 2.5% for Muslim merchants — a measure that suggests Aurangzeb’s underlying intent to promote trade among Muslims, who depended almost exclusively on state patronage for their commercial standing.
- A further farman, issued in 1671, stipulated that revenue collectors on khalisa land must be Muslims. Later, Aurangzeb reluctantly permitted Hindus to be employed in certain departments, but only on the condition that their numbers be kept at no more than half that of Muslim officials.
Aurangzeb: An Enigmatic Personality
Despite these acts of apparent intolerance, Aurangzeb’s overall record presents a genuinely paradoxical picture.
- In sharp contrast to his religious measures, Aurangzeb continued to induct a large number of non-Muslim officers into the state bureaucracy.
- He did not reduce the percentage of Hindus within the mansab system — if anything, the proportion was actually higher than under his predecessors. Many Hindus held high administrative posts, and at least two were appointed provincial governors.
- Strikingly, the very same Emperor who ordered the demolition of numerous places of worship also issued grants, on several documented occasions, for the maintenance of temples and their attending priests.
The Economic and Political Context
According to Satish Chandra, many of Aurangzeb’s measures — though frequently labelled “puritanical” — were, in fact, more accurately economic or social in character, or aimed at curbing what were seen as superstitious practices. Some were moral in intent, others aimed at instilling a broader sense of austerity, and still others sought to ban practices considered contrary to the Islamic spirit.
- Although these measures reflected a genuinely puritanical cast of mind, they were, in part, also prompted by a significant financial crisis that confronted Aurangzeb during this period.
- In the years following the setback of the civil war of succession, scanty rainfall and repeated crop failures struck one province after another in succession after 1660.
- After his accession, Aurangzeb had already abolished rahdari (transit duty) along with a large number of rural and urban cesses considered illegal.
- According to the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, by the thirteenth year of his reign, it was reported that state expenditure had exceeded income for each of the preceding twelve years.
- Among the economy measures Aurangzeb adopted was “the retrenchment of many items in the expenditure of the Emperor, the princes and the Begums.”
- Some of Aurangzeb’s policies were, at their core, primarily political in nature. The jizya, in particular, was not intended merely to address a difficult financial situation.
- Satish Chandra argues that the reimposition of jizya was both political and ideological — political, in the sense that “it was meant to rally the Muslims for the defence of the State against the Marathas and the Rajputs who were up in arms, and possibly against the Muslim States of Deccan, especially Golconda, which was in alliance with the infidels.”
A Psychosomatic Explanation
A further, more psychological explanation has also been advanced for Aurangzeb’s conduct — suggesting that he had developed an intense, unresolved consciousness of guilt.
- He was, after all, the ruler who had killed his own brothers and imprisoned his aged father — an act without precedent in Mughal history from Babur down to Shah Jahan.
- This last act, moreover, had violated even the Turah-i-Chaghatai, the Mughal dynastic code, by ascending the throne while his father still reigned.
- Such a person, according to this line of reasoning, was almost inevitably bound to be overtaken, sooner or later, by an unprecedented sense of remorse, penitence, and contrition — and his religious actions may well have emanated from precisely this feeling, as he sought refuge within the protective shell of Islamic orthodoxy. In this sense, all of Aurangzeb’s actions can ultimately be traced back to the consequences of his own individual choices.
Conclusion
It would, therefore, be an oversimplification to conclude that Aurangzeb’s religious policy was guided solely by a puritanical cast of mind. Rather, his policies emerged from a complex interplay of economic, political, moral, and psychological factors, making a purely one-dimensional reading of the religious policies of Aurangzeb — whether as pure bigotry or pure political expediency — ultimately inadequate to the historical evidence.
