Aurangzeb

The aftermath of the victory was swift and merciless. When Shah Jahan unexpectedly recovered from his illness, Aurangzeb had him declared incompetent and confined within the red sandstone walls of Agra Fort, where the deposed emperor would spend his final eight years gazing across the Yamuna River at the Taj Mahal. Murad Baksh quickly realized the emptiness of his brother’s religious promises; he was arrested and quietly executed. Dara Shikoh was eventually betrayed by a local chief with whom he had sought refuge, brought to Delhi in chains, and paraded through the streets. Following a hasty trial for heresy, Aurangzeb ordered his elder brother beheaded. In a gesture of Shakespearean cruelty, the severed head of the intellectual prince was placed in a wooden box and delivered to their imprisoned father at his dinner table. By August 1658, Aurangzeb had ascended the throne, taking the imperial title Alamgir—the "Conqueror of the World."

For the next forty-nine years, Aurangzeb ruled an empire that surpassed even Qing China as the world's premier manufacturing power and largest economy. Yet his reign was a study in paradox. A monarch who presided over unmatched wealth, he wore simple clothes, refused to touch the state treasury for his personal expenses, and spent his evenings sewing skullcaps and copying the Quran by hand to earn his own keep. In an effort to align the empire with his orthodox Sunni sensibilities, he instituted the Fatawa-i Alamgiri, a massive codification of Islamic law, and banned activities he deemed religiously forbidden. He demolished several prominent non-Muslim temples and schools, and in 1679, he reimposed the jizya—the poll tax on non-Muslim subjects that had been suspended for a century by his great-grandfather, Akbar. To his critics, this was a disastrous betrayal of the Mughal legacy of pluralism, an act of bigotry that alienated his Hindu subjects and fractured the fragile coalition of Rajput nobles who had long been the backbone of the imperial military. To his defenders, however, his actions were those of a pragmatist facing severe financial deficits, pointing to the fact that Aurangzeb employed significantly more Hindu bureaucrats and commanders within his administration than any of his predecessors.

The defining tragedy of his long reign lay in the south. The Deccan, which had been the graveyard of his youth, became the obsession of his old age. The rise of the Marathas, led by the brilliant guerrilla strategist Shivaji, threatened Mughal dominance across the peninsula. Unable to crush this highly mobile insurgency from his northern capitals of Agra and Delhi, Aurangzeb packed up his entire court in 1681. He moved his capital into a sprawling, nomadic tent-city in the Deccan, vowed never to return to Delhi until the region was subdued, and spent the last twenty-six years of his life in the saddle. Though his armies successfully swallowed the wealthy southern sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, extending the empire to its absolute geographic peak, the conquest was a pyrrhic one. The imperial treasury was emptied, the administration in the north rotted from neglect, and his overextended military found itself bogged down in a draining, endless war of attrition against an elusive enemy.

By the time death finally claimed the eighty-eight-year-old emperor in Ahmadnagar on March 3, 1707, the Mughal Empire was an exhausted giant. His final letters to his sons reveal a man haunted by the failure of his grand design, complaining of a deep loneliness and expressing gloomy forebodings for the future of his realm. He had spent his life building a fortress of absolute order, yet he left behind an empire so overstretched and internally strained that it would begin to crumble within decades of his passing. In accordance with his strict instructions, Aurangzeb was buried not in a grand marble mausoleum like his father or mother, but in an unmarked, open-air grave in a simple village courtyard, exposed to the rain and the wind—a austere ending for a man who had conquered almost an entire subcontinent, only to find that its vastness could not be contained by the sheer force of his will.