FROM THE INDIA TODAY ARCHIVES (2017) | Aurangzeb: The misunderstood Mughal?

Aurangzeb’s name has repeatedly been effaced from road signs and school books, but the legend of his cruelty and intolerance endures. In his Discovery of India, first published in 1946, Nehru listed Aurangzeb’s purported faults at length, rebuking him as "a bigot and an austere puritan". Perhaps Nehru’s most damning blow was to pronounce Aurangzeb too Muslim to be a successful Indian king: "When Aurungzeb began to oppose and suppress it and to function more as a Moslem than an Indian ruler, the Mughal Empire began to break up." Aurangzeb laid out his vision of how good kings ought to treat temples and other non-Muslim religious sites in a princely order he sent Rana Raj Singh, the Hindu Rajput ruler of Mewar, in 1654: "Because the persons of great kings are shadows of God, the attention of this elevated class, who are the pillars of God’s court, is devoted to this: that men of various dispositions and different religions should live in the vale of peace and pass their days in prosperity, and no one should meddle in the affairs of another." In the same princely order, Aurangzeb condemned any king "who resorted to bigotry " as guilty of "razing God’s prosperous creations and destroying divine foundations".