The Many Lives of a Mughal King

Abstract This article presents a close reading of Aurangzēb ālamgīr par aik naẕar (1908), Shiblī Nuʿmānī’s (1857–1914) revisionist history of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and its implications for thinking about secular politics in colonial India. At the cusp of the twentieth century, amid the rise of communal tensions, Aurangzeb found himself in the middle of public debates around India's national identity. Whereas upper-caste Hindu reformers and secular nationalists vilified Aurangzeb for his oppressive policies, Muslim reformers celebrated him for his efforts to bring India into conformity with a puritan brand of Islam. Intervening in the public and professional histories of the emperor, Nuʿmānī cast Aurangzeb as a “secular” ruler. Here the author attempts to analyze the variegated ways in which Nuʿmānī was thinking about pāltiks and the “secular” at a politically volatile moment in Indian history. In doing so the author attends to the effects that the imposition of Western secularism had on Nuʿmānī’s thought. Accordingly, the author analyzes how the processes of secularism in India transformed the ways in which its Muslim intellectuals were thinking about what it meant to be Indian and the place they occupied in the burgeoning nation as a minority population.