The Emperor Who Never Was by Supriya Gandhi

(VD Savarkar and Aurangzeb himself have done particularly well here.) This is, you would think, what any responsible historian should do yet our bookstores are full of position papers couched in the language of historical inquiry, cynically meant to exploit our momentary interest in certain aspects of the past. The Emperor Who Never Wasshows unusual resolve by refusing to take sides in the vacuous debate about which son of Shah Jahan would have been the better emperor and, depending on who’s asking, the better Muslim. Gandhi, a historian and professor of religious studies at Yale University, has written an early candidate for biography of the year and this short, sparkling book does perhaps the best service to our common understanding of the Mughals than any other recent work.

This is why Supriya Gandhi’s new biography, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India, is such an astonishing work. Gandhi's nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.Today, as every page of our Islamic history is committed to the fires of political expediency, there could be no more irritating and simplistic line of thinking to pursue. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic.

To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.

After Aurangzeb's reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers-Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb-who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India's next ruler. The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history.ĭara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.

The Emperor Who Never Was by Supriya Gandhi