Alamgir at a Jharokha window

In this painting we see, Aurangzeb, the devout Muslim ruler in profile, with a downward gaze, performing a prayer. Seen through a jharokha window he is also flanked by two nobles. Dressed in stark white garments, his appearance is in sharp contrast to the golden radiance of the halo and grandeur seen in some of his earlier paintings. He only took to austerity as he grew older and moved to the Deccan. For him, there was no greater personal accomplishment than to memorise every verse and chapter of the Qur’an. Having committed to memory the entire text, he wrote two copies of the Qur’an in perfect calligraphy. This style of portraiture, featuring Aurangzeb in his old age and hunched over a manuscript or performing Dikr or a namaaz, was commonly produced and suggests that artists felt that this was the most appropriate type of pictorial format to depict the elderly ruler. Aurangzeb or Alamgir was the last of the six great Mughals. It goes unsaid that history has not been kind to him. Apart from being the Emperor who culled the arts and destroyed temples we also remember him as the son who imprisoned his father and mutilated his brother in a bloody struggle of succession. While his great grandfather Badshah Akbar rejected pressure from the hard-line ulema and even permitted those who had been converted to Islam under pressure to return to their original faith, Aurangzeb sent his emissaries across his realm implementing the Fatwa-e-Alamgiri, a book on Islamic sharia law written by him. His hard-line views are the reason that history has not been too kind to him. As a young man, Alamgir was afforded the best scholars and teachers. He became well-versed in the Quran, the science of Hadith, and other aspects of Islamic sciences. He was known as a very enthusiastic reader. He read and wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai Turkic, the language of his ancestors. He was also trained in the art of calligraphy. Some of his calligraphic works are still in existence today (wrote two copies of the Quran). He despised the opulent ways of his forefathers and was against the display of riches, commissioning of artworks or building grand mausoleums like the Taj Mahal. Reigning from July 31, 1658, to March 3, 1707, he was an exceptional general under whose reign the Mughals reached their greatest extent with their territory spanning nearly the entire South Asia. During his reign, Hindustan surpassed Qing China as the world's largest economy and biggest manufacturing power. While there he no denying that Aurangzeb left a lot to be desired as a human being, he did a bit of good too. He issued a Royal Firman against Sati in 1666 and also gave the death penalty to those forcing widows to be burnt. This may or may not be another move to subvert his Hindu subjects or a political manoeuvre – who knows! But in the administration of Aurangzeb, significantly more Hindus were employed in the bureaucracy than in the administrations of his predecessors. Between 1679 and 1707, the number of Hindu officials in the Mughal administration rose significantly to represent a good chunk of Mughal nobility, the highest in the Mughal era. Obviously, most of these were political alliances and since Aurangzeb has opened war fronts with the Sikhs, the Marathas and Deccani rulers, he had to be very careful about preserving alliances and not fester all of them with his Sharia beliefs. With the Maratha threat looming under the aegis of Chattrapati Shivaji Maharaj, in 1681, Aurangzeb left Northern India for the Deccan in 1681, never to return. Sadly because of his Sharia induced austerity, the Mughal ateliers were disbanded by him and most artists around Delhi migrated to Avadh or Rajputana or Bengal to seek a livelihood. New artforms came out of this migration but the Mughal miniature artforms began to see their decline from there on. Despite this, there still are significant paintings of him made during his reign. Perhaps they served the purpose of documenting his reign and projecting his image of austerity. It goes unsaid that unlike his forefathers who brought the artists of the imperial studios into the courts and their households, Alamgir sent them to oblivion. It would be a longshot to even expect a painting of Aurangzeb to be inscribed (signed) by the creator. So sadly, the artist is unknown.

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