Born in 1618, Aurangzeb ascended to the Mughal throne in 1658, with what has been described as ‘feigned reluctance’, after defeating his brothers in a succession struggle, he kept his father, the fifth Mughal, (Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal) confined until he died in 1666.
Aurangzeb is a hero to many Sunni Muslims, who regard him as a strong ruler who was preceded and followed by weak ones. a man who did not seek much in the way of accommodation with his Hindu subjects, but instead encouraged conversion to Islam and had no qualms about destroying Hindu temples. He also didn’t think much of Muslims who differed from the views he espoused, and when he captured Hyderabad in 1687 he stabled his horses in the Shia mosques.
Any encounter between Aurangzeb and Guru Tegh Bahadur. the ninth of Sikhism’s ten gurus, was never going to be a meeting of like-minded individuals. Tegh Bahadur received both religious and martial training in childhood. After several years of fighting the Mughals, In 1656 he chose the contemplative life and spent several years in retreat, and then in missionary work. News of Muslims converting to Sikhism as a result of Tegh Bhadur’s influence infuriated Aurangzeb, who in 1675 had the Sikh guru brought to Delhi in chains.
The interrogation of Tegh Bahadur by Aurangzeb was brutal. He challenged the guru to perform a miracle to prove he was a prophet of God, and when Tegh Bahadur refused, saying that he was not a conjuror but a man of God, Aurangzeb told him that if he did not convert he would be tortured to death. Tegh Bahadur insisted in return that there could be no compulsion in religion – an Islamic precept – and defended the right of the individual to choose which religion to follow. Kept in an iron cage and starved, Tegh Bahadur was forced to watch as his friends were savagely tortured and killed, before he himself was publicly beheaded.
What Happened Next
Bahadur’s martyrdom is quite possibly unique, in that he died not just for Sikhism, but for the rights of others to practice their religion. It has long been recognised as a pivotal self-sacrifice in the history of humanity. The butchering of the ninth guru earned Aurangzeb the undying hatred of the Sikhs all across the North Indian plain, a costly hatred: Aurangzeb ruled for 46 years, but spent the last 26 years of his life constantly at war with Hindus and Sikhs, until his death in 1707. As Bamber Gascoigne says in The Great Moghuls (1971), the 16th-century Mughal ruler Akbar, who sought reconciliation between all religions (and became a vegetarian late in life) ’disrupted the Muslim community by recognising that India was not a Muslim country. Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as if it were’.