Why did aurangzeb die

Aurangzeb Alamgir, the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire, is the most hated king in Indian history. He ruled for nearly 50 years, from until , the last great imperial power in India before British colonialism.

According to many, he destroyed India politically, socially and culturally. He is charged with fighting protracted, pointless wars in central and southern India and thereby fatally weakening the Mughal state. He is envisioned as a cruel despot who brutally murdered enemies, including his own brothers. He is regarded as a cultural dolt, uninterested in the extraordinary arts of south Asia, even hostile to them.

Above all, many modern Indians see Aurangzeb as a brutal oppressor of Hindus. He was a pious Muslim, and it is widely believed that he spent his long reign, nearly half a century, rampaging against Hindus and Hinduism.

The popular story goes that Aurangzeb tried to convert all Hindus to Islam, and when that project failed he supposedly slaughtered millions of Hindus. People claim that Aurangzeb systematically destroyed Hindu cultural institutions, levelling thousands of Hindu temples. Some have even said that the reason why north India lacks the tall, elaborate temples that one finds in south India is because Aurangzeb smashed them all to pieces.

However, these views of Aurangzeb owe more to myth than reality. Worse, the modern attacks on Aurangzeb are themselves rooted in dark motives. The British, for example, disseminated great calumnies against him, as well as against other premodern Indian Muslim kings, because a barbaric Aurangzeb made British colonial rule look civilised by comparison. British colonialism ended in India 70 years ago, but their misrepresentations of the Mughals and other Indo-Muslim rulers have had a long and poisonous afterlife.

In India, many still cite biased colonial-era British translations of Mughal texts as evidence of supposed Muslim wrongdoings. At least some of this reliance on questionable scholarship and translations is relatively innocent, but not all of it.

Several notable groups in independent India have found maligning Aurangzeb to be useful for other, more sinister purposes, especially attempts to discredit modern Indian Muslims. Through most of the 20th century, Hindu nationalism was not a mainstream view. Instead, they embraced a view of India as a secular state, and a pluralistic one with equal room for followers of all religions.

Despite its recent popularity, Hindu nationalism is an ideology with little, if any, grounding in Indian history. For most of its past, India was neither Hindu nor a nation, in the sense that Hindu nationalists typically use these terms.

Mughal rule, a period in which a Muslim minority ruled over a Hindu majority in South Asia, embarrasses Hindu nationalists. If, as Hindu nationalists aver, India has long been a Hindu nation, why was it for a long time ruled by Muslims? Even more troubling to the claims of Hindu nationalism, why was Mughal India characterised by fruitful Hindu-Muslim relations in many areas, including state administration, literature, painting, music, and even religion and spirituality?

Instead of admitting the complexity of the past, Hindu nationalists insist that religious oppression must have been the signature trait of Mughal rule. H atred of Aurangzeb extends far beyond the Hindu Right in modern India. In some cases, other groups have their own reasons for despising this premodern king. Many Sikhs, for example, remember a history of animosity between early Sikh religious leaders and the Mughals.

More widely, via school textbooks and mass media, the colonial-era image of Aurangzeb the bigot has seeped deep into Indian society. Many Indians accept and repeat misinformed ideas about this king without realising the troublesome politics behind such views.

In late summer , after the idea received the endorsement of several BJP members of parliament, New Delhi officials agreed to rename Aurangzeb Road in Delhi. In , RemoveMughalsFromBooks exploded on Twitter as part of a campaign that called for Indian textbooks to skim over or altogether remove Mughal history — a period spanning more than years. Historians who object to such activities, both in India and abroad, risk becoming the target of intense harassment campaigns.

Of the many scapegoats of Hindu nationalists, Aurangzeb is perhaps their favourite Indian Muslim to criticise. Though it is easy to make fun of some of the more outlandish mischaracterisations, the stakes involved remain quite serious. There is simply no way to understand the state of the subcontinent on the eve of British colonialism without a reasonable, historically grounded perspective on Aurangzeb, who was almost certainly the most important political figure in 17th-century India. Numerically and geographically, his empire was vast.

At the height of his power, Aurangzeb ruled over million people, more than the entire population of Europe at the time.

The imperial treasury boasted lavish collections of gems, diamonds and gold that likely made Aurangzeb the richest man of his day. In the eyes of most people in 17th-century Asia and Europe, Aurangzeb Alamgir truly lived up to his names: the throne-adorner Aurang-zeb and the world-seizer Alam-gir. Historians of the day struggled to convey the carnage, describing battlegrounds drenched in so much blood they glimmered like fields of red tulips.

Aurangzeb was the third of four sons of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, but he had an equal claim to the throne as his brothers. The Mughals did not recognise primogeniture, the succession rights of the eldest son.

Indeed, Aurangzeb indisputably held the Mughal crown only when all three of his brothers were dead or exiled from India. Over a period of two years, from until , the brothers battled with one another in numerous violent clashes that resulted in death tolls in the tens of thousands. Historians of the day struggled to convey the carnage. They often resorted to poetic descriptions, such as describing battlegrounds that were drenched in so much blood they glimmered like fields of red tulips.

In the end, Aurangzeb captured and executed two of his three brothers. The third escaped to Burma, where a few years later a local leader murdered him.

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The activities in primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors are. Aurangzeb, been an orthodox Muslim ruler replaced the seasoned statement of the mixed kingdom.

The first sign of change in the way the kingdom ran was the reimposition of a poll tax or jizya on non-Muslims in In the past, the tax was abolished by Akbar. This led to religious tension in the kingdom which led to many Hindus serving the emperor but were never loyal to him. Because of this, there was a Rajput revolt against the Mughal emperor in After the death of Sambhaji, the Marathas fled towards the south and were inactive for some time.

Aurangzeb then went on and captured forts of the Maratha hill country. Aurangzeb then went on and expanded the Mughal empire in both south and north but his military campaigns and the religious intolerance he showed towards people annoyed many of his subjects.

He started losing control of the administration in the north to and as the matter worst the empire became over-extended and Aurangzeb imposed higher taxes on the agricultural lands in order to pay for the wars. The agricultural revolt of the Sikh began as he started taking additional taxes on the land.

Many Sikhs revolted in Punjab and in he executed the Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, who refused to work under his name. In general, Aurangzeb was considered to be very ruthless and a militant orthodox Sunni Muslim. He forcefully tried to make his beliefs and morals be accepted by his subject which led to many revolts and in the end his fall.

Aurangzeb maintained the empire for half a century and he also started extending the territory in the south and came as far as Tanjore and Trichinopoly. While Aurangzeb was busy expanding the territory in the south, the Marathas drained all imperial resources in the North. The rebellion started by the Sikhs and the jat also added extra pressure in the north. Aurangzeb was 88 years old when he died in central India on March 3,