Writing to his acolyte Jadunath Sarkar more than a century ago, William Irvine, the pioneering historian of Mughal India, lamented the perseverance of the “drum and trumpet school” of historians who gave scant justice to the losers of history, the prime example being the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh (1615–59), who was defeated and executed by his brother Aurangzeb. While much has been written about Dara Shukoh since Irvine's complaint, the historical injustice to him is at last comprehensively rectified by this noteworthy book, which presents a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the prince's life, intellectual production, and legacy.
Supriya Gandhi's The Emperor Who Never Was is organized into nine chapters, each marking a phase of unequal length in Dara Shukoh's abbreviated life. Beginning with the prince's birth in 1615, it traces his early childhood in the Mughal harem; his youthful activities and his increasing interest in matters of religion and involvement in Sufi circles; his unsuccessful military commanderships and rather more successful intellectual exercises in integrating Hindu and Muslim forms of knowledge; and, finally, his defeat and execution in the war of succession that brought his brother Aurangzeb to the throne. In practice, however, the book places the prince in a series of shifting contexts, including the military activities of the emperor and his nobility, the curiosity-driven engagement of the members of the ruling house with the variegated religious traditions and their multifarious practitioners across the North Indian landscape, palace intrigues in which the princesses of the imperial household wielded great influence—all serving as backdrop for the prince's coming of age.
Gandhi is extremely imaginative in making the best of a narrow clutch of sources to yield a vivid picture of the young prince's environment and activities. Thus, just before a brisk portrait of the coup against the emperor Jahangir toward the end of his life, we learn of the six-year-old prince Aurangzeb incurring the wrath of his father (Shah Jahan) for surreptitiously consuming choice bananas reserved for one of his favored noblemen (p. 52). Some pages later, we are presented with an attractive description of the youthful Dara Shukoh and his sister Jahanara engrossed in reading and writing as they crisscrossed northern India. Gandhi meticulously traces Dara Shukoh's movements across the empire and his intellectual trajectory from these early days, showing how he gradually surpassed the initial stages of the Sufi's path and came increasingly to regard himself as an accomplished practitioner.
Particularly valuable here is Gandhi's portrait of not just Dara but his wife Nadira Bano, sister Jahanara, and others, who were important political actors, personal seekers of wisdom and divine truth, and patrons of artists, poets, and intellectuals. Even in this lively milieu, however, Dara Shukoh's path stood out. Marked by an increasingly explicit engagement with Hindu religious knowledge, the prince's culminating achievement was the creation of a scholarly center that included Sanskrit intellectuals and Persian physicians alike, of which we are provided a compelling integrative vision.
Beneath the fluid prose that animates this book lies a sturdy foundation. Gandhi synthesizes a broad range of recent historical work and analyzes to great effect the available sources, many of which remain in manuscript, silently updating and correcting previous scholarship in the endnotes. The portrait that emerges here reinforces the sense of the prince as increasingly obsessed with intellectual pursuits, even to the detriment of his instinct for self-preservation. Thus, we learn how he continued busily jotting down his mystical elucubrations as his campaign against the Safavids ended in failure. Nothing loth, the prince renewed his “focus on an important aspect of Mughal kingship—the continued refinement of his inner self” (p. 179). In the three scant years before the succession conflict in which he would lose his head, we thus find Dara Shukoh quizzing scholars and Sufis and producing one philosophical tract after another. Shortly before the war, a dream of being embraced by the God Ram led the prince to commission a series of translations of Sanskrit texts to the courtly lingua franca of Persian, culminating in his The Greatest Secret. Gandhi presents a sure-footed description of this rendering of the Sanskrit Upanishads, which the prince believed held the key to the deepest secrets of the Qur'an. But it seems inescapable to conclude that while Dara was polishing the mirror of the self, Aurangzeb, in sharpening his sabre for the looming succession conflict, was focusing on the ultimately more consequential aspects of Mughal kingship.
Exemplary in its combination of technical sophistication and literary accessibility, this book supersedes all previous biographies of Dara Shukoh, and it will remain the standard work on the prince till such time as new materials surface. In the meantime, as required reading for all those interested in the history of early modern South Asia, the book is sure to invite further discussion. While Gandhi is at pains to correct the view of the prince as temperamentally unsuited to rule, her narrative shows that spiritual conquests notwithstanding, Dara Shukoh won no victories on any earthly battlefield. We might likewise inquire further into the nature of the prince's contributions to Mughal kingship, given the general effacement of his legacy by his successors. But Dara Shukoh's achievements did not lie in these realms. The book's greatest success is surely in showing how the prince participated in, and gave impetus to, an already existing culture of interreligious exchange, without however downplaying the religious commitments and identities of its varied participants. In shining a light on this still-unexplored wider terrain of Mughal society in the seventeenth century, this excellent work sets the stage for future histories to come.
