The Mughal prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659) has a hotly contested legacy in South Asia. Whereas many champion him as a tragic hero who represented hope for future Hindu–Muslim unity, others dismiss him as being too intellectually minded to have made a fitting ruler. Supriya Gandhi's recent book, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India, offers the most comprehensive, insightful, and eloquent analysis to date of Dara's life and times. First, Gandhi argues that Dara was a natural product of the Mughal world he inhabited rather than an embodiment of modern ideas like secularism and liberalism. In her words, “Dara Shukoh was never a liberal, nor did he promote interfaith harmony in the modern senses of these terms. Yet he oversaw an extraordinary exercise in cross-cultural understanding.” (p. 7). A second stereotype portrays Dara as the wronged prince whose legitimate right to the Mughal throne, as the chosen heir of Shah Jahan, was usurped by his jealous, power-hungry, bigoted younger brother Aurangzeb. Gandhi convincingly breaks down the dichotomy between the two brothers, describing how they grew up in the same milieu and imbibed similar ideas from their ancestors and contemporaries, even as their thoughts and actions reflected their divergent personalities. She therefore urges us to resist the teleological narrative that Dara's rule could have changed the course of South Asian history.

The book is chronologically divided into nine chapters. The first three chapters capture the complexities of the Mughal royal family in which Dara Shukoh was born and raised. As the peripatetic imperial camp settled in Ajmer from 1613 to 1618, contemporary English travelogues convey  their impressions of religious tolerance, economic prosperity, and political factionalism in South Asian society. Until 1622, Dara's early childhood was shaped by his family's interactions with Hindu ascetics and Sufi saints, along with a close bond with his older sister Jahanara. When Khurram (now Shah Jahan) rebelled against Jahangir and Nur Jahan, Dara and Aurangzeb were taken hostage by their grandparents in Lahore in 1626. As Gandhi astutely observes, his father's bloody rise to power against other contenders to the throne foreshadowed Dara's own tussle with his brothers three decades later. Shah Jahan's coronation also marked Dara and Aurangzeb's reunion with their mother and father. But Mumtaz Mahal's death during childbirth in 1631 left Jahanara and Dara in charge of the household. Dara's wedding to Nadira Bano Begum took place in 1633 amid an ostentatious display of wealth.

In chapters 4 and 5, we learn that in his youth, Dara became the most important Mughal prince, his father's favorite and next in the royal reckoning, although he was often overshadowed by Aurangzeb's military prowess. While Dara was given nominal governorships of Punjab, Kabul, and Allahabad, Aurangzeb gained more experience in war and statecraft through governorships of the Deccan and Gujarat. In this capacity, Aurangzeb stormed the temple of the Jain merchant Shantidas in Gujarat in 1645. Gandhi opines that this attack “served to assert his authority in a new territory . . . by desecrating Shantidas's temple, Aurangzeb also struck a blow at his father and eldest brother” (p. 127). While it may be true that Aurangzeb's motives included politically undermining Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh, we cannot completely negate the religious element in this act. Not all rhetoric against kāfirs (infidels) can be explained as political legitimacy or expediency. How do we understand acts of violence committed in the name of Islamic belief on their own terms, without invoking the logic of political strategy to defend against Hindutva-led allegations of Muslim cruelty and barbarism?

Gandhi's writing seamlessly twins court intrigues with Dara's theosophical ruminations. Together with his sister Jahanara, Dara became profoundly immersed in Sufi esotericism under the guidance of the Qadiri saint Mulla Shah Badakhshi. Aside from writing Sufi treatises, they made several trips to Kashmir, generously patronized architecture in Srinagar, and invited Mulla Shah to visit the Mughal court. Dara's early Persian works, the Safīnat-ul-Auliyāʾ (1640), Sakīnat-ul-Auliyāʾ (1643), and Risāla-yi Haqqnumā (1646), reveal his changing outlook on the Sufi path to divine gnosis, as he became more interested in Hindu mysticism and tried juxtaposing his knowledge of yogic chakras with sultān-ul-azkār (heightened divine remembrance).

Chapters 6 to 8 focus on the final productive and eventful years of Dara's life. After the failure of his Qandahar campaign in 1653, he wrote the Hasanāt-ul-ʿĀrifīn (1654) on Sufi ecstatic expressions, Majmaʿ-ul-Bahrain (1655) on the search for Indian monotheists (muwahhidān-i hind), and Sirr-i Akbar (1657) on translating the Upanishads. Dara also commissioned a new Persian translation of the Sanskrit Yogavashishta and was deeply interested in occult sciences like demonology, geomancy, and astrology. These later works hint at Dara's resistance to the dogmatic practices of the Muslim clergy (‘ulamā). But more significantly, they emerged from his interactions with various non-Muslim figures, including Kavindracharya Saraswati, Baba Lal, Jagannatha, Banwalidas, Chandar Bhan Brahman, pundits in Benaras, Sarmad Kashani, and Father Roth. And yet, Gandhi emphasizes that interfaith knowledge production was not unique to Dara, since royals like Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Jahanara, and his brothers Shuja and Murad similarly patronized religious and literary projects. As previous scholarship has also noted,Footnote ¹ Dara was casting himself in the mold of a well-rounded Mughal philosopher-prince by displaying cultural refinement and closely engaging with Islamic and Indic spiritual traditions.

Parallel political developments exacerbated the rift between Dara and Aurangzeb, culminating in the bloody War of Succession (1657–1659) that ended Dara's life, which is the subject of chapter 9. Our only sources for the succession struggle are chronicles dedicated to Aurangzeb, Murad and Shuja (p. 215), but Gandhi reorients the reader to Dara's perspective. Despite having the emperor's support, he was thwarted by the reluctance of nobles like Jai Singh and the lack of help from Rajput rulers, as well as his brother's rebellions. Gandhi challenges the notion of Dara's weak political and military skills, since Aurangzeb's victory was not apparent until the very end. Finally, Gandhi debunks Aurangzeb's religious motives in accusing Dara of apostasy and heresy, arguing that it was merely a ploy to sway the ʿulamā and incite public protest in order to execute Dara. Aurangzeb made sure Dara died in ignominy, burying him in an unmarked grave in the Humayun's Tomb complex in Delhi.

Throughout the book, Gandhi stresses the crucial role that women played in Mughal high society. Nadira Begum is a constant presence, whose pivotal interventions, political counsel, and relationships in the harem were deeply intertwined with the lives of Dara and their children. But the most prominent female figure of authority in the book is Jahanara. Jahanara features on her own terms: as a disciple of Mulla Shah who wrote Sufi treatises, as a patron of architecture, literature, and trading investments, as a peacemaker who was equally revered by her contrary brothers, and as a close political adviser and confidante of her father. In this sense, Gandhi's book also contributes to recent studies on Jahanara.Footnote ² One wonders, however, why Dara's other sisters, Roshanara and Gauharara, do not feature significantly in his story. Roshanara supported Aurangzeb in the War of Succession, but no clear reason is given for her animosity toward Dara.

These minor quibbles aside, The Emperor Who Never Was is a superbly crafted, engrossingly written, compellingly argued book that is a landmark contribution to the histories of Mughal India, Sufism, and Persian literature. Academics and lay readers alike will delight in its lucid prose, attention to detail, and careful, sensitive examination of several underused archival sources, including Dara's first muraqqa or album (1633), his Samudrasamgama (1655), and Tawakkul Beg's Nuskha-yi Ahwāl-i Shāhī (1666). In weaving a complex tapestry of South Asia in the seventeenth century, Gandhi accomplishes much more than a mere biography of Dara Shukoh: her anecdotal style brings to life court intrigues, battle scenes, epistolary exchanges, meditations on Indic and Islamic philosophy, nuances of the Sufi p ī r-murīd (master-disciple) relationship, public perceptions of sovereignty, and skillfully interpreted poetry and paintings. Dara Shukoh's story has had many afterlives in South Asia, but this monograph is testament to the power of timely, persuasive scholarship in reshaping popular imagination.