What if Dara Shukoh had become emperor? Few counterfactuals in Indian history have proved as enduring. Four centuries after his death, Shah Jahan’s eldest son continues to embody a lost possibility: a scholar-prince who translated the Upanishads into Persian, immersed himself in Sufi thought, sought common ground between Vedanta and Islam, and imagined different faiths as paths to the same truth. Defeated in the struggle for succession before he could inherit the Mughal throne, Dara remains one of those rare historical figures whose unrealised future has become as riveting as his life.
Amit Ranjan’s Dara Shukoh: The Faqir and the Throne of Thorns circles around that possibility without succumbing to the temptations of counterfactual history. As Carlos Grenier notes in the foreword, this is “a biographical history unconstrained by chronology.” Rather than reconstructing a life linearly, Ranjan explores the meanings that have accumulated around Dara across centuries. The result is part biography and part intellectual history.
The book announces its intentions immediately. Instead of beginning with ancestry or court politics, Ranjan addresses the prince directly: “Dara Shukoh, who are you? Are you (1615-59)? Is that all?” The question serves as the book’s organising principle. Battles, conspiracies and succession struggles all appear, but Ranjan is more interested in the figure who survived the historical Dara: the prince remembered by chroniclers, mystics, poets and historians.
The Dara who emerges is, above all, a seeker. Ranjan repeatedly returns to the prince’s attempt to discover a common spiritual language between traditions that later generations would regard as distinct and even opposed. Dara was, he writes, “forever comparing Sufi texts with Upanishads trying to prove they had the same ontological foundation and epistemological roots and routes.” That impulse shaped Majma-ul-Bahrain (The Mingling of Two Oceans), his collaboration with Sanskrit scholars, and his celebrated Persian translation of the Upanishads, Sirr-i-Akbar. Equally revealing are Safinat-ul-Auliya and Sakinat-ul-Auliya, Dara’s writings on Sufi saints. They reveal a prince deeply immersed in mystical traditions and spiritual lineages. Long before comparative religion emerged as a discipline, Dara approached faith with unusual intellectual curiosity, searching for affinities rather than differences.
Yet the qualities that made Dara intellectually distinctive also hastened his downfall. Ranjan portrays a prince whose openness shaded into overconfidence and whose impatience with religious orthodoxy earned him powerful enemies. The tension between mystical inquiry and institutional authority runs throughout the book, illuminating both Dara’s appeal and the suspicion he aroused.
Those tensions acquire a political dimension in the figure of Aurangzeb. Ranjan’s sympathies clearly lie with the elder brother, yet he avoids caricature. Aurangzeb appears as disciplined, calculating and politically formidable. Where Dara sought synthesis, Aurangzeb recognised opportunity; where Dara pursued meaning, Aurangzeb pursued power. Their rivalry becomes a clash of temperaments and competing visions of authority.
That conflict reaches its decisive moment at Samugarh in 1658. Dara’s numerically superior army collapsed when soldiers, seeing his riderless elephant, assumed their commander had been killed. Ranjan treats the battle as more than a military defeat. It becomes the point at which intellectual confidence collided with political realism and lost.
The consequences unfolded swiftly. Drawing on François Bernier and other contemporary observers, Ranjan reconstructs Dara’s humiliating procession through Delhi after his capture. Crowds reportedly wept, while Malik Jiwan, whose betrayal had aided Aurangzeb, became the target of public anger. Whatever its historical accuracy, the episode conveys the emotional attachment Dara inspired among his contemporaries.
Ranjan’s account is enriched by figures who rarely occupy centre stage in Mughal history. Sarmad, the naked faqir whose influence on Dara was profound, recurs throughout the narrative like a presiding spirit. Around him gather qalandars, wandering Europeans, eunuch commanders, forgotten courtiers and minor chroniclers. Ranjan repeatedly shifts attention from emperors and generals to witnesses and outsiders, giving familiar events freshness and texture. The women of the Mughal household receive similarly nuanced treatment. Jahanara, Roshanara and Zeb-un-Nissa emerge as distinct personalities rather than supporting figures in a dynastic drama. Running through the book is Ranjan’s conviction that Dara was a tragic figure: learned, charismatic and intellectually adventurous, yet ill-equipped for the realities of power.
At times, the book’s associative method threatens to carry it too far from its subject. Mughal miniatures lead to Rembrandt, Sufi metaphysics gives way to Leonard Cohen, and 17th-century court politics brush against the present. Yet these digressions are central to its appeal. Ranjan’s imagination works through connections rather than chronology.
By the end, The Faqir and the Throne of Thorns feels less like a conventional biography than a conversation across centuries. Ranjan is interested not only in what Dara did but in why he continues to matter. The most evocative line in his preface is: “Humayun died trying to climb down the stairs of his library. You died trying to climb up the stairs of your library of philosophical inquiry and audacity.”
In the book’s final pages, Ranjan leaves readers with a question that extends beyond the 17th century:
The sun rises crimson red,
the poet is done and dead,
or will he haunt Alamgir and his ilk
on their lonely deathbed and beyond?
Aurangzeb may have secured the empire, but Ranjan makes a persuasive case that Dara won the longer battle for the imagination.