Long before multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism entered the vocabulary, Mughal prince Dara Shukoh lived a life that reflected an extraordinary openness to diverse faiths, ideas and cultures. The eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir apparent to the Mughal throne, Dara engaged deeply with Sufism, Hindu philosophy and Christian thought while translating the Upanishads and patronising the arts.
In this book, Dara Shukoh: The Faqir and the Throne of Thorns (Penguin), writer Amit Ranjan revisits the intellectual and spiritual world of the 17th-century prince, looking beyond the familiar narrative of his defeat by Aurangzeb. “Centuries later Dara’s ideas are still relevant and provoke questions,” says Ranjan in a conversation with TMS. The book was released last month.
Beyond the manuscript
While books have been written on Dara, the author argues that they have been largely through the prism of loss and defeat—the prince who lost the war of succession and whose intellectual and military abilities have been judged based on this stereotype.
Ranjan describes Aurangzeb as the “frown prince” and an “epistolary king”. In his book, Ranjan makes a surprising claim—that it wasn’t his military prowess that made him powerful, but deceit. The author argues that Aurangzeb’s success was often rooted in political manoeuvring as much as his prowess on the battlefield. The book also contests both stereotypes, that of Aurangzeb as an exceptionally skilled warrior and Dara as an impractical poet incapable of military strategy.
“He was more of an epistolary king than a pistolary king,” the author says, describing how intercepted letters and carefully crafted correspondence helped Aurangzeb persuade allies to switch sides. “Warcraft is not exactly a military craft. It’s a lot of other things,” he adds.
The author’s background as a literature student has also shaped another strand of the book—Dara’s afterlife in literature. The final chapter examines how 19th-century Urdu, Bengali and British writers interpreted and reinterpreted the prince, revealing an intellectual history that conventional political narratives often overlook.
New credits
The book also offers a revision to the familiar story of Mughal Delhi. The author says it was Dara and his sister Jahanara, rather than their father Shah Jahan, who were closely involved in overseeing the construction of monuments, including the Red Fort, Jama Masjid and Taj Mahal, when Dara was in his early twenties.
The tombs of Sarmad the ‘naked fakir’, who was one of Dara’s spiritual companions, and Hare Bhare Shah, Sarmad’s master, in Old Delhi, and the fact that they are still revered as Sufi shrines, go to show the deep conversations the city still carries on with Dara.
A different history
According to the author, Dara played his cards “too soon”. He was against religious orthodoxy. “But if he were to succeed to the throne, even with all the Sufi backing, he would lose the throne”, Ranjan admits. Dara also was tolerant and secular and maintained good relations with the Sikhs, unlike his father. The history of Delhi would have been different had he been on the throne, says Ranjan. Dara wanted to bring Sufism into kinship and commissioned the reconstruction of temples – which goes to show his belief in pluralism. “It would have been a very rich country in terms of knowledge production, arts and culture,” he says.
Dara’s Persian translation of the Upanishads remains one of his most significant intellectual contributions. He believed that, beyond differences in their modes of expression, there was little that fundamentally separated the doctrines of Islam and Hinduism. To the writer, why Aurangzeb fought so relentlessly to erase Dara’s intellectual and cultural legacy “remains an enduring, and an unanswered question”. Ranjan’s book is an exploration of how Dara wasn’t just a tragic hero but an exceptional scholar who could have definitely been a better king.