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In Delhi in 1820, the swashbuckling Anglo-Indian cavalry officer James Skinner strode angrily out of the house of Resident David Ochterlony, shouting over his shoulder as he left that “it was a pity he [Ochterlony] had not died sixteen years ago for then he would not have left a dry eye in Delhi but now, were he to die, there would be public rejoicings, and the dhole [drums] would sound in every house!”

Skinner’s judgement was harsh, but in fact the once beloved Ochterlony, a “White Mughal” par excellence, had grown autocratic and vengeful as he grew old, and was thoroughly despised by the time he died a few years later.

A somewhat similar tragedy but at a much grander scale besets the sixth Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the subject of Professor Munis D. Faruqui’s latest book, Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire (Juggernaut, 2026). At a time when life expectancy was 35 years, old ‘Alamgir, as the author rightly points out is his regnal title, lived to the age of 88, dying in 1707. “But his end was sad and grinding,” writes Faruqui, as he was by then “a man whose limbs had largely ceased to move, who had trouble breathing, no longer had teeth and could not chew and was … increasingly uncertain of who he was.”

Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold, Munis D. Faruqui, Juggernaut, 2026.

Had ‘Alamgir died in middle age, “he would undoubtedly [have] been judged, deservedly so, as a great emperor.” He would have been remembered as a vigorous general and an able administrator with a firm hand. Instead, contends Faruqui, it is the actions of ‘Alamgir’s later career – the jizya tax, the crushing of the Mewar and Marwar rebellions, the Deccan campaigns – that have made of him a highly controversial and polarising figure in modern South Asia.

Faruqui has been thinking about ‘Alamgir in one way or the other for thirty years. By his own admission, the author did not initially warm towards this emperor very much. He wrote this book, one senses, almost against his will, certainly against his own better judgement and that of his peers, who advised him against........

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