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Dara Shukoh is India’s biggest ‘what-if’. A Mughal ‘Ram Raj’ that could have been

On Dara Shukoh's 411th birth anniversary, the loss of his dream of an Indic Mughal empire continues to haunt India.

Dara Shukoh had a dream. He dreamt of Bhagwan Shri Ram, who appeared to him alongside his teacher, Rishi Vashistha. The vision came while he was immersed in the study of the Indic philosophical text, Yoga Vashishtha. The experience inspired him to undertake a new Persian translation of the book.

In the introduction to that translation, Jug Basisht, Dara’s vision is described in vivid detail:

“In the year 1066 Hijri (1655-56 CE) while the world lay in slumber, I was granted a vision that would forever alter the compass of my soul. I found myself in the presence of the sage Vashistha and the prince Ramchandra. Vashistha, with a countenance of ancient peace, looked upon me with great affection. He turned to Ramchandra and said, ‘O Rama, here is an earnest seeker of knowledge; he is your brother in the true search for Reality. Embrace him.’ At those words, Ramchandra drew me into a warmth so profound it felt as though the very boundaries of my being had dissolved. He held me close, and in that silence, Vashistha handed him sweets. Ramchandra then fed me with his own hand. Upon waking, the sweetness remained—not upon my tongue, but within my heart — and the desire to translate the wisdom of their dialogue became an unquenchable fire.”

In both the Abrahamic and the Indic traditions, dreams carry profound spiritual significance. It takes little expertise in oneirology to decipher the import of this vision. Dara, the heir apparent to the Mughal throne, sought to be a king like Raja Ram, and to model his rule on Ram Raj.

The dream remained unfulfilled. It was cut short by the forces of bigotry led by his brother Aurangzeb, who had him executed in 1659. Dara thus became what Avik Chanda’s biography called the “undisputed Emperor of inchoate dreams”, and Indian history’s most enduring subject of counterfactual speculation — the biggest “What If” of our past, his historiography forever steeped in the melancholy of lost possibilities. This is evident in the wistful titles of two recent books about him: The Man Who Would Be King (Avik Chanda, 2019), and The Emperor Who Never Was (Supriya Gandhi, 2020).

Today, on Dara Shikoh’s 411th birth anniversary, the loss of this dream continues to haunt India, for certain counterfactuals can be posited without fear of contradiction.

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The India that could have been

If Dara had ascended the Peacock Throne, there wouldn’t have been a renewed regime of subjugation and humiliation of Hindus, the most demeaning expressions of it being the reimposition of jizya and large-scale demolition of temples. The latter would have spared us the fraught legacy of a Gyanvapi ‘mosque’ here in Kashi, and an Idgah ‘mosque’ there in Mathura.

Neither would there have been a war without end in the Deccan, which bled the country dry of its resources, both men and material. Nor would religious animus have dictated the predatory taxation and heartless exploitation that broke the back of the peasantry and contributed to the decline of the empire. Furthermore, the simmering Hindu resentment wouldn’t have erupted in open revolt across the country. Above all, if Dara had the chance to bring about a semblance of Ram Raj, Hindus would have had no reason to fight for Swaraj, as the Marathas did.

A reign like Dara’s might have given the oppressed Hindu society a breathing space, and, in all likelihood, afforded it an opportunity for regeneration — the renaissance it had to wait for till the beginning of the 19th century.

Such an India would never have fallen prey to British conquest, sparing us the intergenerational trauma of colonialism, post-colonialism, and now the arduous process of decolonisation.

Hindus and Muslims might never have become two separate communities. A regime that........

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