1. Introducing Aurangzeb
2. Early Years
3. The Grand Arc of Aurangzeb's Reign
4. Administrator of Hindustan
5. Moral Man and Leader
6. Overseer of Hindu Religious Communities
7. Later Years
8. Aurangzeb's Legacy
Postscript: A Note on Reading Medieval Persian Texts
Bibliographical Essay: Bibliographical Essay
Audrey Truschke is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (2016).
"Basing her judgments on a careful reading of contemporary Persian
chronicles and European traveler accounts, Audrey Truschke presents
a fresh, balanced, and much-needed survey of one of the most
controversial figures in Indian history. Crucially, the author
insists on evaluating the man in terms of the norms and traditions
of his own day, and not those of later, more polarized
times."—Richard M. Eaton, University of Arizona
Following British historians of the colonial era, Indian
nationalists used the last and most controversial of the great
Mughals in ways that simultaneously distorted Mughal history and
served as a goad to Hindu cultural renewal. Audrey Truschke's
project of looking at Emperor Aurangzeb afresh is thus a welcome
and timely one and will interest readers in academia and
beyond."—Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis
"Truschke's laudable objective is to criticize Hindu nationalism,
which makes the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707) into a
metonym for the Muslim community, and vilifies the emperor in order
to vilify the community almost in its entirety....Truschke
demonstrates with superb precision that the political-theological
fault lines in Aurangzeb's reign did not run along simple Muslim
versus Hindu / Sikh binaries."—Milinda Banerjee, Sehepunkte
"Truschke is to be applauded on a number of counts: her courage for
writing a biography of Aurangzeb (), her willingness to write a
book that is easily accessible to nonspecialists, her skill in
integrating large amounts of information within a coherent
narrative, her thoughtfulness when balancing conflicting evidence,
and her ability to give Aurangzeb his due without coming across as
an apologist."––Munis D. Faruqui, Journal of the American Academy
of Religion
"[An] important contribution to Mughal history....[and] an
important effort for discussions around Muslim-Hindu encounters and
the pre-modern/early modern India."—Shaharyar Zia, Reading
Religion
"Audry Truscke, a professor of history at the Rutgers State
University, New Jersey, mentions how she had to endure
unprecedented pushback for daring to write a rather balanced and
objective account of 'the life of India's most important emperor,
Aurangzeb Alamgir.'... Yet, she dared to embark on the project 'to
introduce the historical Aurangzeb - in all his
complexity.'"—Chowdhury Mueen Uddin, The Muslim World Book Review
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