Dr Abdul Kalam was Great, but Why Target Aurangzeb (Road)?

Abdul Kalam deserves respect, a road in his name & more. But this 90’s kid says Aurangzeb need not be the fall guy.

The Kejriwal government in Delhi has decided to rename Aurangzeb Road after Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Does Dr Kalam deserve to be commemorated? Of course. But for me at least, the more important question is why Aurangzeb needs to be erased. Earlier this year, the Shiv Sena too had pressed for the renaming of the town of Aurangabad, also named after the Mughal emperor. It is also where his grave is located.

Aurangzeb’s Peers Weren’t Much Better

Was Aurangzeb bigoted and cruel? Perhaps. But not more so than other medieval rulers, no matter what their religion. If Aurangzeb introduced regressive taxes on non-Muslims, Hindu rulers of the time also upheld a very oppressive form of the caste system.

We no longer celebrate Aurangzeb’s conservatism, just as we no longer stand by the iniquities of varna and jati that so many Hindu kings then supported.

While growing up, I was always told that a free India emerged in 1947 for its tryst with destiny after “do sau saal ki ghulami”. During the First War of Independence, which the Brits thought of as mutiny, quite a few kings and regiments, both Hindu and Muslim, declared the ailing and decrepit Bahadur Shah Zafar as Emperor of India.

The Mughals were, as far as I knew, the last great Indian empire. Somewhere along the way though, do sau saal ki ghulami became barah sau saal ki ghulami, and some of us became keen on whitewashing the sections of our history that we no longer appreciated.

Accept History, Don’t Erase it

Aurangzeb was a less liberal and syncretic figure than his ancestors, particularly Akbar and Jahangir. But by any reckoning of his time, he was far from being an unsuccessful emperor. He extended the boundaries of the empire further than any other Mughal ruler, a necessity for a feudal economy based largely on conquest.

Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jahan’s opulence (read building the Taj Mahal, etc) and the war over his succession had left the Mughal treasury depleted. Aurangzeb was pious, spartan and used a religious idiom to inspire his army. Even today, army units with strong regional traditions – such as the Sikh, Maratha, Gurkha, Rajputana regiments – use such idioms to motivate themselves in battle.

Besides, a civilisation as old as ours will always have controversial figures. Instead of erasing them, I would rather try to understand the historical context in which they lived, and not misuse them as tools of competing political discourses.

Let us have towns (or should Dalhousie succumb to our new doctrine of lapse?) and roads named after Alexander and Prithviraj, Sher Shah and Humayun, Akbar and Maharana Pratap, Shivaji and Aurangzeb, Nehru and Mountbatten.

When I walk down the streets of Lutyens’ Delhi, I am proud of the fact that the few square kilometres from where India is ruled bears the name of so many historical figures. I am proud that India is able to celebrate the Mughals and the Rajputs, Ranjit Singh and Rani Lakshmibai.

We are a humungous country with a long and deliciously contentious history. The worst thing would be to try and erase bits of our past.

(The views expressed by the author are personal)