THE RUIN OF AURANGZEB; OR THE

HISTORY OF A REACTION.

WHEN Dr. Johnson wanted a modern example of The Vanity of Human Wishes, he took the career of the Royal Swede. But during the same period that witnessed the brief glories of Charles the Twelfth in Europe, a more appalling tragedy of wrecked ambition was being enacted in the East. Within a year of Charles's birth in 1681, Aurangzeb, the last of the Great Mughals, set out with his grand army for Southern India. Within a year of Charles's fatal march to Russia in 1708, Aurangzeb's grand army lay shattered by a quarter of a century of victory and defeat; Aurangzeb himself was dying of old age and a broken heart; while his enemies feasted around his starving camp, and prayed heaven for long life to a sovereign in whose obstinacy and despair they placed their firmest hopes. The Indian emperor and the Swedish king were alike men of severe simplicity of life, of the highest personal courage, and of indomitable will. The memory of both is stained by great crimes. History can never forget that Charles broke an ambassador on the wheel, and that Aurangzeb imprisoned his father and murdered his brethren.

But here the analogy ends. As the Indian emperor fought and conquered in a wider arena, so was his character laid out on grander lines, and his catastrophe came on a mightier scale. He knew how to turn back the torrent of defeat, by commanding his elephant's legs to be chained to the ground in the thick of the battle, with a swift yet deliberate valour which Charles might have envied. He could spread the meshes of a homicidal intrigue, enjoying all the time the most lively consolations of religion; and he could pursue a State policy with a humane repugnance to the necessary crimes, yet with an inflexible assent to them, which Richelieu would have admired. From the meteoric transit of Charles the Twelfth history learns little. The sturdy English satirist probably put that vainglorious career to its highest purpose when he used it to point a moral, or adorn a tale.' From the ruin of Aurangzeb the downfall of the Mughal Empire dates, and the history of modern India begins.

The house of Timur had brought with it to India the adventurous hardihood of the steppes, and the unsapped vitality of the Tartar tent. Babar, the founder of the Indian Mughal Empire in 1526,

was the sixth in descent from Timur, and during six more generations his own dynasty proved prolific of strongly marked types. Each succeeding emperor, from father to son, was, for evil or for good, a genuine original man. In Babar himself, literally The Lion, the Mughal dynasty had produced its epic hero; in Humayun, its knighterrant and royal refugee; in Akbar, its consolidator and statesman ; in Jahangir, its talented drunkard; and its magnificent palacebuilder in Shah Jahan. It was now to bring forth in Aurangzeb a ruler whom hostile writers stigmatise as a cold-hearted usurper, and whom Muhammadan historians venerate as a saint.

Aurangzeb was born on the night of the 4th of November 1618, and before he reached the age of ten, his father, Shah Jahan, had succeeded to the throne of his ancestors. His mother, The Exalted of the Palace, was the last of the great queens who shared and directed the fortunes of a Mughal Emperor. Married when just out of her teens, she bore thirteen children to her husband, and died in giving birth to a fourteenth. Her nineteen years of wedded life had been splendid but sorrowful. Of her children, eight died in infancy or childhood. Her bereaved husband raised to her, in sight of his palace, the most beautiful tomb in the world. It crowns the lofty bank of the Jumna, a dream in marble, with its cupolas floating upwards like silver bubbles into the sky. To this day it bears her Persian title, The Exalted of the Palace; a title which travellers from many far countries have contracted into the Taj Mahal.

She left behind her four sons and two daughters. Her eldest surviving child was the Princess Imperial, named. The Ornament of the World; a masterful but affectionate girl of seventeen, and not free from feminine frailties. The Princess Imperial succeeded to her mother's place in her father's heart. During the remaining twenty-seven years of his reign, she guided his policy and controlled his palace; and during his last eight years of dethronement and eclipse, she shared his imprisonment. The great rest-house for

travellers at Delhi was one of her many splendid charities. She died with the fame of her past beauty still fresh, unmarried, at the age of sixty-seven. Her grave lies close to a saint's and to a poet's, in that campo santo of marble latticework, and exquisite carving, and embroidered canopies of silk and gold, near the Hall of the Sixtyfour Pillars, beyond the Delhi walls. But only a piece of pure white marble, with a little grass piously watered by generations marks the princess' grave. Let no rich canopy surmount my resting place,' was her dying injunction, inscribed on the headstone. This grass is the best covering for the grave of a lowly heart, the humble and transitory Ornament of the World, the disciple of the holy Man of Chist, the daughter of the Emperor Shah Jahan.' But the magnificent mosque of Agra is the public memorial of the lady who lies in that modest grass-covered grave.

The eldest son of The Exalted of the Palace, and the heir apparent to the Empire, was Prince Dara. One year younger than the Princess Imperial, he became the object of her ardent affection through life. In the troubles that were to fall upon the family she devoted herself to his cause. Dara was an open-handed, high-spirited prince, contemptuous of advice, and destitute of self-control. He had a noble and dignified bearing, except when he lost his temper. At such moments he would burst out into a tornado of abuse, insulting and menacing the greatest generals and officers of State. The rigid observances of Islam, with its perpetual round of prayers and its long fasts, were distasteful to his nature. And he had all the rival religions, Christian, Muhammadan, and Hindu to choose from, in the Court and the seraglio. Dara leaned towards Christianity and Hinduism. While contemptuously continuing in externals a Muhammadan, he concocted for himself an easy and elegant faith from the alternate teaching of a Brahman philosopher and a French Jesuit. He shocked good Mussulmans by keeping an establishment of learned Hindus to translate their infidel scriptures into Persian. He even wrote a book himself to reconcile the conflicting creeds.

His next brother Shuja was a more discreet young prince. Conciliatory to the nobles, courageous and capable of forming welllaid plans, he might also have been able to execute them, but for his love of pleasure. In the midst of critical affairs, he would suddenly shut himself up with the ladies of his palace, and give days and nights to wine, and song, and dance; no minister of State daring to disturb his revels. Like his elder brother, he too fell away from the orthodox Suni faith of the Indian Muhammadans. But Shuja's defection was due to deliberate policy. He adopted the Shia heresy of Persia, with the hope of winning the Persian adventurers, then powerful at Court and in the army, to his side in the struggle which he foresaw must take place for the throne.

She

Next to him in the family came the princess named The Brilliant Lady; less beautiful and less talented than her elder sister, but equally ambitious, and fonder of gifts and of display. attached herself to the cause of the third brother Aurangzeb, born fourteen months after herself. The youngest of the four brethren was Prince Murad, six years younger than Aurangzeb. Murad grew up a model Muhammadan knight; generous, polite, a despiser of intrigue, and devoted to war and the chase. He boasted that he had no secrets, and that he looked only to his sword to win his way to fortune. But as years passed on, his shining qualities were tarnished by an increasing indulgence at the table, and the struggle for the throne found him, still a brave soldier indeed, but also a glutton and a drunkard.

In the midst of this ambitious and voluptuous Imperial family, a very different character was silently being matured. Aurangzeb, the

third brother, ardently devoted himself to study. In after-life he knew the Kuran by heart, and his memory was a storehouse of the literature, sacred and profane, of Islam. He had himself a facility for verse, and wrote a prose style at once easy and dignified, running up the complete literary gamut from pleasantry to pathos. His Persian Letters to his Sons, thrown off in the camp, or on the march, or from a sick bed, have charmed Indian readers during two centuries, and still sell in the Punjab bazaars. His poetic faculty he transmitted in a richer vein to his eldest daughter, whose verses survive under her nom de plume of The Incognita.

But in the case of Aurangzeb, poetry and literary graces merely formed the illuminated margin of a solid and sombre learning. His tutor, a man of the old scholastic philosophy, led him deep into the ethical and grammatical subtleties which still form the too exclusive basis of an orthodox Muhammadan education. His whole nature was filled with the stern religion of Islam. Its pure adoration of one unseen God, its calm pauses for personal prayer five times each day, its crowded celebrations of public worship, and those exaltations of the soul which spring from fasting and high-strained meditation, formed the realities of existence to the youthful Aurangzeb. The outer world in which he moved, with its pageants and pleasures, was merely an irksome intrusion on his inner life. We shall presently see him wishing to turn hermit. His eldest brother scornfully nicknamed him The Saint.

To a young Muhammadan prince of this devout temper the outer world was at that time full of sadness. The heroic soldiers of the Early Empire, and their not less heroic wives, had given place to a vicious and delicate breed of grandees. The ancestors of Aurangzeb, who swooped down on India from the North, were ruddy men in boots. The courtiers among whom Aurangzeb grew up were pale persons in petticoats. Babar, the founder of the empire, had swum every river which he met with during thirty years of campaigning, including the Indus and the other great channels of the Punjab, and the mighty Ganges herself twice during a ride of 160 miles in two days. The luxurious lords around the youthful Aurangzeb wore skirts made of innumerable folds of the finest white muslin, and went to war in palankeens. On a royal march, when not on duty with the Emperor, they were carried, says an eye-witness, stretched as on a bed, sleeping at ease till they reached their next tent, where they are sure to find an excellent dinner,' a duplicate kitchen being sent on the night before.

A hereditary system of compromise with strange gods had eaten the heart out of the State religion. Aurangzeb's great-grandfather, Akbar, deliberately accepted that system of compromise as the basis of the empire. Akbar discerned that all previous Muhammadan rulers of India had been crushed between two opposite forces;

between fresh hordes of Mussulman invaders from without, and the dense hostile masses of the Hindu population within. He conceived the design of creating a really national empire in India, by enlisting the support of the native races. He married, and he compelled his family to marry, the daughters of Hindu princes. He abolished the Infidel Tax on the Hindu population. He threw open the highest offices in the State, and the highest commands in the army, to Hindu leaders of men.

The response made to this policy of conciliation forms the most instructive episode in Indian history. One Hindu general subdued for Akbar the great provinces of Bengal and Orissa; and organised, as his finance minister, the revenue system of the Mughal Empire. Another Hindu general governed the Punjab. A third was hurried southwards two thousand miles from his command in Kabul, to put down a Muhammadan rising in districts not far from Calcutta. A Brahman bard led an imperial division in the field, and was Akbar's dearest friend, for whose death the emperor twice went into mourning. While Hindu leaders thus commanded the armies and shaped the policy of the empire, Hindu revenue officers formed the backbone of its administration, and the Hindu military races supplied the flower of its troops. It was on this political confederation of interests, Mussulman and Hindu, that the Mughal Empire rested, so long as it endured.

Akbar had not, however, been content with a political confederation. He believed that if the empire was to last, it must be based on a religious coalition of the Indian races. He accordingly constructed a State religion, catholic enough, as he thought, to be acceptable to all his subjects. Such a scheme of a universal religion had, during two hundred years, been the dream of Hindu reformers and the text of wandering preachers throughout India. On the death of the Bengal saint of the fifteenth century, the Muhammadans and Hindus contended for his body. The saint suddenly appeared in their midst, and, commanding them to look under the shroud, vanished. This they did. But under the winding sheet they found only a heap of beautiful flowers, one half of which the Hindus burned with holy rites, while the other half was buried with pomp by the Mussulmans. In Akbar's time, many sacred places had become common shrines for the two faiths: the Mussulmans venerating the same impression on the rocks as the footprint of their prophet, which the Hindus revered as the footprint of their god.

Akbar, the great-grandfather of Aurangzeb, utilised this tendency towards religious coalition as an instrument of political union. He promulgated a State religion, called the Divine Faith, which combined the monotheism of Islam with the symbolic worship of Hinduism, and with something of the spirit of Christianity. He worshipped the sun as the most glorious visible type of the Deity;