Why the Argument About Him Is Still Running

The facts of the reign are largely agreed and the weighing of them is not. He ordered the destruction of particular temples, including at Banaras and Mathura, and he issued grants of land and protection to others; documents of both kinds survive. He had the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, executed at Delhi in 1675, an event Sikh tradition reads as a defence of another community's freedom to worship and as a turning point in the formation of the Khalsa. He employed more Hindu officers in the imperial service than any predecessor. And he spent decades at war in the Deccan against Muslim as well as Hindu powers, which drained the treasury and the army together.

Historians divide over whether the pattern is doctrinal or political, whether a temple was pulled down as an act of piety or as punishment for a rebellion that had used it, and how much a grant proves about intention. What makes this disagreement unusual is that it is not confined to scholarship. The reign is argued about in Indian public life, in school textbooks, in street names and in film, and the positions taken there rarely match the positions taken in the journals. The atlas records the events and the division rather than settling it, because the division has itself become part of what the figure is.