Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb governed by law and by paper. The largest religious undertaking of the reign was the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, a state commissioned digest of Hanafi jurisprudence assembled by a board of scholars over years, which gathered scattered legal opinion into one reference for the courts of the empire. It is among the most substantial acts of legal codification attempted in a premodern Muslim state, and it stayed in use long after the dynasty that produced it had gone.

Fiscal decisions carried religious weight in both directions. In 1679 he reimposed the jizya, the tax on non Muslim subjects that Akbar had abolished more than a century earlier. That was a return to classical legal practice, and in the politics of the moment it was also a demand made on communities whose loyalty was doubted. He abolished at the same time a long list of transit and market duties that jurists regarded as having no basis in law. He appointed censors to enforce public morality, stopped appearing at the jharokha window and gave up the ceremonial weighings, and cut back court music and painting, all of which had been marks of Mughal sovereignty and none of which the law required. The reign reads most coherently as an attempt to make an empire resemble the legal ideal its own jurists described.

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.