In Delhi in 1820, the swashbuckling Anglo-Indian cavalry officer James Skinner strode angrily out of the house of Resident David Ochterlony, shouting over his shoulder as he left that “it was a pity he [Ochterlony] had not died sixteen years ago for then he would not have left a dry eye in Delhi but now, were he to die, there would be public rejoicings, and the dhole [drums] would sound in every house!”Skinner’s judgement was harsh, but in fact the once beloved Ochterlony, a “White Mughal” par excellence, had grown autocratic and vengeful as he grew old, and was thoroughly despised by the time he died a few years later.A somewhat similar tragedy but at a much grander scale besets the sixth Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, the subject of Professor Munis D. Faruqui’s latest book, Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire (Juggernaut, 2026). At a time when life expectancy was 35 years, old ‘Alamgir, as the author rightly points out is his regnal title, lived to the age of 88, dying in 1707. “But his end was sad and grinding,” writes Faruqui, as he was by then “a man whose limbs had largely ceased to move, who had trouble breathing, no longer had teeth and could not chew and was … increasingly uncertain of who he was.”Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold, Munis D. Faruqui, Juggernaut, 2026.Had ‘Alamgir died in middle age, “he would undoubtedly [have] been judged, deservedly so, as a great emperor.” He would have been remembered as a vigorous general and an able administrator with a firm hand. Instead, contends Faruqui, it is the actions of ‘Alamgir’s later career – the jizya tax, the crushing of the Mewar and Marwar rebellions, the Deccan campaigns – that have made of him a highly controversial and polarising figure in modern South Asia.Faruqui has been thinking about ‘Alamgir in one way or the other for thirty years. By his own admission, the author did not initially warm towards this emperor very much. He wrote this book, one senses, almost against his will, certainly against his own better judgement and that of his peers, who advised him against it.In the intensely charged political atmosphere of India, dedicating a large chunk of one’s academic career to this emperor is an act of faith. For it is Faruqui’s firm belief, after years of sifting through the archives, that ‘Alamgir has been harshly portrayed – vilified and caricaturised.Instead, Faruqui maintains that while ‘Alamgir was personally devout, he was also pragmatic in looking for Islam-inspired solutions to solve the empire’s many problems as well as in his enactment of the language of sovereignty used by previous Mughal emperors.One of the book’s major arguments is that ‘Alamgir depended “heavily, and significantly more than previous emperors, on the Mughal imperial harem and on the royal eunuchs, to consolidate his power”. The power and role of Mughal women has long been neglected by historians because they were largely expunged from the records produced at the imperial courts. Indeed, in records written by those close to imperial power, it would have been unthinkable to be so indelicate as to mention the presence of imperial women, considered haram (inviolable) and beyond the purview of ordinary mortals. For modern readers, therefore, these women were either rendered entirely invisible or recast in the mould of the European tainted exoticised and eroticised Mughal harem.Also read: Aurangzeb’s Afterlife and the Chhaava-fication of Indian HistoryFaruqui’s book, at last, reverses this grievous injustice, and he devotes fully a third of the book to the working of the harem and the eunuchate. The reason Faruqui was able to access information about these “invisible” women was because he used an extraordinary resource that was hidden in plain sight – the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla. The akhbarat were short news reports about happenings at court, scribbled in Persian by a horde of agents for patrons at the different courts and power centres across India. They were meant to be listened to, preferably reverentially, and then discarded. Unlike the curated official writings that the court produced, nothing was out of bounds for the akhbarat, which could contain gossip, snippets of court intrigues, details of finances, etc.For a casual reader, the akhbarat can seem like a mind-numbing listing of disconnected events, names and lists. The dexterity, finesse and patience it would have taken for Faruqui to sift through a work like the akhbarat, to delicately slot together the innumerable timeframes, characters and events to create this complex and textured Mughal world cannot be over-emphasised.There lies beneath the surface of the book a vast erudition, lightly handled. Faruqui trawls through these items with painstaking attention, teasing out careful implications. There are signs of special favour towards a wife, for example, when prince Aurangzeb gifts that wife’s child an elephant destined for the imperial court, thereby risking imperial displeasure. On other occasions the women of his harem are gifted rare and beautiful things like jewel-encrusted Quran stands, silver lamps, ivory toothpicks, rare pomegranates.Further still, the favour shown to ‘Alamgir’s last and favourite wife, Udaipuri Mahal, can only be gauged obliquely – when her household doctor effects a great cure and is handsomely rewarded for it. Once ‘Alamgir dies, Udaipuri Mahal slips quietly away from the record, the cause of her death not worth noting down even in the akhbarat, and thus she is obliterated from memory itself.Perhaps the most extraordinary woman to be uncovered in this book is Zinat al-Nisa, Alamgir’s second daughter, a woman Faruqui deems to have been “likely the second-most-powerful person in the empire and a key political and financial buttress of ‘Alamgir’s power”.We are far more familiar with the figure of ‘Alamgir’s third daughter Zeb al-Nisa, whose tragic fate and poetic sensibility has endeared her to posterity. Instead, Faruqui found that it was Zinat al-Nisa’s name that reappeared again and again in the akhbarat. Faruqui excavates the power of this woman in myriad ways. It is visible in her gifts, salary and promotions, naturally, but also in the dangerous imperial prisoners who are entrusted into her care, including ‘Alamgir’s rebellious son’s child, Buland Akhbar, and the Maratha general Sambhaji’s son Shahuji. Her power flickers through in the frequent visits ‘Alamgir makes to the harem, in the placement of her tents close to his, the attention paid to all her travel arrangements, the high nobles who make up her cavalcade.Also read: Why We Should Oppose the Aurangzebing of AurangzebThe close analysis of the harem produces some tantalising clues that sometimes go against the grain of some of Faruqui’s conclusions. The author maintains that while ‘Alamgir was a deeply pious Muslim, his treatment of his subjects, both Hindu and Muslim, was based on realpolitik and was ultimately pragmatic rather than ideological.But the harem certainly did not always react with sang-froid and equanimity to some of the emperor’s actions. Most notably, when he re-introduced the jizya (poll-tax imposed on non-Muslims) in 1679, three powerful women are recorded as having opposed it, an exceptional occurrence – Jahanara Begum, Shah Jahan’s daughter Zeb al-Nisa and Aurangabadi Mahal, ‘Alamgir’s wife.Zeb al-Nisa and Aurangabadi Mahal were also opposed to the emperor’s decision in 1678 to invade Marwar after the death of the longstanding ruler Raja Jaswant Singh. The invasion would result in “a brutal and grinding campaign” in Rajasthan that would eventually lead to “a quagmire and the corrosion of ties between formerly loyal Rathor and Sisodia clans and the dynasty”.Faruqui’s startlingly evocative and extensive detailing of a vibrant and powerful harem will surely affect the way in which all future histories of the Mughal empire are written. Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire is a capacious and superbly generous book that provides no easy answers. Perhaps we must reformulate the questions we ask of our history, to move beyond the binaries of good and bad, hero and bigot. Faruqui’s book is exceptional for giving us answers to questions we did not know we had, or could never imagine we could ask of our history and our historical characters.Ira Mukhoty is an author. She wrote The Lion and the Lily: The Rise and Fall of Awadh, Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire and Heroines: Powerful Indian Women in Myth and History.