If Aurangzeb has emerged as the defining Mughal of our political present, occupying the centre of both scholarly attention and popular imagination, Dara Shukoh has inevitably returned in his wake. The two brothers are bound together by history and by the afterlives of history, their rivalry continually re-enacted in contemporary debates over India’s past and future. Within the contemporary dialectic, Dara Shukoh emerges as the moral counterpoint—the touchstone against which Aurangzeb’s reign is measured, the “other possibility” that history foreclosed. If Aurangzeb stands as the emblem of austere orthodoxy in popular imagination, Dara is cast as the apostle of sulh-i-kul, the patron of translations, the bridge between the Upanishads and the Qur’an. To read Dara Shukoh today is to enter the crucible of several debates shaping our contemporary political life: debates on pluralism and orthodoxy, syncretism and sovereignty, memory and majoritarianism. It is into this fraught and flickering arena that Amit Ranjan’s latest book steps.
The Spectre of Aurangzeb
Released earlier this month by Penguin Random House, Dara Shukoh: The Faqir and the Throne of Thorns unfolds over eleven chapters that chart the arc of the Mughal prince’s remarkable, yet tragic career. In the prefatory note, the author acknowledges that the book does not follow a chronological order—a narrative decision that serves the story remarkably well. Each chapter shifts its gaze from one character or a set of characters to another. At first glance, Dara Shukoh appears to be the thread that binds these lives together. As the narrative unfolds, however, Aurangzeb does occupy an important place. The blurb promises an answer to history’s perennial “What if?”—what if Dara had ascended the Mughal throne? Perhaps it is the enormity of this counterfactual that sometimes confines Dara to the role of the work’s hero without quite allowing him to become its central character.
One of the book’s several striking creative choices appears at the very outset. Ranjan frames his introduction as an epistolary address to Dara Shukoh himself, directing the letter to the site of the prince’s unmarked grave. The epistolary form suspends the distance ordinarily maintained between historian and subject, replacing the impersonal voice of historical narration with one of intimate address. Ranjan declares his allegiances early. There is the Crown Prince, and there is the “Frown Prince.” The reader quickly comes to recognise that Dara is not merely the Poet Prince, but also the poet’s (Ranjan) prince. The work expects its readers to choose sides just as decisively. The risk of such an approach is evident: characters increasingly come to exist in relation to one another rather than as fully realised historical actors.
Yet this partisanship is an interesting aspect of this account. Ranjan’s Aurangzeb is unapologetically the dark side of the story, and the work rarely attempts to soften that judgment. Zebunissa, the daughter of Aurangzeb, is the poetic ghost that re-emerges many times in the book. With her father imprisoning her for a long time for reasons not clear to history – Alamgir loses the readers’ empathy. The reader begins the book knowing who its hero is, and the author never disguises where his sympathies lie. By the end, he has almost craftily ensured that they have become the reader’s sympathies too.
The Historian as Poet
The iron-fisted, orthodox Aurangzeb decided that the syncretic philosopher Dara had to die; there was no room for the two to coexist. Fortunately, historian Amit Ranjan harbours no such impulses toward poet Amit Ranjan. The two coexist within the same covers in quiet harmony. Throughout the account, the poetic function of language is foregrounded. Ranjan’s language draws attention to itself rather than serving as a transparent pane of glass.
At one point in the epistolary introduction, reflecting on the interception of letters, an event central to the Frown Prince’s life, the author quips: “The purported pistol-ary king was actually an epistolary king.” The effect is enhanced by the writing’s self-reflexive nature: the observation about the “epistolary king” itself appears within a letter. Such wit recurs throughout the book. Ranjan has an ear for rhyme, alliteration, and wordplay, lending the prose a quality that is not merely ‘readable’ but eminently ‘read aloud-able’. The style of writing reminded me of the French poet Paul Valéry’s famous observation that “Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.” In Amit’s hands, however, prose is often made to dance.
Another distinctive feature of the book is its use of Leonard Cohen. Every chapter is prefaced by a line from one of Cohen’s songs, an affectionate nod to an artist whose influence on Ranjan is already evident from the title of his debut poetry collection, Find Me Leonard Cohen, I’m Almost Thirty. These lyrical fragments establish the emotional register of the chapters that follow. They become even more resonant in retrospect. Returning to each Cohen lyric after finishing the chapter is a rewarding exercise, revealing the care and precision with which they have been chosen.
The author also weaves these little ‘fun fact’ moments into the narrative with remarkable ease. After recounting Aurangzeb’s penchant for beheadings, Ranjan briefly digresses to suggest that such autocrats would have been enthusiastic proponents of phrenology—the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that claimed to infer character and mental faculties from the shape of the skull. Another particularly striking example appears in the chapter “Horses, Hawks and Hacks,” where a falcon becomes the thread binding together a series of disparate episodes. It first appears as one of the possible reasons behind Shah Jahan’s persecution of Guru Hargobind. The narrative then pivots unexpectedly to “Federigo’s Falcon,” Boccaccio’s celebrated tale from The Decameron, before returning to argue that the bird’s symbolism aptly captures Dara’s fierce loyalty. Finally, a miniature depicting Dara presenting a falcon to Shah Jahan opens into an illuminating discussion of seventeenth-century Mughal painting.
One of the pleasures of Ranjan’s narrative lies in the breadth of material he brings into the story. Alongside archival sources and established historical accounts, he makes room for oral legends, courtly anecdotes, and even colonial-era gossip—those fragments through which historical figures acquire their afterlives in popular memory. The book also engages critically with some of the more recent and widely circulated accounts of Aurangzeb, including Audrey Truschke’s account. With considerable precision, Ranjan demonstrates how Truschke’s selective deployment of sources downplays Dara in order to bolster Aurangzeb. Therefore, rather than accepting such accounts uncritically, Ranjan examines their provenance, contexts, and limitations, distinguishing between historical evidence and historical imagination The result is a narrative that is both scholarly and lively, where rigorous source analysis coexists with the pleasures of storytelling.
Dara Shukoh may have lost the Mughal succession, but he has won a curious second life in the Indian imagination. Amit Ranjan’s book is a passionate contribution to that afterlife—one that is less interested in pretending to neutrality than in asking what Dara has come to mean in our own time. The answer, perhaps, lies not in the history of the Mughal throne, but in the histories we continue to build around it.
The book is an important addition to the canon of Mughal history, Sufism and Dara – and promises to be a book designed to be quoted from, for a long time.
Souvik Nath is a Doctoral Scholar of English at IIT Bhubaneswar. His research interests centre on colonial modernity and its textual manifestations. He writes on Literature, Culture and History.
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