Nostalgia Lahore and The Ghost of Aurang

Nostalgia, Lahore, and the Ghost of Aurangzeb
TAYMIYA R. ZAMAN
University of San Francisco
[email protected]
Abstract: In the winter of 2011, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was assas-
sinated by his security guard, Mumtaz Qadri, who stated that Taseer’s opposition
to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws was an attack on Islam. In Lahore, a city with a
Mughal past, Taseer’s death was understood through invocations of a murder
that happened in 1659, when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb killed his brother
Dara Shikoh after declaring him an apostate: Taseer was portrayed as Dara rein-
carnated and Qadri Aurangzeb. This article argues that images of past kings stem
from trauma caused by the loss of kingship and by a century of colonial rule.
This article proposes that beneath nostalgia for past kings lies a deeper longing
for the intact world kingship sustained. To reconstruct this world, I close-read
the account of Bhimsen Saxena, a Hindu soldier who served under Aurangzeb
and expressed both anger and loyalty towards his king; in this, he possessed
a pre-modern subject’s capacity to hold ambivalence that modern citizens no
longer possess. Narrative accounts such as Bhimsen’s can open the imagina-
tion to lost capacities for holding pain or ambivalence and bring scholarship on
religious violence in modern South Asia into conversation with scholarship on
the Mughal past.
The city of Lahore is at odds with Pakistan. This is because Lahore has
a Mughal past but a new country like Pakistan is still not sure what to
make of the Mughals. Stories of kings circle Mughal monuments in La-
hore; adventures accompany kings, as do chance encounters in which they
forgo their riches to become dervishes, prophecies through which they
gain back their kingdoms, and otherworldly guides who appear when fate
demands their path cross with the king’s. Meanwhile, Mughal kings are
absent in Pakistani history textbooks or flattened to suit the needs of the
nation, where Akbar (d. 1605) represents heresy and Aurangzeb (d. 1707)
orthodoxy and the two battle one another for the soul of Islam, which
finds its final sanctuary in the shape of Pakistan. Among those opposed
to this narrative, the inverse is true: Akbar represents secular tolerance
and Aurangzeb represents religious fanaticism. Although there are many
excellent arguments about the losses caused by Partition in 1947, there are
none that address how kings are old, archetypical symbols living in the
soul of the city and why they keep surfacing in distorted forms produced
by erasure and nostalgia. 1
Fragments Volume 4 (2015) 1

ZAMAN: Nostalgia, Lahore, and the Ghost of Aurangzeb
Prince Dara Shikoh. Chitarman. Reprinted with permission from the British Library Board, Add.
Or. 3129, f. 19v.

When the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was assassinated for his
opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws in the winter of 2011, many in
Lahore went into mourning for Dara Shikoh, the brother who Aurangzeb
declared an apostate and killed in 1659. Dara is seen as a throwback to
Akbar in popular imagination, and Taseer as a throwback to Dara. Mum-
taz Qadri, Taseer’s murderer, was celebrated and showered with rose
petals, which further intensified mourning for Dara Shikoh and longing
for alternate courses history could have taken had Dara lived. 2 Or, many
made comparisons between Qadri and Aurangzeb, as though the same soul
had transmigrated through different bodies, determined to annihilate its
enemy yet again. In mourning Dara and Taseer as manifestations of one
soul and Aurangzeb and Qadri as manifestations of another, the centuries
between the present and past collapsed. Regardless of whether Aurangzeb
was portrayed as jihadi hero or fanatical villain, these characterizations
constituted personal emergencies in which something held dear was en-
dangered and required a hollowed-out king to act as a container for loss.3
Stories of kings in Lahore also point to longings for an unpartitioned
world made up of imaginary maps that float free of Pakistan. Tour guides
tell of a secret network of tunnels beneath Mughal monuments that still
links Lahore to cities in India. These maps of underground tunnels directly
mirror maps of old routes that once connected Mughal cities, as though
the disappeared routes form threads in a shared consciousness shaped by
the memory of an older, unpartitioned world. In tunnel stories, Mughal
kings are believed to have escaped through elaborate tunnel networks
and their armies to have traveled unseen beneath the land as Mughal
power waned. 4 This means that images of kings serve a dual function in
Lahore. They sustain nationalist binaries by representing Aurangzeb and
Dara Shikoh through mutually exclusive notions of orthodox and hetero-
dox, religious and secular. Simultaneously, images of kings possess the
potential for destabilizing these binaries because they are unconsciously
oriented towards a time when such binaries did not exist.
What is missing from both these formulations is the actual experience of
kingship, which is too far removed for us to remember, but close enough
to summon nostalgia. This essay will excavate the experience of kingship
by resurrecting Aurangzeb through the memoir of Bhimsen Saxena, a
Hindu newswriter who accompanied Aurangzeb’s armies on campaigns
into the Deccan that began in 1680. Bhimsen romanticized past kings such
as Aurangzeb’s father Shah Jahan (d. 1666) and was disappointed with
Aurangzeb. But despite his love for Shah Jahan and his anger at Aurang-
zeb, Bhimsen possessed an ability to hold ambivalence that the modern
citizen does not, because Bhimsen’s psyche was shaped by his rootedness
in the very world for which the modern citizen feels nostalgic. Recover-
ing ambivalence through the interiority of one life can allow a modern

citizen to see Aurangzeb from behind the eyes of one of his subjects and
destabilize certainties about the king created by nationalism and nostalgia.
My focus on one life is in keeping with the writing of Mughal history,
which contained several accounts of individual lives and with scholarship
on Partition, which draws upon personal narratives to recover nuances
of individual experience that do not fit into linear accounts. 5 Partition is
recent enough for historians to speak to survivors; the memory of king-
ship however, can only be found in the archives and in fragments of the
everyday in cities such as Lahore. Reading Bhimsen while reading La-
hore creates a bridge between subjecthood and citizenship through the
possibility of empathy with the lived experience of a royal subject. This
methodological intervention is needed because loss, anger, and longing
lodge themselves too deep in the psyche to be countered with historical
reasoning alone. Access to Bhimsen’s psyche can address both the distorted
versions of kingship that shape the present and our sublimated desires
for an unpartitioned world.
I focus on empathy and the capacity to hold ambivalence because many
acts of violence in South Asia that command media attention are evidence
of a constructed other deserving of neither. A mosque built at the order of
Babur was destroyed in Ayodhya in 1992 because it symbolized Muslim
invasion, statues of Buddha at Bamiyan were reduced to rubble by the
Taliban in 2001 because they allegedly insulted Islam, and Wendy Doni-
ger’s book, “The Hindus,” was pulped by Penguin Press, India in 2014
on the grounds that it offended Hindus. 6 This is not to say there were no
notions of self and other in the pre-colonial world; rather, the presence
of the king mediated notions of Islam and Hinduism, self and other, one
person’s sacred and another’s. 7 The absence of a figure entrusted with
both temporal and spiritual authority has meant the loss of this mediating
function and the loss of this mediating function has meant that places of
worship or laws about blasphemy are now the repositories of religious
sentiment. The sense of violation that occurs when these sites, and by
extension religion, is perceived to be under threat would not have been
possible in a world where the sacred was housed in the body of the king.
Understanding the broken link between subject and king is integral to
measuring what we have lost with the passing of kingship and to imagin-
ing ways of being in the world now out of reach. Before reading Bhimsen,
I will show how the loss of kingship has morphed into strange imaginings
that appear in textbooks, films, and personal encounters in both India
and Pakistan. From its origin in British India, where colonial rule put
an end to kingship, to its surfacing in present-day Lahore, nostalgia for
lost kings and futures that could have been is a consistent undercurrent
in the creation of Pakistan. It is easy to dismiss caricatures of kings and
caliphs in popular imaginings in the Muslim world as evidence of how

divorced communal identity is from history. However, if we read loss

into the constant surfacing of kingship, then voices from the past such as
Bhimsen’s can offer a remedy. Beyond Pakistan, this kind of intervention
can be tried in any context in which a past made difficult to access or
deliberately severed from the present refuses to disappear, surfaces in a
distorted form, and insists on claiming popular imagination in ways that
academic interventions often fail to address. 8
I. Nostalgic Inheritances
Nostalgia was once a medical diagnosis. By combining the Greek roots
nostos (homecoming) and algia (longing), a Swiss physician coined the
term in 1688 to refer to pathological longings for home among displaced
people. Svetlana Boym has argued that at a historical moment when at-
titudes towards time and space were changing, those resistant to progress
and excessively attached to home would be diagnosed with nostalgia and
treated with leeches, opium, or a trip to the Alps. Eventually nostalgia
went from treatable disease to incurable condition as no gene could be
located for it, nor could its origins be found to reside in the body. Nostalgia
also came to be institutionalized—as Pierre Nora has argued—in public
sites of memory belonging to the nation.9 This means that nostalgia is both
a product of modernity, which allows for unprecedented displacements,
and a reaction against modern notions of time and progress because of
which older, magical ways of being in the world have been lost. 10
Nostalgia for Mughal kings began with the waning of Mughal power
and intensified because of the traumatic end of the Mughal Empire in
1857 at the hands of the British, who exiled the last Mughal king Baha-
dur Shah Zafar to Burma after putting him on display for visitors “like a
beast in a cage.”11 The loss of Delhi to Muslims, who were driven out of
the city and blamed for the uprising of 1857, and the violence done to the
body of the last Mughal king created a body of literature that mourned
lost kings, ruined cities, and impossible futures. 12 From this loss emerged
reconstructions of kingship: As British colonial historiography on the Mu-
ghals portrayed Akbar as syncretic and Aurangzeb as sectarian, Muslim
intellectuals, whose imaginings Pakistan has inherited, defensively por-
trayed Akbar as swayed by Hindus and Aurangzeb as a staunch Muslim
preserving his faith in a hostile landscape. 13
Allama Iqbal, the philosopher, poet, and politician whose ideas gave
language and momentum to the Pakistan movement saw Aurangzeb as a
proto-nationalist and “the founder of Musalman nationality in India.” 14
Aurangzeb was also heralded as an exemplary Muslim by influential po-
litical leaders such as Maulana Abul Ala Maududi (d. 1979), the founder
of the Islamist political party, the Jamaàt-i Islami, who reached back into
the past to find a leader whose morals could point Pakistan towards its

Poster for Jodhaa Akbar. Reprinted with permission from Ashutosh Gowariker
Productions Pvt. Ltd.
future.15 Meanwhile, Hindu intellectuals and politicians, including Nehru,

propped up Akbar as a secular, non-denominational leader. 16 Hindu and
Muslim nationalists then recast Akbar and Aurangzeb along colonial bi-
naries even though both kings articulated their roles across a spectrum of
divinity that allowed for many formulations. While Akbar claimed to be

the messiah returned and an embodiment of God, Aurangzeb portrayed

himself as a human servant of the divine, given to asceticism. In both
these formulations, despite their variance, Islam was not an abstraction
to be defended or destroyed by the king; rather the king was himself a
sacred symbol whose fashioning changed depending on the political and
cultural mood of the time. 17
Despite the disappearance of actual kings, communal identity in India
and Pakistan continues to draw upon representations of kingship. 18 The
successful Bollywood film Jodha Akbar (2008) celebrates the love between
Akbar and his Rajput wife as indicative of the tolerant co-existence that
characterized Akbar’s India.
Meanwhile, in March 2008, a month after the release of Jodha Akbar,
a group called FACT (Foundation Against Continuing Terrorism) staged
an exhibit on Aurangzeb in Chennai to reveal Aurangzeb’s atrocities
against Hindus. The exhibit, which included depictions of temple de-
structions undertaken by Aurangzeb, drew protests from Muslims, who
feared becoming targets of violence once news of temple destructions
spread through Chennai. The exhibit was shut down by police officers
for fear of creating communal unrest. A newspaper article titled, “Has
Aurangzeb reincarnated in form of police?” suggested the Chennai police
were incarnations of Aurangzeb because they were suppressing freedom
of expression. 19
The release of a nostalgia film about Akbar’s tolerance followed by the
staging of an inflammatory exhibit pointing to Aurangzeb’s intolerance
show the fault lines of collective imagination. In the case of the exhibit, the
quick spread of news from hundreds of years ago collapsed time as though
temples were being destroyed today. Time collapsed around Salman Taseer
in Lahore in the same manner; mourning Dara Shikoh fused into mourn-
ing Taseer because both men possessed a soul repeatedly murdered in
a cosmic battle. The backdrop for this capsizing was the city of Lahore;
Lahore’s Mughal monuments disrupt our experience of time by evoking
an older world that hides behind a new one. This uncanny quality makes
the Mughal past seem inescapably lost, because Mughal monuments do
not fit into the present. Simultaneously, the arresting power of Mughal
monuments creates desires for the lost world they represent. As Santhi
Kavuri-Bauer and Veronica Della Dora argue, ruined monuments in the
post-colonial city act like a synecdoche on the imagination of citizens;
representing a whole that once was, they offer the fragmented subject a
relationship with a fabled past. 20
Lahore’s historical link to Delhi—both cities were Mughal capitals—
and the splendor of the Mughal past is still mourned by families who
live in the old city. 21 I taught Mughal history in Lahore for a year in the
fall of 2010 and the spring of 2011 and was introduced by a colleague to

Amir, a descendant of a family with roots in Lahore that go back several

generations. 22 Amir explained to me that Lahore was Dara Shikoh’s city.
“Lahore loved Dara Shikoh,” he began. “This city was with him, not
with Aurangzeb, who is just like bearded fundamentalists today who
are destroying Pakistan. Aurangzeb tried to win us over by building
the Badshahi mosque, but we knew better,” the “we” in his statement
representing, for all time, the loyal denizens of Lahore. “As if Aurangzeb
could build anything like Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal,” he scoffed. “It’s Dara
we loved. This was his city.” 23 In this narrative, Aurangzeb was the first
in a line of calamities that had befallen Lahore, which was tolerant in the
way of Akbar and Dara Shikoh and deprived of the future that Dara, its
murdered could-have-been king would have created.
After telling me about Dara’s tolerance, Amir began to tell me he
mourned Ranjit Singh (d. 1839), the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire,
which rose up after the weakening of Mughal power in North India. “It’s
not India that was partitioned,” he said. “It was the Punjab. Lahore got cut
off from Amritsar. These two holy cities of the Sikhs were like two eyes on
a face.” 24 In Amir’s map of his world, Ranjit Singh is another mythic king
who held together the land, and like Dara Shikoh, represents co-existence.
“Between Aurangzeb and Zia-ul-Haq,” said Amir, “the tolerance of South
Asia has been destroyed.” Amir’s nostalgia is grounded in pain about the
present but is also an escape that disavows present responsibility in favor
of turning points in the distant and strangely immediate past.
Defenses of Aurangzeb did not break down the good Islam/bad Islam
binary through which each king was understood in Lahore; one person’s
good Islam simply became another’s bad Islam. Aurangzeb’s piety and
simplicity were recounted to me by many who opposed the lavish expen-
ditures of the Pakistani elite: In these arguments, Taseer, a rich politician,
was being mourned while the deaths of villagers from American drone
attacks were being ignored. An administrator from a lower middle class
background, Ahmed, who works at Punjab University, saw the Mughals,
with the exception of Aurangzeb, as representing the secularism of Paki-
stan’s urban elites. “No one is willing to defend Islam in this country,
especially not the elites,” he said. “Akbar and Dara Shikoh practiced
Hinduism and drank wine—why are we making them heroes when they
were bad Muslims? The real hero was Aurangzeb, who stood up for Islam
and practiced it correctly.” 25 The Islami Jamiàt-i Talaba (Islamic Society
for Students), a group founded by Maulana Maududi in Lahore in 1947
has a stronghold in Punjab University, where it has demanded gender
segregation, a conservative dress code, and a return to Islamic values.
As a supporter of the Jamiàt at a public university, Ahmed’s attachment
to Aurangzeb comes from seeing Aurangzeb as a throwback to the early
days of Islam before the polluting influence of Hinduism.

This longing for pristine Islamic nationhood can be found in textbooks

for “Pakistan Studies,” which is compulsory in all schools. Ikram Rab-
bani, the author of a widely-used Pakistan Studies textbook writes that
Muslims under colonial rule longed for the lost glory of the Mughal Em-
pire. However, under Akbar, “mystics and sufis” had led people astray
by making them believe in the miracles of the saints—a form of magic
that was “alien to Islam.” 26 Pakistan was the answer to the threat posed
to Islam by external forces such as Hinduism, and internal forces, such as
mysticism; Pakistan then succeeds where kings such as Akbar failed. Rab-
bani is a product of over a century of distancing and erasure on the part
of Muslim reformers: The knowledge that all Mughal kings appropriated
the power of mystical orders has no place in the narrative of Pakistan.
Arguments about good kings and bad kings, while often specific to
Pakistan, are also emblematic of a global imagination in which tolerance
is dying in South Asia and can be revived if South Asians can remember
that other versions of Islam, as represented by Dara Shikoh, also exist.27 In
the BBC documentary, “The Story of India,” the historian Martin Davidson
narrates how a helpless Dara Shikoh was brutally murdered by Aurangzeb
while he was cooking lentils for his small son. Davidson then laments what
this would come to mean for South Asia. 28 The U.S. based scholar David
Pinault, in a similar vein, writes that Dara Shikoh would not have died
in vain if his memory can help revive pluralism in Pakistan. 29 Reviews of
the nostalgic play, “Dara Shikoh,” penned by the Pakistani playwright
Shahid Nadeem and adapted for a showing in London recently, appeal
to the tolerant vision of Islam that Dara represented and to the relevance
of the play to contemporary times in which Aurangzeb’s fanatical Islam
has triumphed. 30 These pleas for tolerance through invocations of Dara
ironically subscribe to the same empty binaries through which the intol-
erance they rage against is constructed.
By representing abstract principles that align with nationalist and global
imaginings, the figures of Mughal kings are able to order emotion, and
succeed where history—with its insistence on ambiguity and nuance—
fails. Once the image of an idealized or vilified king takes root within
the psyche, the partitioned self is ordered again, and the world neatly
divided into notions of good and evil, self and other. Global images of
Islam and Muslims that support these demarcations make them difficult
to diffuse; to someone who believes Islam is under attack, praise for Dara
Shikoh in London adds fuel to aggrievement. Similarly, any instance of
religious violence that is celebrated rather than condemned in Pakistan
bolsters the convictions of the liberal supporter of Dara Shikoh that Dara’s
Islam is being extinguished. In both cases, if an individual sees herself
and her idealized nation as secular/pluralistic (i.e., of Dara Shikoh), then
the other is always constructed as religious/sectarian (i.e., of Aurangzeb).

This normative inversion—in which every self has an opposite who func-
tions as other—creates a false sense of stabilization in unstable times. 31
Because we do not remember kingship, past kings and their world re-
mains hazy enough to accommodate both the Dara/Aurangzeb dichotomy
and the more elusive desire for pasts we believe were better than the
present but to which we cannot return. What lurks beneath longing for
Mughal kings is the traumatized citizen’s desire to return to a place in
time prior to the injury caused by the loss of kingship and the partitioning
of the land. For Amir, Dara Shikoh and Ranjit Singh represent a moment
in time when the land was intact and free of trauma; for Ahmed the early
community of Muslim believers represents the purest of times and Au-
rangzeb the last flicker of this purity. Despite supporting heroes at odds
with one another, each possesses a consciousness that finds solace from
a fragmented present in past kings. A reading of a subject of Aurangzeb’s
such as Bhimsen Saxena can bring into clearer focus the unpartitioned
selves for which we are actually nostalgic. While normative inversions
through reimagined kings are the only form of stabilization available to
present-day citizens, Bhimsen is rooted in a geography that contained
the multiple sacralities of which Aurangzeb was only one manifestation.
Currently, Aurangzeb has been split between two nations; in both, he is
a savior to some and an agent of destruction to others but he is no longer
allowed to be both as he was to Bhimsen. Once we pull together the two
selves of the partitioned king, we can rebuild a missing order of being
within ourselves. 32
II. The King Who Lived in Tents

Bhimsen Saxena belonged to a family who had served the Mughals for
generations. Bhimsen was a soldier and news-writer for Aurangzeb’s
Deccan campaigns on which he began to compose an account of his life
and times, titled the Tarikh-i Dilkasha, which can be translated as a history
that pleases or pulls at the heart. 33 Bhimsen begins by writing that he has
left royal service and rank and is facing difficult times in which he has
chosen to content himself with stories of old. 34 Bhimsen’s memories are
ordered according to each successive year of Aurangzeb’s reign and while
he does not mention ever meeting Aurangzeb, the services rendered by
his father and uncles to the king shape their lives; they move with their
families at Aurangzeb’s order and rely on him for promotions.
Aurangzeb appears in the text as an untested prince who Shah Jahan
made the governor of the Deccan in 1636. Bhimsen mentions that the
young prince gave Subhkaran Bundela, a patron of Bhimsen’s family, a
post and an army.35 During the succession struggle between Shah Jahan’s
four sons, Subhkaran Bundela and Bhimsen’s elder uncle Bhukandas left
their families in Burhanpur to join Aurangzeb and were rewarded upon

Aurangzeb’s victory.36 Aurangzeb proclaimed himself king in 1658, writes

Bhimsen, after which he set off in pursuit of his brother Dara Shikoh who
fled towards Lahore and who Aurangzeb captured, paraded through the
streets, and beheaded. In Bhimsen’s account, Dara Shikoh’s beheading
is a matter of course; his body was relieved of the burden of his head,
writes Bhimsen dourly, and does not follow this up with either praise or
blame.37 As succession struggles and fratricide were common, the charge
of apostasy leveled by Aurangzeb against Dara appears irrelevant to Bhim-
sen. In other Mughal accounts, Dara Shikoh is a divisive figure; loved by
his father but unsuited for leadership, Dara might not have made for the
most able successor. 38
After establishing his authority through his family’s ties to the Mughals,
Bhimsen leads his reader through the landscape of Aurangzeb’s India.
Bhimsen’s geography includes Lahore, which is one of the eight cities
of Aurangzeb’s “heaven-protected” empire, and a node on a larger map
built by the Mughals. The historic city is titled the realm of sovereignty
and is one of five cities that remain prosperous despite the ruin that has
marked Aurangzeb’s reign. The other four cities Bhimsen names as pros-
perous and whose longevity he prays for are Ujjain, Ajmer, Shahjahanabad,
and Kabul. Of the three cities of the Deccan that fall under Mughal rule,
namely Bijapur, Hyderabad, and Burhanpur, Bhimsen writes that all have
witnessed population decreases because of Aurangzeb’s campaigns and
the villages around them lie desolate. Burhanpur is Bhimsen’s birthplace
and he shares with his readers his memories of Burhanpur in better days. 39
Aurangzeb’s empire, sacred by virtue of being reigned by a king who
is the shadow of God on earth, is also part of a Hindu mythic geography.
On this land, Bhimsen writes, there are seven famous rivers just as there
are seven immortals, unseen to human eyes, and they are Aswathama, Bali,
Vyas, Hanuman, Vibhishan, Kripacharya, and Parashuram. 40 These seven
immortals will rule for all time. There are furthermore seven blessed places
in all of Hindustan: Ayodhya, Mathura, Maya, Kashi, Kanchi, Avantika,
and Dwaravati, cities that continue to be pilgrimage centers today. 41 The
empire, and the land over which its cities are spread out, is dotted with
the actions of mystics and pilgrims, heroes and kings. 42 Bhimsen tells his
readers about the River Godawari, sacred as the Ganges, where his father
and his father’s friend, the noble Amanat Khan went on pilgrimage to-
gether, and Ellora, where local memory held that a king found a spring in
the desert which was able to heal him, miraculously, of a skin disease. 43
These two geographies, which contain what would today be separated
as Hinduism and Islam, feature as integrated sources of sacral power in
Bhimsen’s known world. The king is the symbolic center of this landscape.
Just as Amir used the metaphor of the body to refer to a once unified land,
Bhimsen writes that God has made each man an empire, and the heart is

the ruler of the empire that is man. The king, acting as the agent of God
on earth, is the heart of his empire and he is meant to maintain order. 44
But Aurangzeb, according to Bhimsen, is flailing and entirely unlike his
just and wise father Shah Jahan. 45 Shah Jahan’s subjects were loyal and
clean of heart and only required the king to preside over court once a
week, writes Bhimsen, but Aurangzeb holds court twice a day and still
subjects swarm in with uncountable grievances. 46 Shah Jahan placed ef-
fective grandees in each principality, but Aurangzeb has put small men
with small armies in charge of conquered provinces and “no one gets any
justice.” 47 Bhimsen mentions that Hindus are often not recommended to
Aurangzeb’s service but adds that this does not affect his family because
of their loyalty. Similarly, he mentions Aurangzeb’s imposition of the jizya
(a tax paid by non-Muslim subjects to Muslim kings in exchange for state
protection) and complains that tax collectors are corrupt. 48
How are we to understand Bhimsen’s use of the word “Hindu” when
it is not contrasted with any statement about Muslims as being favored
by Aurangzeb; rather, it appears that the king unwisely favors small men
with small armies who are disloyal to him? Bhimsen’s Aurangzeb lacks
discernment; he favors those who may not act in his best interests and
Bhimen uses this critique of the king to point to how his own family re-
mains loyal nonetheless and is thankfully still rewarded for it. Bhimsen’s
identification with the Mughal family—where Mughal power represents
the power of both the king and loyal servants such as Bhimsen—compli-
cates the question of “Muslim” and “Hindu” as mutually exclusive catego-
ries. The framework of dissatisfaction through which Bhimsen describes
Aurangzeb points to a failure of administration; the corruptness of tax
collectors appears to offend Bhimsen more than the tax itself.
The broader cosmological framework through which Bhimsen un-
derstands his times is that of Kaliyuga, the last and most destructive of
the four ages outlined in Hindu theology. 49 Kaliyuga is reflected in the
physical and the moral deterioration Bhimsen sees around him. He writes
that Aurangzeb’s ambition has sent him on endless military campaigns
that have ruined entire cities or subjected them to poor administration. 50
Kaliyuga is a time in which “firmness of heart, purity of deeds, and im-
provement of circumstances” are not to be found in either kings or their
subjects.51 Aurangzeb’s itinerant lifestyle is itself a sign of upheaval: “Ever
since His Majesty has come to the throne, he has not lived in the city,”
complains Bhimsen. “The inmates of his camp, tired of long separations,
have now summoned their families to live with them, which has meant
that a new generation has been born and raised in the camp.” Although
Aurangzeb’s predecessors were as itinerant as he was (in fact, his long
stay in the Deccan was a departure from the policies of earlier kings),
the prosperity associated with past kings leads Bhimsen to forget their

propensity for tents. 52 As a member of an urbanized elite (an important

limb of the body that was the Mughal empire), Bhimsen’s sense of self
is unmoored when cities are abandoned by their king and are unknown
to his subjects. 53 The sight of men of nobility walking through mud, as
exhausted and diseased as their animals while relentless rains pour down
and bring more disease, then leads Bhimsen to think of the better times
of “sovereigns of old.” 54
Bhimsen documents Aurangzeb’s prolonged war against the Maratha
leader Shivaji and assesses Aurangzeb and Shivaji through a similar moral
framework. Bhimsen dislikes the Marathas, who he says have infested Mu-
ghal lands, but praises Shivaji for being a good leader to them. According
to Bhimsen, a probable cause for Shivaji’s death in 1680 was his plunder
of the town of Jalnapur, where Jan Muhammad, a dervish who was “un-
matched in his accomplishments of knowledge,” resided. The dervish had
repeatedly issued warnings to Shivaji and Bhimsen writes that it could
be a curse on the part of Jan Muhammad that led to Shivaji’s departure
from this world. 55 Bhimsen’s critique of Shivaji is similar to his trenchant
critiques of Aurangzeb, who is also acquisitive. “The men of this world
are so greedy,” writes Bhimsen, “that a king like Aurangzeb, who lacks
for nothing, is seized with such an obsession for capturing forts that he
runs about panting after these heaps of stone.” Bhimsen adds that if this
is a king’s conduct, little can be expected of lesser men. 56
Shivaji meets his end in a holy man’s curse, but Bhimsen’s Aurangzeb
still pays homage to the sufis of the Deccan the way Bhimsen’s father
would. Bhimsen mentions Aurangzeb’s visit to the tomb of the sufi Gisu
Daraz, which has an air so pure even kings can benefit from it. 57 Aurang-
zeb’s movements reveal Bhimsen’s awareness of the movements of past
kings and holy men; he mentions for instance that Gisu Daraz came to
the Deccan in the reign of the king Firoz Shah (d. 1422) of the Bahmani
Sultanate.58 Bhimsen also mentions Aurangzeb’s long illness of 1704, which
he writes was only alleviated by the prayers of his subjects; these were
well-deserved, says Bhimsen, for Aurangzeb was rare in his piety. 59 Un-
like Shivaji, who commits the error of disregarding a dervish’s warnings,
Aurangzeb’s adherence to piety is redemptive. Of an earlier time in 1697,
when the king’s encampment in Brahmapuri, on the banks of the River
Bhima, was flooded by the river on account of rain, Bhimsen reports that
Aurangzeb, in response, wrote a prayer and threw it into the water. Im-
mediately after, the flood subsided. “The prayer of the king was accepted
by God, and the world composed again,” writes Bhimsen. 60
The ability of the king to save his camp from being washed away
points to how in Bhimsen’s eyes, Aurangzeb still possessed the spiri-
tual charisma associated with his lineage. It also shows how despite his
grievances against Aurangzeb, Bhimsen saw the king as able to harness

Portrait of Aurangzeb. Artist Unknown. Reprinted with permission from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

spiritual forces to his aid when needed and order the world. This is in
keeping with the intense personal allegiances kings commanded; soldiers
were known to dream of their king, and kings were both spiritual guides
and temporal rulers. 61
In Bhimsen’s landscape, other holy guides intervene in the ordinary
and he writes that his life has been filled with divine encounters that have
made him indifferent to the wealth of this world. 62 When Bhimsen gets
separated from the army in a battle against Shivaji in 1672, he encounters
a dervish in a jungle who tells Bhimsen that he knows his name and that
of his father’s, having observed them on pilgrimage together. Bhimsen
implies that just as he recognizes the spiritual capacity of the dervish,
the dervish recognizes his. “Ask anything of me,” says the dervish and
Bhimsen asks that he be shown the way back to the imperial encamp-
ment.63 This comes to pass and Bhimsen’s account of the incident points
to his fidelity to values that he shares with dervishes, which the king
often betrays.
If Bhimsen’s moral framework is tied to the geography of the land, so
is his sense of self and other. The edge of Bhimsen’s known world is the
south of India, where Marathas “swarm like ants and locusts.”64 Vandivasi,
in the southern state of Tamil Nadu consists of people who eat coarse
food and might as well wear no clothes, because men roam around in
loincloths and women do not cover their breasts. The sea is a billowing
green hill that speaks of the mystery of God and sea ports have in them
French and Dutch men who sell goods but cultivate no land, make fine
weapons, and store grain from Bengal on their ships. 65 In the sea lies the
island of Ceylon, populated with magicians. There are creatures there
with the bodies of men and faces of animals, writes Bhimsen. 66 The king’s
rule, and any semblance of order end at the sea, in which lies a magical
island of men neither human nor animal. The end of land marks the end
of empire and the slipping away of Bhimsen’s known world.
Compared to a natural expanse that ends at the sea, the modern na-
tion is a bounded entity cut off from parts of what used to be whole and
it cannot accommodate what is seen as other. The particular premodern
holiness of Aurangzeb in Bhimsen’s text is manifest over the landscape,
where the king built mosques and went to shrines, threw a prayer into a
river, and asked his sufis or his god for intervention while simultaneously
chasing after wealth. The often overlapping power of holy man and king—
so prevalent in Mughal India—once rested in Aurangzeb too. This is the
aspect of Aurangzeb that is lost to both his supporters and his opponents
in Lahore. He is seen by all sides as a praying, fasting, religious Muslim
(a set of attributes that represent good Islam to his supporters and bad
Islam to those that support Dara), but he is not seen as a shrine-visiting,
miracle-performing holy man (a set of attributes that represent bad Islam

to his supporters, and good Islam to those that support Dara). The holi-
ness of kings and mystics in Bhimsen’s geography cannot translate when
that geography is fragmented into Hindu and Muslim, Pakistan and India.
Pieces of this geography still survive. 67 In the Deccan, guardians of
shrines tell stories of Aurangzeb’s visits in which Aurangzeb is a penitent
son who begs sufis for intervention, comes to them in remorse about his
deeds, and asks them to summon the spirit of his dead father to ask for
forgiveness.68 Another version of the River Bhima story appears in an
eighteenth century text that contains biographical anecdotes of two sufis
who came to India in 1674–1675. One of these sufis, Baba Palangposh,
traveled with Aurangzeb’s armies and it was his concentration rather
than the king’s that made the water of the river subside. 69 Yet another
version of the story is now repeated in Maharashtra at Macnur, on the
River Bhima, according to which Aurangzeb wanted to divert the river to
destroy a temple for Shiva, but the river washed away Aurangzeb’s camp
instead.70 These stories show overlapping aspects of beliefs about kings,
gods, and holy men. Divine will affects the elements for better or worse
and is concentrated in men favored by God. The story also shows change
over time; the Hindu temple Aurangzeb wanted to destroy seems a later
addition in which Aurangzeb is not favored by the divine.
In Pakistan too, shrines of sufis contain lost pieces of the sacred;
frowned upon by some as evidence of an Islam polluted by Hinduism,
and valued by others as legitimate sources of divine intervention, shrines
in Lahore occupy an ambivalent space. They are also often the targets
of armed attacks. 71 Spectacular acts of destruction aimed at mosques in
India or shrines in Pakistan in the name of cultural purification always
attract attention. On a global theater, denunciations of spectacular violence
themselves contain the violence of the binaries through which destruction
happens in the first place. A subject such as Bhimsen meanwhile, finds
meaning through the view that he is living in the Kaliyuga, in which
great kings fail, and purpose through the act of writing about the past
by emphasizing his own role in accessing the divine. In Bhimsen’s world,
a flawed king who functioned as the failing heart of an empire did not
mean kingship itself was lost.
I posit here that modern citizens contain within them shadows of earlier
selves that still attach easily to images of kings. 72 David Edwards writes
that Afghan refugees living in Pakistan in the 1980s saw their last king,
Zahir Shah, then in exile in Rome, as a man on horseback returning to
them.73 Even though the actual king, Zahir Shah returned to his country in
a plane, the archetypical image of the king on horseback points to recol-
lections of a leader who could unify the land and save his people. In my
classrooms in Lahore, Mughal kings surfaced along a continuum of pain
each time we talked about the end of empire. When we visited Mughal

monuments, students said Mughal ruins filled them with a combination

of wonder and loss, a sense that a part of them—like the ruined build-
ings we saw—had been amputated. This acute sense of missing a part of
the self, always articulated through metaphors about the body and often
through tears, haunted all of us, as did our proximity and distance from
Mughal kings.
As I wrestled with questions about the meaning of kingship, I was
aware of the pull of a present cluttered with so many emergencies that
talk of kings seemed frivolous, escapist even. Between natural disasters,
assassinations, drone attacks, and passionate demands by academics and
activists that Pakistan be framed through a lens other than calamity, the
kings who occupied my hours would often waver. And yet, they kept
returning, with the insistency only ghosts possess by virtue of being nei-
ther fully buried nor entirely alive. Even though modern historians and
anthropologists have written about Pakistan, their expertise in the pres-
ent has meant they cannot speak to the particularities of the pre-colonial
past, in which a unifying cultural ethos was shaped by the sacred symbol
of kingship. Historians of the pre-colonial Islamicate world, meanwhile,
remain grounded in the epistemologies of the past without analyzing the
present; we work with subjects who cannot talk back to us and we leave
the present to those who can study it without recoiling from its voices
and its chaos. In conversations among ourselves—especially those among
us with roots in South Asia—we admit the present is too painful to study,
and we escape it by losing ourselves in a different world whose textures
are vivid and intricate, and whose disappearance we too mourn.
Conclusion: Past Kings Present

The blasphemy law, which Salman Taseer died for challenging in Pakistan,
and the law against offending religious sentiments which was invoked
against Wendy Doniger in India to pulp her book, “The Hindus,” both
originate from the writings of Thomas Macaulay (d. 1859) who designed
the Penal Code for British India. 74 Enshrined into these laws is the idea
of the excitable and excessively religious primordial subject whose senti-
ments the state must protect. Such a subject—easily offended, strangely
fragile—did not exist before colonial rule broke the link between subject
and king. Prashant Keshavmurthy writes that ambiguity in the pre-modern
world had its locus in the body of the king and its interpretive base in a
body of jurists and scholars and—I would add—sufis. The end of king-
ship meant that the king’s body “vacated an altar whose emptiness began
to constitute democracy.” According to Keshavmurthy, “people’s aware-
ness of the impossibility of legitimate power inhering in an individual’s
body justif[ied] their sense of its dispersal across themselves.” Instead
of residing in an individual’s “mysteriously inherited radiance,” politi-

cal legitimacy came to be sought among the masses that were shaped
by definitions of religious community in British censuses. New religious
identities came to be “consolidated around rage at the hurt caused by
signs taken to be unambiguously meaningful.” 75
This rage ignites across South Asia in events such as Taseer’s assasina-
tion or through the threatened destruction of perceived others. The scholar
James Laine, who wrote a book on Shivaji that challenged notions of him
as a Hindu nationalist hero, received death threats for tampering with
memory shaped by parents, schools, and textbooks in Maharashtra where
Aurangzeb is seen as a Muslim invader and Shivaji as the Hindu cham-
pion who stood up to him. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute,
where Laine conducted research was vandalized for assisting Laine, its
manuscripts destroyed, and Laine’s local colleague assaulted for work-
ing with him. Laine’s suggestion that Aurangzeb and Shivaji had more
in common with one another than either their supporters or detractors
would like to admit was unpalatable, even though to Bhimsen, this was
certainly the case.76
Events such as this mean that we live with a pervasive fear of sym-
bols.77 The person whose need to destroy has already expressed itself in
physical violence is difficult to reach. But there are acts of violence and
disavowal still within the reach of our interventions. Students often come
to classrooms certain of their Hindu or Muslim others, or even certain
of the religious other that secular commitments create. Because sustain-
ing the idea of the inverted other is an escape from pain, dismantling a
student’s worldview carries the risk of causing more pain. However, as
James Baldwin writes, “any real change requires the breakup of the world
as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the
end of safety.” 78 Showing students that their sense of self and other is
based on colonial legal codes created after the passing of kingship means
being responsible for the end of another’s safety; this must be remedied by
creating empathy with a past consciousness such as Bhimsen’s and allow-
ing stories of kings and the stories kings read to populate the imagination
with different ways of being in the world.
In the same way, we must interrogate the contours of our own safety.
We are trained to study the primordial other from a safe distance each
time he destroys a shrine or finds his way into headlines that scream of
sectarian violence. Those to whom symbols matter the most do not read
our work or alternatively, appropriate it to ignite those very symbols, as
was the case with Laine. But we have yet to engage with the radical pos-
sibility that longing for the past and for futures that could have been cuts
across people who appear, on the surface, to have nothing in common
including those who idealize Aurangzeb and imagine a pristine Islamic
past, those who see Dara Shikoh as representative of South Asia’s lost

tolerant future, and even the historian who sees the retreating figure of
the king in stories of tunnels beneath Lahore. All of us are drawn, often
for reasons we cannot explain, to a world that no longer exists.
I have sought, through this reading of Bhimsen, to show that directing
longing back to the forgotten injury that created it, namely the loss of
kingship, can bring together those who see themselves as opposites along
fault lines of good Islam and bad Islam, Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb.
Understanding how kingship actually shaped the psyche can refashion
our inheritance of the past: In cities such as Lahore, where the resurfac-
ing of kingship sustains national binaries while possessing the potential
to erase them, narrative accounts such as Bhimsen’s can knit together the
fractured psyche. Recently, there has been a resurgence in Pakistan of
interest in stories known to Mughal kings that are now being translated
into English; many have remarked that long before there was Harry Pot-
ter, our own land produced tales as captivating. 79 These tales we have
left behind and an acknowledgement of loss is one way forward; in the
absence of an intact landscape, they exist as entry points into a conscious-
ness less fragmented than ours and allow for the possibility of building
within ourselves the infinite field that comes into being when we forget
where our other ends and we begin.
Notes
An NEH Chair in the Humanities at the University of San Francisco (2012–2013) supported
my research. For their generous engagement with the ideas here, I thank Haniya Aslam,
Humeira Iqtidar, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, James Laine, Azfar Moin, Bilal Tanweer, Audrey
Truschke, and two anonymous reviewers at Fragments. I am especially grateful to Jawziya
F. Zaman for her extraordinary insights and wisdom.
1. I use “archetype” in a Jungian sense. See Jung and Hull, The Archetypes and the Collec-
tive Unconscious, 42–48.
2. See The Express Tribune, “Valentine’s Gifts for Mumtaz Qadri.” See also Taseer, “The
Killer of My Father.”
3. For a genealogy of Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh’s Islams, see Ahmed, Pakistan Society,
12–13.
4. See Wescoat, Brand, and Mir, “Gardens, Roads, and Legendary Tunnels.”
5. See Zaman, “Instructive Memory.” See also Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Menon
and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries.
6. See Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism; Flood, “Between Cult and Culture”; and
Doniger, “Banned in Bangalore.”
7. I use “pre-colonial” to refer to the period prior to the British conquest of Bengal in
1757. After the conquest, colonial epistemological categories began to shape political, social,
and legal discourses that eventually produced identities severed from sacred kingship. The
formal conquest of India in 1857 solidified this rupture.
8. See Bhattacharya, “Predicaments for Secular Histories.” See also Guha, “On Speaking
Historically.”

9. See Nora, “Between Memory and History.” See also Pandey, Remembering Partition,
7–20.
10. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 3–18. See also Tuan, Space and Place, 195–98.
11. Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, 4–5.
12. For a brief historiographical essay on 1857, see Wagner, “The Marginal Mutiny.”
13. See, for instance, Naumani, Aurangzeb Alamgir par Aik Nazar, 47–50, 96; and Ikram, Rud-i
Kausar, 466–67. On colonial Muslim identities, see Raja, Constructing Pakistan, 95–98, 109–26.
See also Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters, 118–26. For Akbar in the colonial imagination,
see Stevens and Sapra, “Akbar’s Dream.”
14. Iqbal, Stray Reflections, 47.
15. Ahmad, “Power, Purity, and the Vanguard.” For Pakistan’s aspirations to statehood,
see Khan, Muslim Becoming, 22–23.
16. See Mehta, “Ur-national and Secular Mythologies.” For nostalgia among Muslim
reformers, see Ali, Tarikh ki Daryaft, 12–15, 56–58. See also Jalal, “Exploding Communalism.”
See also Khan, Muslim Becoming, 56–90.
17. The conceptual framework I use for self-fashioning and kingship owes a debt to the
work of Azfar Moin and Aziz Al-Azmeh. See Moin, The Millennial Sovereign; and Al-Azmeh,
Muslim Kingship.
18. See Ali, Tarikh ki Daryaft, 55–61; and Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters, 95–109.
19. See “Has Aurangzeb Reincarnated in Form of Police?,” Hindu Janajagruti Samuti. For
Hindutva politics in Chennai, see Hancock, The Politics of Heritage, 82–118.
20. See Dora, “The Rhetoric of Nostalgia”; and Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters, 4–6,
23–28. For Lahore as palimpsest, see Glover, Making Lahore Modern, 2–3. See also Waraich,
“Locations of Longing”; Murphy, “Performing Partition in Lahore”; and Murphy, “The
Hairbrush and the Dagger.”
21. The popular blog “Lahorenama” says it is in search of the city that “was and ought to
be” and painstakingly documents Lahore’s Mughal past. See http://lahorenama.wordpress.
com/.
22. I am using a pseudonym to protect privacy.
23. See Jai, “Dara Shukoh and the Fate of Pakistan.”
24. For the connected history of Lahore and Amritsar, see Talbot, Divided Cities, 130–53.
25. “Ahmed,” too, is a pseudonym.
26. See Ikram Rabbani, Comprehensive Pakistan Studies, 24–26; Rosser, “Contesting His-
toriographies in South Asia; Jalal, “Conjuring Pakistan”; Sundar, “Teaching to Hate”; and
Nair, “Textbook Conflicts in South Asia.”
27. Mahmood Mamdani has pointed to how popular American discourse divides Muslims
into “good”—i.e., secular and Westernized—and “bad”—i.e., religious and medieval. See
Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.
28. Davidson, The Story of India.
29. See Pinault, Notes from the Fortune Telling Parrot, 210–26. For a persuasive historiogra-
phy, see Brown, “Did Aurangzeb Ban Music?” For temple destruction, see Cynthia Talbot,
“Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self”; and Ian Talbot, “Temple Desecration.”
30. Ajoka Theater, started by human rights activists in the 1980s, staged Dara Shikoh af-
ter Salman Taseer’s death. See Rumi, “Ajoka’s New Play on Dara Shikoh.” See also Usman,
“Ajoka Theatrical Tribute to Taseer”; and Alawadhi, “Bid to Promote Cultural Relations with
Pakistan.” For a note on the play in London, see Halliburton, “Dara.” For a more nuanced
analysis, see Green, “Past Concerns.”
31. See Assmann, Moses the Egyptian, 30–32. See also Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making, 57,
72–76. Wimmer believes there is no pre-modern equivalent to normative inversion, though

Assmann would disagree. I agree with Wimmer because nationalism magnifies the scope
of previous inversions and lacks the mediating figure of the king.
32. For building an older order of being within oneself after historical loss, see Banac,
“Introduction,” xiii.
33. See Richards, “Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers.”
34. I have used the British Library manuscript of the Tarikh-i Dilkasha. See British Library
MS. Or. 23 completed in 1727. For a translation, see Saxena, Tarikh-i Dilkasha: Memoirs, trans.
Jadunath Sarkar. Sarkar’s folios do not always overlap with those in the MS, which I will refer
to as “Bhimsen.” I will refer to Sarkar’s translations as “Sarkar.” For Bhimsen’s introduction,
see Bhimsen, fol. 2b and Sarkar, 2.
35. Bhimsen, fols. 9a–9b and Sarkar, 10–11.
36. Bhimsen, fols. 13b–14b and Sarkar, 17.
37. Sarkar, 28. Folio missing in original.
38. See Kinra, “Infantilizing Baba Dara.” See also Faruqui, “Dara Shukoh”; and Gandhi,
“The Prince and the Muvahhid,” in the same volume.
39. Bhimsen, fol. 149b, and Sarkar, 245.
40. Bhimsen, fol. 14a and Sarkar, 18. For the symbolism of rivers in Hindu sacred geog-
raphy, see Eck, “India’s Tirthas.”
41. Bhimsen, fol. 104a and Sarkar, 180. The folio is blurred. Sarkar has translated the
third city to be Prayag, another name for Allahabad. I read the third city as “Maya,” which
is the city mentioned in the Puranas in the verse that refers to seven sacred cities. Maya is
understood to refer to Hardvar. See Goldman, “A City of the Heart.”
42. See Eck, “The Imagined Landscape.”
43. Bhimsen, fols. 20b–21b and Sarkar, 32–33. See also Bhimsen, fols., 50a–50b and Sarkar,
81–82.
44. Bhimsen, fols. 4a–4b and Sarkar, 2.
45. Bhimsen, fols. 26b–27a and Sarkar, 42–43.
46. Bhimsen, fol. 157a and Sarkar, 255.
47. Bhimsen, fols. 138b–139b and Sarkar, 230–31.
48. Sarkar, 83. Folio blurred in MS. For a contrary point of view about the tax, see Kruijtzer,
Xenophobia in Seventeenth Century India, 266–76.
49. For debates during the Kaliyuga, see O’Hanlon, “The Social Worth of Scribes”; and
Granoff, “Tales of Broken Limbs and Bleeding Wounds.”
50. Bhimsen, fol. 134a and Sarkar, 223. See also Bhimsen, fol. 141a and Sarkar, 233.
52. Bhimsen, fol. 141a and Sarkar, 233. See also Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 187–89.
53. Richards, “Norms of Comportment,” 276–77. See also Dale, The Garden of the Eight
Paradises, 156–68, 376–84. For cities in Islamicate imagination, see Sharma, “The City of Beau-
ties in the Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape”; and Robinson, “Ubi Sunt”; See also Meisami,
“Places in the Past”; and Antrim, Routes and Realms, 33–83.
54. Bhimsen, fol. 140b and Sarkar, 232.
59. Bhimsen, fol.149a and Sarkar, 244.
61. Richards, The Mughal Empire, 107–09. See also Green, “The Religious and Cultural
Role of Dreams and Visions in Islam.”

63. Bhimsen, fols. 56b–57a and Sarkar, 92.

65. Bhimsen, fols. 112b–114a and Sarkar, 193–95.
66. Bhimsen, fol. 115b and Sarkar, 196.
67. See Taneja, “Nature, History, and the Sacred in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi.” Taneja
tracks how gatherings at Pir Ghaib, a fourteenth-century hunting lodge and observatory built
by Firoz Shah Tughlug, mourned their lost king after 1857. See Taneja, 115–18.
68. See Green, “Stories of Saints and Sultans.”
69. See Digby, Sufis and Soldiers in Awrangzeb’s Deccan, 46–47. The historian Khafi Khan
reports Aurangzeb’s throwing of prayers into the river, but says this had no effect. Khan,
Muntakhab-ul Lubab, 446–47.
70. Feldhaus, “Goddess as Sister.”
71. On this, see Ewing, Arguing Sainthood.
72. I am influenced by the idea that damage to the land is echoed in the psyche. See Duran
and Duran, Native American Post-Colonial Psychology, 142–55.
73. Edwards, Heroes of the Age.
74. See Ahmed, “Specters of Macaulay.”
75. Keshavmurthy, “Profanations I.”
76. See Laine, Shivaji. See also Laine, “Resisting My Attackers.”
77. Amitav Ghosh uses the phrase “an Indian’s fear of symbols.” Ghosh, In an Antique
Land, 204–10.
78. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 117.
79. See, for instance, Zia, “Review: Tilism-e-Hoshruba.”
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Nostalgia, Lahore, and the Ghost of Aurangzeb

Fragments Volume 4 (2015) 1

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divorced communal identity is from history. However, if we read loss

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future.15 Meanwhile, Hindu intellectuals and politicians, including Nehru,

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the messiah returned and an embodiment of God, Aurangzeb portrayed

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Amir, a descendant of a family with roots in Lahore that go back several

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This longing for pristine Islamic nationhood can be found in textbooks

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II. The King Who Lived in Tents

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Aurangzeb’s victory.36 Aurangzeb proclaimed himself king in 1658, writes

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propensity for tents. 52 As a member of an urbanized elite (an important

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monuments, students said Mughal ruins filled them with a combination

Conclusion: Past Kings Present

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63. Bhimsen, fols. 56b–57a and Sarkar, 92.

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