Aurangzeb Beyond Orthodoxy: Veena Player and Calligrapher and the Politics of Mughal Aesthetics

Aurangzeb Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), the sixth emperor of the Mughal dynasty, has long held a central and contested place in the historiography of South Asia. Celebrated by some as a champion of Islamic orthodoxy and condemned by others as a destroyer of cultural pluralism, he remains one of the most debated rulers in Indian history. This paper re-examines that reception by highlighting two relatively neglected dimensions of his biography: his early training as a veena player under the guidance of court musicians, and his lifelong, deeply devoted practice of Islamic calligraphy. Drawing on Persian chronicles including the Alamgir-nama and Maasir-i-Alamgiri, Mughal court correspondence, epistolary literature (particularly the Ruqqat-i-Alamgiri), and modern historiographical interventions by scholars such as Jadunath Sarkar, M. Athar Ali, Audrey Truschke, and Munis Faruqui, the study investigates the productive tension between Aurangzeb's personal artistic engagements and the public policies through which he curtailed music at the Mughal court. Rather than signifying a blanket hostility toward artistic expression, this paper argues that Aurangzeb's aesthetic choices reflect a coherent, if internally tense, program of devotional discipline a reimagining of Mughal aesthetics that privileged the spiritual over the sensuous, the ethical over the pleasurable. Calligraphy, as the art of the divine word, was not merely permissible but exemplary; music, by contrast, occupied morally ambiguous terrain in classical Islamic jurisprudence, and its suppression at court served both theological and political functions. The paper situates these findings within a critique of reductive colonial-era and Hindutva nationalist historiographies that have instrumentalized Aurangzeb as a symbol of Islamic fanaticism, arguing instead for a portrait of a ruler whose relationship to aesthetics was complex, self-aware, and historically embedded.