Book review: Avik Chanda,Dara Shukoh: The Man Who Would be King and Supriya Gandhi,The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

‘Heaven is a place where there is no mullah

Where there’s no noise and disturbance from the mullah’

So said Dara in the small collection of verses he has left behind. ‘Mullahs’ are of course not confined to Muslims only. Currently, we see much interest taken by them in Dara Shukoh: the current central government after removing Aurangzeb’s name from one of the major roads of New Delhi has now reportedly appointed a committee to trace Dara Shukoh’s grave. One irresistibly feels that Dara Shukoh’s memory needs protection from such admirers.

Such protection is, indeed, provided by the two books under review. Both bring out the objectives of Dara Shukoh’s major intellectual or ideological project and his weaknesses as a politician and administrator.

To a reader interested in a racy but largely accurate account, Avik Chanda’s book would be the obvious choice between the two books. The author has based himself on English translations of Persian sources; but one could say in his defence that a large part of the major source material on Dara Shukoh has by now, indeed, been rendered into English. Where the translations are inadequate, Chanda too is necessarily weak, as in his handling of Dara Shukoh’s major intellectual achievement, the translation of the Upanishads, where our author has almost entirely depended on Hasrat’s older biography (pp. 136–37, 291). Chanda is also prone, though rarely, to inaccuracy, like having Sa‘dullāh Khān alive in 1658 to tell Shahjahan after Samugarh that all was over (p. 183).

Supriya Gandhi has the advantage of direct access to Persian sources, although she gives references to both texts and translations wherever the latter are available. She is thus able to use a more extensive store of sources than Avik Chanda. She also explores a larger area of modern works on related themes. This can be seen in what she says on the Upanishads (pp. 204–212), going well beyond Qanungo and Hasrat, though not necessarily contradicting them. She could, however, have noted, as the strictly contemporary Dabistān-i Mazāhib (c. 1652) of Mobad (Kaikhusrau Isfandyār) shows, that pantheism, traced to Śankarāchārya, was then becoming seemingly the dominant current in the philosophical thought of Hinduism, and Dārā Shukoh had no paucity of kindred spirits among Brahmanical thinkers. She not only points out, as Qanungo had done in his pioneering study of Dara Shukoh, that Dara Shukoh adopts Śankarāchārya’s glosses on the Upanishads, but also that by misrendering deities in the Upanisads as mere spirits or angels, Dārā Shukoh makes the composers of the Upanishads endorse a monotheism they did not necessarily believe in. Thus Dārā was able to project unity of thought in the ‘book of secrets’ that is not there, and it is in this altered form that Anquetil-Duperron introduced the Upanishads to the European world 150 years later; it appealed to European thinkers to a degree which perhaps the texts in their original form might not have done.

Incidentally, Jahānārā in her autograph (reproduced, p. 243) describes herself as khā dimu’l fuqarā’, ‘servant of faqirs’ and not ‘humble servant ( kh ādim) and faqir’ (as Gandhi renders it, p. 244).

Both books are recommended: Avik Chanda, for those, who, like the author himself, have other matters of business also to attend to; and Supriya Gandhi to those, for whom, like the reviewer, history is a profession.