Who was Dara Shukoh, and why has he become one of the most misunderstood figures of Mughal history? In this episode of The Unofficial Seminar, Arup K. Chatterjee speaks with Amit Ranjan about the latter’s recent book on Dara Shukoh (Penguin 2026), on Dara’s intellectual, spiritual, political, and personal worlds. The conversation moves beyond the familiar image of Dara as merely the prince who translated the Upanishads. It explores his engagement with Sufism, his relationship with his sister Jahanara, his teachers and spiritual lineage, his encyclopaedic writings on Sufi saints, and his ambitious attempt to place Hindu and Islamic thought within a shared intellectual continuum. The discussion also considers Dara’s political failures, the succession struggle with Aurangzeb, and the ways later historians constructed their contrasting reputations. Amit discusses Dara’s marriages and relationships, the story surrounding Shivaji and Zeb-un-Nissa, and the role of nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians in shaping historical memory. The conversation finally turns to the larger problem of studying Mughal history today, asking how historians can move beyond inherited binaries, political myths, and simplified judgments. This is a conversation about Dara Shukoh, but also about how history itself is written, remembered, contested, and misunderstood.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Unofficial Seminar. Joining me is my friend and colleague, Dr. Amit Ranjan, professor at NCERT and author of the recently published book on Dara Shukoh, published by Penguin. It was released last month in New Delhi and recently also in Jaipur. The book has been received very warmly, and it promises to be most exciting. Dara Shukoh is an all-time favorite of historians, politicians, and all sorts of people in between, and I’m sure Amit will walk us through those trajectories in today’s conversation. Amit, welcome to The Unofficial Seminar. What inspired you to take on this task?
Amit Ranjan: Well, I always wanted to do a book on Dara Shukoh — when and how, I don’t know, but I guess it’s probably the influence of Sufi music in our lives, starting with Bollywood, and then with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I’ve been deeply immersed in his music for the past twenty years or so. And at some point it seemed to be part of our collective memory — I gave a talk nine years ago at CIIL about Dara Shukoh, and I seemed to know the story very well with very little preparation. I was able to do that, and that’s when I resolved to do this book.
In fact, I was looking for a publisher for John Lang, and the publisher said, “Well, this character is too unknown for us, but you write in a rather funky style — can you write about a Mughal?” I said, “I can write about a Mughal who could not be a Mughal,” and I told them the story, and they signed the contract even without a proposal. That was amazing — but that wasn’t Penguin. Then it changed hands, and it eventually came to Penguin, and it took longer than I expected, because there’s much more to the story than we generally know. So I just had to dive deep and dig here and there.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Let’s talk about that. Now, Amit, I know you, and people who know you will understand that this is a kind of writing which requires a lot of experience — phenomenology. It’s not about literary criticism or archival research; it’s much of both, but it’s something more as well.
Dara Shukoh is a darling child of secularism. The Constitution of India did not feature that word for a very long time, but as Ashis Nandy and many others — including, I’m sure, you — would agree, the Constitution itself, and all the discussions that led to it, were of an exceedingly secular nature. So India had had no problem, as it were, living in or with secularism without calling itself a secular republic for a very long time. Particularly after the eighties, Dara Shukoh has been a favorite — but I’m sure he was also a favorite Mughal, in quotes, because you say he’s not entirely a Mughal, or he could not be one. Why do you think this happens? You seem to claim that there isn’t a clear binary between Aurangzeb — his foster brother — and Dara Shukoh, as much as it is claimed. Is that a fair theory, and how do you defend it?
Amit Ranjan: Sure. So, as I understand it, there are two or three parts to this question. First of all, about being the poster boy of secularism — that’s a very limited understanding, and that’s a binary independent India has been operating with, and on the other side of the border as well: in Pakistan, he’s much vilified within conservative circles. There was a playwright in the seventies — I’m forgetting his name — who was jailed by General Zia-ul-Haq for writing a play about Dara Shukoh. So the binary operates at great extremes.
But first, to answer the question of secularism: I would not use the word “secular” for Dara Shukoh, because secularism in India, as we understand it, is sarva dharma sama bhava — somehow equidistance: you do your thing, I do my thing, we will not disturb each other. And secularism in the European sense, in the origin of the word, is a distancing of politics from the Church — political power grabs power in day-to-day affairs and does not let the Church interfere, does not let the Church burn women at the stake, and so on — secularism rose in Europe because the excesses of the Church were getting too much.
Here it’s the opposite, isn’t it? It’s the state trying to introduce a spiritual form of religion into polity. Dara Shukoh wanted to bring Sufism to kingship. So that’s definitely not secular in the way we know it. He had long conversations with Baba Lal at Lahore, for example — of course he had conversations with multiple players of multiple faiths — but with Baba Lal he spent a whole week trying to figure out whether a king could be a fakir, and a fakir could be a king. So he was doing the opposite of secularism — he’s bringing spirituality to kingship. He’s also deeply comparing religions — theology, comparing the Upanishads specifically with the Qadiri order, and, in general, all of Sufism, which he believed was part of Islam, whether orthodox people of that time believed so or not. He very much believed it, and so he was going much beyond our understanding of either equidistance or the separation of political power from the Church. He was comparing, and saying that these all go back to some pagan root — which is Neoplatonism, which Plotinus also drew on in the third century — so he had that idea. Let’s call him cosmopolitan, not secular. He’s the original cosmopolitan medieval boy, let’s say.
The second broad question you’ve asked is the binary between Aurangzeb and Dara — is it the poet prince and the warrior prince? As I’ve shown in my book — I haven’t shown the book yet, please — Dara Shukoh: The Fakir Prince and the Throne of Thorns, by Penguin —
as I’ve shown in my book, Aurangzeb was not really a pistol king but an epistle king. He did not really win by the might of his sword or his gun, but rather the might of his pen. He would write letters, and cause them to be intercepted — that was his trick. He wrote a letter from Shah Jahan to Dara Shukoh where Shah Jahan is plotting Aurangzeb’s fall, so he could declare both the father and the eldest son apostates and turn people against him. Or when his own son, who had declared himself Akbar Sani, or Akbar II, had surrounded him with around thirty thousand soldiers and he was completely outnumbered at five thousand, he wrote a letter to his own son Akbar II saying, “Good, you’ve brought a Hindu king — we’ll surround him at night and kill him.” He caused this letter to be intercepted by the Hindu king. The Hindu king ran away, and so Akbar II was surrounded and had to flee to the Deccan — Jahanara had told him, “You’ll never be able to return.” Her statement was prophetic — he was never able to return.
And if you read the war descriptions — Dara Shukoh almost had victory by the throat in the first battle itself, and Khalilullah Khan, who switched sides, advised him to get off his elephant and onto his horse to chase Aurangzeb. Then he shouted that Dara was dead, because he was not on his elephant. His army went into disarray and scattered. Similarly, in the second battle at Deorai, he was betrayed the same way. So you have to think: Shah Jahan’s army was the Indian army, and Aurangzeb’s army was the Deccan army. The Deccan army could not possibly have beaten the might of the emperor whose reign ran from Afghanistan to the Deccan. So it had to involve a lot of betrayal. Aurangzeb’s strategy was more trickery than valiant knighthood or gladiatorial battle.
So this is a binary that’s been created over time by both sides — Dara’s side and Aurangzeb’s side — and they were trained in the military arts together. It’s another matter that Aurangzeb fought more battles than Dara, but what’s silenced by history is that Aurangzeb failed in the Deccan campaign twice, for which Dara had to be sent. Dara also failed at it, but nobody mentions Aurangzeb’s failures in those particular episodes.
Arup K. Chatterjee: It’s fascinating — it could be the idiosyncrasy of your storytelling, but I’m guessing it is not entirely that.
Amit Ranjan: It is all documented …
Arup K. Chatterjee: Absolutely, I’m not in doubt about that at all — but what happens, just about a hundred years later, is the Battle of Plassey, and you can see, in the way I was narrating that tale, there are parts of it that are uncannily similar to certain betrayals that happen then. So I’m wondering …
Amit Ranjan: … True, it is said that Hindustan changes every hundred years or so —
Arup K. Chatterjee: It would be very interesting for somebody to consider whether the narration of the Battle of Plassey by British Empire historians had anything to draw from the narration of Dara Shukoh’s betrayals. But that’s an aside, of course. I do agree with you — secularism has a very different definition than the one Indians and Indian public discourse generally make of it. The right word is “pluralism” — at least Mahatma Gandhi, I suppose, would have preferred that word to “secularism.”
Coming to the focus of your book, Amit — you are very attached to Sufi music, I know that, you make no secret of it, and I’m sure you have invested a lot in Dara’s Sufi career. Would you like to share a few aspects of that with us? Because Dara — a lot of people today even now know him only as the translator of the Upanishads, and very little else is generally recognized about him. Walk us through his spiritual and political career.
Amit Ranjan: There are a few very striking things about Dara’s Sufi career — and before that, Jahanara’s Sufi career. Jahanara wrote a biography of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz. They both had the same guru, Mulla Shah Badakhshani, who was in Kashmir, and Mulla Shah declared that Jahanara should be his successor. There was no provision for a woman to become a successor, but Mulla Shah recorded and made a statement about it — so, in effect, Jahanara was a spiritual successor, which is why she’s buried next to Nizamuddin Auliya as well.
Now, coming to Dara — the brother-sister duo operated together in all these endeavors. He was very devoted to Mian Mir, who was the guru of Mulla Shah, and to Mulla Shah himself. Once, he was very ill and was taken to Lahore, and that’s where he recovered as a young man — that’s when his faith started growing, with the proximity of these two saints. His contribution is immense: there are two compendiums, two encyclopedias, if you will — Safinat-ul-Auliya and Sakinat-ul-Auliya. The Safinat-ul-Auliya is the history of all Sufi saints from Muhammad down to his own time, covering what we now call the Middle East, Iraq and Iran and so on. The Sakinat-ul-Auliya is centered on India, which is his tremendous contribution — bringing focus to his own Qadiri silsila, into which he was properly initiated, and to Mian Mir and Mulla Shah and all the Indian saints. It’s a gorgeous and memorable work, because he records the birth and death dates of everyone, all the miracles, all the hagiographies. It’s like two different PhDs that he did in these two books.
These are two major contributions — and also to the field of translation, because of course he translated whatever was available in the Sufi canon, and translation, in its original sense, of “carrying the dead across” — he carried the dead across to this time. There’s also a special chapter on women in the Safinat, which is tremendous, which no other Sufi compendium has — including female saints who were alive during his own lifetime.
Then there’s Hasanat-ul-Arifin, “the sayings of the saints” — a hundred apostasic sayings, a hundred sayings on kufr, a hundred sayings of shath — let’s say, “shath,” which is the allegorical, metaphorical word of God — he says, “I’m the 101st, why are you bothering me?” These were his own apologia.
And his biggest work, of course, is the Sirr-i-Akbar — the translation of fifty-six Upanishads, which he found in Kashmir. If you go to Srinagar, there’s Mulla Shah’s mosque, which has fifty-odd cells, which were for all the students who would translate them from Sanskrit to Persian — these were pundits whom he brought into his school of translation, and he finished this mammoth work in nearly two years. This work is his grand finale, where he’s trying to show, with comparative notes, how Sufism — especially of the Qadiri order — and the Upanishads are so similar, culminating in his big, bold claim that there is a Kitab al-Maknun, a “hidden book,” within the Quran, which says that you have to be insan-i-kamil — someone who is accomplished — and he claims to be accomplished himself, having read texts of all religions, from Judaism to Islam, the Bible, and the Hindu texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Vasistha, and so on. He then declares that the Kitab al-Maknun is nothing but the Upanishads. So he’s trying to solve, with one master stroke, the Hindu-Muslim problem forever, by saying that one contains the other — they are part of the same continuum, which, if you go historically, archaeologically, may have a lot of merit. One doesn’t know, but this claim has never been made again after him. He’s a very bold character that way — as a prince, to not just be a patron but to be an active agent, to make these claims and study things so assiduously and diligently. He is properly a Sufi — it’s a tragedy that he was a prince, so he’s counted as a prince and not as a Sufi.
Arup K. Chatterjee: The current scenario in India, in several parts, does not perhaps allow for safe spaces for discussions, or for what will be termed as “radical” claims like the one you just made. But I, on the one hand, completely understand why Aurangzeb was turned into this poster child — call it cosmopolitanism, secularism, pluralism — because there have been theories floating around, once upon a time, in centrist circles from whom we do not hear much, that during the sixth, seventh, eighth centuries AD, when Adi Shankaracharya and his followers were trying to reform and reclaim Hinduism through commentaries on the Upanishads, they were also responding not only to Buddhism but to Islam, and trying to find some middle ground. Now, that again is a very poetical, very metaphysical claim — I’m not sure there’s any primary record for it. But similarly, yours is an equally outrageous claim, some might say — but also contains a lot of merit — because Dara did believe Hinduism to be a kind of extension of Islam, or Hinduism lurking within Islam, or vice versa.
You mentioned Jahanara — what about the other women in Dara’s life? Was he entirely scholarly — was he a very dry person, or did he enjoy the rasas of the Indian tradition?
Amit Ranjan: I think the historians of the Santiniketan school — Kalika Ranjan Qanungo, Jadunath Sarkar, and others — all concur that Dara Shukoh was as much of an ardent lover as Shah Jahan was toward his wife, and of course there’s a lot of archival evidence of that. When Dara was on the run after the defeat at Samugarh, near Agra, Raja Jai Singh was summoned by Nadira Begum, his wife — and it’s a very fascinating story how there were wet nurses who fed Mughal children, so that the beauty of the queens was not destroyed. But more than that, so that they would have “Sufi blood,” these wet nurses would be from Sufi lineages, mostly Chishti — and the milk-brother, the half-brother, the son of the wet nurse, would often be more loyal to the prince than his own brother. But he had to fight his own battle of succession.
So Nadira Begum summoned Raja Jai Singh — she had just had a child, who is actually undocumented, because any writing about Dara Shukoh was banned by Aurangzeb, so the last two children of Dara Shukoh are not mentioned in the court histories. She was lactating, and she gave her milk to Raja Jai Singh, saying, “You are now my milk son, and now you have to protect my husband.” He turned his back on her at Ajmer, which is greatly ironic, and literally tragic, because Ajmer was the birthplace of Dara Shukoh — and, you know, he was defeated on the very site of his birth. There’s a strange, double literary irony happening there. So that was the kind of love Nadira Begum had for Dara Shukoh, equally reciprocated. When he was about to be captured by Malik Jiwan, some contemporary accounts say Nadira Begum committed suicide because she saw the end coming; others say she died of dysentery. Whatever the case, she wanted to be buried next to Mian Mir in Lahore, so her coffin was sent with the most able generals who were left with Dara — leaving him defenseless — and that’s when he was captured by Malik Jiwan. It’s a very tragic love story between them. He also gifted her an album, one of the rare albums of the time, which records the life of that period.
Then his second wife, Ranadil — legend has it that Aurangzeb found her so beautiful that he wanted to make her his own wife. She sent a message asking why he wanted this, and he replied that he loved her hair — so she shaved her head and sent him the hair. Then he said her cheeks were very beautiful, so she slashed her face and said, dramatically — as I put it in my book — “Beauty is now a beast.” He backed off after that.
So the people in Dara Shukoh’s life were very loyal to him, and his two wives loved him as much as he loved them. And of course, talking about the other women, there’s Jahanara, who was devoted to her brother — she spent twenty-one lakhs at his wedding, at the time it was announced that he was the crown prince — and she was with him in all his Sufi yearnings and learnings.
Arup K. Chatterjee: I’m also informed that you’ve delved into a kind of alternative world of history, featuring Shivaji and his supposed interaction — if that’s the right word — with a Mughal woman named Zebunnisa. There’s a conspiracy theory that Zebunnisa was in love with Shivaji. How much does your book confirm or deny this?
Amit Ranjan: This is a very interesting story. Jadunath Sarkar — the authority on Aurangzeb, with his six volumes on him — recalls this, and it’s also very interesting how the historians of the early twentieth century were literary and opinionated in ways native historians today do not always like. He talks about a novel by Rangalal Bandyopadhyay — Anguriyo Binimoy, “The Exchange of Rings” — published around the mid-nineteenth century. That’s the period of the rise of the novel in all three languages — Bengali, Urdu, and English — and Hindi as well; people wrote it fervently. So while there was one camp — Bankim Chandra and others — who wanted to paint the Mughals in a dark light, others, like Rangalal Bandyopadhyay, wanted to show Hindu-Muslim unity, love, and convergence.
He exploited a little glitch in the archive — we all know Shivaji escaped from Aurangzeb’s clutches in a fruit basket, though we don’t really know how — and Zebunnisa was young and beautiful at that point, used to attend court, was a poet, was the favorite daughter of Aurangzeb. In the fictional account, Zebunnisa looks at Shivaji and falls in love with him. The novel is called Anguriyo Binimoy — the exchange of rings — they exchange rings, but they know it’s ill-fated, so they part ways. That’s the plot of the novel.
Jadunath Sarkar tells us this novel became so popular in Bengal that it began to be considered history — people started believing that Shivaji had actually been in love with Zebunnisa, also because Zebunnisa was imprisoned around this time; one doesn’t know exactly why. But Sarkar also tells us that, if you triangulate all other historical accounts, there is no reference to Zebunnisa in Shivaji’s escape, or to any influence of hers in any kind of history — court or market gossip — nothing of that sort is pointed to anywhere. So Jadunath Sarkar says, in his very opinionated fashion — for which he’d probably be attacked today — that Zebunnisa was such a sophisticated, beautiful princess, a poet, while Shivaji was rugged and unlettered — do you think this match was possible? Of course, he doesn’t know what all kinds of matches are possible — all kinds of matches happen, that’s why we have things like Beauty and the Beast. But to call Shivaji “rugged and unlettered” would invite a lot of wrath today. He took that literary liberty in the 1920s, when he was writing.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Yes, it would incur a lot of wrath today. But Jadunath Sarkar and R. C. Majumdar were painfully aware — and by “aware” I mean they were documenting — the kind of destruction that was wreaked on Bengal in the eighteenth century. On the one hand there was famine, on the other there were the Maratha raids — the bargis, as they’re still referred to in Bengal. So I’m not surprised that they did not have a high opinion of Shivaji’s aesthetic appearance.
But since you’ve mentioned Jadunath Sarkar a few times, Amit, let me ask you this somewhat provocatively, if I may: you’ve been writing for some years now — John Lang and Dara Shukoh — both are, I think, more than writings of history. Whether you are a historian is a different, rather facile debate I’m not going to get into — but surely you’ve been handling the archival papers quite a lot. What’s your view on the likes of Jadunath Sarkar? You haven’t mentioned any of the more contemporary voices.
Amit Ranjan: The bulk of my reading is from the nineteenth century — mostly translations of Persian texts, and the Indologists of that period. The problem these days is the matter of authenticity — the moment you hear “Indologist,” “British,” “German,” people immediately want to cast them aside. But they are the ones who did all the hard work. Take Jadunath Sarkar — six volumes, and not just that: his writings on Bihar, on Bengal, on Odisha, are tremendous, and all of it is done primarily through archival material. He’s the one who studied all the Jaipur records, all the letters exchanged between the Jaipur court and Aurangzeb, and between all sorts of courts, and all the museums that held these papers in Persian — most of which now are just lying there, because there are very few people left who can read the Mughal-era script. That painstaking work, in one lifetime, is tremendous. You may call him a revisionist, you may call him whatever you like for his opinions, but the primary groundwork was laid by him, and we have to give him that — at least in the case of Aurangzeb.
In the case of Dara, of course, I’ve had to refer to lots of other sources. I wanted to keep Aurangzeb on the periphery, but somehow he refuses to be that — he’s reduced Dara to a footnote of history, to one war, but within Dara’s own story, I could not reduce him to a footnote. He’s a very Machiavellian character, very paranoid — and you know how historians generally tend to say, “Oh, it’s a time-honored thing” — they use that phrase, “time-honored,” like Lord Rushdie’s — sorry, like — every generation there was bloodthirst in battle, but you don’t blame Shah Jahan for it, and so on. And so what if he killed his three brothers? All right — but what about his own four sons? He went after his sons, the ones who were to inherit the kingdom — he declared that the dominion was barren, told his sons they’d have to fight it out, while Shah Jahan had tried to solve the problem by simply giving it to Dara.
But more than all of this, the real trouble — where it becomes psychologically fascinating for me — is the matter of Zebunnisa, Aurangzeb’s favorite daughter, who was herself a Sufi poet. What did she do? We don’t really know. There are accounts of her supporting Akbar II, her brother — but how would she have supported him, really, except through encouraging words, or maybe some secrets? It’s described that Aurangzeb loved her very much, and yet his paranoia grew so much that he threw his favorite daughter into prison, and she stayed there for twenty years — he gave opium-laced water to all his prisoners, and that’s what he did to his own daughter as well. He was a very lonely, wretched man who had lost all his relatives — and Jahanara had to make great efforts to patch things up, to get the cousins married off again, to reform the family, when he became quite old. And anyway, he was in the Deccan, not in Delhi, so the affairs of Delhi had to be handled by Jahanara.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Amit, I’m afraid — this conversation should go on ideally, but we’ve come to the end of our stipulated time. One last question for you: how do you think we should communicate Mughal history to India’s future today? History is not linear — no matter what one says, we can see that it has been refashioned by regimes in the seventies and eighties, for good or bad reasons — I won’t get into that — but clearly it has been creatively represented in many ways. You are also a very creative person, but you’ve also told me, off the record, how much liberty has been taken with Mughal history. So what do you think, as a thinker of history, we should do about Mughal history in India today?
Amit Ranjan: I think Mughal history is like any other period of history — it’s an important period because it’s closer to us, and there’s British history before it, and just before that, the Mughal period. It’s only the proximity in time, and the bearing it has upon us. Otherwise, Muslims had been rulers since Ghori, 1192 — but one doesn’t really — the Mughals have become metaphorical. There’s 1200 to 1526, which is 325 years, never seen as a unity, but the three hundred years of the Mughals are seen as some kind of metaphor.
It’s a very interesting phase — it’s also the rise of Sikhism as a militant religion out of a largely Sufi force, largely because of Jahangir, who hated the Sufis, because of his own psychological problems — it’s a very good psychological study. Akbar was such a great ruler, he tried so many things; Dara Shukoh, too, with his long career — it does have tremendous —
It’s a very important part of history, and it’s closer in proximity — the Marathas going north, and so on — and that’s why it seems the way it does. But it should be treated like any other period of history, and people are welcome to study the Gupta empire, the age of the Buddha, Ashoka, whatever fascinates them. We’ve been blessed in India that we’ve had a good education system, where we’ve been taught everything — unlike our neighbor, where large parts of history have been obliterated, so they don’t have that kind of perspective.
One also has to understand that kingship is kingship, and it’s very different from modern democracy — you cannot pick up one and start bashing it. You have to look at it in a larger context. Of course, the forces of history moved the world on, from monarchy to democracy, and the world is churning right now to move toward some other, better form of governance — as human beings, we’re always on the lookout for better forms of governance. All feudal systems were alike, in fact — the number of allies Aurangzeb had on the Hindu side — all the Rajputs of Rajasthan were with Aurangzeb. Raja Jai Singh was a loyal servant of Shah Jahan, but he betrayed him to be with Aurangzeb. So to try to create this binary of Dara with the Hindus and Aurangzeb with the Muslims does not hold up at all. It’s all the strategic feudal politics of its own time, and that’s how it should be studied.
The problem is that we’ve lost the culture of deep reading, critical understanding, and contextual understanding. We pick up tidbits and get emotional about them, which is a reflection of our own litost, as Milan Kundera would say.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Good old Milan Kundera. Good old Amit. Today’s episode, I’m afraid, was slightly devoid of your favorite figures of speech and rhetoric —
Amit Ranjan: But I’ll tell you, just as a last thing — every chapter in the book begins with a Leonard Cohen song epigraph.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Why am I not surprised? Amit, all the very best. You’re most welcome to hold the book up once again and make sure it’s in focus this time.
Amit Ranjan: So now it loses focus, but —
Arup K. Chatterjee: You are in focus, which is more important. Thank you for writing this book — all the very best to it, all the very best to Dara Shukoh. Thank you so much, it’s always lovely talking to you.
Dear audience, please like, share, and subscribe to The Unofficial Seminar, and we hope to have Amit back shortly.
Amit Ranjan: Thank you for giving me your time.
Arup K. Chatterjee: Once again, all the very best — and take care, ladies and gentlemen.
Arup K. Chatterjee 