Author: Audrey Truschke

Format: Digital

Aurangzeb is a very short (~150 or so) page biography of the last great Mughal emperor. Truschke attempts to reasses the image of Aurangzeb, who she claims has been unjustly maligned / praised for his supposed religious intolerance / devotion, depending on who you ask (among a litany of other moral condemnations which seem to follow mostly from this argument). While it was a very quick read (don’t ask me how long it actually took me to bother sitting down to read it), the biography ends up being too short for its own good. In the span of the text, there is barely enough time to give even a semi-coherent narrative description of Aurangzeb’s reign (Truschke chooses instead to highlight a couple of aspects of his reign that are thematically coherent) and even less time to make any sort of coherent argument beyond a basic one that essentially reasserts typical historical principles (don’t overly moralize historical figures etc).

After finishing the book, I suspect the target audience is really people who get into arguments with Hindutva Twitter accounts and want some book they can cite to give themselves scholarly backing1. For anyone more interested in an actual analysis of Aurangzeb’s rule / his legacy, I feel like you might be better served by reading his Wikipedia page and calling it a day.

  1. Like more power to whoever this is relevant for but this is not me I guess. ↩