This special issue of the JRAS, guest-edited by Heidi Pauwels University of Washington and Anne Murphy University of British Columbia, brings together an extremely interesting set of articles that collectively explore vernacular perspectives on the emperor Aurangzeb/Alamgir drawn from outside the Persianate heartland of Mughal India. Its beginnings lay in an innovative interdisciplinary panel at the 2014 European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) held in Zurich in July 2014, which was organised by Heidi and Monika Boehm-Tettelbach (Horstmann). Drawing on vernacular literature, as opposed to more mainstream Persian sources, their authors seek, in various ways, to complicate past and present-day assumptions about the nature of Aurangzeb's rule, how he interacted with his subjects, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and how his subjects in turn viewed him. Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707 as Alamgir) continues to divide opinion sharply, as reactions to Audrey Truschke's 2017 study Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India's Most Controversial King (Stanford University Press) have recently underlined. Aurangzeb remains a firm fixture in South Asia's twenty-first century ‘culture wars’. By drawing on less-commonly referenced vernacular sources, and hence offering access to less state-centric views of Aurangzeb, this special issue makes a welcome — and very opportune — case for more rounded and nuanced understandings of the emperor and the India in which he lived.

In an unprecedented show of efficiency, workers of the New Delhi Municipal Corporation worked overnight on September 3, 2015 to change signposts of Aurangzeb Road to A. B. J. Abdul Kalam Road. This renaming had been decided on roughly a week earlier, prompted by a proposal from Members of Parliament from the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). The move proved popular, but was followed by a degree of soul-searching in the Indian press about whether Aurangzeb's image as a villain is justified. Discussion of the figure of Aurangzeb in South Asian history has not abated since then, with scholars intervening in the debate. The popular reaction to such interventions has been equally contentious, with vituperative web-based responses too numerous to cite.

This article is part of a larger effort to broaden the source-base for understanding Mughal-period India by engaging with the Hindi literary archive. I analyze the vignettes of Aurangzeb and other Mughal figures that are available in Lāl Kavi's Chatraprakāś (Light of Chatrasal, c. 1710), a Brajbhasha (classical Hindi) historical poem commissioned by the Bundela ruler Chatrasal (1649–1731). Written shortly after Aurangzeb's death, the Chatraprakāś is in part a retrospective on Aurangzeb's reign. It is also a valuable source of regional history that gives voice to how the Mughal Empire was perceived from a local court that went in and out of political favour. In places, Lāl Kavi engages in trenchant political critique, expressing the court's strong disillusionment with the Mughal manṣabdārī system as well as more local grievances. While by no means the dominant tone of the work, there are occasional hints of the court's outrage at Mughal offenses against what Lal Kavi explicitly terms “Hindu dharma.” Parsing the Chatraprakāś as both poetry and history, I probe the text's complex perspectives on Mughal rule.

The literary and genealogical accounts produced at the Kachvāhā court of Jaipur, addressing the relationship between Aurangzeb and the Kachvāhās, post-date Aurangzeb. Three of these are introduced, one of them in Sanskrit, two vernacular. While all these writings are informed by archival records, they serve the end of glorifying Kachvāhā kingship as it had started visibly defying Mughal authority from the late 1660s. The last of these accounts was written in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jaipur was a British protectorate, and reflects an attempt to represent the sum total of Kachvāhā Rajput ethos and history at the critical point when the Jaipur state was overhauled by administrative reforms.

Through comparison of three poetic texts describing the career of Rana Raj Singh of Mewar (r. 1652–1680), this paper demonstrates how representations of Aurangzeb could vary dramatically even when they were produced for the same Rajput court. Much of the paper focuses on Rāj-vilās, a vernacular-language work with a lengthy account of conflict between Aurangzeb and the Rajput lords of Marwar and Mewar. Rāj-vilās is also noteworthy for its negative portrayal of the Mughal emperor, whom it castigates as a wicked killer of kin who was duplicitous and vengeful. Sometimes thought to be modern constructions, the criticisms of Aurangzeb found in Rāj-vilās reveal that certain ideas about Indian historical figures have continued to be deployed and repurposed over the centuries. Yet Rajput views during Aurangzeb's lifetime were not uniformly unfavourable, as the Sanskrit texts Rāja-ratnākara and Rāja-praśasti attest. Although these two works resembled Rāj-vilās in covering the reign of Rana Raj Singh and were written at roughly the same time, they cast Aurangzeb in a considerably more positive light. This difference can be attributed to the fluctuating political relationship between the Mughal empire and the Mewar kingdom in the decade between 1677 and 1687, underscoring the need to carefully identify the historical contexts within which representations of Aurangzeb were produced and circulated.

This paper studies how Brajbhāṣā Vaishnava narratives describe the role the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb played in the displacement of Krishna images from the Braj heartland in the 1660s and 1670s. While contemporary discourse frequently suggests that the emperor was a villain persecuting beloved Hindu deities, who in turn are victims forcibly moved from their original homeland, the early-modern vernacular narratives we consider here perceive these peregrinations in rather more complex ways. This article foregrounds the case of the best-known dispersed Krishna image: Śrī Nāthajī, a deity of the Vallabha-Sampradāya, now residing in the Mewar area of Rajasthan. It analyses mostly the discourse of the Śrī Nāthajī kī Prākaṭya-Vārtā, or ‘The story of the Appearance of Śrī Nāthajī’, attributed to Vallabha's descendant, Harirāy. The sectarian logic presents Aurangzeb as an ardent, if uncouth, devotee and Śrī Nāthajī as an autonomous agent, not a victim, but rather a victor.

Examining narratives about Sultan Singh, Udaipur's most prominent sagasji (divine, heroic guardian), this essay analyzes the narrative frame of contention between Sultan Singh's father, the Maharana (“Great King”) Raj Singh and the emperor Aurangzeb. It argues that the frame inevitably glorifies the Maharana and contrasts him with emperor, invariably represented as a worthy opponent, as it contextuales variant lore about the life and tragic death of the Maharana's heir apparent. In some accounts, Sultan Singh's demise is blamed on a plot devised by the emperor. This lore exalts both father and son while also demonstrating a pervasive anxiety about the danger inherent in power.

This article focuses on some representations of Aurangzeb in the Nath Yogi lore; their ambivalence appears as a signifier of the complex relationships the Nath Yogis had with Islam. Aurangzeb figures both as a powerful enemy and as a clumsy devotee, he is depicted more as a symbol than as an historical individual character.

This article argues for the value of looking past the emperor Aurangzeb, in seeking to understand how he has been portrayed. The eighteenth century Braj source from Punjab examined here portrays local debates and conflicts at the centre, and the Mughal state at the periphery, of the project of communitarian self-formation. Here, the emperor operates from the outside. Internal communitarian concerns, particularly regarding caste inclusion, dominate, linking the text in question to larger questions around caste and community that emerged in early modern South Asia in a range of contexts.

This article argues for a re-evaluation of the ‘Islamist’ policies of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (r. 1658–1707), many of which were arguably harsher towards Shi‘i and millenarian groups than towards Hindus. By charting Aurangzeb's trials of millenarian leaders throughout his long reign, it suggests that the emperor's desire to introduce a more standardised legal system was at odds with the ‘millennial’ nature of his own kingship. The article further suggests we should look more closely at the influence of regional politics on Mughal policy-making. The fact that Sunni Gujarati clerics acquired a remarkable intimacy with Aurangzeb, both as prince and emperor, demonstrates how Gujarat's sectarian disputes and political economy could play out in the imperial court. Finally, the article calls for a realistic reappraisal of the long shadows cast by Aurangzeb's Islamist legalism.