The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India by Supriya Gandhi (review)

Drawing from an impressive range of sources in several genres and languages, Gandhi has persuasively reconstructed, engagingly narrated, and insightfully analyzed the significance of the ideas, life, and times of prince Dara Shukoh (1615—1659), would-be heir to the Mughal Empire (1526—1858). Because each of these genres had its own conventions of exposition and bodies of reference, interdisciplinary historians like Gandhi must master the appropriate methodology to analyze each source individually and then to combine the evidence through intertextual synthesis.

The Mughal imperial court sponsored detailed Persian-language histories of the dynasty as well as philosophical and literary works in prose and poetry. Many of these diverse sources contain evidence about the Dara himself and the context in which he was born and in which he developed intellectually, which Gandhi skillfully extracts and weaves into her biography. Additionally, imperial painters constructed images that include Dara, his contemporaries, and their architecture and environment; Gandhi knowledgeably reads and explains this colorful visual language (although the eighteen images included in the book are rendered only in grayscale).

Throughout, Gandhi argues that Dara and his closest sister, Jahanara (1614—1681), even more than others in the imperial dynasty, devoted themselves to exploring and mastering Sufi mysticisms, theologies, and philosophies, written in Persian and Arabic. Indeed, both of them wrote esoteric works within these genres. Further, Dara incorporated Indic ("Hindu") religious traditions through personal meetings with ascetics and through written sources in Sanskrit and Hindi (via Persian translations that he sponsored) in order to prove that the highest truths of Islam could also be found in Indic mystical traditions. Gandhi's history of Dara's religious quest for the ultimate truth shows its culmination in Dara's final book Sirr-iAkbar ("The Greatest Secret," completed in 1657). While Dara concentrated on the "continued refinement of his inner self and his intellect" in order to make himself"a perfect ruler, one who was also the perfect philosopher" (179, 182), his three rival brothers more successfully mobilized financial and military resources for the inevitable war of succession that only a single victor would survive.

Gandhi continually remains in dialogue with other historians, many of whom have characterized Dara as the ecumenical antithesis of Aurangzeb, his Islamicist younger brother (1618—1707), who militarily defeated and executed Dara for heresy, succeeding as the last of the " great" Mughal Emperors. Gandhi s scholarship demonstrates the oversimplification of that binary argument about the brothers' influences, instead showing how Dara s ideas emerged from strong Indic as well as Islamic strands already long present at the imperial court, most famously but not exclusively developed by Emperor Akbar, his great-grandfather (1556—1605). Much of Gandhi's explicit historiographical discussion appears in her fifty-eight pages of endnotes, about one-quarter of the book (the volume has no bibliography).

The accomplished interdisciplinary methodology of Gandhi s book should make it attractive to a wide readership. She writes in a style and with an authority that makes her work accessible to general readers as well as edifying to specialist scholars. Future writers about the Mughal Empire specifically, and histories of Islam and India generally, will gain much from Gandhi's work.