The death of Aurangzeb and the decline of the Mughal Emperor

Aurangzeb died in 1707 CE. Actually, it was the end of the great Mughals. Though he left a complex impulsion for the historians mixed up with his saint like life style with his austere ruling it was true that he held his empire tight and expanded its boundary than he found it.

Percival Spear¹, a great historian, was prelude to describe in his famous “A history of India (vol. 2) in such a way.....Aurangzeb succeeded not because he was crueler but because he was more efficient and more skilled in the current game of statecraft with its background of dissimulation. He never shed unnecessary blood;......Once established he showed himself a firm and capable administrator who retained his grip of power until his death at the age of eighty-eight......He differed from Akbar in consciously tolerating Hindus rather than treating them as equals, but his supposed intolerance is little more than a hostile legend based on isolated acts such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site at Benares.......

Spear’s description is able enough to draw a thin line between the myth and the knowledge. The decline of the empire which approached after his death proved his legends.

The visible decline of Mughal Empire started in 1712, at the time of death of Bahadur Shah I². The attack of Maratha in 1738 and the same of Nadir Shah3 of Persia in 1739 made the Empire worst than ever. Though Nadir Shah’s back with Peacock Throne⁴ made temporary recovery of the Empire and it enabled itself to fend off the incursion of Afghans in 1748 the death of Muhammad Shah⁵ at the eve of the victory made the Empire fragile again. They lost Sind and Gujrat in 1750 and Oudh and Punjab in 1754. Bengal became virtually independent during that period. All that events not also made the Empire weak but also made the way for Europeans.