Context: Dara Shikoh is often invoked as the nemesis of Aurangzeb. March 20th marks the birth anniversary of Dara Shikoh, who was born in 1615.

Background: –

• Dara Shikoh was the eldest son of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan and was engaged in an intense battle of succession.

Key Points

• Dara Shikoh strove to develop cordial relationships between people by finding commonalities between Hinduism and Islam. 
• His most important works, Majma-ul-Bahrain (Mingling of Two Oceans) and Sirr-i-Akbar (Great Mystery), are devoted to the cause of establishing connections between Hinduism and Islam.
• Dara Shikoh concluded that the “hidden book” mentioned in the Quran was none other than the Upanishads and believed that to understand the Quran, one needed to study the Hindu text.
• With the help of pandits, he translated 52 volumes of the Upanishads from Sanskrit to Persian into a tome called Sirr-e-Akbar (The Greatest Secret). He even drew an equation between Adam and Brahma — a view which, according to historians, led to him being branded a heretic and to his execution.
• However, he was defeated by his brother Aurangzeb in the War of Succession following Shah Jahan’s illness. Thus he was executed on the orders of Aurangzeb under a fatwa issued by his clerics stating that he had apostatised from Islam.

War of Succession

• The Mughals did not believe in the rule of primogeniture, where the eldest son inherited his father’s estate. They followed the custom of coparcenary inheritance or a division of the inheritance amongst all the sons. This became the ground for the war of succession during the Mughal Empire.
• The war of succession broke out in 1657 after Shah Jahan fell ill. Though all four brothers — Dara, Aurangzeb, Murad and Shuja — were locked in a bitter war, the first two were the serious contenders.
• Aurangzeb battled fiercely with his brothers, eventually sentencing all three to death and confining his father to a gilded prison for the last seven years of his life.

Source: Indian Express