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One question that all of us have asked ourselves about our own lives is the question what if?
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What if I had done this instead of that?
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What if I had chosen another career?
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What if I had lived in a different city or not gone on that first date or was just born
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There's a universe of possibilities in just those words and our fascination with those
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words extends beyond our own lives.
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What if the world was a different place?
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We apply this to history sometimes and that can be a mistake.
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The world is complex but we tell ourselves simple stories to make sense of it.
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Similarly, the past has many layers and we build simple histories to make sense of it.
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For this reason, what if questions often don't work?
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Changing one variable in a complex world may not change much at all.
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But what if that variable is a big variable?
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What if that variable is a Mughal emperor?
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If a tolerant and intellectually curious religious scholar had become Mughal emperor instead
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of an orthodox bigoted violent man, would history have proceeded differently?
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If Dara Shikoh had become emperor instead of his younger brother Aurangzeb, would India
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be a different place today?
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on Economics, Politics and Behavioral Science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest on the show today, the historian Supriya Gandhi, once said that she saw one
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of her tasks as making history complex again.
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While the pursuit of history might be driven by the need to build narratives that explain
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the world and those narratives are always simpler than the real world, it could be argued
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that the stories we have of the past today in India are just too damn simple, such as
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the one I mentioned a few moments ago about Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb.
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We like to think of them in the stark binaries I mentioned.
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Dara is a tolerant and intellectually curious religious scholar and Aurangzeb as a brutal
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But these are caricatures and both men were far more complex than these glib descriptions
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Another false binary is the one between tolerant Sufism and rigid orthodox Islam.
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Also a simplistic view that misses the complexities of Islam in India.
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To better understand those complexities, I recommend you read The Emperor Who Never Was
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Dara Shikoh in Mughal India by Supriya Gandhi.
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This is a marvelous human portrait of Dara Shikoh that gives a deep sense of what a complex
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man he was and which also shows us the complex times he lived in.
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There is a popular narrative today that talks about how India would be so different if Dara
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had been emperor instead of Aurangzeb.
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Ashok Malik even called the murder of Dara Shikoh, quote, the partition before partition,
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Supriya's book gives me the sense that, well, maybe we are overthinking it.
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Maybe it wouldn't have been that different.
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And certainly, we would all still have been coping with lockdown.
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Before we head on over to the conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If you enjoy listening to The Scene and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Scene and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe,
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Help keep this thing going.
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The Scene and the Unseen.
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Supriya, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Before we begin, you know, I'd like to know a little bit about your sort of intellectual
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Like how did you get into the field that you are in?
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You majored in religious studies, you teach religious studies at Yale.
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You know, what drew you to this field and who were sort of your intellectual influences
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while you were growing as an intellectual?
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Religious studies is a field that is more commonly encountered in the United States.
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And it's sometimes confused with theology or divinity studies.
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Religious studies is studying about religion.
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It isn't comparing religions to see what the best religion is, neither is it training people
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to become priests or chaplains or whatever.
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And I actually haven't really studied religion very much formally, but my interest in this
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and my whole intellectual trajectory was shaped by growing up in India.
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I changed schools a number of times.
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I went to a boarding school.
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And then finally, when I turned 17, I landed in Delhi to go to college.
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I went to St. Stephen's College.
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And for me, my educational experience wasn't just the college and the people I encountered
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there and my teachers, of course, they were also very important.
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It was exploring an Indian city as an adult, especially a city like Delhi with all the
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layers of history and histories of people, migrations, et cetera, associated with it.
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So I would enjoy exploring old Delhi.
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And one day I came across near Ajmeri Gate, the Ghaziuddin Madrasa, which seemed to be
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just a beautiful building.
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It was utterly quiet, full of the sound of birds.
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And I was there with a couple of friends and we just started wandering around.
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And then we were accosted by somebody and I thought he was going to tell us off, that
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he was going to rebuke us and say, get out of here.
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And instead he said, he asked if we had come to see Dr. Jaffee.
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And at that point, I wasn't quite sure who he was.
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And then he introduced himself as Dr. Yunus Jaffee, the Persian professor, and no doubt
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he was very used to having all kinds of people making a pilgrimage to see him.
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And it turned out he'd been profiled in William Downingville's book, City of Jinns.
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So Dr. Jaffee invited us to his little room, his little cell, and he served us delicious
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chai and offered to teach us Persian.
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And I was the only one among our friends who took him up on the offer, and I started learning
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And I thought this would be a wonderful opportunity to read the poetry of Yunus, about whom I'd
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So Dr. Jaffee and my explorations of Delhi, I got my initial introduction into a language
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and a history that was very, very much part of the education of most educated people in
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North India at one point in time, but that had been excised from my own curriculum.
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So it was a fascinating complement to my studies of philosophy, which I pursued at St. Stephen's.
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And I had an equal interest in Indian philosophy, Sanskrit philosophy, the six Arshanas, and
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And after this, after my studies, I was going to either spend a year in Banaras doing Sanskrit
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or spend a year in Iran doing Persian.
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And the year in Iran worked out, so I landed up there.
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I wanted to do something different.
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It's quite common for people from my college to, if they've got good marks and so on, just
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want to go to Oxford and Cambridge.
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And that idea didn't really attract me.
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I wanted to do something that didn't really have so much to do with an education in the
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So that year in Iran led to lots of other things.
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I was immersed in the study of Persian.
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I got to see a fascinating side of Iran that isn't really covered in the Western press.
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Indian is a huge advantage in the world, just immense hospitality and warmth that I received
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And I got to see this amazing, very vibrant intellectual culture, some of it underground,
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some of it not so much.
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This long street of books in Taiwan that is probably one of the longest streets for bookshops
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Students discussing philosophy and ideas, an immense amount of intellectual curiosity.
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So what I wanted to do then was to take what I had learned in Iran, of the Persian language,
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philosophy, Sufism and so on, and apply that back to India.
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Because then I discovered that there were all these texts that were waiting to be read.
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I started hearing about Balashuk, although I didn't know that I was later going to work
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on him, and all the Persian translations of Sanskrit works at Akbar's Court and so on.
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So I thought, wow, I have this skill, and I might as well put it to use, but not just
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So I continued my studies.
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I got a master's degree in London, in Middle Eastern studies, and I started Arabic.
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I spent a year in Syria, I spent a year immersing myself in Arabic and the study of the Islamic
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sciences through Arabic.
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And that, again, that was very, very different Syria to the war-torn, ravaged country that
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So that also was a wonderful experience.
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And then I realized that I had to pursue a PhD in the United States, where you have the
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advantage of being able to fund your studies, you get paid to study and teach if you get
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So that's what I did, and so that's where I've ended up now.
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So my PhD was really in area studies, but I ended up working on topics that give me
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a common vocabulary and common interests with those in the study of religion.
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So that's where I've ended up right now.
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You know, it's fascinating that you often warned against looking at history in terms
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But while you were telling the story, it almost seemed as if it wasn't for that serendipitous
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meeting with Dr. Jafri in the ruins and him offering to teach you Persian, this whole
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journey may not have happened.
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Is that kind of true, or did you have a prior interest in all of these areas anyway in terms
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of history and languages and so on?
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Well, it's a little hard to go back and do counterfactual autobiography to see what might
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have happened had I not met Dr. Jafri.
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But I think my interest in exploring Old Delhi did stem from my curiosity about these aspects
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that at least weren't part of my own school curriculum, and that were very much part of
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my exploring the city around me.
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So it might have happened.
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And at that point, did you sort of have a specific vision of yourself in the future
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that I want to study history or write books of history or so on, or were you just sort
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of going with your passions and going with your interests and letting them lead you where
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I had no specific career plans.
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My board in school was founded by J. Krishnamurthy, it was in South India, and we were encouraged
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to do things for the sake of it.
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It wasn't like kind of typical Indian school with rankings and like having people really
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sort of geared to do competitive exams.
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Of course, one's very lucky and privileged to be free of that, but no, I was not thinking
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instrumentally in any way, I was following my interests.
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And you know, it sort of strikes me that, you know, did studying Persian and did, for
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example, spending time in Iran and Syria and all of that, give you a window into aspects
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of India and Indian culture, which are otherwise invisible to us?
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For example, we know that there is a lot of Persian influence in our language, in our
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culture, in our cooking and all of that, except that is, you know, we've internalized it and
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we don't think of ourselves in that way.
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Many of us don't think of ourselves as the sort of melting pot that we are, where all
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these influences exist.
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So did you feel that your understanding of India itself, our culture, our language, all
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of that deepened because you were going deeper into, say, the influences of Persian as a
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language and then maybe influences from Iran as a culture, because those exist as well.
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Did that make you sort of see the unseen in a sense, which many of us would otherwise
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And, you know, I consider myself very much still a student of India and Indian history.
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I find it endlessly fascinating.
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Yes, my studies of Persian, for instance, helped me see all the Persian words that existed
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in Hindustani and Indian languages, the influences, whether it's cuisine, poetry, language and
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You know, had I grown up in Lucknow, for instance, I might have been more steeped in that, but
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I spent a lot of my life in South India and in fairly insulated environments.
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So absolutely, I got a completely different perspective on India through my studies in
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And is it sort of, you know, when you start studying history, given that, especially when
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you study the Mughals, that there are such set narratives about the Mughals that are
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And when you start studying a period in history, how difficult is it to put the hindsight bias
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Because there's no mystery, right?
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We already know everything that has happened in terms of the events that have taken place.
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And for those specific times, there are very few sources.
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Often those sources will tend to be bias sources, like the winners will write their own history
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and Aurangzeb obviously will want to, you know, paint Dara Shikoh in whatever way is
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So how difficult is it to then be able to say that, you know, regardless of what period
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of history you're studying, how difficult is it to sort of strip all of that away, the
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things that you know, the narratives that are almost reflexive to us, and be able to
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sort of figure out things in a contemporary way, like one of the things that struck me
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while reading your book, which was so different from everything that we've sort of learned
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about Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, apart from obviously the false binaries, which we'll
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But one of the things that kind of struck me was that sense throughout the book that
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Dara Shikoh is really in training to be an emperor, it's it's almost it seems foredained
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and he is behaving as if he is going to be the emperor.
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He's almost co ruling with his father in a sense.
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And then one day it all falls apart and Aurangzeb is a, you know, a bit player in all of this
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going off to the deck and going off there going off here.
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And you know, when we typically look at history, we think of what we're taught in our textbooks.
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These are the great emperors, you know, after Shah Jahan, there's Aurangzeb and it's a very
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Is that something you have to consciously tell yourself that, look, I have to avoid
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these dominant narratives, I have to, you know, look at each period and each event as
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if I don't know what is happening next?
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Is that a discipline you have to build?
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That's an interesting question.
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And actually, to an extent that is sort of the methodology that I've followed in this
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Initially, I was reluctant to choose Dara Shako partly because he's so well known.
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He's not as well known as Aurangzeb, but the story of Dara Shako and Aurangzeb is sort
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of like a foundational origin story of the subcontinent explaining how we got where we
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So I was a bit hesitant about doing that, because there's also a lot of merit in looking
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at the histories of people who don't have written histories.
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There are many, many ways in which one can look at this early modern period, addressing
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themes and processes and so on.
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And in the end, I found that I couldn't really lead Dara, partly because he's such a prominent
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figure today, I see in my introduction that these Mughal royals, most of them emperors,
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but some others also still live among us.
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We feel we know them, we feel that they're just so familiar, you just need to call someone
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Aurangzeb in India and you know that it's a slur, it's something, you're seeing something
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really nasty about them, they're treacherous, they're not loyal to their families and so
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But having looked at Mughal primary sources, I knew that the story was much more complicated
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So I think if one dips one's feet in the water of the Persian sources of the times, sources
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in other languages, you do get the sense that things are very different.
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And then there's another kind of principle, a methodological principle of writing history
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that are used, which was to try to look at the sources that were contemporaneous with
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Dara, or that if one looks at later sources to make sure that you know that, to make sure
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that you're sort of disclosing that these are later sources, these are written by people
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who are not eyewitnesses, who are not contemporaries, and you know, they might have another axe
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They might have, it is definitely coloured by either being written in Aurangzeb's time
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or later with the benefit of hindsight.
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So that definitely tells you a lot about the period in which those sources were written.
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But if we want to know how Dara was representing himself, again, you know, one's being quite
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careful about avoiding any, just any kernel of core historical truth, because what you
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have is just an array of representations.
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But if we look at the representations from that period, what are they saying?
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What are they telling us?
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So that's the question that I kept in mind when I was doing my research.
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And what drew you to the project to begin with?
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Like you said, it's a very resonant story, the Dara versus Aurangzeb, it's almost a foundational
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story of Islam in the subcontinent in many senses.
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So were you sort of drawn into exploring that further?
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Or during your readings, did you find that, wait a minute, this guy is much more complicated
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than all of this, and I need to dig into this deeper, like, which came first, your choosing
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the story or the story choosing you, as it were?
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So I think what came first was what I did during my doctoral studies, my PhD studies
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I wanted to study some aspect of the Sanskrit Persian encounter.
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And I found that I couldn't really avoid Dara Shikoh.
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He is such a central figure after Akbar, I mean, he is a Mughal royal who's producing
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his own translations, with help, of course, and collaboration.
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And that I found that people were reading his writings later on.
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So he had this really long diachronic influence.
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And he was such a key figure.
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So I started just looking at the works that he wrote, you know, I did a fresh translation
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of the Majmul Bahrain that I'm sitting on, I haven't published that yet.
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And I looked at his Siddhi Akbar and so on.
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And then later on, when I wanted to write a book, I realized that I have to place this
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in its social and political context.
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So the book is quite different from what I did during my PhD.
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But my initial attraction was just to look at Dara Shikoh, you know, he was, he's just
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this amazingly prolific figure.
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And to sort of to see, to look at his intellectual trajectory, to see, you know, how he was developing
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his, his thought and his ideas.
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You know, in a recent interview, which of course are linked from the show notes, you
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said something I found very interesting, which is that the narrative task of a historian
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is to make history complex again, which of course speaks to how in trying to make sense
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of the world, we necessarily have to come up with simple narratives for everything.
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And very often when we look at history, these simple narratives are convenient, simple narratives
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in the sense that they bolster whatever our vision of the world is.
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In fact, you quoted Barthes in your book, and you said that, you know, you invoke his
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saying history evaporates.
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And you said that, in your words, quote, myth also clads ideological structures in a narrative
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And obviously there are very deeper entrenched narratives that are at play here.
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So now when you get into it, it's almost as if, and you also chose a narrative form, which
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I suppose in some senses was meant to reach out to a broader than academic leadership.
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So obviously you want to also tell a compelling story, which you think is, you know, different
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from the simple narratives which previously exist.
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But where do you maintain that balance of sort of being complex and being coherent?
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And was it also a challenge that there is so little material to play with that you're
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being forced to make choices and are those choices something that you're then examining
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why you're making those choices?
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You know, there are a lot of choices involved in one's telling of the story.
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For instance, you know, so this is to this book, it is a narrative.
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It's a retelling of the simple myth of Tarasheko and Aurangzeb, even as you know, as you mentioned,
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I'm calling this a myth, not because I'm saying it's not true, but because these are stories
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There are ciphers and sort of short forms for a whole range of ideas and ideological
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So when I'm turning this into a story, I am making choices about what to include, what
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And I think that's something that happens no matter what kind of book you write.
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One could write a more conventional academic sort of book, the kind of book that has an
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introduction with a chapter outline and a conclusion sort of summing up these things
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and perhaps some thematic chapters, and you're still making choices, you're making choices
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about what to include, what fits in with your argument, what doesn't necessarily address
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your argument, what isn't so useful to you.
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And in this case, I chose to present my argument in the form of a narrative, so doing more
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showing than telling, though of course there is definitely some telling that goes on.
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But what this book isn't, it isn't a grab bag of every single fact in the world about
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Dara Shukoh and all that's said.
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And that's partly because no publisher would really want to publish something like that.
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There are word limits, there are all kinds of things that have to be negotiated.
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So if you want to book something between two covers that can reach a fairly wide audience,
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there are always choices that one makes.
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And what were your sort of models in terms of books which attempted a similar thing,
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a show-don't-tell approach with a distant period of history, a very serious book written
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with a lot of rigor, but told in a narrative style that can appeal to larger audiences.
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So who were the writers of history who you admired and learned from?
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So that's a great question.
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And I didn't have a whole lot of models from this period of South Asian history.
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There are loads of historians whom I admire, of course.
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But when I was writing this, I didn't have a precise model.
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It's not as though this is a genre.
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It so happened that as I was writing the book and as it was in production, there was a whole
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slew of mobile biographies that came out, some by academic colleagues, one or two, and
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a lot of them by other writers in South Asia, which I think is a wonderful trend.
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There wasn't a whole lot.
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I can just think of the top of my head of some writers whom I read.
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There is the American historian Jill Lepore, who writes very prolific essays for The New
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Yorker and also other books.
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And again, she has this amazing gift for a narrative history and a kind of lucid prose.
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So she's one author whom I have been reading.
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I've also been really impressed by Shamsa Rehman Haruki's sort of luxuriant novels that
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really bring to life the times that they talk about, and they're all these intricate narrative
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threads and characters woven in.
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So that was another sort of indirect influence.
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I was drawing inspiration from novelists as much as from historians, except that I was
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trying to piece together this narrative after being really steeped in the primary sources
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So I had to construct something that I hoped would read a bit like a novel, except that
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In the introduction to your book, you sort of pointed out about how you were at first
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hesitant about writing it because you didn't want to privilege this whole great man sort
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And so much of the narrative around Dara is actually a great man narrative that had he
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been emperor, instead of foreign, the entire subcontinent would have proceeded in a different
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And this is something I kind of like to ask the historians who come on the show that,
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where do you stand in the great man theory of history?
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And I'd be interested in having you elaborate on that.
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Yes, so the thing about great men is that we tend to really love them in the present
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That's how we tend to look at history.
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So in the popular imagination in South Asia, history is this succession of either great
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men or depraved men who had tremendous control over steering its course and so on.
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So if you write about someone, it must mean that you greatly admire them.
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And I do have empathy for Dara Shukla, I feel that I've tried to understand things from
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And there are lots of things I like about him, but I would be very hesitant to elevate
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him or any mobile emperor for that matter to this great man status.
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So I'll just talk about my hesitancy for a bit and then I'll go back to why I still
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think it's important to study these figures.
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I'm hesitant because the Mughal Empire was about a whole lot more than just the emperor
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It was a fairly loose, knit empire.
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It was held together by a whole array of nobility, chieftains and so on, who were really masters
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The emperor was still important as a figurehead and as an idea, Dara Shukla lived during the
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period where the idea of the sacred sovereign was really at its height.
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So yes, the idea of this all-powerful emperor who is responsible for keeping the whole,
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the empire in a state of harmony and balance was very important.
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And yet our obsession with great men can obscure us to broader facts of cultural process that
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exist quite separately, quite independent of the actions of emperors.
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There are a whole range of environmental changes, for instance, that are taking place that also
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have an impact on where people live, what religion they might choose and so on.
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Richard Eden's work on Bengal is a case in point.
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So there are a whole range of other factors that are far more important than men.
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And of course, there is the gender dimension that our focus on men has obscured the important
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role of women and others in history.
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But still, it's hard to get away from these figures because I think it's important to
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study them in their complexity as well.
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And for Dara Shukla, his influence ranges far beyond his time, in fact, my current work,
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which we can speak about in a bit, partly addresses how people were reading Dara Shukla
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much after his death and how his own studies of Indic thought spawned all kinds of other
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intellectual debates, changes and dialogues that he couldn't even have predicted.
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So if you're looking at the section of elite society in pre-modern and even in colonial
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India, the small section that was literate or a larger section that was kind of literate
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and not aware, figures like Dara Shukla do tend to have an important reach.
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And they also remind us that what happened at the court wasn't something that was just
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purely located in that context, that what happened at the court was informed by other
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intellectual conversations, dialogues, cultural processes that were taking place outside the
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So Dara Shukla, he wasn't alone.
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It wasn't just that he was, he invented inter-religious dialogue.
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He was participating in something that took place in many other venues as well.
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No, in fact, one of the things that I have got a sense of in the past few months by reading
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books like yours and Iram Akhati's book, and she was also on the show a while back and
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Mani Mukta Sharma and so on, is that, you know, we think of these as almost caricature
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figures that Aurangzeb is this evil bigoted guy and Dara Shukla is this tolerant secular
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But you know, the emperor wasn't the be all and end all of the empire.
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There was a deep state.
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There was a political economy in which the women of the hadams were deeply involved.
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And also, as we'll discuss shortly, these binaries also don't hold true in the sense
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that Aurangzeb was also to an extent steeped in culture and engaging with the world.
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And if Dara Shukla had come to power, he would probably have beheaded his brothers as well.
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So you know, it's not that things would have necessarily been as different as we try to
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You know, Ashok Malik once wrote a piece where he called, you know, the execution of Dara
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Shukla, the partition before partition, which you've sort of cited in your book.
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And I was, you know, which is almost emblematic of these definitive simplistic takes that
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one draw of these and I was also, you know, struck by and I'll quote this bit from your
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book because it overall seems to sum up how the binaries play out where you talk about
#
the trial of Dara Shukla and you write, quote, The trial is a powerful motif because it transforms
#
a story about 17th century India into a narrative about today.
#
It creates a dialectic between two opposing visions of Islam.
#
Islam is zealous extremism, immediately familiar in our present context, and its counterpoint
#
Islam as Sufi antinomianism.
#
But even without the supposed trial, the brothers clash is a story that addresses the deepest
#
questions of who we are and how we got here.
#
And you also relate in your book about how through history we look at these two very
#
divergent views of, say, Aurangzeb and Dara Shukla where Mohammed Iqbal and Rumusi Bekhodi
#
praises Aurangzeb as, you know, that ascetic, that sword master and all of that.
#
And you know, Ashok Malik calls it the partition before partition, but equally on the other
#
side you have, you know, the two 20th century bios of Dara that you've referred to by Kalikranjan
#
Karungu and Bikramjeet Hasrat, where both of them praise him and Karungu says the world
#
has not become richer in any way by the long reign of Aurangzeb, but it would certainly
#
have been poorer without Dara Shukla.
#
And one, of course, we'll talk about how these binaries aren't true, but the question that
#
struck me while I was reading these is that at some point in our history, what is happening,
#
and I think it happened repeatedly over the late 19th century and the early 20th century,
#
is that these conflicting ideas of Islam are competing with the conflicting ideas of India,
#
you know, as in where does a lot of the debates that are playing out, you know, where does
#
the good Muslim stand with relation to his fealty towards India.
#
This was part of the reason why, for example, you know, Mahatma Gandhi's alliance with the
#
Ali brothers at the time of the Khilafat movement seems so discordant because, you know, while
#
Gandhi is fighting for a vision of India as a nation state per se, the Ali brothers are
#
fighting for a larger ummah where your allegiance is to somewhere else entirely.
#
So what are sort of your thoughts also on how these competing ideas of Islam have played
#
out against the competing ideas of India?
#
I mean, I realize this is a sort of a larger question than, you know, what your book is
#
about, but because that's of course set in those Mughal times.
#
But I'd love to know what thoughts you've had on these.
#
So, you know, of course, the Khilafat movement is very, very modern.
#
It comes at a time when ideas of Islam are changing and there is this kind of political
#
Islam that is forming in opposition to colonialism.
#
You know, there is a Muslim public sphere, there's a Hindu public sphere.
#
So colonialism played an important role in transforming how these communities drew boundaries
#
around their identities, how they saw each other, how they saw their role.
#
In the case of Dara Shukoh, yes, it's depending on which side of the border you're on or what
#
ideology you gravitate towards, you know, Dara Shukoh is either this terrible heretic,
#
you know, it was like just as well that Aurangzeb got him out of the way.
#
You see this in a lot of narratives from Pakistan, not all at all, you know, not kind of more
#
state-sponsored narratives, or Dara Shukoh is this wonderful philosopher and gentle mystic
#
who really ought to have been ruler, but there's always a caveat, there's always a little bit
#
of doubt with that because even those like his wonderful earlier 20th century biographers,
#
Phanungo and Hester, even those who praise him, they still feel, well, you know, yes,
#
he had these amazing views and was interested in Sanskrit and Indic thought, but there was
#
actually no way he could really practically rule, he was too weak, he was uninterested
#
in the throne and you really needed someone kind of more ruthless like Aurangzeb.
#
So it was inevitable that somebody who was more crafty was more capable of being the
#
And this, as you've pointed out, is not the truth, obviously, I mean, that whole binary
#
that Dara had his head in the clouds and he was just doing all these religious studies
#
and meeting Sufi saints and Aurangzeb was a guy who was going out and conquering territories
#
and all that isn't true at all and Dara was Shah Jahan's chosen successor in a sense and
#
they almost co-ruled for many, many years.
#
So when people ask that hypothetical question of what would Dara have been as a ruler, what
#
you've pointed out is that we already kind of know.
#
So, you know, one thing that I've tried to do is to disturb the idea that that's a very
#
modern idea, that a ruler should not be interested in philosophy, that a ruler should, you know,
#
is not really the kind of person to have dialogues with ascetics, that belongs to a totally different
#
realm of life and it's not part of an emperor or a would-be emperor's political relations.
#
And I've tried to show how Dara wasn't an outlier in this regard, he was actually following
#
an established Mughal tradition, he was, without acknowledging them, following in the footsteps
#
of his great-grandfather Akbar and to an extent as well, his own grandfather Jahangir, that
#
he complemented his own father Shah Jahan, who was often viewed as somebody who was more
#
orthodox, he was paving the way for Aurangzeb's fast, you know, stricter, more ascetic, orthodox
#
But Dara and Shah Jahan together were hosting Sanskrit pundits at the court, who composed
#
poems in praise of them, you know, who was hosting all these intellectual and spiritual
#
dialogues and was very, very much part of what he was doing as a ruler, he certainly
#
Now Aurangzeb did have an advantage, Aurangzeb had the advantage of gaining a lot of military
#
experience on his own, often in the face of, you know, either opposition and really irritating
#
micromanaging on the part of Shah Jahan.
#
He was able to govern the Deccan as well on his own, so he got a lot of independent experience
#
that served him well in the struggle for this throne later on.
#
But it doesn't mean that Dara Shukla didn't prove himself as a future emperor.
#
No, I was, in fact, you mentioned micromanaging and there are these very funny bits in your
#
book, which are again, perfect examples of show don't tell and I love the bit about the
#
mangoes where, you know, Aurangzeb, I think is in Aurangabad and he's got to stand and
#
his dad is waiting for mangoes because it's Aurangzeb's duty to send them the mangoes
#
as soon as the first good ones come.
#
So Shah Jahan writes him a letter and says, have people stand below the tree, I can't
#
wait as soon as they come, they got to catch them as they fall, Aurangzeb sends him mangoes
#
and Shah Jahan replies that these are shitty mangoes and have you eaten my good mangoes
#
and Aurangzeb has to reply that no, your highness, I would not dare to eat.
#
And of course, there's a more consequential version of this during the Kandahar battle
#
where you point out about how they are laying siege to Kandahar, which the Safai itself
#
taken over and Aurangzeb who is on the ground, who can see the conditions, realizes that
#
the artillery is useless and he's in line with the suggestion that let's just attack
#
from one point and focus there and he tells his dad and Papa Shah Jahan, you know, doing
#
central planning from hundreds of miles away says, no, no, we, you know, use those cannons
#
and we'll, we'll, you know, attack from two places and he seems like such an, you know,
#
must be such an irritating dad to have to deal with for Aurangzeb, you know, and since
#
you're talking about sort of Shah Jahan, I found a really interesting character because
#
there are just so many sides to his persona that you can really paint him as anything
#
like you've pointed out, you know, his journey to the throne, of course, is incredibly bloody
#
various to get rid of all his brothers and nephews and all of that.
#
At the same time, you have the softer, more sensuous side of him, partly reflected, of
#
course, in his deep love for his wife and, you know, the good deeds that he does.
#
Now you point out an example of what, you know, today, I'm sure many people would jump
#
on where in 1633, he decides to get a bunch of temples raised, including 66 under construction
#
But at the same time, later in the story, when Dara Shikoh is, you know, involving himself
#
with Indic philosophy, calling all these scholars to the court, it is Shah Jahan who is, as
#
you point out, giving them generous gifts and all of that.
#
So you know, all these figures are so deeply complex and Shah Jahan himself is so complex.
#
This is a dude who, you know, did away with his whole damn family.
#
And yet you see this side of him as well.
#
And in the end, you almost feel sorry for him because he's sort of imprisoned by Aurangzeb.
#
And one story that you pointed out is that, you know, after Dara Shikoh is killed, his
#
head is sent to Aurangzeb.
#
And there is, you know, so and this is another thing, there are so many versions of that
#
One of the stories is that Dara Shikoh is beheaded and the head is brought to Aurangzeb
#
and he says, I don't want to look at it.
#
And the other version is that he stabs her three times, you know, and sends it to his
#
So when you're reading all this delightfully juicy stuff, you know, and you have no way
#
of doing which one is true, right?
#
So how do you navigate that?
#
So with the head story, some of it, you can see if it falls into recognizable motifs and
#
tropes that are used elsewhere.
#
So it's one of the head stories retold by the Italian adventurer, Manucci.
#
You see that what he's doing here is really making Dara Shikoh into a Christ-like figure.
#
So whether or not the story is true, the way in which Manucci is recounting it serves a
#
certain narrative end and definitely elicits horror and sympathy.
#
And these are, of course, things that the European travelers to India wanted to elicit
#
They spun all kinds of stories and we can't dismiss them completely.
#
Their accounts are colored by the fact that they were transforming their adventures in
#
India into entertainment for the consumption of the European reading public.
#
So they were fitting them into morals that were also familiar to their readers in Europe.
#
And let's take a quick commercial break and after we are done with that, we'll come back
#
from Shah Jahan and zoom into his two errant children.
#
And I'm Amit Verma, here to tell you about a new weekly podcast that Vivek and I have
#
launched called Econ Central.
#
In Econ Central, we will help you make sense of the economic news of the last week.
#
And we'll also try to explain complex subjects in a simple language.
#
We will also take events outside the world of economics like from politics, sports, literature
#
and explain them through the lens of economic thinking.
#
Why is the stock market going up when the economy is going down?
#
What's the deal with high petrol prices?
#
Should we boycott Chinese goods?
#
What does free speech have to do with incentives?
#
Why are the roving bandits of Uttar Pradesh in competition with the biggest protection
#
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#
All this and more in our new weekly podcast, Econ Central.
#
Econ Central launched a few weeks ago and is free on all podcast apps.
#
You can browse our archives at EconCentral.in Econ Central, you have an incentive to listen.
#
And forget the URL EconCentral.in
#
Welcome back to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Supriya Gandhi about Dara Shikoh, Shah Jahan, Auram Zeb, all of that.
#
So you know what I sort of found very interesting about your story also is that how your narratives
#
by placing us in that contemporary moment makes us for a moment, you know, forget what
#
I actually, you know, at different points, you find yourself rooting for guys you eventually
#
And I thought it a very interesting choice to sort of start with the story of Khurram
#
there, because like you pointed out when Dara Shikoh is born, Dara Shikoh is basically,
#
you know, the first son of the third son, you know, he's really, you know, there's nothing
#
much happening there and Auram Zeb is even further down the feeder chain and nothing
#
And for large periods of time, Khurram is not even his father's choice till eventually
#
he ascends and he becomes Shah Jahan.
#
And you know, Dara Shikoh is sort of regarded, you know, we have this simplistic view that
#
okay, he's a person who was into spiritual matters and really got into a sort of Hinduism
#
and the Indic religions and all of that.
#
But the sense that I got from reading your book is that this stuff happened in stages.
#
And what seemed to me to be the case and you can correct me, but my feeling was through
#
the book that before his intellectual journey really took off, like the sense that I got
#
initially, although the changes is that it was more of a spiritual journey than an intellectual
#
For example, you know, the way that he's he meets me Amir, for example, and almost instinctively,
#
you know, sort of prostrates himself before him and offers himself as a disciple and it
#
just seems sort of very impulsive and even irrational because it's not as if he's read
#
like five books by this guy and he, you know, really believes in his worldview and all that.
#
It's just that he's following some kind of an instinct to attain some kind of spiritual
#
And for much of that early period, like after Miyami dies, we see this, you know, you talk
#
about the visions he's having and this seemed like very sort of I mean, I didn't know what
#
to make of that because he's having visions where his former teacher comes to him in a
#
There is one vision where his former teacher sort of unbuttoned his shirt and then grabs
#
him and there's this nipple to nipple contact and it's almost like his heart has, you know,
#
this whole sort of mystical exchange of the spirit happens.
#
There are other visions where the Prophet Muhammad comes to him in a vision, you know,
#
and if this sort of stuff was to happen in modern times, you would really sort of question
#
whether this person needed help, right?
#
And but he's a prince and this stuff is happening and later, of course, and it seems to me that
#
the whole intellectual exploration where he writes his book about the lives of the 400
#
Sufi saints and all that, that comes later.
#
So is that sort of a misreading on my part or, you know, that the narrative gave me that
#
impression and what do you make of that early young questing Dara Shikoh who's doing all
#
these things like he literally prostrates himself first before Miyami and then when
#
he goes to Kashmir, you know, Mullah Shah, where he's doing things that no prince should
#
But and at that point, you know, you just wonder that these are just religious God men
#
He doesn't know any of them intimately yet.
#
You can develop respect later once you get to know them.
#
But he is just falling at their feet and offering himself as a disciple.
#
So what did you make of all that?
#
Well, of course, we live in a time where from a certain rational perspective, you know,
#
all of the scenes are strange and weird, but if you look at even our own times, we find
#
that there is, especially today, the political, spiritual, intellectual are actually really
#
And that was the case in Dara Shikoh's time, that it's, you know, hard to separate the
#
political, for instance, from the spiritual.
#
You know, Tep Akhbar, who made these great public shows of piety, he would walk barefoot
#
to the shrine of Moinuddin Chishti to pray for a son, you know, he would give thanks
#
So Dara Shikoh's displays of piety, that he was later telegraphing, not because he
#
wasn't an emperor, he didn't have an Abel Fazl, but you know, through his own writings.
#
You know, I would say these are not merely kind of the rantings of a naive, mystical
#
prince with his head in the clouds.
#
He was always making a particular argument.
#
So for instance, when he talks about his first meeting with Miamir, and he meets Miamir,
#
his father is actually the one who takes him, so his father, and then later we learn that
#
even Jahangir had reverence for Miamir, so he's an established Sufi figure.
#
You can see that he has influence because, you know, emperors themselves are going, giving
#
So he then shows how he had this amazing experience with him, he gets healed, and he shows Miamir
#
a true reverence and piety, and then he makes these kind of little nasty, sort of passive-aggressive
#
digs at his own father and his grandfather saying, yes, you know, and when they went
#
to visit Miamir, they said they wanted to talk about spiritual matters, and even thought
#
of like, you know, confided that we're so sick of rulership, we just want to be like
#
you and, you know, be a recluse like you, and then Miamir, you know, sharply rebuked
#
So in this case, Dara Shukoh is showing himself in a good light, he's showing himself as the
#
true Sufi murid, he's a true kind of follower of the path of Sufism, unlike other emperors,
#
and then maybe this means that he has a special spiritual quality that other rulers don't
#
have, that he's destined for something really great.
#
Yeah, I mean, the reason I found this striking was I don't mean this as a criticism of Dara
#
Shukoh to say, oh, look at that mad guy, he was having visions, I'm sorry if it came across
#
that way, that's not what I meant.
#
But why I found these incidences fascinating is that I was trying to, during the book,
#
and there are times where I felt I got glimpses of this, but I was trying to get a sense of
#
what is his interior life, you know, Dara Shukoh's, what's the stuff that what does
#
he want, you know, what's the stuff that causes turmoil in him, for example, when he does
#
all of this, like you pointed out, he's trying to portray a side of himself, is he posturing
#
Is he posturing for himself?
#
Is there sometimes an element of self delusion to that?
#
And does all of this, even if let's say he begins to act in a particular way, because
#
he's posturing for others or for himself, does it then shape what he actually becomes?
#
Because later on, you know, he's written all these phenomenal books of scholarship, there's
#
no question that his intellectual engagement with, you know, both Sufism and Islam and
#
later on the Indic religions at a much later stage was very deep and genuine.
#
But in this early stage, what I sometimes get a sense of this young person who is floundering
#
around for an identity and to define his place in the in the bigger scheme, is that a sense
#
you got and you've obviously read all his original stuff in the original Persian, right?
#
So, you know, do you get a sense of who is this person?
#
I mean, strip away all the history and he's an emperor and all of that.
#
So, you know, that raises a lot of interesting questions about how one reads these texts,
#
how one looks at narratives of the self.
#
This is, you know, we have, we have a very modern, post-enlightenment view of the self.
#
The self is this autonomous being, we have, you know, our own narratives of inner transformation
#
and conversions, understandings and so on.
#
We have now that we use the terms of modern psychotherapy, psychoanalysis to, you know,
#
to talk about the self.
#
And there were other ideas that and other concepts that people used to understand the
#
self in Dara Shukla's time.
#
So it's hard to make a distinction between public performance and the inner journey of
#
It's very hard to make that distinction because it's not one that Dara Shukla makes, you know.
#
It's not as though we have a private diary where he's giving us his private outpourings
#
and then he has another, you know, some other documents that talk about his public persona.
#
But I think we can definitely see a journey and a trajectory.
#
When Dara Shukla plunges into spiritual affairs, again, it's not merely kind of cold and instrumental
#
that he's like just going and paying respects to some, you know, Sufi because he has to
#
because it's not his duty.
#
He is actually working on cultivating and transforming the self.
#
And this has been a preoccupation in India in many, many contexts, whether one sees this
#
in the concept of the Rajarshi, you know, the kind of, again, the ruler who is also
#
So we have lots of other lots of examples.
#
We have lots of examples of sages, ascetics, renunciants from different religious traditions
#
who would work on this.
#
And we have a whole tradition of rulers who either renounce the throne or stayed on the
#
throne and engaged in asceticism.
#
So it's not surprising that later on, one of the models for Dara Shukla is Ram, not
#
the Ram necessarily of the Ramayan, you know, who is an exile and then becomes a ruler of
#
But this is the Ram of the Yoga Vasishta, where Ram is a young prince and his Guru Vasishta
#
takes him on the spiritual journey by telling him a whole range of interlocking stories.
#
One story leads to the other story and Ram is reaching different levels of spiritual
#
perfection, finally, until he reaches Jeevanmukti.
#
And this idea of Jeevanmukti was one that was very attractive to Mughal emperors.
#
Jahangir had beautifully lavishly illustrated manuscripts of the Yoga Vasishta.
#
There was one that was translated for Akbar, Jahangir had a special one translated.
#
Dara Shukla was also very interested in this text, and even though all the others had their
#
own versions, he also got his own version of it.
#
And it was a text that in different abridgments circulated all around South Asia.
#
And even today, you know, whether it's the Yoga Vasishta or whether it's a similar Advaithic
#
text on liberation, you find them everywhere.
#
They're very popular, circulated by Gita prayers, they're found in railway stations and so on.
#
So it's an idea of enduring satisfaction because at this point, this was a way in which a king
#
or a ruler could be liberated, and then he could still carry out his royal tasks.
#
So you know, what could be better than that?
#
And then later on, these ideas became very important for merchants, especially for those
#
of the middle castes, you know, so they weren't necessarily going and kind of being ascetics.
#
They were engaged in earning money, they were engaged in the material world.
#
And at the same time, they cultivated a great sense of asceticism, you know, we see that
#
with certain version of business families.
#
There's a great emphasis on personal asceticism, as well as amassing a lot of material wealth
#
And so how do you balance that?
#
You know, the Yoga Vasishta is a good guide for that, which Dara Shukla also found quite
#
So would it be fair to say, and I'm just thinking aloud, that then there are two sort of dual
#
imperatives that seem to come into play.
#
And one is that you are an emperor, and you have conquered all the lands you can conquer,
#
but you cannot conquer death.
#
And that sort of leads to this quest.
#
But the other side of that is that, actually, you've conquered nothing, because you've got
#
relatives plotting against you, and every moment is stressful in some way or the other.
#
And you got to watch your back.
#
And this stuff gives you some release.
#
So you know, would both of these be factors?
#
Yes, you know, I definitely agree.
#
I mean, Dara Shukla, he certainly was going far deeper down this route than a lot of other
#
Again, you know, but he wasn't unique.
#
You know, his brother Murad had a Sufi peer, and he was always in contact with him, and
#
the peer was always giving him guidance.
#
Aurangzeb met a whole range of peers.
#
Aurangzeb was more savvy in that way.
#
You know, he didn't put all his eggs in one basket.
#
But Shudha also paid reverence to Mullah Shah, the Sufi peer of Shah Jahan's household, and
#
especially Dara Shukla.
#
So there were ways in which all of all the others were doing this, but Dara, more than
#
the others, was really cultivating himself as the quintessential philosopher here.
#
It's also interesting how in the book you talk about the influence on the Mughal kings
#
of the example of Alexander, like you point out how Jahangir in one of his books quotes
#
this following line, quote, sovereignty brooks no bonds between fathers and sons and emperor
#
has no relatives, a stock quote which you point out is from the Iskandar Nama by Nizami
#
Ganjavi, which is again about Alexander.
#
And there are these two sides to Alexander, both of which seem very relevant to Dara Shukla.
#
One is, of course, that you have no friends and you've got to watch out for your brothers.
#
And as we've seen in Shah Jahan and Jahangir and earlier, and in, of course, poor Dara
#
Shukla's own generation, that you basically have to get rid of all your brothers and nephews
#
or at the very least blind them.
#
So that's one angle where he's growing up.
#
He is the chosen one of the emperor, but he's got an eye, he's the eldest son, but there's
#
So it isn't that, you know, the eldest son automatically becomes king.
#
So he's got an eye on the prize.
#
And you know, you've pointed out how in the book he'll try to influence things his father
#
does about, you know, sending Aurangzeb somewhere or, you know, making sure that two of the
#
other brothers don't meet so they can't plot with each other and all of that.
#
So on the one hand, there is that very real polity kind of, you know, eye on the throne,
#
watch out for everyone and beware of your brothers.
#
And on the other side, there is that intellectual and spiritual quest.
#
And Alexander, of course, also famously was on his own kind of intellectual quest.
#
And you also see that mirroring itself out, you know, very often on a tangent is very
#
hard for me to imagine those times because how do people gain the knowledge of the world?
#
There are no books, there's no television, there's no internet, there's nothing.
#
And yet you have these heroes like Alexander and Timur and all of that.
#
So you know, one wonders what is the popular culture of the time and where do you learn
#
And yet, you know, people like Alexander and Timur are clearly examples.
#
How much of this would have sort of played a part in Dara's becoming who he was?
#
Like one is he's wrestling with these dual imperatives, a very early real world imperative
#
or watch out for your brothers and do what you got to do to, you know, be the next big
#
And the other one is that whole intellectual and spiritual quest is on.
#
And some of it comes from phobias like Alexander, like maybe Timur in terms of the sort of emperor
#
he was or even Akbar, though, as you say, he doesn't acknowledge Akbar much, but even
#
Akbar in terms of the syncretism and the way he sort of is open to other cultures.
#
Is there a sense that these made a difference to Dara Shikoh in shaping him, the person
#
he was and what he went on to become?
#
So all of these were models for Timurid kings and you're right in that they weren't printed
#
books the way we have printed today.
#
So books didn't, they were expensive, they didn't circulate in the same way, but books
#
The invention of writing and of the written codex, you know, meant that you could really
#
have the whole world between two covers, you know, in a sort of bundle of papers.
#
And mobile libraries, of course, are sort of famous, Dara Shikoh had the advantage of
#
several generations of collection.
#
He also, you know, got his own, acquired his own manuscripts and sponsored the copying
#
So books did circulate, they just not to the extent that they do, but they did circulate.
#
And we can see that ideas circulated and ideas spilled out of books and circulated and permeated
#
the popular imagination.
#
So the idea of Alexander as a powerful conqueror, and as a powerful conqueror, he also was successful
#
in India, he overpowered Indians, so there's that.
#
And he also was a philosopher ruler.
#
He would have dialogues, a kind of Darbar sort of similar to the dialogues that Akbar had
#
with philosophers in his Abadat Khana.
#
So these dual roles of Alexander came to be very important.
#
And I think Alexander is one of the overlooked models for the Mughal, the Indian Timurid
#
So these past figures were very, very important for Mughal rulers, and they were constantly
#
Mostly Timur, Timur is one of them, somebody whom Shah Jahan very consciously modeled himself
#
on and helped circulate his spurious memoirs that gained a lot of popularity.
#
But I would say he never vanishes.
#
It becomes very common for people to talk about the second Sikandar, you might even
#
So one of the bitter ironies of the story and one reason why I bring up Alexander at
#
the beginning, in the context of Jahangir and the dialogues that are taking place at
#
Jahangir's court, is because yes, of course, both sides of Alexander to different degrees
#
become important for Shah Jahan's sons and for Dara Shikoh.
#
And then you know that, of course, Alexander defeats Darius, the emperor whom Dara is also
#
And then finally, after the Battle of Samavar, there's a poet who says, now in this case,
#
you have the second Sikandar who is defeating Dara.
#
So that becomes, so there is this bitter irony that we have Dara Shikoh who is modeling himself
#
on Alexander, you know, on Alexander as portrayed in Persian poetry.
#
And then we actually have Aurangzeb who truly becomes the second Sikandar and defeats his
#
Let's talk a bit about the religious landscape of the time, like another sort of false binary
#
that seems to have come down is that, you know, is of orthodox Islam, the Sunnis on
#
the one side and then you have the Sufis on the other side who don't really believe in
#
all of those conventions and are much more free flowing.
#
So to say, as you pointed out, this isn't quite true.
#
Like you refer to how Dara Shikoh in his first book, Safinatul Auliya, assigned himself as
#
Muhammad Dara Shikoh, Hanafi Qadiri.
#
And Hanafi, of course, as a nod to the orthodox elements in Qadiri is, you know, one of the
#
Therefore, sort of point Qadiri and therefore sort of pointing out that there's nothing
#
incongruous about those going together.
#
And you speak of sort of the interplay between that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that landscape and how the sort of explorations that Dara
#
Shikoh was making, were they as unusual as they are made out to be today?
#
Or was it all par for the course in those times?
#
So I would say both things are true in that, yes, there were sections at the court who
#
might have been disapproving of what Dara Shikoh engaged in.
#
It was also hard to say, you know, who an Ahlam was, who is a member of the Ulema.
#
You know, if you look at any kind of modern Bollywood movie on the mobiles, then you might
#
see these kind of black robed people who are always like plucking and tutting about things
#
You know, say the Emperor Akbar has a wife and she's doing puja, you know, and then like
#
they get really upset about that.
#
So a very easily visible group who don't stand for pluralism, you know, very close minded.
#
And this stems from modern developments.
#
So the idea of the Ulema as a very closed social group who are separate from Sufis is
#
something that happens at a later stage in South Asia.
#
Now at this stage in the 17th century, a lot of, you know, who, you know, an Ahlam, a member
#
of the Ulema is really is a learned person.
#
And a lot of these people had roles at the court, so they juggled multiple tasks and
#
responsibilities and many of them had initiation in different Sufi orders.
#
So the idea of a Sufism that again is more tolerant, heterodox, and it's totally separate
#
from the more juridical world, legalistic world of the Ulema is, it's not something
#
that we see when we look at the court chronicles and when we look at lists of who an Ahlam
#
So they might have a list of the Ulema and the Hukama and the Fuzila, you know, so the
#
people who are considered to be learned and, you know, these were, these could be physicians.
#
These could be people who are well versed in Islamic law, but they also have initiation
#
Some such person could have a, his main job could be managing the emperor's household
#
So it's not as though there was like a separate like room or council of Ulema who didn't
#
have other worldly responsibilities and, you know, their sole job was to police what was
#
acceptable and respectable and what wasn't.
#
At the same time, there were different strands of thought, you know, among Sufis also.
#
There were Sufis who leaned towards the more ecstatic sides of the side of things.
#
For instance, those who enjoyed or propagated listening to music, musical audition.
#
And then there were Sufis who espoused a more sober form of religiosity.
#
So there were definitely divisions, but the divisions did not fall along the lines of
#
You know, having looked at Dara Shikoh, let's also talk about Aurangzeb, because one of
#
the things you sort of demonstrate in your book as well is that the traditional view
#
of him as this austere religious bigot who did not, you know, who was extremely orthodox,
#
did not have any regard for the arts and all of that is not quite true either.
#
So tell me a bit about the young Aurangzeb, especially again, I was sort of struck trying
#
to by the glimpses one got of the human aspects of him, for example, just as, you know, Dara
#
is close to his elder sister Jahanara and they share so many of the same interests in
#
terms of religion and all of that.
#
We find that Aurangzeb is also close to Jahanara and he's always, you know, going and meeting
#
her and obviously regards her very much.
#
And there's also a sense where you speak about how, you know, Dara sort of in court in Lahore
#
and Aurangzeb has, you know, is visiting from somewhere else.
#
And he's very upset because Dara is not giving him the importance he feels he deserves.
#
It's almost as if he wants his elder brother to sort of, you know, to love him almost.
#
You know, what's the sense of that you got of Aurangzeb as an individual during these
#
young years who's also growing up and trying to find his identity?
#
What's his journey like?
#
So the thing with Aurangzeb is because he becomes emperor later on.
#
So anything that he wrote is of high value and is preserved and circulated.
#
So we have a whole range of letters that Aurangzeb has written and these letters get collected
#
and and they circulate later on.
#
So, you know, so we don't have them necessarily all of them, like directly from Aurangzeb,
#
you know, with the seal, we don't have those original documents, but you have the letters
#
as they are preserved in later collections, collections that were made during his lifetime.
#
So we have that advantage in that we can see his own personal, we can hear his own personal
#
voice more clearly than we can a lot of the other mothers.
#
And through these letters, we see that there are a number of letters he writes to his elder
#
You know, the popular perception is that he was close to Roshannara, Darshak was close
#
to Jahannara and Murad was close to Goharara and, you know, so there were these different
#
factions that were formed.
#
And we really see Jahannara's role as family peacemaker.
#
She maintains a good relationship with all her brothers.
#
She really goes out of her way to do that.
#
She goes out of her way to try to smooth over any difficulties that they might have, tries
#
to engineer meetings between them, for instance, and, you know, perhaps she engineers reconciliation
#
or tries to between Dara and Aurangzeb when Dara is serving as governor of Lahore.
#
And we get glimpses of like the sisterly relationship that she has with Aurangzeb.
#
She's always writing to him more than he writes to her.
#
She's sending him various gifts, you know, murabbas and, you know, like various like
#
So we get a sense of the human side of Aurangzeb through these affectionate letters that he
#
And we also get a sense of his grievances.
#
That also has to do with the nature of the sources, because a lot of the argument that
#
is made later on to justify Dara Shukoh's murder and Aurangzeb's accession to the throne
#
is that Dara Shukoh was really, apart from the fact that, you know, he was supposed to
#
be an infidel and so on, that Dara Shukoh was not really a good son and a good brother.
#
He was, he took over the helm of affairs from his father, he was not fair to his brothers.
#
So that could also color the kinds of sources that are later preserved and circulated that
#
show Aurangzeb to be a sensitive sibling.
#
At the same time, you know, we do get a sense, you know, that he enjoyed listening to music
#
He might have, you know, there is this album that's associated with him, like it was supposed
#
to be a stunning album of art.
#
If indeed it is found and found to be authentic, that would give us an amazing picture of his
#
own artistic sponsorship and interests when he was a prince.
#
So in these regards, he was not so different from other Mughal princes who were patrons
#
of the arts and so on, you know, they cultivated their own aesthetic side as just part of being
#
He did temper that later on, you know, partly to show himself in contrast to his brother,
#
you know, so he, there was a change, there was definitely, you know, like far less sponsorship
#
of cultural activities when he was a prince.
#
And one of the thoughts that kind of struck me while reading the book was that in one
#
curious aspect, Aurangzeb reminded me of Indira Gandhi in the sense that when Indira Gandhi
#
needed to rebrand herself and distinguish herself from the syndicate in the late 1960s,
#
she took this massive leftward turn to set herself apart because that was the only way
#
to sort of distinguish herself as a brand.
#
And it seems to me that in some ways, would it be fair to say that, you know, those could
#
be the imperatives behind Aurangzeb also moving in that more doctrinaire sort of rigid direction
#
to distinguish himself from his main rival for the throne, which was Dara Shigo and even
#
perhaps to some extent from his father.
#
So would you say that those incentives also kind of came into play?
#
Most definitely, you know, I think it took Aurangzeb a little while to fully define himself
#
by abandoning the traditions of his forebears, you know, whether it's the Jharoka darshan,
#
you know, where the emperor kind of sits and has, you know, everyone view him at this Jharoka,
#
which is an institution that Akbar really established and popularized.
#
So it took him a while, you know, it didn't all happen overnight, but there was this process
#
by which, you know, even during the struggle for succession, you can see that there are
#
some insinuations about heresy on the part of Dara Shigo.
#
And these insinuations get solidified once he becomes emperor so that he does have a
#
solid case that's built up.
#
And he then has his own very austere model of kingship that again is a departure from
#
And just thinking aloud, would it be then fair to say that wherever you have this sort
#
of a conflict, it's bound to be a polarizing one and it's bound to drive people towards
#
the extremes, like you could argue that, you know, Aurangzeb might have been not as extreme
#
as he was, but he felt the need to define himself.
#
Similarly, in modern times, if you look at Pakistan, would it be fair to say that to
#
some extent, they are shaped by their need to define themselves in opposition to what
#
Yes, you know, I think that's, that's really happening on both sides, you know, just state
#
language, for instance, the way in which the Urdu language has developed in Pakistan, official
#
It's highly Persianized.
#
There are a lot of Persian and Arabic neologisms.
#
There are many ways in which there's an attempt to look westwards, to look at West Asia, you
#
know, for cultural models as opposed to India.
#
Of course, one can't totally sort of build a wall.
#
There are still lots of commonalities and lots of cultural interactions.
#
You know, similarly with the official Hindi that is used in television and in official
#
term in India today, that these Hindi and Urdu have become two languages that are not
#
so easily mutually intelligible, for the language that people speak often falls in the middle
#
Like, I traveled through Pakistan while covering a cricket tour in 2006 and I spent a month
#
and a half there and apart from the Urdu signs, it didn't feel like I was in a foreign country
#
and the language is exactly the same and I was sort of aware of, you know, the Hindi
#
nationalism, so to say, and how Shudh Hindi is such an artificial construct and has been
#
I wasn't aware that there's a similar process happening with Urdu in Pakistan.
#
In fact, just thinking aloud, you know, when I watch Prime Minister Modi's 8pm speeches
#
and all of that and it strikes me that the kind of Hindi that he uses very deliberately
#
is that kind of Shudh Hindi which people don't speak and therefore I'm sort of kind of baffled
#
by the immense popularity because he's not actually speaking even the language of the
#
He's speaking this very Shudh Hindi which people don't speak in their everyday lives
#
from my experience, but that's an aside.
#
Kind of moving on, you know, and again earlier I spoke about how it seemed to me through
#
the book that you have sort of Tara evolving in stages where, you know, initially it felt
#
like a spiritual journey and then there's an intellectual blast to it and he writes
#
these different books and then after he comes back from his failed conquest of Kandahar,
#
there is this deeper turn and this engagement with the Indic philosophies which wasn't there
#
I mean, more specifically, the project of translating the Upanishads into Persian.
#
In fact, he even had a theory that the Upanishads were the lost book mentioned in the Quran,
#
Tell me a little bit about that phase and what do you think drove that phase because
#
it doesn't seem to be, you know, like it's been speculated that part of it was because
#
he was trying to get alliances among the Rajputs and he wanted to portray that image, but this
#
seems a bit too far to go for the sake of posturing and also the fact of the matter,
#
as you've pointed out, is that, you know, the Rajputs were equally divided in Aurangzeb's
#
camp as in Dara Shikoh's camp.
#
This is simply a post facto binary we have kind of invented.
#
So tell me a little bit about his new deepening interest into sort of the Indic philosophies.
#
So I think there are a couple of things going on here.
#
One is the deepening and widening of Dara Shikoh's own spiritual intellectual interests,
#
which come from a genuine curiosity and also a kind of restlessness.
#
So Dara Shikoh is, he feels that he has perhaps had his fill of Sufism, not, you know, not
#
in the sense that he's kind of completed, but he's already ascended these amazing spiritual
#
He's now speaking not as a disciple, but he's really speaking as a master who is giving
#
instruction on the Sufi path, and you can see seeds of his interest in Indic thought.
#
And there's already a basis for this because in Sufi writings and poetry, there is this
#
celebration of what is not Islam.
#
There's the celebration of what is called kufr, you know, or infidelity, and the celebration
#
is something that's, it's really complicated, you know, it doesn't mean that everyone has
#
to go out and just do things that are completely against religion.
#
But the poetry, certain Sufi writings give a space for this in order to really ascend
#
higher spiritual levels and metaphorically see the countenance of the beloved, you know,
#
So Dara Shikoh was already, you know, even before this, he's reaching out to other Sufi
#
You know, he's achieved what he's wanted to with the Qadavis, and his sister and his
#
father continue their relationship with them, and so does Dara, but, you know, Dara doesn't
#
You know, he writes to other people, and what he doesn't want to do is to go into the real
#
nitty gritties of philosophical Sufism, which he can, if he wants to, you know, this famous
#
Andalusian mystic, Ibn Arabi, whose very, very complex and abstruse Arabic writings
#
have been translated and commented upon in India, in the Indian subcontinent.
#
One of the most famous interpreters of Ibn Arabi is Sheikh Mahibullah El Ahabadi, with
#
whom Dara has a correspondence.
#
And Dara Shukoh wants something that's a little more transgressive and perhaps a little less
#
arduous than kind of sitting and, you know, like, understanding these really difficult
#
So he starts getting interested in Indic thought, and there's already a tradition of that, and
#
there are already several yogic ideas that have been incorporated into Chishti mysticism,
#
and you know, it could be that the Qadavis also have some association with that.
#
And then he goes even deeper.
#
So when he's coming back from Kandahar, he makes sure to stop and have dialogues with
#
a version of ascetic called Baba Lal, and he has all these dialogues.
#
So we have the results of those sessions written down, except that it doesn't seem that these
#
are really the literal transcripts, there are many different versions of this.
#
But we can see that Dara Shukoh has acquainted himself with at least the Persian translations
#
of the Ramayan and so on, and he has questions.
#
And I think he finds his dialogues with Baba Lal inspiring enough that he continues and
#
And he's already compiled a collection of the rather shocking, so transgressive ecstatic
#
sayings of Sufis, and he's included some non-Muslims in there, you know, including Baba Lal.
#
So once he's in Delhi, he starts launching out and he already has access to a lot of
#
works in the mobile library, but he wants to patronize and sponsor more.
#
And the other thing that's going on is that this is a time where both he and Aurangzeb
#
are competing to really jockey for alliances and influence amongst Rajput rulers.
#
So say there's some trouble brewing in Mewar, like both of them want to try, they want to
#
be the first ones to go there and to try to solve it, and they compete by sending their
#
envoys, Brahmin envoys, like sensitive choice and messengers.
#
And later on, on the eve of the Battle of Succession, Aurangzeb is also telling Rana
#
Raj saying, you know, I'm going to be like my illustrious forebears, I'm going to allow,
#
you know, everyone to flourish in peace with their own religions and so on.
#
So Aurangzeb is making this very, very explicit gesture towards fostering an environment of
#
And Daya Shukla is doing it in a less direct way, not that he's not interested, he is,
#
but one can't wish away this backdrop where they each try to get influence amongst the
#
And I know, you know, all the historians that I've had on my show don't like counterfactual
#
It's only, you know, non-historians who love to speculate about, you know, what would have
#
happened if this person did this and blah, blah, blah.
#
But nevertheless, given that there is such a dominant narrative around this particular
#
counterfactual, given that, you know, Ashok referred to Dara Shukla's death as the partition
#
What is your sense of what kind of an emperor he would have been if he had somehow managed
#
to win, because really his managing to win is a few lucky events here and there.
#
Like you point out how when Aurangzeb when getting rid of one of the other brothers pretended
#
he had dysentery and called him to his tent and plied him with drink.
#
Now Aurangzeb could actually have gotten dysentery and died, right, in those times.
#
So if Dara Shukla ends up as emperor, what's your brief sense?
#
I mean, you've already pointed out that he was like a sort of a co-ruler for a long time
#
by Shah Jahan's side and wouldn't have been very different from Aurangzeb because he would
#
have followed the imperatives of politics and he would have had to kill all his brothers.
#
Probably I think in the book you mentioned that when his son Suleiman is chasing his
#
brother Shuja across the border, he tells him, bring me back his head, something to
#
So all of that would have happened.
#
But in terms of the Indian subcontinent, would it have made a difference or would the larger
#
currents of history have continued going more or less the way they did?
#
So it's a difficult question.
#
Now, of course, one thing to keep in mind is that when the war of succession broke out,
#
Shah Jahan was ill, he was possibly severely ill.
#
I actually had a well-known medical specialist from Yale kind of give me his take on what
#
Shah Jahan's illness might have been, but he survives, he survives for many years after
#
So Dara would not have been an official ruler right away, though he would have been a kind
#
of co-ruler, a proxy ruler along with his father.
#
So I think perhaps that period of time would have also helped him learn the ropes better
#
He would have tried to be a sacred ruler in the model, again, of his forebears, in the
#
In terms of the broader structural problems of the mobile empire, whether what Irfan Habib
#
has termed the agrarian crisis, the very costly Deccan expansions, for instance, the other
#
foreign adventures that Shah Jahan liked to fund.
#
So these were all serious issues, and it's hard to see how Dara Shoko might have prevented
#
I think you've spoken a lot about your book, and I'll leave it to readers to read it for
#
And of course, I highly recommend it.
#
Let's move on to what you're working on now.
#
The book was finished a while back, and of course, there is that whole release cycle
#
and you have to go around promoting it and all of that.
#
But what are you working on now, what preoccupies you?
#
I'm working on a book that, in some indirect ways, is a sequel to this, except that it's
#
not about Aurangzeb, and it's more a history of ideas than a biography of one particular
#
But the reason why it's connected to this book is because part of the idea starts by
#
seeing what happens to Dara Shoko's writings, and that's something that I hint in the epilogue.
#
So Aurangzeb did do his best to efface traces of Dara Shoko, he didn't succeed completely,
#
and later rulers and writers did try to complete the work.
#
But what we see, if we look at the manuscripts and circulation of Persian manuscripts, is
#
that there were lots and lots of people making out copies of Dara Shoko's writings, circulating
#
and reading them, and a lot of these happened to be Hindus.
#
Even Aurangzeb, and even during Aurangzeb, we just see growing numbers of Hindus who
#
were literate in Persian.
#
So these came to form part of a socially privileged elite administrative class.
#
There were often certain castes that we see that predominated, Kayas, Khatris, certain
#
They were using Persian just like elite Indians use English today.
#
English is seen as the passport to success, to a shot at a good middle-class, upper-middle-class
#
life, social mobility, and at the same time, there are certain groups who are learning
#
I mean, there's not all that much mobility, the elites are reproducing themselves.
#
And that's sort of what we see in the 17th and 18th centuries, but we see these growing
#
numbers of Hindus who come to be part of the vast local bureaucracy, again Aurangzeb expanded
#
the bureaucracy, and these Hindus are looking for ways in which to access their sacred texts.
#
And not all of them are Brahmins, and many of them don't know any Sanskrit, they might
#
be, of course, conversant in Hindavi and various early forms of Hindi and so on.
#
And they read in Persian, and they write in Persian, and many of them are reading and
#
writing Dara Shukla's works, and they're also writing, producing their own works.
#
They're producing their own religious texts in Persian.
#
And these people come to be the intermediaries at the time of British colonialism.
#
So we have the British winning the battle of Plassey, trying to expand their hold over
#
And they also, they want to learn about the peoples over which they rule, they want to
#
divide laws, and so on, to apply and use in their courts.
#
And initially, Brahmins are reluctant to teach them Sanskrit, and they find people to teach
#
Persian is the first language that they use for governing.
#
So there is this whole class of munchies and translators, literatures, who are either tutors
#
to colonial officials or informants to them, who are telling them about Indian customs
#
and Indian religions, and this is what Hinduism is all about.
#
And part of this is being shaped just by what colonial sponsors and patrons want to learn,
#
and part of this is being shaped by what these informants are telling them.
#
So there is this collaborative process that is creating a huge, huge body of work in Persian
#
that is about religion in India.
#
And what's the impact of this work?
#
So the impact of this is it's shaping colonial policy.
#
It's also shaping how Hindus, in this case, are presenting themselves and thinking about
#
So it's in dialogue with other broader trends that are taking place that would have taken
#
place in the 18th century, regardless of colonialism.
#
And it's also influenced by the kinds of things that colonial officials wanted to learn, and
#
it's creating new centers of patronage, competing centers.
#
So for instance, in the 18th century, we have Delhi being sacked, there are numerous attacks.
#
Of course, there are various Afghan attacks on Delhi, there are the Marathas.
#
And then we have centers that are further east, that are really gaining in prominence
#
and in cultural vibrancy, whether it's Fezabad or Lucknow or Benares.
#
The population of Benares becomes double that of Delhi.
#
We have Calcutta and so on.
#
So we have all these centers that are becoming centers of patronage, and these are becoming
#
hubs of Persian literature.
#
Like Benares, which we associate with Sanskrit, and Sanskrit learning also becomes a hub of
#
Persian, partly because of the Eastern India Company and their interest in the region.
#
And we have all these Hindus, this network of Hindus who are traveling, who are producing
#
And to me, this is an interesting angle on the prehistory of later developments.
#
So it's often been neglected because it's the historians of the Mughal period of what's
#
called medieval Indian history, but what we also call the early modern period, who tend
#
And often historians of the modern period tend to look at sources in other languages,
#
get not hard and fast rules, but these are the trends.
#
So I wanted to see what certain elite Hindus were reading and writing, because I wanted
#
to look at the history and trajectory of certain ideas.
#
The idea of universalism, for instance, or the idea that there is a core monotheistic
#
essence to religion, no matter what you call it.
#
Some people called it Sanatana Dharam, some people just called it religion, or the essence
#
So it's the evolution of Hinduism into something that was stripped down, universal, that had
#
its roots in Mughal Indology, and that also becomes seen as the cultural matrix of India.
#
And I find that Persian and other sources are really an interesting lens through which
#
Would it then be the case that this sort of stripping down of Hinduism or getting to
#
broad core principles and all of that is happening partly because of the language?
#
Is the language shaping the content?
#
Is the fact that this is a bunch of Brahmans who are speaking and writing in what is essentially
#
till that point a foreign language?
#
Does it change the nature of the content that is being produced?
#
Is it more universal and say less insular than the content that might otherwise be produced
#
at that time in Sanskrit or Hindavi or whatever the local languages are?
#
That's an interesting question.
#
And I find that there are ways in which the language definitely shapes what's being produced.
#
There are certain texts that are just more receptive to translation, but it doesn't entirely
#
So we do have a lot of Advaitic texts that are being subplated, but this isn't only happening
#
So what's happening in Persian also mirrors what is happening in Hindavi.
#
So we have this whole series of Brajbhasha translations of Advaitic texts that become
#
So we have a kind of vernacularization of Vedanta, and Persian is contributing to and mirroring
#
But all of this is laying the groundwork for Vedanta being seen as the kind of essence
#
So we have the popularization of Vedanta that is taking place, and Persian is a major driver
#
And I don't know to what extent Persian is being seen as a foreign language, by some
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perhaps, but by others, they are very, very comfortable with it, just like English, for
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Yeah, that's what I was going to say, much as English is very much an Indian language
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today, so no one should complain about words like preporn.
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And question I'll ask about this project then, I mean, it sounds incredibly fascinating,
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and I wasn't aware that Persian was so widely used within the subcontinent by people who
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weren't part of the empire per se.
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But then what's a broad aha moment there?
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What drove you to the project, and what excited you about it?
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Well, one of the things that drove me to this is when you look at figures who seem to be
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really key to the evolution of modern Hindu thought, like Radha Ramahun Roy, you know,
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his initial writings, his initial book, the Tawafatul Mawahideen, is in Persian, you know,
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with an Arabic introduction.
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It was initially written in Persian, you know, I found that that work is in dialogue with
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the writings of various other Hindus and Muslims, you know, people who considered themselves
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kind of so free thinkers, but who were very also not shaped by the colonial context, who
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were resident in Banaras, and he's supposed to have traveled to Banaras.
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So I find that it definitely gives an interesting window onto this.
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One of the ways in which I'm personally interested in the study is that amongst scholars of the
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field, there is this perennial debate about Hinduism.
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And this is something that, you know, no doubt would seem really shocking to many people
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in India, or people who might consider themselves Hindus.
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And the debate is really about whether Hinduism, of course, the English term Hinduism is something
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that's pretty modern, you know, from the 18th century.
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Is this something that was really shaped and formed under colonial rule?
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Or is this something that existed earlier?
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You know, there are some scholars of colonialism who are using this not as a way to critique
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Indian religions per se, but as a way of critiquing colonialism, showing how the colonial authorities
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tried to reshape religions, erect strict boundaries around communities, formed these really as
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kind of racialized communities and attributed to them, you know, in essence.
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So some of this might have been done in a slightly more admiring fashion.
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Other part of this project might have been done in a more denigrating fashion.
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We have we have orientalists who admired aspects of what they studied.
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We have others who thought this was all just terrible.
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And there is one argument that is really strongly in favor of the colonial construction of Hinduism.
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And those who study the pre-modern period find that no matter what you study, you can
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always find some early antecedents for this.
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You can find antecedents for a kind of Hindu consolidation.
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If you study Indian philosophy, for instance, there's a consolidation of the aspects, you
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know, against the aspects, for instance, you know, well, why did this happen?
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You know, it's not something that's very immediately apparent, but, you know, it could be that
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having Muslim rulers or an Islamic presence indirectly kind of nudged a unification or
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a consolidation of these philosophical schools.
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So it's a perennial question that people are debating.
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And one of the actual links between the pre-colonial and the colonial period is Persian, because
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that's a bridged language and a whole kind of view on a cultural world that we find operating
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seamlessly through the transition from pre-colonial to colonial rule.
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There's a fascinating book about this called, I think, The Truth About Us by Sanjay Chakraborty.
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And I also discussed it with Manu Pillay in an old episode where, yeah, I mean, the broad
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sense that I had of this period of time and how or what we know as Hinduism as a concept
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came about was that, look, the British land up in India and they don't understand the
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They don't understand anything.
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They want to make sense of a complex world.
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They need a simple narrative.
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Their early interlocutors are these upper caste Brahmans who give them their version
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of what how society is structured and the Varna system is very much part of that.
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And that kind of one sided view, it forms a convenient narrative through which you view
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this exotic land and begin to navigate, you know, Indian society.
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And that becomes the narrative.
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And oddly enough, this mistaken narrative by, you know, our colonial rulers becomes
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the narrative that then seeps into all of our culture and gets widely accepted.
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And regardless of what the intent might be of the British, whether this was a deliberate
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way and it played into the divide and rule or whether it was unwitting and they were
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just trying to what the hell makes sense of the world, how else could they do it?
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You know, but it strikes me while you were speaking just now that intellectual histories
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of a period like that must be way more complex than this period because there are, again,
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so many languages in play and, you know, I had no idea that Persian was such a big part
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And is the Persian literature of the time then also playing a part in narratives like
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this being built and propagated?
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In the 18th century, there was more Persian being produced in India than in Iraq.
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Again, you're absolutely right, it's hard to do justice to all the different languages.
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You know, there was, again, there was development and innovation in Sanskrit as well.
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You know, there's one narrative that Sanskrit kind of like dies out, there's nothing much
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new that's done in it, but scholars have shown that the 18th century, far from being a kind
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of a period of darkness and dissolution, was really a period of great cultural vibrancy
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at the time of political crisis and turmoil also, partly perhaps as a result of that.
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Persian is one aspect of it, and what I find that even after the colonial government abandons
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it as an official language and abandons some of its earlier interest in Orientalism and
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producing scholarship on India, they kind of, you know, this is like more of the Macaulay
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influence that we see popping up, it doesn't really die.
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We have these generations of people who are educated in Persian, they learn Persian because
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they also want to get jobs in the colonial administration, and then they find it doesn't
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quite serve them as well, but they're producing these books.
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And with the growth of the Hindu public sphere, you have a lot of reformists who are translating
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these Persian works into Urdu, because now Urdu is what is more commonly understood and
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these languages still don't have the kind of communal charges that they have today.
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So again, Urdu, though there was beginnings of the Urdu-Hindu controversy in the 19th
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century, it doesn't always play out that way, you know, in Punjab, for instance, loads of
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Hindus were learning Urdu, and part of the education policy meant that Urdu really continued
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So we have people who are proto-Arya samajis, proto-part of groups, the Sanatana Dharam
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We have debates with each other, and these debates are in a very personalized register
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of Urdu, and they're debating and talking about things that we really get into trouble
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for, if we were to debate or talk about these things today in India, but they're doing that.
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There's just reams of really fascinating literature that would otherwise be ignored.
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And some of these intellectual currents that you're exploring, is it also driven by what
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is happening in modern times?
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Because you know, both what you're talking about now and the whole Dharashiko book is
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very resonant with the sort of debates that are taking place today, are different sort
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of ideas of ourselves, so to say.
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So is all of this driven by that and made more vivid, and is that history, are the writings
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of that time made more vivid for you because of sort of the world around us?
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Yeah, so I would say that, of course, when I started on this path, we were not in our
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current political scenario at all, so that wasn't my initial impetus, but you know, definitely,
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how can, you know, we are shaped by our current times that affects how we view the past.
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So it's, I'd say it's very, very difficult to step out of that.
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You know, there's some more, of course, profound questions that I have that I didn't have when
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I initially started on this path, which is, you know, of course, the ecological catastrophe
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in one's thinking of what is really worth studying now, you know, with the anthropocene
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with this ecological crisis, you know, what, like, what should we be doing with our lives?
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What kinds of history are worth reading and talking about?
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But I think it's not, you know, apart from the actual topic, I think just the very practice
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of reading critically, interrogating, debating, discussing are incredibly important things
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that we need to just keep doing, I'd say.
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I can agree with you more.
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Thank you so much for coming on the show, Supriya, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to your nearest bookstore online
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or offline, probably online, and pick up The Emperor Who Never Was, Dara Shikoh in Mughal
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India by Supriya Gandhi, magnificent storytelling, and it'll give you a much better sense of
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the era that it covers.
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Supriya doesn't seem to be on social media, but you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma,
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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And hey, what if you hadn't listened?
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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