Later, he went to a top college in Delhi and eventually joined a corporate house as a management trainee. His career graph was pretty much okay, but he drew a complete blank on the relationship front.
When he was 25, his aunt found him a bride. I used to wonder if marriage was a good idea for him. But it worked. His wife was a remarkable woman with an above average understanding of human psychology: something I learnt only last year when we met after many years. I was quite surprised to see the changes in my friend. His stammer had disappeared and he was much more outgoing.
I asked his wife how she engineered this magical transformation. The loss of his mother at such a tender age hit him hard. He knew life, but never felt it. I just picked it up from where his mother had left. I realized in the first year of marriage that I would have to be a wife and mother at the same time.
Once he trusted me, it became all easy. My friend was surely lucky, but not everyone is. The mighty Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir lost his mother when he was Empress Mumtaz Mahal, history says, loved all her children equally. She had to part with both her sons Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb in when Shah Jahan, then Shahzada Khurram, had unsuccessfully rebelled against his father, Emperor Jahangir, and had to give up his two sons as imperial hostages. Later, in , when the mother was united with her sons, she had wept for hours holding them.
Shah Jahan gave lofty titles, such as Bulund Iqbal, to Dara, but treated Aurangzeb with contempt, almost. This prince, growing up without the care of his mother, was always kept far away from Delhi and Agra. That must have affected his psychology, and influenced his future dealings with his brothers.
That makes us wonder if Aurangzeb would have been a different man had he not faced so many upsets in his personal life, if his mom was around always to guide him. In the Indian situation, that pejorative expression may be used for most men.
The mother does not tolerate the intruder who wants to control her boy; the wife feels frustrated when her man turns to his mother and not her for advice. This centuries-old power game has forever acted as fodder for saas-bahu soaps.
One of my friends walked out on her husband for his failure to rein in his mother. Hers was a love marriage, but after marriage, there was no love lost between the two most powerful ladies in the house. She wanted him to relocate to another city, as she needed privacy; he said he would die if he were to be separated from his family. He never wanted to grow up. A man cannot live like a boy after marriage.
He should be responsible to his wife. Aurangzeb tried to stem the growing independence of the different parts of his empire by returning to autocratic rule. He abandoned the policy of separation of religion and state and turned away from the policy of religious tolerance that during the previous three generations had kept Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others together in peace and common destiny.
In he executed the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur because of his refusal to convert to Islam. The Sikh rebellion that followed continued throughout Aurangzeb's reign; relations between Sikhs and Muslims have been strained ever since.
In Aurangzeb reintroduced the jizya, a poll tax for non-Muslims that had been abolished by Akbar the Great a century earlier. The result was a revolt of the Hindu Rajputs, supported by Aurganzeb's third son Akbar, in - In the south of the empire the Maratha kingdom was conquered and broken up and its ruler Sambhaji executed in , which started a long and exhausting guerilla campaign by the Maratha Hindu population.
The ongoing struggles placed severe strain on the empire's finances, and increased taxation led to several peasant revolts, often but not always under the guise of religious movements. At Aurangzeb's death the empire was larger than before but severely weakened.
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