If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb was harmony, why does Kashi's Nandi still wait?

Some myths are so beautiful that people stop asking whether they are true.

As I sat down to write the second part of my series on the Timurids, a dynasty still persistently and wrongly called the Mughals, a WhatsApp message arrived carrying a recent Scroll article claiming that Jahangir sought to reconcile Vedanta with Islam. I read it carefully and could only smile. The reason for that smile will become clear soon enough.

This essay concerns one of the most fashionable phrases in modern Indian historiography: Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. It is invoked as a golden age when faiths embraced, cultures mingled, and the wounds of conquest dissolved into a shared civilisation. Curiously, this renewed celebration arrives alongside the 500th anniversary of the First Battle of Panipat (1526), remembered as the foundation of an empire but seldom as one of the earliest recorded instances of an invading army using Indian villagers as human shields.

The expression Ganga-Jamuni traditionally referred to mixtures and alloys, gold and silver, copper and brass, even mixed grains and lentils. Only in the twentieth century was tehzeeb attached to the phrase, transforming it into a symbol of a supposedly syncretic culture associated with the Sultanate, Timurid, and Nawabi eras.

Yet before we surrender ourselves to the romance of this narrative, a question must be asked: was Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly a confluence of rivers, or has history draped the wounds of conquest in the silk robes of nostalgia?

For even today, one of its most enduring monuments stands in Kashi. Nandi still waits for his Shiva, his gaze fixed upon the spot where the sanctum once stood. Centuries have passed, Timurids have crumbled, yet the faithful bull continues his silent vigil, looking towards what later generations were taught to call a fountain.

Perhaps that is the most fitting metaphor for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb itself.

A civilisation watched temples fall, sacred spaces transformed, and memories renamed. Then it was told that this was harmony. That conquest was accommodation. That loss was synthesis.

And so, before celebrating the flowers floating upon the river, it may be worth asking what became of the ashes carried beneath its waters.

My concern in this essay is only with the Samarkandis, as I prefer to call the Timurids for reasons explained in the earlier essay, and whether this celebrated Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb truly existed in their realm.

This is the second of a three-part series. You can read the first article of the series, The Samarkand Syndrome: Why Babur and family never became 'us', here.

Let us go back to that WhatsApp message, and begin with our lover boy Salim, better known as Jahangir, whose interactions with the Vedantic philosopher Jadrup Gosain were highlighted in the Scroll article as evidence of syncretism. But can a handful of meetings really sustain such a sweeping claim?

According to the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir met Jadrup only a few times. During these encounters, he interpreted aspects of Vedanta through an Islamic lens and even remarked that Vedanta contained many ideas similar to Islam. That observation itself suggests he misunderstood Vedanta largely, filtering it through familiar categories rather than engaging with it on its own terms.

Yet let us leave aside what Jahangir understood or misunderstood about Vedanta. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri reveals a more telling reality. For all his fondness for wine, conversation, and occasional reflections on virtue, a Hindu daughter could enter a Muslim household only after abandoning her gods and embracing Shari’a. Conversion was the price of admission to the emperor's notion of "harmony".

If she refused, her fate would be different. She could be reduced to the status of a concubine, a silent presence in the imperial harem, her faith and dignity sacrificed at the altar of accommodation. Such arrangements may be described as coexistence, but they rested upon a hierarchy where adjustment flowed in only one direction.

But the idea of a Muslim daughter crossing the threshold of a Hindu home? Astaghfirullah! A blasphemy so grave that it invited not acceptance, but punishment. Jahangir himself thundered in the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri:

"They ally themselves with Hindus, and both give and take girls. Taking them is good, but giving them, Allah forbid! I gave an order that, hereafter, they should not do such things, and whoever was guilty of them, should be capitally punished."

This, then, was the Timurid model of coexistence. Hindu women could be absorbed into Muslim households, but the reverse was treated as an affront to both religion and empire. Muslim honour was a fortress; Hindu society, a field open to penetration.

To portray Jahangir as inherently syncretic on the basis of a few philosophical conversations is a scam. Intellectual curiosity toward another tradition does not erase the larger pattern of conduct reflected in imperial decrees and court records.

And what of the supposedly benevolent Shah Jahan? He, too, walked in the footsteps of his father. This brings us to the curious case of Dalpat.

In the 10th year of his reign, a man named Dalpat of Sirhind married a Muslim woman named Zinab, renamed her Ganga, and raised their children as Hindus. Worse still, from the imperial perspective, he reconverted one Muslim boy and six Muslim girls to Hinduism.

Shah Jahan's response was swift and unforgiving. Dalpat's wife and children were separated from him, and he was presented with a choice that was often imitated as justice in medieval chronicles: embrace Islam or embrace death. Dalpat chose the sword over surrender, becoming the offering at the altar of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

But why stop at regulating marriages? Shah Jahan, never one for half-measures, decreed that apostasy itself was a capital crime. Conversion from Hinduism was celebrated as a triumph of faith; conversion away from Islam invited the executioner's blade. The road into Islam was open and the road out of it led to the scaffold.

When his son Shuja assumed the governorship of Kabul, he carried this orthodoxy beyond the Indus. The domains of Sankar (ruler of the land) were subdued by force. Sixteen of his sons and dependents were converted, contributing to a reported tally of more than five thousand new adherents. Temples were transformed into mosques, and those who attempted to return to their former faith found little mercy awaiting them.

The rebellion of Jujhar Singh (Bundela ruler of Orchha) followed a similar pattern. Post defeat, his sons and grandsons were recast under new identities as Imam Quli and Ali Quli. His eldest son, Udai Bhan, refused conversion and chose death instead. A younger brother, still a child, too was absorbed into Islam. The women of the household, confronting the realities of conquest, chose self-immolation over captivity.

The conquest of Beglana (around present-day Dhule and Nashik districts in Maharashtra) unfolded at the same rhythm. Naharji's son was renamed Daulatmand after his conversion, while Nasrat Jang forcibly converted a Brahmin boy, only to be repaid with a dagger in the darkness, a final act of resistance from one who had lost everything else.

Even when armies rested, the coercive power of the state remained active. Blasphemy became a crime carrying the gravest consequences. Hindus accused of insulting the Quran were executed. A Brahmin named Ghhaila, a qanungo of Berar, met the same fate for remarks deemed offensive to the Prophet.

Let us now turn to perhaps the most famous of all supposed symbols of this cultural synthesis: the legend of Jodha Bai.

The story has become so deeply embedded in popular imagination that many accept it as unquestioned fact. Yet the historical foundations are remarkably fragile. Neither the Ain-i-Akbari nor the Akbarnama of Abu'l-Fazl mentions a Rajput queen named Jodha Bai. The name emerges much later in the writings of James Tod, whose Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan often blended folklore, bardic tradition, and historical reconstruction.

The legal framework of the empire rested firmly upon Shari'a. A formal nikah with a non-Muslim woman required her acceptance of Islam. This was not a matter of sentiment but of law. No woman, regardless of lineage or political importance, could attain the status of Malika-e-Hindustan without first entering the fold of Islam.

The woman later identified as Jodha Bai appears in the sources as Mariam-uz-Zamani. Before her marriage to Akbar, she entered Islam and thereafter lived under her Islamic title. Her burial was conducted according to Islamic rites, and her tomb near Sikandra stands as a monument to the identity under which she lived and died.

More broadly, no Hindu princess who entered the Timurid zenana is known to have retained her public Hindu identity. These unions were rarely romantic tales of civilisational fusion, as Bollywood and intellectuals often tried to present. They were political arrangements shaped by the realities of theological power.

So desperate has the search for Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb become that some now seek its reflection even in the life of Aurangzeb. The usual defence follows: Hindu nobles in his court, Hindu generals in his armies, and occasional grants to temples.

Yes, Aurangzeb employed a number of Hindus in his administration for certain periods. But that fact, by itself, proves very little. Empires are not sustained by ideology alone; they are sustained by revenue, manpower, and political necessity. Even the most intolerant regimes in history have often relied upon members of the very communities they discriminated against. Do check the case of Hitler.

The notion that even a bigoted medieval autocrat like Aurangzeb would govern a vast empire populated overwhelmingly by kafirs (as he repeatedly described non-Muslims) without strategically accommodating at least a section of them, defies both logic and statecraft. Yet, as his reign matured, its court grew increasingly dominated by Muslim elites, many of them foreign-born, further distancing the ruling establishment from the people and land it governed.

One of the most frequently cited examples of his supposed tolerance is the famous Farman issued to Abul Hasan, the faujdar of Varanasi, on 28 February 1659. In this order, Aurangzeb directed that old temples should not be demolished, while simultaneously prohibiting the construction of new ones. This document is routinely displayed as evidence of a tolerant — inclusive; and yet another ruler representing Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb. Yet a closer look at the circumstances surrounding it reveals something rather different.

The year was 1659. Aurangzeb had only recently secured the Timurid throne after a brutal war of succession. Dara Shukoh had been defeated, and on 5 January 1659, at Khajua, Aurangzeb crushed another rival, his brother Shuja. The defeated prince fled eastward towards Kashi.

At that moment, Kashi was not merely a sacred city. It was a strategically important centre whose population could potentially provide shelter, intelligence, or sympathy to a fleeing claimant to the throne. Barely weeks after Khajua came the famous Farman.

The message behind it was unmistakable: pacify the local Hindu population, prevent any alignment with Shuja, and tighten the net around a dangerous rival.

Sir Jadunath Sarkar saw through the political calculations with characteristic clarity. Referring to this order, he wrote that the Farman "had been issued during Aurangzeb's struggle with Shuja just by way of a political move to win, for the time being, the good will and co-operation of the Hindus for capturing Shuja and had nothing to do with his spirit of toleration".

The document itself raises an obvious question. If Aurangzeb's purpose was genuine religious tolerance, why did he simultaneously forbid the construction of new temples? A ruler committed to syncretism does not merely preserve existing shrines while preventing future ones from being built. Such a policy speaks of a calculated restraint.

The chronology, too, tells a lot. The Battle of Khajua took place on 5 January 1659. The Farman followed on 28 February 1659. The two events are separated by barely 54 days. This is not a distant and speculative connection of the kind sometimes invoked to explain away temple demolitions years after the fact. Here the political context and the imperial order stand virtually side by side.

And if one seeks testimony from someone outside modern ideological battles, consider the words of the Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci, who spent much of his life in India and observed the Timurid world from close quarters. In Storia do Mogor he wrote:

"The latter [Aurangzeb], rid of a rajah [Raja Jai Singh] whose influence might have been dangerous to his kingdom, declared that very hour an open war against Hinduism. He sent orders at once for the destruction of the fine temple called Lalta, in the neighbourhood of Dihli. He also ordered every viceroy and governor to destroy all the temples within his jurisdiction.”

Whether one accepts every detail of Manucci's account or not, it remains difficult to reconcile such descriptions with the modern portrayal of Aurangzeb as a misunderstood apostle of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with many contemporary attempts to rehabilitate him and others. Every act of temple destruction is explained away as political necessity, yet every temporary act of restraint is celebrated as evidence of tolerance. Political context is eagerly invoked when it softens his image, but quietly ignored when it exposes the limits of his supposed pluralism. Read together, Aurangzeb's Farmans, the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, court newsletters, and contemporary testimonies reveal a ruler who repeatedly viewed Hindu institutions through the prism of Islamic supremacy, occasionally tempering ideology only when political expediency demanded it.

And perhaps that is where the larger question of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb must be confronted. If this celebrated ideal truly represented a relationship of mutual respect and cultural reciprocity, why must its defenders rely so heavily on exceptions while treating episodes of persecution, coercion, and destruction as inconvenient footnotes?

Before taking leave of Aurangzeb, one final irony deserves mention. It was under his reign that music itself was officially banished from the imperial court. The ruler who is today enlisted as evidence of composite culture presided over one of the most severe assaults on a tradition that had long enriched the cultural life of Hindustan.

And before I bring this essay on Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb to a close, allow me to leave you with a chilling anecdote.

Whenever the phrase is invoked, we are shown paintings of Akbar or Jahangir celebrating Holi. These scenes are endlessly reproduced as proof of a harmonious age where cultures merged like the waters of the Ganga and Yamuna. Yet there exists another Holi from the Timurid era, one that seldom finds a place in these romantic narratives.

The year was 1568. Akbar had laid siege to Chittor for four relentless months. Following the fall of Jaimal, the eve of Holi witnessed hundreds of Rajput women and girls entering the flames of Jauhar, choosing death over slavery to Mlecchas (as addressed by Indians back then). Then came the morning of Holi itself. Contemporary accounts record the massacre of roughly 30,000 civilians after the fort fell. Akbar celebrated it as a triumph of Islam over the kafirs.

For whenever I hear of the Holi supposedly shared between the Timurids and their subjects, my mind does not wander to painted miniatures of emperors playing with colours. It returns instead to Chittor. To the smoke rising from Jauhar pyres. To the cries of a city facing annihilation. To a Holi where the red that covered the land did not come from gulal, but from blood.

If Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb is to be discussed honestly, it must be remembered in its entirety: the courtly festivals and the conquered fortresses, the poetry and the pyres, the celebrations and the massacres. For history ceases to be history when it remembers only the flowers floating upon the river and forgets the ashes carried by its waters.

In memory of those ashes, and the countless brave men and women who became them, I now rest my keyboard.

This is the second of a three-part Opinion series. You can read the first article of the series, The Samarkand Syndrome: Why Babur and family never became 'us', here.

(Aabhas Maldahiyar is the author of Babur: The Quest for Hindustan.)