Shah Jahan with Dara Shikoh, Mughal Prince, Muslim Scholar
Translated Upnishad called Sirr-i-Akbar with help of Banarsi
Pandit, Falcon in Hand, Falconry, MNH
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Dara Shikoh, Emperor Shah Jahan´s son and brother of the much hated
Aurangazeb, believed that the mystical traditions of both Hinduism
and Islam spoke of the same truth. Unlike Aurangazeb, whose
spiritual and religious views were fundamentalist, Dara Shikoh, who
was a follower of the Qadiri order of Sufis and a disciple of Miyan
Mir, devoted much of his time to the study of ancient Indian
spirituality along with Islamic traditions and felt that the search
for God was one all over the world and at all times. In his search
for truth, Dara Shikoh tried to find the common ground between
Upanishadic and Islamic spirituality believing that there was no
need for spiritual traditions to live in isolation from each other
and their mingling could produce a tradition that is healthier than
either.
As the eldest son of Shah Jahan, and as the emperor´s and his wife
Mumtaz Mahal´s favorite, the Mughal empire should have gone to him.
But that was not to be, mostly due to the ambitions of the younger
Aurangazeb. There were continuous power struggles among the royal
brothers and much of Dara´s time was spent in these struggles and
the battles that they lead to. In the middle of it all, though, he
amazingly found time to pursue his quest for the common mystical
heritage of Hinduism and Islam, particularly as taught by the
Sufis. He believed that what is referred to in the Quran as Kitab
al-Maknun [The Hidden Book] is actually the Upanishads. It was
inspired by this belief that he spent whatever time he could find
in translating the Upanishads into Persian, with the help of
several pundits of Banaras. His translation of the Upanishads is
appropriately called Sirr-i-Akbar, ´The Greatest Secret.´ Before
Sirr-i-Akbar he had written several other books, the most famous of
which is Majma ul-Bahrain [´The Mingling of Two Oceans´], an
independent work devoted to discovering the affinities between
Vedantic and Sufi perceptions of the Ultimate Truth.
However, the spiritual stand that Dara who hated the rigidity of
religious fundamentalists took did not go well with Aurangazeb who
had by then managed to come up in the struggle for the throne and
had all the power of the empire firmly in his hands. Partly because
of his fundamentalist faith and partly from political compulsions,
he called for a council of nobles and clergy to decide the fate of
Dara Shikoh - and the council promptly declared Dara Shikoh a
threat to public peace and a traitor to Islam, exactly as
Aurangazeb had desired. Dara was put to death on the night of
August 30, 1659.
While it is certain that Indian history would have taken a
different turn had Dara, who was in the middle of all literary,
spiritual, and intellectual movements of his time, come into power
instead of Aurangazeb, many people of the past shared the belief
that the end of the Mughal empire in India came because of the
curse of killing Dara Shikoh and the great Sufi sage and Persian
poet Sarmad, whose disciple Dara Shikoh had become towards the end
of his life.
Dara Shikoh completed his translation of fifty-two Upanishads in
1657, two years before he was executed. Such was his devotion to
the goal he had set for himself, discovering the common ground
between Hindu and Islamic spiritual traditions, that in order to do
the work, he learnt Sanskrit. Apart from the Upanishads, Dara had,
with help from Sanskrit scholars, translated into Persian two other
classics of Indian spirituality - the Bhagavad-Gita and the Yoga
Vasishtha.
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