Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi has been booked in Maharashtra for contesting the popular culture portrayal of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as anti-Hindu and cruel.
Asked about the blockbuster film Chhaava, based on the life of 17th-century Maratha ruler Chhatrapati Sambhaji who was executed by Aurangzeb, Azmi told reporters outside the Maharashtra Assembly on Monday: “Wrong history is being shown. Aurangzeb, Rahmatullah (one who is in Allah’s mercy), got many temples made. In Benaras, when one of his soldiers wanted to marry the daughter of a pandit, he got him crushed by an elephant. The pandits built a mosque for him there.”
When reporters asked Azmi, the president of the Maharashtra unit of the SP, if he didn’t think of Aurangzeb as a “cruel ruler” for executing Sambhaji, he replied: “I do not at all consider Aurangzeb a cruel ruler…. The kings back then used to struggle for power and property, but it was not Hindus versus Muslims.”
Chhatrapati Shivaji and his son Sambhaji are revered in Maharashtra. The Vicky Kaushal-starrer Chhaava, while being critically acclaimed and commercially successful, has found itself in the middle of a Right-wing communal drive. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently praised the film.
Azmi, who has frequently made controversial and misogynistic remarks in the past, iterated and expanded on his statements in subsequent bytes to TV channels, insisting that he was stating historical facts and meant no disrespect to Maratha rulers.
He has been booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Sections 299 (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings by insulting religion or religious beliefs), 302 (uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings) and 356(1) and 356(2) that relate to defamation.
The FIR has been registered at Marine Drive police station and involves an MLA of the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena, which is part of the ruling Mahayuti helmed by the BJP.
Deputy chief minister Shinde said: “His (Azmi’s) statement is wrong and should be condemned. Aurangzeb tortured Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj for 40 days. Calling such a person good is the biggest sin. Abu Azmi should apologise. Our CM has taken this matter seriously. He (Azmi) should be charged with treason.”
The Assembly was adjourned on Tuesday with BJP and Shiv Sena members demanding Azmi’s expulsion and prosecution for “treason”. Opposition Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MLAs also joined the chorus.
Aurangzeb Wikimedia Commons
The SP left the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi after the Assembly polls last year, citing the eulogising of the Babri Masjid demolition by MLAs of the Uddhav faction of the Sena.
Naresh Mhaske, the Shinde Sena MLA who has complained against Azmi, said the SP leader had “no right to stay in India”. BJP leader Navneet Rana called for Aurangzeb’s tomb in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district to be demolished. The district was earlier named Aurangabad, after Aurangzeb. In 2022, the then Aghadi government rechristened the district.
On Tuesday, Azmi attempted to pacify his detractors, saying: “If my statement has hurt people, I take it back. I have never spoken ill of great leaders (such as Sambhaji). It would be an injustice to the people of Maharashtra to stop Assembly proceedings over this issue. I take back my statement.”
In an interview to The Telegraph in 2018, Aurangzeb’s biographer Audrey Truschke, a historian at the Rutgers University in the US, had said: “And the reason people believe it (the representation of Aurangzeb as a Hindu baiter) is because it does have a scholarly basis. But a major point of that (scholarship) was to make the British look better. The other reason is it serves modern-day purposes. The villainisation of Aurangzeb, projecting him to be this Islamic bigot, is bad history but it is a good storyline if you are trying to achieve Hindu rashtra.”
Heramb Chaturvedi, former head of Allahabad University’s history department and author of several books on the Mughals, told this newspaper on Tuesday: “If Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of temples, he also conferred grants on many temples, including those to Someshwar Mahadev Arail, the Balaji temple in Chitrakoot, the Mahakal temple in Ujjain and the temples in Bagambari and Varanasi’s Jangambari. To the Balaji temple, he not only conferred a grant but also gave revenue-free land. The edict says that this was for the continuous burning of ghee lamps so prayers could be offered for the perpetuation and prosperity of the empire.”
Asked about Azmi’s comments and the actions taken against him, Chaturvedi said: “Colonial historiography gave rise to communal historiography and this accentuated after the 1857 uprising as the British realised that they could not remain here if Hindus and Muslims came together. If there is a call today to reject colonial history, then we should not go back to this communal historiography.”
Shivaji Sawant’s novel Chhaava, on which the film is based, gives a nuanced understanding of the multi-faceted Sambhaji beyond the popular folklore of his military exploits. Critics say the film has remained true to the novel — a product of the reformist and egalitarian post-Independence historiography of Maharashtra.
The release of the film has also led to another controversy in Maharashtra with historian Indrajit Sawant being threatened after he cited French records that it was a Brahmin clerk, and not a landlord, who betrayed Sambhaji to the Mughals.