The Mughal heir who translated fifty Upanishads into Persian and lost the throne
Shah Jahan's favourite son preferred mysticism to soldiering and spent his energy looking for common ground between Sufi Islam and Hindu Vedanta. He was the designated heir, yet his younger brother Aurangzeb beat him in a war of succession, had him condemned as an apostate, and buried him in a grave nobody could identify for centuries.
Born in Ajmer in 1615 to the future Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, Dara grew up speaking Persian and later learned Hindi, Arabic and Sanskrit. He was named heir in 1633 and confirmed with grand titles in 1642, and he stayed especially close to his sister Jahanara. Unusually for a Mughal prince, he married only once, to his half-cousin Nadira Banu, and the pair were known for their devotion; in 1641 he gave her an album of paintings and calligraphy that survives with its original covers.
His intellectual life drew on Sufi teachers such as Mian Mir of Lahore, a saint respected enough across faiths that Sikhs invited him to lay the foundation stone of the Golden Temple, and Dara later befriended the seventh Sikh Guru, Har Rai. In 1654 and 1655 he wrote a short Persian treatise, The Confluence of the Two Seas, tracing affinities between Sufi and Vedantic thought. In 1657 he finished rendering fifty Upanishads from Sanskrit into Persian for Muslim scholars, suggesting in his introduction that they were the hidden book the Quran alludes to.
That same year Shah Jahan fell ill and four brothers went to war. Aurangzeb crushed Dara at Samugarh in 1658 and again at Deorai near Ajmer in March 1659. Fleeing into Sindh, Dara sought shelter with an Afghan chieftain whose life he had once saved, only to be seized and handed over. Paraded through Delhi in chains, he was declared a threat to public peace and an apostate by an assembly of nobles and clergy, and killed on 30 August 1659 at 44.
He was buried in an unmarked spot inside Humayun's Tomb. In 2020, after four years of research, an engineer with the South Delhi Municipal Corporation, Sanjeev Kumar Singh, concluded the prince lies beneath one of three unmarked cenotaphs in a chamber under the dome. The library Dara founded still stands in Delhi and now operates as a museum.
Source: Dara Shikoh
