Aurangzeb: Monarch and Man review: How a 1974 Tamil play speaks to our times

Is Aurangzeb a historical play, a political play, or a psychological play? It is all three blended into one though the author himself puts it in the historical category. It is historical in its setting and its characters. It is political in its contrasting of ideologies represented by the main characters, the emperor and two of his sons and two of his daughters. And it is psychological in exhibiting the personalities and the dreams of these characters as they were shaped by the nature of relationship between the members of the royal household.

Material conditions alone are not deterministic of every happening in the world; there are human elements and their fault lines. This worldview permeates most of the creative works of Indira Parthasarathy. Aurangzeb is not an exception.

The ideology of false unity

This play is comparable with another play, Tughlaq in Kannada by Grish Karnad, written ten years earlier. Tughlaq is also historical and political and it is about the Islamic ruler with that name, who had an ideological vision about the kingdom, which was different from Aurangzeb’s and his portrayal in history is that of a failed ruler.

The presentation of historical figures in modern plays is through re-presentation of history to make history relevant to the present rather than claiming it to be the real representation of history. The history in such plays may be called the chronicled history. They are meant to be a caution about the contemporary political climate. Historical plays like Aurangzeb are not different from the relook of mythologies to bring them into contemporary relevance to be in communication with the modern liberal audience.

It is a truism to say that history repeats itself. There are Prime Ministers and Presidents in the modern period who are obsessive like Emperor Shah Jahan to build monuments so that their presence in the past is remembered by generations in the future. Like the Emperor’s elder son, Dara Shukoh, there was Mahatma Gandhi who dreamed of blending religions and philosophies but could not win the two-nation argument politically.

Like the Emperor’s younger son Aurangzeb, there was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had a diametrically opposite idea of Swaraj, which currently has gained power. The answer to the question whether the fate of this second ideology of false unity of the nation based on religion would end like Aurangzeb’s lies in the future.

A play of competing ideologies

Aurangzeb, as can be seen, is a play of competing ideologies. Its characters represent them unidirectionally. It is the achievement of Indira Parthasarathy that the uni-dimensional characters do not make the play flat. One reason for it is that the ideas defended in the play by the characters have contemporary relevance. The power of appeal of the play is demonstrated in the repeated staging of it in Delhi and in Chennai in Tamil and in other languages.

The play’s appeal comes also from the language that expresses the ideas. It is deceptively simple while sharp to pierce into one’s mind. This language makes the play enjoyable to read silently as an unfolding story as it is when performed through voice. It is to the credit of the translator T. Sriraman that the English retains the above qualities of the Tamil in the original. This success of the translation explains the selection of this play in 2023 by the Tamil Nadu Textbook Board to provide support for a new edition (with a Postscript by the translator); the first edition of the translation appeared twenty years earlier in 2004) for the current generation.