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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 2 Aurangzeb — LET'S EXPLORE

Book page 45 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
In his last letters to two of his sons, Aurangzeb wrote, “I came alone and am going away alone. I know not who I am and what I have been doing. … I have not done well for the country and the people, and of the future there is no hope. I was helpless [in life] and I am departing helpless.” What do these words tell us about Aurangzeb? How do you feel about them?
Answer

They tell us that at the end of the longest and most powerful reign in the chapter, the man who held it judged it a failure — by a measure that was not conquest.

Read what he actually says, phrase by phrase:

  • “I came alone and am going away alone.” An emperor who had removed three brothers and imprisoned his father is describing himself as without company at the end.
  • “I know not who I am and what I have been doing.” This from a ruler who titled himself Alamgir, ‘conqueror of the world’.
  • “I have not done well for the country and the people.” Notice the standard he chooses. Not territory — by that measure he had succeeded, since the empire reached its greatest extent under him — but the country and the people.
  • “I was helpless… and I am departing helpless.” The word from the man who had spent 25 years fighting war after war in the Deccan, draining the treasury.
How historians read a passage like this. There is more than one defensible reading, and it is honest to give both:
  • Genuine remorse. A private letter to his sons is not a public proclamation; he had nothing to gain from it. Read this way, it is a man measuring his life at the end and finding that the empire did not answer for it.
  • Conventional humility. Aurangzeb was deeply religious and led an austere life. In that tradition, a dying man is expected to declare his own worthlessness before God. Read this way, the letter is sincere but formal — it tells us about his faith more than about his faith than about his judgement of his policies.
The strongest position is not to pick one and hide the other. The letter is evidence of what he felt; it is not evidence about what he did. For that, the chapter gives the 1669 farman ordering governors “to demolish schools and temples of the infidels”, the destruction that followed at Banaras, Mathura and Somnath and of Jain temples and Sikh gurudwaras, and the reimposed jizya and pilgrimage tax. Regret at the end does not undo any of that, and the chapter does not suggest it does.
Sample answer for the second half, which asks how you feel — this is a personal response, so write your own; here is one honestly-held version to compare with. “I find the letter sad rather than moving. Sad, because a man with more power than anyone else in the Subcontinent could not use it to do what he himself thought was good, and knew it. But it does not change how I judge his reign. The people whose temples and gurudwaras were destroyed, and Guru Tegh Bahadur, who was beheaded on his orders in 1675, are not helped by his regret. I think both things can be true at once: the letter shows a real human being, and the record shows real harm.”
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