Aurangzeb stands in Taymiya Zaman’s narrative as an avatar of the kingly archetype. She uses archetype in the Jungian sense, with all the overtones of the collective unconscious that this implies. The king as archetype has been thrust by history into a straightjacket. His human complexity is lost and his history serves in the vernacular as avatar to the simplified purposes of the archetype. Zaman interrogates the seventeenth-century sources on the Mughal king Aurangzeb in order to offer a means of healing the wounds of history. Zaman’s analysis is replete with submystical elements: the archetypes of kings, the comingled soul of a city and its citizens, Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh as avatar and sacrifice.

The concepts of soul and archetype surface often in the literature of intergenerational healing, as writers seek a language to express the space in which wounds are received as one’s own, but through other bodies in the past. The collective soul that is wounded in traumatic episodes of history is also healed through a historical process, in this case one of reintegrating the currently circulating, simplified, and truncated stories of Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh with their more complex past tellings. Surrounded by stories that yearn for a past imagined as a simpler time, Zaman calls us to a more complicated, ambiguous past. She seeks to restore the full spectrum of experience to a polarized, partitioned world.

Of all the injuries wrought by the partition, Zaman is most interested in one that receives little analysis, the loss of kingship. Through a series of powerful narrative associations, she describes for us anachronistic combinations of identity, simplified and collapsed to fit into a bipolar conflict between intellectual openness and religious purity. A single act comes to represent the entire history of a king in the post-partition world. Aurangzeb is reduced to his righteous pursuit and punishment of Dara Shikoh; Dara Shikoh is simplified to his unorthodoxy, his syncretic tendencies. Openness is denied Aurangzeb in the instrumentalized history; Dara Shikoh is denied good Muslim status. History as it is told in the vernacular ignores countervailing details, repeating only that which reinforces the simplifying dichotomy: us and them, good and evil.

Anachronism allows the use of history for the purposes of modern identity politics, by bringing the salience of the past into the vernacular of the present. The process of imagination that Benedict Anderson describes in the creation of national communities is important also at the more organic level of the urban community. One of the ironies of history is that the complexity of reality often produces narratives less convincing than anachronistic uses of the past. Nonetheless, Zaman seeks, if not to reconcile Aurangzeb and Dara Shikoh, at least to complicate their story. Through her reading of Bhimsen Saxena’s chronicle, Zaman reintegrates the king and his brother into their history, revealing a greater richness of character for the king through moments of heterodoxy and tolerance that belie the polarized imaginings of the postpartition world.

Zaman opens with the city of Lahore. As are all real cities, Lahore is an organic community, with its own particular history inscribed in its streets and buildings. The history of Lahore is also the history of its people, and its geography contains also an imaginative narrative geography that reflects this history. The process of analogy, so crucial to narrative, is a useful tool in Zaman’s analysis. People in Lahore tell stories of a network of tunnels that trace the map of the lost empire; the tunnels are the ghosts of connections now severed or complicated by modern geopolitics. The imagined tunnels of Lahore and the real buildings damaged by modern conflicts coexist in the mental world of its citizens, one informing the other.

Perhaps the strangest of the collapsings in Zaman’s story is the identification between the history of the city and the individual selves of its people. Zaman speaks of the partitioned souls of the people of Lahore, implying that the experiences of history are powerfully inscribed on their psyches, leaving a division within each individual that aches to be healed and made whole again. The division is both the geopolitical partition and the religious and political polarization of the postpartition world. She treats the former, as it were, by treating the latter through her reading of Bhimsen’s history. Thus Zaman seeks to reverse the damaging oversimplification of the rich culture of the past and restore to the past its true complexity.

As we read through Zaman’s analysis of Bhimsen’s history we see the nostalgia of the present is not unique. Bhimsen also is nostalgic for a better past, one in which kings were better kings: less partisan, more victorious, more regal. This idealization of the past is present also in the historian, and in her entire project. Thus Zaman, too, is nostalgic, and the reader wonders if this nostalgia does not in the end hinder the goal of analyzing the nostalgia of Lahore. To long for the past is also to remember it, and to remember a lost past is to imagine, to recreate, to simplify that past. The historian uses other tools to reach the past, beyond her nostalgia and imagination. She uses the chronicles and memoires of its actors. But the source himself is nostalgic for a further past. How does Bhimsen’s nostalgia influence his story? How does Zaman’s nostalgia influence hers? These layers of longing must surely have an effect.

Indeed, there are moments in the text where Zaman appears to be blinded by her nostalgia. She writes of the pre-colonial past in which “a unifying cultural ethos was shaped by the sacred symbol of kingship.” Bhimsen and Zaman both provide good evidence on the sacred and symbolic nature of the kingship, even in Aurangzeb’s somewhat fallen day, but it is difficult to imagine as unified a world replete with violence and atrocity. Aurangzeb’s soldiers sacked Hindu cities and his clients and officers included relatively few Hindus. Zaman’s contention might well hold more weight in the face of the atrocities and quotidian persecutions of Bhimsen’s day. As Zaman astutely argues, Bhimsen does not blame Aurangzeb or his Muslim status for these difficulties. Bhimsen does not even vilify or demonize the soldiers who did the bloody work of conquest. He accepts it as a natural, if regrettable, part of the world in which he lives. Was kingship the key and unifying element of that world, as Zaman argues? Was the king a lynchpin that held together a multireligious, multiethnic empire?

An interesting piece of evidence is offered on this point when Zaman tells us that Mughal soldiers were known to dream of their king, and that the king thus played an archetypal role in early modern culture. The Hindu chronicler Bhimsen admires the Muslim piety of his king Aurangzeb; this piety is harmonious with the king’s dual roles as spiritual guide and temporal ruler. The further Zaman gets into the historical anchoring that is her project, the more convincing the article becomes. We can see how, at least in Bhimsen’s reading, the Muslim king was guided and constrained by the sacred Hindu geography of the subcontinent. The two worlds that now appear destined to eternal conflict were once intermeshed and interpenetrating. While this former interaction included conflict and atrocity, it was not determined by these. Indeed, it was the historical context of the partition that codified the bipolarity of subcontinental history, as British colonial historiography represented Aurangzeb as sectarian and his sixteenth-century predecessor Akbar as syncretic.

From beginning to end, then, Zaman’s piece is about the uses and abuses of history. She intervenes to restore the whole, complex, and ambiguous story in order to heal the “partitioned selves” who now people Lahore.

Why do kings matter? When Akbar and Aurangzeb were Mughal kings, early modern Europeans were grappling with kingship, sovereignty, and the organization of power. In the late sixteenth century, when France was embroiled in a generation of brutal war and religious violence, Jean Bodin turned his pen to the problem of social order. As Thomas Hobbes later did, Bodin favored a strong monarch to counterbalance the centrifugal tendencies of aristocratic society in the age of religious war. Hobbes and Bodin believed that the natural tendencies of a strong monarch, to further strengthen and rationalize his control, would work to the benefit of the general society by providing structure through a coherent and consistent political order. These European political thinkers believed that a strong king could overcome the violently divisive tendencies of the new religious diversity by providing a hierarchy in which such religious differences were clearly subordinate to political unity.

Of course, both Hobbes and Bodin had their famous opponents, in John Locke and Theodore Beza. Locke and Beza argued for the importance of personal freedom, and worried about the infringements that a strong monarch might impose on the rights of the individual. While Locke was concerned with civil society, the point of crisis for Beza was a religious one. The attempt to impose Catholic conformity in France had spurred a defense of revolt from the pens of Calvinist dissenters, including Beza’s friend Jean Calvin. In the early modern European discourse about kings, then, individual rights and communal liberties were balanced against royal prerogative and centralizing structure. The individualist and liberal political argument ultimately won in the West. This victory has had crucial implications for our sense of self, but it has failed to counterbalance the power of the state and other totalizing modern institutions.

The power of modern states is very different from the atomic nature of monarchy as it was so forcefully imagined in early modern Europe. An absolute monarch was, in theory, both an individual and the embodiment of an entire commonwealth. Hobbes believed that this identity of particular man with nation would mean that when the king acted naturally and pursued his self-interest, the nation would benefit. The king would provide unity of direction, preventing internal conflict and wasted effort. Our modern governments may have far outstripped the monarchs Hobbes envisioned in their raw power and their knowledge capacity, but they are far from atomic. The pluralistic and democratic nature of our dominant paradigm ensures a multiplicity of voices in the heart of decision-making processes. We are powerful state-societies, but we are divided.

Beyond the difficulties that arise from the simple fact of this division, there are other problems that have descended from these intellectual and political victories in the west. One such is the tyranny of responsibility hidden within rational actor theory. Not only are we all free to act, that freedom confers a burden of responsibility that is impossible to fulfill. In the longing for kings, then, is there nostalgia also for subjecthood? There is a danger that the individual falls into a state of desiring action while repudiating responsibility, of wanting to act and wanting not to have to act. This is what Jean Paul Sartre identified as nausea and Hannah Arendt saw at the root of banal evil. It is the curse of Seneca, the gift of Aristotle: the belief that we are all free actors. Put differently, we are struggling with the implication that we can all be kings, that in an ideal world we would all be sovereign, free actors. If we allow the analogic substitution of self and past selves, if we accept the identification of the king archetype as an object of personal identification, then we dream not of subjecthood but of universal kingship, with all the impossibility and frustration that this entails.

We might choose instead to take this nausea as a longing for the acknowledgement of structure, of the ways in which our lives are determined beyond our control. Perhaps it is a way of insisting that some things are structural, not chosen. We might change one or two of them in the course of a lifetime, with great effort. For most of us, most of the effort goes to basic care of self and family, and little is left for the greater social burden of responsibility, much less for transforming the basic parameters that structure our lives. That we do transform these parameters, individually and collectively, is amazing. It would be too much to ask that we transform them all, all at once. This is the anxiety at the heart of the American dream, that it demands of us both the impossible—that we all succeed, wonderfully—and the inane—that we all want success in the ways that the dream imagines it. Is the longing for subjecthood a metaphorical episode of the intellectual quest to understand the simultaneously unknowable elements encapsulated in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: action and structure, free will and determinism?

The European debate over the role of kings was a debate over the proper location of sovereignty and autonomy. But it was also a debate about how to ensure social order in the face of religious discord. The story of Aurangzeb as Zaman tells it fits neatly with the latter concern. Aurangzeb, and the institution of kingship he represents in Zaman’s essay, provided an umbrella identity under which religious difference faded in importance despite real conflict. Was there something about early modern kingship that mitigated civil or religious strife? And why are the modern political identities of South Asia predisposed to fail in exactly this regard? There is a fundamental problem with the assumption that Western democracy is the best solution to the political problem in every context. This is made clear from continuing and widening global wealth disparities, over a century into the humanitarian project of the West that has sought to export Western economic and political culture through both direct and indirect aid. How we tell history matters, and historians have long acknowledged the importance of seeking multiple perspectives on any story. Zaman proposes that we put our energy to rediscovering the past in its fuller ambiguities, that we engage in untangling the divisions that have been woven into the cloth of our narrative collective selves. In place of such dangerous simplifications of the past, Taymiya Zaman offers the richness of ambiguities and the possibilities it holds for the work of building bridges.