This book deals with the times, life and works of Dara Shukuh as a Sufi scholar and a military man subsumed under Akhlalq working for social cohesion within Akbar’s dominant state ideology. His effort at raptures produced biographies, translations of the Upanishads, quatrains, calligraphy, architecture, astronomy and painting album. The book deals with his loves, travails, turbulence and heinous martyrdom owing to his vision and constrains of the times he lived in. This crystal tower was brought to dust owing to treachery, limited vision of his orthodox and ambitious co-brothers. He became a path blazer within the paradigm of the seventeenth century anticipating Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ravindra Nath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawahar Lal Nehru, by challenging orthodoxy. The book contextualises him in the times as part of the opposition between orthodoxy and heterodoxy around the grid of equality of religions and not priority of a religion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rakesh Gupta
Rakesh Gupta is a professor with the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. New Delhi since the last twenty-three years. He was Head of the Centre for Political Studies 2000-02 and officiated as Dean, School of Social Sciences from time to time during this period. Prior to this he was with Motilal Nehru College, Delhi University for eleven years. He has been teaching courses on political philosophy, political theory, comparative politics and Indian politics. He specializes on strategic studies and foreign policy. He has co-authored and edited numerous books. Among them are books on Bihar Peasantry, Outer Space, Soviet Union, Civil-Military Relations during Gorbachev Period, Sub Sahara region, Pakistan, Indian Security and USA’s Strategic Defence Initiative. He has published Occasional papers on Russian Military Doctrine (Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi). He has written research papers on Socialist Societies, Foreign Policies of US, Russia, Pakistan, India, on arms control, disarmament and international relations and philosophy of Jean Franchois Lyotard in national and international academic journals. He has written about four hundred articles in dailies, weeklies, monthlies, tabloids and occasional periodicals on current issues of national and international politics.
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