Dara Shukuh : Captive Visionary of His Times

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 cobrothers. 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.