![]() ![]() He is the only Tamil writer to have won both the Sangeeth Natak and Sahitya Academy Award. He has won several awards including the Sangeeth Natak Academy, Sahitya Academy and Saraswathi Samman Award. Some of his novels, such as Kuruthi Punal intermingle these two milieus. Most of his novels are set in Delhi, where he lived during his working years, or in the Srirangam area of Tamil Nadu, where he spent his childhood. He has carved a special niche for himself in Tamil literature - his characters, mostly urban intellectuals, speak very openly and analyze deeply what others say. He has written several short stories, plays and novels in Tamil that have been translated into several Indian and world languages. ![]() I was reading a book on him, when I came across this line that he himself had acknowledged that he owed his philosophical wisdom to the great book from India, ‘The Upanisads’, which he read in Latin translation by a Frenchman called Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron.He was born on 10 July 1930 in Chennai in a traditional Iyengar family. The Frenchman, according to Schopenhauer ,had rendered it in Latin from the Persian translation of Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the great Mogul Emperor ,who built Taj Mahal. I began reading R.C.Mazumdar, Jadunath Sarkar and all those scholars, who had written about the Moguls. ![]() I had not heard of Dara Shiikoh before, because the history we were taught in the schools was only about those, who became kings. Of course, I knew about his brother Aurangzeb because he succeeded Shah Jahan, But the Aurangzeb I knew from my school text-books was a religious fanatic, who wanted to bury music twenty fathoms deep and also who hated poetry. ![]() Once when I became absorbed in the Mogul history, many things came to me as revelations. Aurangzeb was as interesting a character as Dara was. I realized that he had strong psychological reasons for being what he became in his later years. But what brought this cosmic change in his personality that conventional history had been projecting him as an intolerant and ruthless king with a staunch dislike for Fine Arts? It seems he loved music, was gifted with an excellent musical voice, and he wrote elegant romantic poems, when he was young. This is the question I try to answer that constitutes the sum and substance of my play ‘Aurangzeb’. Beyond this, I have no intention of teaching history to anyone. ![]()
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