Page:Aurangzíb and the Decay of the Mughal Empire.djvu/33

Rh of his captivity under the jealous eyes of Queen Núr-Jahán. Nor is anything recorded of his boyhood, from the day when, at the age of nine, he saw his father ascend the throne, to the year 1636, when the youth of seventeen was appointed to the important office of Governor of the Deccan. The childhood of an eastern prince is usually uneventful. Aurangzíb doubtless received the ordinary education of a Muslim, was taught his Korán, and well grounded in the mysteries of Arabic grammar and the various scholastic accomplishments which still make up the orthodox body of learning in the East. He certainly acquired a facility in verse, and the prose style of his Persian letters is much admired in India. In later years he complained of the narrow course of study set before him by his ignorant – or at least conventional – tutor, and drew a sketch of what the education of a Prince ought to be. To his early religious training, however, he probably owed his decided bent towards Muslim puritanism, which was at once his distinction and his ruin.

Aurangzíb's early government of the Deccan was a nominal rule. The young prince seems to have been more occupied with thoughts of the world to come than with measures for the subjugation of the earth beneath his eyes. Possibly the pomp and empty pageantry of his father's sumptuous Court set the earnest young mind thinking of the 'vanity of human wishes'; or some judicious friend may have instilled