Dara Shukuh: Captive Visionary of His Times

ABOUT THE BOOK:- 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:- Dr. Rakesh Gupta (b. 1946) retired as a Professor from Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University after thirty years and at Motilal Nehru College, DU (11 years), Executive Editor of Mainstream, a Junior Fellow, ICHR and Senior Fellow ICSSR attached to the IDSA, Visiting Professor IIT, Guwahati (2014), Visiting Fellow to Central University, Hyderabad (2015). Publications: Bihar Peasantry and Kisan Sabha, State in India, Pakistan, Russia and Central Asia, Terrorism and Communalism and other Threats to Indian Security, Use of Metaphors by Jawaharlal Nehru, Soviet Policies in the 1980s, Political Stability and Civil Military Relations under Gorbachev, Polisario, Militarisation of Outer Space: A Case Study of US Policy, edited SDI: Aims, Implications and Responses, Indian Security in the twenty first century, co-authored, Pakistan and The Nuclear Bomb, Novella Raziyya Sultan and poetry collections, i.e. Frozen Moments and Rouge. CONTENTS:- Preface .11 Chapter - 1 Dara’s Times – Rapture and