New Delhi, India — Datta Shirke has not left his home for the past two days and fears for the safety of his family. Vehicles parked in the lane where he lives have been torched in Hindu-Muslim sectarian clashes.

Barely a mile (about 1.5km) away, Aslam, who requested to be identified by his first name only, is similarly terrified. He is avoiding going back home, where he lives with his wife and mother, because he fears being arrested by the police, who he says are detaining innocent Muslims. “I have done nothing. But when police come, their eyes seek our blood,” he said.

They are both residents of Nagpur, a city of three million people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, where violence erupted on Monday over the future of the tomb of the long-dead, 17th-century Mughal ruler Aurangzeb.

The police have imposed a curfew and more than 50 people — mostly Muslims — have been arrested in raids in advance of a planned March 30 visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Nagpur. The city also hosts the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindu majoritarian allies.

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So why did a city otherwise famed across India for its oranges explode into interreligious clashes? Who was Aurangzeb? And why does his legacy still divide India?

Why did Nagpur erupt in violence?

Last week, a BJP parliamentarian from Maharashtra raised a call for the excavation of the Mughal emperor’s grave.

Nearly 100 volunteers associated with the far-right group Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) staged a protest in Nagpur on Monday demanding the demolition of the grave of Aurangzeb, who they say discriminated against Hindus and attacked their places of worship during his reign from 1658 to 1707.

“That grave is a black spot in our homeland,” said Amit Bajpai, a spokesperson for the VHP, who was also one of the organisers of the protest. “We gathered near a square and burned the effigy of Aurangzeb wrapped in a green cloth in the presence of the police.”

“It is our democratic right to demand for what we feel right,” he added.

But other onlookers, including Muslim shopkeepers, demanded that the police stop the demonstration, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, said Asif Qureshi, a lawyer and former chairman of Maharashtra Bar Council, who lives in the neighbourhood.

Rumours spread that the green cloth used to wrap the effigy had Quranic verses written on it, angering Muslims. That evening, after breaking their fast and offering Maghrib prayers, groups of Muslims held a counterprotest demanding that the police register a case against the VHP members.

“Unfortunately, soon, things got out of hand and angry people started clashing,” Qureshi told Al Jazeera.

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Since then, a curfew remains in place, with police barricades dotting the part of the city where clashes had broken out. And a police crackdown has followed. Qureshi said the police ought to arrest Muslims who participated in clashes, but instead, “have arrested innocents, who were just out to offer prayers”.

After the clashes, Bajpai of the VHP said he was fuming. “Now we will resist even harder. Why do they [Muslims] think that they can scare us by rioting? We want Aurangzeb gone from here.”

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Maharashtra’s chief minister, Devendra Fadnavis, seemed to suggest that a recent Bollywood film that portrays Aurangzeb as a villain might have played a role in inflaming Hindu sentiments. Chhaava, the film, fictionalises the battles between the Mughal ruler and the Marathas, who ruled large parts of present-day Maharashtra. The film, Fadnavis said, brought “the public anger against Aurangzeb” to the fore. Fadnavis also belongs to PM Modi’s BJP.

Who was Aurangzeb?

One of the most powerful rulers to have governed the Indian subcontinent, Aurangzeb’s grave is not in Nagpur. It is located more than 450km (280 miles) away from Nagpur, in a city that until 2023 was named after the ruler – Aurangabad – and has since been renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar.

The name was changed under pressure from Hindu majoritarian groups, who have long viewed Aurangzeb as the bloodiest villain in India’s modern history. But historians argue that he had a more complex legacy than the portrayals of Aurangzeb that today dominate India.

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Aurangzeb inherited a strong empire, where he ascended after imprisoning his father and having his elder brother killed. But the power-hungry emperor was also unmatched on the battlefield in his time and excellent at building alliances, said Audrey Truschke, historian and author of the book Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth.

His policies were heavily influenced by another Mughal emperor, his great-grandfather Akbar, Truschke said.

“Aurangzeb brought all kinds of groups in the empire – as a prince, he travelled all over the empire and read; he forged his connections with all groups, from Marathas to Rajputs – and later gave them important positions in his cabinet,” she said, referring to major Hindu communities in western India.

But Aurangzeb also imposed tough Islamic laws and had a discriminatory tax that Hindu residents needed to pay in return for protection. “Aurangzeb was a very complicated king, with many sides to him,” said Truschke.

While the Hindu far right often portrays Aurangzeb as a religious zealot, Truschke said, the Mughal emperor repeatedly showed during his reign that he was driven not by faith — but by power. “Whenever piety and power conflicted, he chose power,” she said. “Every single time.”

Why is Aurangzeb so divisive in India?

Many historians have pointed out that kings, as a rule, were not democratic at the time. In many ways, said Truschke, “Aurangzeb was not particularly deviant from Indian kings in the pre-modern period”.

But British colonialists vilified him, she said. The Hindu nationalist movement that the BJP and the RSS belong to “are essentially repeating colonial-era propaganda”, she added.

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That anti-Aurangzeb sentiment is increasingly playing out in aggressive, even violent, ways.

In 2024, four people were arrested for raising posters of Aurangzeb in a procession. In June 2023, an Instagram post on the ruler landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in jail. In 2022, the Modi government changed middle school and high school history textbooks, cutting chunks from chapters about the Mughal Empire, including removing a table detailing the accomplishments of emperors such as Aurangzeb and his ancestors.

To many supporters of Modi and his politics, Aurangzeb is not just history. He is widely believed to have championed the demolition of many temples — but is also known to have provided grants and land to other Hindu shrines.

Now, Hindu nationalists have laid a claim to the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, Modi’s parliamentary constituency in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. They claim that the mosque was built on the ruins of the Vishwanath temple, a grand 16th-century Hindu shrine destroyed in 1669 on Aurangzeb’s orders.

Addressing an event in Varanasi in 2022, PM Modi spoke about “Aurangzeb’s atrocities, his terror”, adding that “he tried to change civilisation by the sword. He tried to crush culture with fanaticism.” Modi has himself since invoked his name several times.

A day after the clashes in Nagpur, Fadnavis, the Maharashtra chief minister, said, “It is unfortunate that the government has to take responsibility for the protection of Aurangzeb’s grave, despite his history of persecution.”

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Aurangzeb’s tomb is safeguarded as a Monument of National Importance by the Archaeological Survey of India under a 1958 law, which protects it from unauthorised alterations or demolition.

As tensions continue to simmer in Nagpur, residents and local activists fear more violence might be around the corner.

“There is no trust or faith in each other,” said Shirke. “I cannot trust that my neighbour is not waiting to harm my family the next chance they get.” Muslim residents live in fear of raids, said Qureshi, and hope that the state authorities will deal with the situation without bias.

For Truschke, though, the Hindu majoritarian obsession with history is about that movement’s hatred for Muslims, whether in the past or the present. Knowing history is critical to understanding how communities and nations have been shaped, she said. “But litigating for what may have happened in the 17th century is an insane idea.”