Dara Shikoh’s engagement with India’s diverse religious traditions was neither an incidental curiosity nor merely a political expression of tolerance. Rooted in the Sufi milieu of Lahore and shaped by figures such as Mian Mir and Mulla Shah, his quest gradually evolved into an ambitious intellectual and spiritual search for the points of convergence between Islam and other traditions.

Seen in this light, Dara’sMajma-ul-Bahrain was not simply a work of comparative religion; it was the culmination of a lifelong attempt to understand how different paths might lead the seeker towards a deeper apprehension of the Divine.

Ather Abass Rizvi’s treatment of Mian Mir offers an important way into understanding the religious imagination of Dara Shikoh. In Rizvi’s account, Mian Mir was not simply a saint whom the Mughal prince admired; he represented a wider Qadiri milieu in which spiritual authority could transcend narrow communal boundaries and seekers could encounter one another in a shared quest for the divine. It was within this atmosphere of devotional openness that Dara’s own religious curiosity took shape.

The significance of Mian Mir, therefore, lies not only in the stories associated with his name, but in the spiritual culture he came to embody. Rizvi’s portrayal helps explain why Dara’s engagement with other faiths was more than a political gesture or an ornamental claim to tolerance. His later conversations with Hindu scholars, his study of Sanskrit texts, and his search for correspondences between Vedantic thought and Islamic mysticism can be seen as an extension of a much earlier spiritual formation—one in which encounter with the religious “other” was itself a path towards deeper knowledge of God.

Rizvi’s treatment of Mian Mir and the wider Qadiri milieu helps explain why Dara’s religious inclusiveness was not an ornamental political posture. The saint’s khanqah belonged to a wider culture of devotional encounter, in which seekers from different communities could approach a spiritual master. Scholarship on the period also records the presence of Hindu-Muslim interaction around Mian Mir’s circle.

The association of Mian Mir with the foundation of the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar is famous in popular memory, although historians have rightly treated the story with caution: Dara’s ownSakinat-ul-Auliya, for example, does not mention the foundation-stone episode. What is beyond doubt is that Mian Mir’s later image became deeply associated with inter-communal spiritual fellowship, and that this image became inseparable from the memory of Dara’s own religious quest.

Dara’s historical significance, however, should not depend upon turning him into the flawless opposite of Aurangzeb. Recent scholarship has challenged precisely such easy binaries. Murad Khan Mumtaz’sFaces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500–1800(2023), for example, places Dara within the visual and devotional culture of Mughal India rather than treating him merely as a precursor of modern secularism. His study of Mughal albums and portraits reveals the importance of Sufi teachers such as Mian Mir and Mulla Shah in the spiritual imagination surrounding Dara and his sister Jahanara.

Similarly, Supriya Gandhi’s biography insists that Dara must be understood through the sources and categories of his own period. His writings were shaped by Islamic scripture, Sufi metaphysics and his encounters with learned Hindu thinkers. His pluralism was, therefore, not the secular pluralism of the modern nation-state. It was a mystical pluralism: the conviction that different religious paths could disclose aspects of a single divine reality. That distinction makes Dara more interesting, not less.

Dara’s inclusiveness was not simply a plea to “tolerate” people who were different. He went further. He wanted to understand the other tradition from within its own intellectual vocabulary. He learned about Sanskrit texts; he worked with Hindu pandits; he entered into conversations with yogis and Vedantins; he translated Indian philosophical works into Persian; and he attempted to compare their metaphysical categories with those of Islamic mysticism.

His intellectual journey, therefore, had two dimensions. The first was epistemological:Can I understand what another tradition is saying?The second was spiritual:Can the truth I discover there illuminate my own search for God?

That is why Majma-ul-Bahrainremains so powerful. It does not ask us merely to tolerate difference. It asks us to investigate it, converse with it

and search for the truth that may lie beneath competing forms. Dara’s vision was also connected to his friendships and associations beyond Muslim Sufi circles. His relationship with the Sikh Guru Har Rai is part of the broader record of his engagement with Punjab’s plural religious culture, while his conversations with Hindu thinkers demonstrate that his curiosity was not restricted by communal boundaries.

There is, finally, something deeply symbolic about the connection between Dara Shikoh and Lahore. The city contains the memory of Mian Mir, the saint who transformed the young prince’s spiritual imagination. It contains the tomb of Nadira Banu Begum, Dara’s wife, whose remains were brought to Lahore and buried in the precincts associated with Mian Mir. It preserves the memory of a Mughal prince who looked upon Punjab not merely as territory to govern but as a land of saints.

The geography itself tells a story: the Mughal court, the Sufi khanqah, the Sikh sacred landscape and the intellectual world of Hindu scholars were not sealed compartments. They intersected. Lahore was one of the places where those intersections became visible. This is perhaps the deepest reason Dara Shikoh still matters.

His tragedy was not merely that a prince lost a war of succession. It was that a particular intellectual possibility within Mughal India was extinguished before it could become a political programme. Dara imagined authority informed by spiritual humility, scholarship enriched by translation, and religion deepened rather than weakened by encounter with another faith. He did not preach that differences did not exist. He sought the deeper unity that could exist through difference.

Mian Mir was the Lahore beginning of that journey;Majma-ul-Bahrain was its intellectual expression;Sirr-i-Akbarits great act of translation; and Dara’s life, ultimately, became its unfinished testament. For contemporary South Asia, the lesson is not to manufacture Dara Shikoh into a modern secular icon. It is more valuable to recover him as he was: a Muslim prince deeply formed by Sufism, yet sufficiently confident in his own spiritual tradition to enter into sustained dialogue with other traditions. His plurality was born not of indifference to religion but of an intense engagement with it.

That is what makes the memory of Dara Shikoh—and of Lahore’s Mian Mir—so enduring. Their legacy suggests that religious conviction and openness to the other need not be enemies. A person may remain deeply rooted in one tradition while listening seriously to another. Indeed, Dara’s life suggests that the deepest faith may sometimes make genuine dialogue possible.

In an age repeatedly tempted by walls, Dara Shikoh’s metaphor of two oceans retains its quiet power: the waters may come from different sources, carry different names and travel different courses, yet they can still meet. (Concluded)

Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2026