Haibat, Dara, Primavera, Sarmad, sons of Sulaiman – quite a few heads have rolled by now.
Dara and Sarmad were poets, as were some others. Head-hunting must have become a private obsession with Aurangzeb, and maybe he kept an account of the number of beheadings during his reign.
If only phrenology had been in vogue in the 17th century, the king would have amassed quite some wealth to fund the seemingly endless number of military campaigns during his reign. Phrenology was a 19th-century pseudo-science, considered as revolutionary as the telegraph in the 1850s, wherein the human mind (phrenos) was studied by examining skulls. Much like palmistry assumes that human destiny gets mapped onto the palm, the phrenological assumption was that the mind was mapped onto the inner skull, and in turn to the outer skull. The skull was mapped into 50 odd zones of criminality, romance, genius, etc. The only problem was the skin on the head; and the study, therefore, was better conducted on skulls of the deceased. This was a raging idea in the field of psychology, and human skulls were procured from far and wide by doctors. Of special interest, obviously, were skulls of geniuses and criminals. There were riots in...
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