In the summer of our discontent about the changing of a road name, Aurangzeb’s restless spirit has been awakened. In his splendidly evoked account of the last great Mughal’s rise to power, Murad Ali Baig describes how, for all his calculating brilliance in extending the reach of his empire, Aurangzeb died an embittered man. As he writes in the epilogue describing the ban on music, the one edict of Aurangzeb’s that every schoolchild remembers: “His disapproval of music caused the musicians in his capital to try and mock his edicts by taking out large funeral processions of their instruments. But Aurangzeb was not moved when he was told about it. He had simply said, ‘Make sure that the grave is deep.’”