Though many historians have written of conversions of Hindus, surprisingly little, if any, evidence has been offered to suggest how far the conversion of Hindus took place, and whether there was any official policy beyond one of mere encouragement that led to the conversion of Hindus. Then, as now, conversion would have been more attractive to the vast number of Hindus living under the tyranny of caste oppression, and it isn't clear at all how the kind of inducements that Aurangzeb offered -- if indeed he did so for the purposes of conversion, as Richards maintains -- are substantially different from the inducements that modern, purportedly secular, politicians offer to people in their electoral constituencies. And what of the popular representation of Aurangzeb as a ferocious destroyer of Hindu temples and idols? Hindu temples in the Deccan were seldom destroyed, notwithstanding Aurangzeb's extensive military campaigns in that area. True, in north India, some Hindu temples were undoubtedly torn down, but much work needs to be done to establish the precise circumstances under which these acts of destruction took place. The famed Keshava Rai temple in Mathura was one such temple, but here Aurangzeb seems to have been motivated by a policy of reprisal, since the Jats in the region had risen in revolt. Like his predecessors, Aurangzeb continued to confer land grants (jagirs) upon Hindu temples, such as the Someshwar Nath Mahadev temple in Allahabad, Jangum Badi Shiva temple in Banaras, and Umanand temple in Gauhati, and if one put this down merely to expediency, then why cannot one view the destruction of temples as a matter of expediency as well, rather than as a matter of deliberate state policy? Moreover, recent historical work has shown that the number of Hindus employed as mansabdars, or as senior court officials and provincial administrators, under Aurangzeb's reign rose from 24.5% in the time of his father Shah Jahan to 33% in the fourth decade of his own rule.
