•   Before Aurangzeb came to the throne, there was a war of succession between Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan and his brothers.

•   He imprisoned his father inAgra and killed all his brothers to get to the throne.

•   The war for the throne between the brothers continued for 2 years.

•   Aurangzeb ruled for about 50 years from 1657 to 1707 A.D.

•   In 1659, he was proclaimed king in Delhi.

•   During his reign, the Mughal Empire extended from the Himalayas to Karnataka and Gujarat to Bengal.

•   However he faced lot of rebels from the Jat, Maratha as well as Sikh community.

•   Marathas were not included in Aurangzeb's government, whereas Rajput and Pathans were included.

•   The first ten years of his reign are documented in Muhammad Kazim's ‘Alamgir Nama’.

•   During his early reign, he defended the northwest against Persians and Turks.

•   He had a feud with Maratha Chief Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, who had twice stolen the major port of Surat from Aurangzeb, in 1664 and 1670.

•   Aurangzeb adopted his great grandfather's conquest techniques, which included defeating the enemy, reconciling them, and enlisting their services in the imperial service.

•   As a result, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was defied in 1667 and summoned for reconciliation, but he flew away and died as the independent ruler of the Maratha Kingdom in 1668.

•   He employed many Hindus in his court, but he also went against his ancestors' policy of religious tolerance.

•   Many of Akbar's policies toward non-Muslims were reversed by him.

•   He reestablished the Jizya or non-Muslim tax in 1679.

•   Many Hindu temples were demolished by him.

•   He also assassinated Guru Tegh Bahadur, the Sikh leader who refused to convert to Islam.

•   The Mughal Empire's stability was severely harmed by Aurangzeb's orthodox religious behaviour and imposition of religious rules against Hindu monarchs.

•   A Rajput (from Sanskrit ‘raja-putra’, ‘son of a king’) is a member of one of the patrilineal clans of western, central, northern India and some parts of Pakistan.

•   They claim to be descendants of ruling Hindu warrior classes of North India.

•   Rajputs rose to prominence during the 6th to 12th centuries.

•   Until the 20th century, Rajputs ruled in the “overwhelming majority” of the princely states of Rajasthan and Surashtra, where the largest number of princely states was found.

•   The Rajput population and the former Rajput states are found spread through much of the subcontinent, particularly in north, west and central India.

•   Populations are found in Rajasthan, Saurashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Jammu, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

•   There are several major subdivisions of Rajputs, known as vansh or vamsha, the step below the super-division jati.

•   These vansh delineate claimed descent from various sources, and the Rajput are generally considered to be divided into three primary vansh:

o  Suryavanshi denotes descent from the solar deity Surya,

o  Chandravanshi from the lunar deity Chandra, and

o  Agnivanshi from the fire deity Agni.

•   Beneath the vansh division are smaller and smaller subdivisions: kul, shakh (“branch”), khamp or khanp (“twig”), and nak (“twig tip”).

•   Marriages within a kul are generally disallowed (with some flexibility for kul-mates of different gotra lineages).

•   The kul serves as primary identity for many of the Rajput clans, and each kul is protected by a family goddess, the kuldevi.

•   Rajputs are said to be descended from the thirty-six royal Kshatriya clans, some of which are Rathore, Solanki, Chauhan, and Tanwar etc.

•   Famous king Prithavi Raj Chauhan (1149-1192 A.D.) was a Rajput king from Chauhan clan.

•   Maratha rule formally began in 1674 with the coronation of Shivaji as the Chhatrapati (‘Keeper of the Umbrella’).

•   Although Shivaji came from the Maratha caste, the Maratha Empire also included warriors, administrators and other notables from Maratha and several other castes from Maharashtra.

•   They were responsible for weakening the Mughal control over the Indian subcontinent.

•   Maratha rule officially ended in 1818 with the defeat of Peshwa Bajirao II at the hands of the English East India Company.

•   The Marathas were a Marathi-speaking warrior group from the western Deccan Plateau (present day Maharashtra) who rose to prominence by establishing Hindavi Swarajya (‘self-rule of Hindus’).

•   The Marathas became prominent in the 17th century under the leadership of Shivaji, who revolted against the Adil Shahi dynasty, and the Mughals to carve out a kingdom with Raigad as his capital.

•   In 1761, the Maratha Army lost the Third Battle of Panipat, which halted their imperial expansion into Afghanistan.

•   Ten years after Panipat, the young Peshwa Madhav Rao I's Maratha Resurrection reinstated Maratha authority over North India.

•   In a bid to effectively manage the large empire, Madhav Rao gave semi-autonomy to the strongest of the knights, and created a confederacy of Maratha states.

•   These leaders became known as the Gaekwads of Baroda, the Holkars of Indore and Malwa, the Scindias of Gwalior and Ujjain, the Bhonsales of Nagpur, the Jadhavs of Vidarbha, the Dabhades of Gujarat, the Puars of Dhar and Dewas.

•   There were a series of Anglo-Maratha wars which finally culminated in the end of Maratha rule in India.

•   First Anglo-Maratha War (1775-1782) in which the Marathas emerged victorious.

•   The Marathas remained the pre-eminent power in India until their defeat in the Second and Third Anglo-Maratha Wars (1805–1818), which resulted in the East India Company seizing control of most of the Indian subcontinent.

•   Pathans in India are citizens or residents of India who are of ethnic Pashtun ancestry.

•   "Pathan" is the local Hindi-Urdu term for an individual who belongs to the Pashtun ethnic group, or descends from it.

•   Large-scale Pashtun migration into India began in the 11th and 12th centuries, as a result of the many Muslim empires and dynasties founded by Pashtuns on the Indian subcontinent.

•   The Pathans originate from the region straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan.