While Dara concentrated on the "continued refinement of his inner self and his intellect" in order to make himself"a perfect ruler, one who was also the perfect philosopher" (179, 182), his three rival brothers more successfully mobilized financial and military resources for the inevitable war of succession that only a single victor would survive.
Gandhi's history of Dara's religious quest for the ultimate truth shows its culmination in Dara's final book Sirr-iAkbar ("The Greatest Secret," completed in 1657). Further, Dara incorporated Indic ("Hindu") religious traditions through personal meetings with ascetics and through written sources in Sanskrit and Hindi (via Persian translations that he sponsored) in order to prove that the highest truths of Islam could also be found in Indic mystical traditions. Indeed, both of them wrote esoteric works within these genres. Throughout, Gandhi argues that Dara and his closest sister, Jahanara (1614-1681), even more than others in the imperial dynasty, devoted themselves to exploring and mastering Sufi mysticisms, theologies, and philosophies, written in Persian and Arabic. Additionally, imperial painters constructed images that include Dara, his contemporaries, and their architecture and environment Gandhi knowledgeably reads and explains this colorful visual language (although the eighteen images included in the book are rendered only in grayscale). Many of these diverse sources contain evidence about the Dara himself and the context in which he was born and in which he developed intellectually, which Gandhi skillfully extracts and weaves into her biography. The Mughal imperial court sponsored detailed Persian-language histories of the dynasty as well as philosophical and literary works in prose and poetry. Because each of these genres had its own conventions of exposition and bodies of reference, interdisciplinary historians like Gandhi must master the appropriate methodology to analyze each source individually and then to combine the evidence through intertextual synthesis.
Drawing from an impressive range of sources in several genres and languages, Gandhi has persuasively reconstructed, engagingly narrated, and insightfully analyzed the significance of the ideas, life, and times of prince Dara Shukoh (1615-1659), would-be heir to the Mughal Empire (1526-1858).
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