The Mughal war of succession from 1658 to 1659 followed the illness of Emperor Shah Jahan and pitted his sons against one another. Aurangzeb defeated his rivals, imprisoned his father, and became emperor, while Dara Shikoh was captured and executed. The conflict altered the direction of Mughal politics, religion, and court culture across South Asia.

Dara Shikoh's Persian translations of Sanskrit and Hindu philosophical texts symbolised a cosmopolitan Indo-Persian world that Aurangzeb's victory partly curtailed. Mughal court poetry, histories, letters, and Sufi writings preserve the tension between imperial ambition and spiritual synthesis. The succession struggle helps explain the multilingual literary environment in which Persian, Sanskrit, Braj, Dakhani, and early Urdu traditions continued to interact.