Mughal Chronicles

Mughal Chronicles

Subject : History

Section: Art and Culture

Context: NCERT removes chapter on Mughals

• The chronicles commissioned by the Mughal emperors are an important source for studying the empire and its court.
• They were written in order to project a vision of an enlightened kingdom to all those who came under its umbrella.
• At the same time, they were meant to convey to those who resisted the rule of the Mughals that all resistance was destined to fail.
• Also, the rulers wanted to ensure that there was an account of their rule for posterity.
• The authors of Mughal chronicles were invariably courtiers. The histories they wrote focused on events centered on the ruler, his family, the court and nobles, wars and administrative arrangements.
• Their titles, such as the Akbar Nama, Shahjahan Nama, Alamgir Nama, that is, the story of Akbar, Shah Jahan and Alamgir (a title of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb), suggest that in the eyes of their authors the history of the empire and the court was synonymous with that of the emperor
• Mughal court chronicles were written in Under the Sultans of Delhi, it flourished as a language of the court and of literary writings, alongside north Indian languages, especially Hindaviand its regional variants.
• As the Mughals were Chaghtai Turks by origin, Turkish was their mother tongue. Their first ruler Babur wrote poetry and his memoirs in this language. It was Akbar who consciously set out to make Persian the leading language of the Mughal court. Cultural and intellectual contacts with Iran, as well as a regular stream of Iranian and Central Asian migrants seeking positions at the Mughal court, might have motivated the emperor to adopt the language.
• Persian was elevated to a language of empire, conferring power and prestige on those who had a command of it. It was spoken by the king, the royal household and the elite at court. Further, it became the language of administration at all levels so that accountants, clerks and other functionaries also learnt it.
• Even when Persian was not directly used, its vocabulary and idiom heavily influenced the language of official records in Rajasthani and Marathi and even Tamil. Since the people using Persian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came from many different regions of the subcontinent and spoke other Indian languages, Persian too became Indianized by absorbing local idioms.
• A new language, Urdu, sprang from the interaction of Persian with Hindavi. Mughal chronicles such as the Akbar Nama were written in Persian, others, like Babur’s memoirs, were translated from the Turkish into the Persian Babur Nama. Translations of Sanskrit texts such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Persian were commissioned by the Mughal emperors. The Mahabharata was translated as the Razmnama (Book of Wars)