Later Mughals v1.c4.s2: Literary Work in England
Later Mughals v1.c4.s2
- Language
- English
Contents
- v1.c4.s2.t1 His Later Mughals — 6 parts
- v1.c4.s2.t2 The Later Mughals Left a Fragment — 11 parts
Literary Work in England
v1.c4.s2.1
At his retirement he was only 48, and looked forward to many years of health and leisure which could be devoted to literary work. Already while in India he had perfected his knowledge of Persian, and, what is much more difficult, he had become proficient in reading manuscripts written in that tongue. He had also begun to collect Persian historical MSS., in addition to printed and lithographed works in that language as well as Urdu and Hindi having even the remotest connection with the Mughal period. During his official career many Indian gentlemen, knowing his special taste, sought to please him by presenting Persian MSS., and he also purchased them in India and in England. Besides, he kept in his pay a Muhammadan scribe of Bhitari Sayyidpur (Ghazipur district), to search for and copy such Persian MSS. as could not be had for love or money. Transcripts were also made for him of those rare MSS. of the Royal Library, Berlin, which he required for his historical researches. Thus it happened that he made a collection of original MS. authorities on his special period which was unapproached by any of the public libraries of Europe.
v1.c4.s2.2
To take only one example, he had two MSS. of the Anecdotes of Aurangzib (Ahkam-i-Alamgiri) ascribed to Hamid-ud-din Khan Nimchah, which is not to be found in any public library of India or Europe, and of whose existence historians were unaware, though it is a work extremely characteristic of the Emperor and gives information of first-rate importance concerning his life and opinions. I was happy to have been able to discover another fragment of this work and to present a transcript of it to him. Again, I could find only one copy of the *Chahar Gulshan* in India, and had to base a portion of my *India of Aurangzib* on this single manuscript. But Mr. Irvine possessed three MSS. of it,—two of them having been presented to him by Indian friends. After I had made his acquaintance, whenever I came upon any find of rare Persian MSS. on Indian history, he was sure to secure a copy of them for himself. Thus I was the means of enriching his private library with transcripts of Mirza Rajah Jai Singh's letters (*Haft Anjuman*), the orders issued by Aurangzib in his old age and collected by his secretary Inayetullah Khan (*Ahkam-i-Alamgiri*), the letters of Shah Jahan and his sons as preserved in the *Faiyaz-ul-qawanin*, and the epistles of the Persian king Shah Abbas II. As Mr. Irvine wrote to me,—
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"What you tell me about your various finds of MSS. makes my mouth water, and I shall be very grateful if you can engage any one to copy for me Inayetullah Khan's *Ahkam* and the various fragments you have of Hamid-ud-din's collection. The *Haft Anjuman* seems to be a valuable and most unexpected discovery. I have scolded Abdul Aziz [his retained scribe]—whose special hunting ground is Benares,—for not having discovered it!!" (Letter, 13 Nov., 1908).
His Later Mughals
v1.c4.s2.t1.1
With such a wealth of original Persian sources in his possession and his knowledge of continental tongues opening to him the East Indian records of the Dutch, French and Portuguese Governments, as well as those of the Christian missions to the East (especially the letters of the Society of Jesus), Mr. Irvine planned an original history of the decline of the Mughal Empire. It was entitled *The Later Mughals* and intended to cover the century from the death of Aurangzib in 1707 to the capture of Delhi by the English in 1803. As he wrote to me on 23rd February, 1902:—
v1.c4.s2.t1.2
"I have first to finish the History from 1707 to 1803 which I began twelve years ago. At present I have not got beyond
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1738, in my draft, though I have materials collected up to 1759 or even later."
v1.c4.s2.t1.4
But the work grew in his hands, and so conscientious a workman was he, so many sources of information did he consult, and so often did he verify his references, that his progress was slow and he lived to complete the narrative of only thirty-one years out of the century he intended to embrace in his work. Chapters of the *Later Mughals* appeared from time to time, once in the *Asiatic Quarterly Review*, but mainly in the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal*. Five years after writing the above to me, he thus speaks of the state of his undertaking in the *L'envoi* to its last published chapter (*J. A. S. B.*, November, 1908):
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"With the disappearance of the Sayyid brothers the story attains a sort of dramatic completeness, and I decide to suspend at this point my contributions on the history of the Later Mughals. There is reason to believe that a completion of my original intention is beyond my remaining strength. I planned on too large a scale, and it is hardly likely now that I shall be able to do much more...The first draft for the years 1721 to [April] 1738 is written. I hope soon to undertake the narrative of 1739, including the invasion of Nadir Shah. It remains to be seen whether I shall be able to continue the story for the years which follow Nadir Shah's departure. But I have read and translated and made notes for another twenty years ending about 1759 or 1760."
v1.c4.s2.t1.6
These words were written in October 1907, and they show that the work had not grown at all during the preceding eight years. What lured Mr. Irvine away from the *Later Mughals* was his monumental edition of Niccolao Manucci's *Travels in the Mughal Empire*, the *Storia do Mogor*,—a work which entailed seven years of hard labour and about which I shall speak later. Another but lesser source of distraction was his monograph *The Army of the Indian Moghuls*, (1903)—a thoroughly sound and scholarly work, which will long endure as an indispensable dictionary of Persian, Turki and Hindi military technical terms. He hurriedly brought together in it the fruits of long years of study, lest he should be anticipated by Dr. Paul Horn, an eminent German orientalist, who had published a similar work on an earlier period of Muhammadan India. Chips from Mr. Irvine’s workshop were also published in the *Indian Antiquary*, the *Indian Magazine* (1903), the *Journal of the Moslem Institute* (Calcutta), and the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal*. Thorough in everything that he undertook, his careful editing and annotation cost him an immense amount of time even in the case of these bye-products of his historical factory.
The Later Mughals Left a Fragment
v1.c4.s2.t2.1
But students of Indian history must lament that Mr. Irvine ever set his hand to the *Storia* and the *Army of the Indian Moghuls*; these books prevented the continuation of *The Later Mughals* to the date, 1765, after which the Persian records cease to be of first-rate value and we get full light from the documents in the European tongues. In these Persian records lay the special strength of Mr. Irvine. He had spent a life in collecting, mastering and arranging them; and his death robbed the world of all his garnered knowledge. His successor in the same field will have to begin at the very beginning and to spend years in going over the same materials, and can hope to arrive at Mr. Irvine’s position only after twenty years of preliminary study. If Mr. Irvine had rigorously shunned all such diversions of his attention and pushed on with his grand work, he could in his remaining years have placed on record his life’s accumulation of information and reflection on the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire, and completed its history at least up to its practical extinction about the middle of the 18th century. But he has not done it; and for years to come we have little chance of his unfinished task being carried to completion with anything approaching the high standard of fulness and accuracy he attained in the portion he lived to write. In this respect the world is distinctly the poorer for his having undertaken to edit Manucci.
v1.c4.s2.t2.2
Shortly after he had begun work on Manucci, Mr. Irvine was attacked by the disease to which he ultimately succumbed in 1911. For the last eight years of his life he was haunted by a sad foreboding that his days on earth were numbered and that the chosen work of his life was destined to remain a fragment. In letter after letter he urged me to hurry on with my own historical work if I wished him to see it.
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"At my age I cannot afford to lose any time, as I fear not surviving to finish the long and heavy tasks I have on hand." (18th March, 1904).
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"I see every reason to believe that your edition of the Alamgir letters will be a thorough, good piece of work,—but I trust it will not be too long delayed,—for I am getting old and shall not last very much longer." (16th Jan. 1906).
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"I hope that your first volume of Aurangzib may appear before I leave the scene." (29th Jan. 1909).
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At last in October, 1907 he mournfully admitted that he had not enough strength left to complete his original plan, and that he was not likely to write much more of The Later Mughals than the portion already sent to the press. Things looked a little more hopefully for him in the warm weather of 1910. As he wrote on 8th July—
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"Thanks for your enquiries about my health. Decay has not come on so rapidly as I thought it would. The complaint I suffer from is under control and apparently no worse than it was five years ago,—and considering I was 70 three days ago, I have a fair amount of activity, bodily and mental, left to me. In fact I am contemplating this next winter writing out my Bahadur Shah chapter (1707—1712) and sending it to the Asiatic Society of Bengal."
v1.c4.s2.t2.8
But unfortunately the hope was delusive. On the last day of the year he was taken very ill. For some time it was expected that he might recover a certain amount of health and strength. In the summer of 1911 he was a little better and appeared to be getting stronger. On 31st August he wrote to me,
v1.c4.s2.t2.9
"I am coming downstairs once a day for 4 or 5 hours...... I am working on quietly and happily. My upper part—heart, lungs and liver, are declared by the specialist to be quite clear and likely to go on [doing their] work so long well that I may reasonably [hope for ] a continued life of five to ten years. So it is worth while going on, as I shall be able to finish one thing or [another.]"
v1.c4.s2.t2.10
The improvement, however, was temporary. Since the autumn set in, he began to fail rapidly and it was realized that he could not last the winter. He bore his long and trying illness with admirable patience and fortitude, and passed away quietly at last on Friday, 3rd November, 1911.
v1.c4.s2.t2.11
Since S. R. Gardiner died with the cry "My History! Oh, my History!" there has been no such sad case of a monumental work undertaken with the fulness of knowledge but cut short by the cruel hand of death. For Gardiner, however, there was the consolation that he had arrived almost within sight of his goal, the Restoration, and was leaving a not unworthy disciple and continuer in Prof. Firth. This consolation was denied to the closing years of William Irvine's life.