Shivaji and His Times c2.8

c2.8

When Captain J. Grant Duff was writing his *History of the Mahrattas* (published in 3 vols. in 1826), the veteran scholar-statesman Mountstuart Elphinstone, in a letter to him (20th April, 1822) exactly described the character of the materials then available for a life of Shivaji: "Your difficulty was to get at facts and combine them with judgment, so as to make a consistent and rational history out of a mass of gossiping *bakhars* and gasconading *tawarikhs*." These two sources of admittedly dubious value were supplemented by the English factory records, which Grant Duff rightly declared to be "very important for fixing dates, and invaluable in corroborating facts admitted by native authorities."