Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c33.2

v3.c33.2

In fact, this third volume has taken twice the time of its immediate predecessor to write, because of the immensity, variety and confused character of the historical sources on which it is based. The dates of thousands of laconic Marathi despatches had to be ascertained, their obscurities cleared, and the textual reading and arrangement of the Persian manuscript sources had to be corrected, before a single page of my narrative could be composed. To give two examples: the Persian news-letters collected by Claud Martin and now preserved in the British Museum in two volumes running to 1500 manuscript pages (*Or.* 25,020 and 25,021), do not except in the rarest cases give the year, and hence the owner has bound them by placing *all* the sheets of a particular month for these nine years lumped together in one place, in the order of the days of the month only! It is only after ploughing my way through these huge collections of reports and concentrating light on their contents from the three languages, Marathi, Persian and English, that I have been able to date and interpret this class of sources correctly.