Mughal Administration c16.s1: § 1. How Secretaries made Collections of Letters.
Mughal Administration c16.s1
- Language
- English
§ 1. How Secretaries made Collections of Letters.
c16.s1.1
The Mughal Emperors had a very elaborate Secretariat or department of letters (*dār-ul-inshā*), and the papers of this department that have survived are of inestimable service to the modern student of Mughal history. The *ākhbārs* or news-bulletins of the Court or camp of the Emperor, which were sent to feudatory princes and provincial viceroys by their retained agents in his Court, and many of which have been preserved for the reigns of Aurangzib and some of his successors,—are of first-rate value to the historian, no doubt. But the main wealth of historical information regarding Aurangzib lies in the contemporary *letters*, which together with the above *ākhbārs* form the very raw materials or most authentic source for the history of his reign. The preservation of these letters we owe not to any action on the part of the Emperor, nor to the practice of any secretariat archive, but to a private source, namely, the literary vanity of the secretaries (*munshis*) who drafted them. Each of them kept with himself copies of the letters which he wrote for his master, afterwards collected them together in one volume, with a formal preface and colophon, and sent them forth into the world; I mean, he allowed others to read and take copies of them, as printing was unknown in India in those days. Sometimes this "publication" of the letter-book was the result of the pious care of the late secretary's son or devoted friend, as the best literary monument to the learning of the deceased. Once the volume got into publication, its contents were picked out and included in miscellaneous collections of letters and in text-books on the art of letter-writing (as examples). In this way some letters have been saved, though the "volumes" of which they originally formed parts have disappeared. Many isolated letters of historical importance which were never included in any collection (because not written by the same man, or because not numerous enough to form a volume) have escaped destruction by being incorporated in such general collections of select letters.
c16.s1.2
These letter-books were put together and "published" for literary and not historical purposes. The *munshis* had not the future historian of the Mughal empire before their mind's eye, but the polished society of their own days. Their aim was not to leave historical records for posterity, but to show their own mastery of style and to set models of composition before students of rhetoric and epistolary prose. Some of the clerks even preserved and collected together the official and private letters of their own composition for the instruction of their sons and grandsons in the hereditary profession. Practically every one of the *munshis* could also write Persian verses and epigrams in which the date of an event was yielded by the total numerical value of the Arabic letters contained in the significant phrase or sentence, as calculated by the rules of *abjad*.
c16.s1.3
Some of the later collections are professed textbooks illustrating the art of the writer. They begin with an eulogy of the pen or of the art of letter-writing (*inshā*) in verse and florid prose, followed by a discourse on the mythical origin and development of the alphabet, the various known styles of penmanship and their founders; then come the letters forming the body of illustrations. Such letter-books, however, belonged to a decadent age, when the Court had ceased to make history.