Mughal Administration c16.s1.2

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*.