Mughal Administration c16.s2: § 2. The Hindu Munshis and their Work.
Mughal Administration c16.s2
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§ 2. The Hindu Munshis and their Work.
c16.s2.1
From the middle of the 17th century onwards most of the *munshis* were Hindus, and their proportion rapidly increased. The Hindus had made a monopoly of the lower ranks of the revenue department (*diwāni*) from long before the time of Todar Mal (Akbar’s revenue minister), probably from the very dawn of Muslim rule in India. Todar Mal’s order to have all their papers written in Persian, (instead of one set in Persian and a duplicate set in Hindi, as under Sher Shah), compelled all the Hindu officials of State to master the Persian language, and the effect of this change became manifest in the next century, when the Hindus filled the accounts department (*hisāb*) of the State and even rose to be deputies and personal assistants (*nāibs* and *pesh-dasts*) to the heads of many departments. Most of the nobles and even princes in the late 17th century engaged Hindu *munshis* to write their Persian letters. The docile abstemious hardworking and clever Hindu did the work well and cheaply. A Persia-born or Persia-trained Muslim clerk would have been cleverer and would have written a purer idiom, but he was too costly a luxury in India, and the supply of such men from the Persian home-land was dried up at its source by the political disorders in that country at the close of the 17th century. Indian Muhammadans, as a rule, were unsatisfactory for clerical work.
c16.s2.2
The earliest Hindu *munshi* of note (after Harkarn Itibarkhani, *c.* 1624), known to me was Chandrabhan (poetical name *Brahman*), a protege of Shah Jahan’s wazir Sadullah Khan, who has left works in elegant prose and conventional verse besides some letters of little historical value. But from the middle of the 17th century onwards, Hindu clerks rapidly multiplied under most nobles, till at last in the 18th century a Hindu rose to be Secretary (Mir Munshi) to the Emperor Muhammad Shah,—I mean Anand Ram (pen-name *Mukhlis*.)
c16.s2.3
The clerks and other office subordinates of the Mughal empire, both Hindu and Muhammadan, formed a brotherhood and lived on terms of the greatest intimacy and mutual aid, giving feasts and dances to each other, as we learn from the memoirs of Bhimsen. In addition to the tie of service in the same department, they were also united in a brotherhood by their love of Sufi philosophy, which formed the common meeting-ground for the Persian-cultured official classes of India in the 17th and more especially in the 18th century. Their letter-books often end with a collection of Sufistic verses of the munshi’s own composition or his favourite author’s.