Mughal Administration c17.s1.4

c17.s1.4

The second gift of the Muslims to India is historical literature. The chronological sense was very imperfectly developed among the Hindus, probably because being a race of Vedantists they kept their gaze fixed on eternity and despised this fleeting world and its ephemeral occurrences. The Hindus in the pre-Muhammadan days composed no true history at all ; only four political biographies have been preserved in Sanskrit, and in all of them the facts lie buried under a mass of flowers of rhetoric, tricks of style, and round-about expressions. In none of them have we dates. Even when the Hindus learnt Persian and wrote histories or memoirs of their times in that language in imitation of Persian models, their works were woefully lacking in dates.