Mughal Administration c18.s1.1

c18.s1.1

The best known source of information about Mughal administration is Abul Fazl's *Ain-i-Akbari*. But this work, though it was the progenitor and in certain respects the model, of later official handbooks, has many defects. It was the first work of its kind in India and was written when the newly created Mughal administration was in a half fluid condition. Abul Fazl, therefore, tells us what an officer ought to aim at doing, rather than what the experienced servants of a long-settled Government were in the habit of doing; that is to say, he draws an ideal picture instead of giving us a faithful description of the administration in its actual working. Moreover, he is an insufferable rhetorician, and even when he intends to tell a fact, he buries it under a mass of figures of speech and round-about expressions. His work, therefore, does not give us much real help in drawing a correct and detailed picture of the administrative machinery, though in the statistical portion he is detailed and correct. We are oppressed by a sense of the vagueness and unreality of the picture as we go through the descriptive parts of the *Ain*.