Which one of the following is not a characteristic of the Mughal chronicles?

Correct — D, (d) They contain brief biographies of the authors of the chronicles. The stem is negative, with not printed in bold italic, so the answer is the statement that is not a characteristic of the Mughal chronicles — and the chronicles are histories of a reign, not accounts of the men who wrote them. A chronicle of this kind was commissioned by the emperor, written in Persian by a court historian with access to the household records, the orders issued and the reports of officers, and organised around the ruler; its subject is the dynasty and the empire. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar Nama, written for Akbar and arranged in regnal years, and Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Badshah Nama, written for Shah Jahan, are the standard examples. What we know about their authors we know from other sources — from biographical dictionaries, from court records, from the memoirs of contemporaries — and not because the chronicles carried lives of their own writers. The three other statements are exactly what these works are valued for. They give a continuous, dated narrative of the reign; they are the great store of factual detail about the court, the administration, the campaigns and the provinces, which is why the Ain-i Akbari, the concluding part of the Akbar Nama, remains a standard source on Mughal institutions; and, because they were written to persuade as well as to record, they let a historian watch an imperial ideology being manufactured and circulated.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)They present a continuous chronological record of events. — This is a characteristic, and it is the plainest sense of the word chronicle. These works narrate events in sequence, year by year through the reign, so that the reader can follow a campaign, an appointment or a rebellion in the order in which it happened. Abu’l Fazl organised the Akbar Nama around the regnal years of Akbar’s rule, and the same annalistic frame is used by his successors. It is this continuity that makes the chronicles usable as history at all — a collection of anecdotes, however vivid, could not be checked against dates and documents in the same way.
• (b)They were a repository of factual information about the Mughals. — This is a characteristic too, and it is the reason the chronicles have never been discarded despite everything historians say about their bias. They record revenue arrangements, ranks and appointments, the composition of the nobility, prices, campaigns, buildings and ceremonial in enormous detail, because their authors had the official records in front of them. The Ain-i Akbari is the extreme case: it sets out the departments of the household, the organisation of the army, the provinces with their revenue figures, and a mass of statistical and descriptive material that no other single source supplies.
• (c)They allow us to understand how imperial ideologies were created and disseminated. — This is a characteristic and it is the one modern scholarship emphasises most. The chronicles were not neutral; they were written to project a particular vision of kingship — the emperor as the recipient of divine light, the guarantor of justice, the ruler under whom peace was maintained among communities — and to make that vision known to everyone within the empire’s reach and to those who resisted it. Precisely because the works were commissioned and their language chosen with care, they show a historian how an imperial ideology was constructed and how it was spread, which is a different kind of evidence from the facts they contain but no less useful.

The Mughal chronicles are the principal literary source for the empire and they have to be read for two things at once: the information they carry and the purpose they were written for. They were produced inside the court, in Persian, which Akbar made the language of administration, by authors who depended on imperial patronage; many were illustrated by the court ateliers, so that the picture and the text carried the same message. The main works form a short list — Babur’s own memoir the Baburnama, translated from Turkish into Persian at Akbar’s court; Gulbadan Begum’s Humayun Nama; Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar Nama in three volumes, of which the third is the Ain-i Akbari; Jahangir’s memoir the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri; and Lahori’s Badshah Nama for Shah Jahan. Alongside them stand other genres that are often confused with chronicles: the tazkira or biographical dictionary, of which the Maasir-ul-Umara on the Mughal nobility is the best known, and the memoir written by the ruler himself. Knowing which genre does what is the whole of this question.

Key facts

• Mughal chronicles were commissioned by the emperors, written in Persian by court historians, and organised as a continuous, dated narrative of the reign.
• Abu’l Fazl’s Akbar Nama was written for Akbar; its third volume, the Ain-i Akbari, describes the administration, the army, the household and the provinces with their revenue.
• Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Badshah Nama is the corresponding official chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign.
• The chronicles project a vision of kingship — the ruler as bearer of divine light and guarantor of peace among communities — which is why they are read as vehicles of imperial ideology.
• Memoirs written by rulers themselves, such as the Baburnama and Jahangir’s Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, are a separate genre from the commissioned chronicle.
• Biographies of individuals belong to a different genre again, the tazkira or biographical dictionary; the Maasir-ul-Umara covers the Mughal nobility.
• Persian was the language of the court and administration under the Mughals, and the chronicles were often illustrated by the imperial painting workshops.

Common traps

• Reading past the emphasised not and picking the statement that best describes a chronicle.
• Confusing the commissioned chronicle with the ruler’s own memoir. The Baburnama and the Tuzuk are autobiographies, not court chronicles.
• Assuming that because a chronicle is biased it cannot also be a repository of fact. It is valued for both.
• Mistaking the biographical dictionary of nobles for a feature of the chronicles themselves.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Ain-i Akbari, which describes the departments of the household, the army and the provinces with their revenue, forms part of which larger work?

  • (a)The Badshah Nama
  • (b)The Akbar Nama
  • (c)The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri
  • (d)The Humayun Nama

  Answer(b) The Akbar Nama

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is a memoir written by the ruler himself rather than a chronicle commissioned from a court historian?

  • (a)The Akbar Nama
  • (b)The Badshah Nama
  • (c)The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri
  • (d)The Maasir-ul-Umara

  Answer(c) The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri