The trio who came together to chronicle a little-covered Mughal era

This is a work about three historians, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (died 1958 just a few months short of 90), G S Sardesai (who died the next year aged 95) and the much younger Raghubir Sinh, heir to Sitamau in Malwa (who died in 1991). This book has biographies of the three men as well as glimpses into the sort of history they wrote. It is elegantly conceived and written.

Before Sir Jadunath, the history of India was told to us by British historians to a large extent. Especially the amateur Indologists who came and dabbled in works that were untouched and untranslated for centuries. Babur wrote in a form of Chaghtai Turk that was unusual; the later Mughals wrote in Farsi. Baburnama was translated by a woman named Annette Beveridge in the 20th century, 400 years after it was written. Once it was clear that the British would leave India, this source of translation and examination began drying up. Absent Sarkar, it would not have been easy or even possible for the critical years after Aurangzeb to be written about.

The last such work was written by Sir William Irvine, who begins his book Later Mughals with the squabble between Aurangzeb’s four sons and takes it to the raid by the Persian king Nadir Shah three decades later. Sir Jadunath’s The Fall of the Mughal Empire is like a continuum to this work, much like Xenophon’s is to Thucydides — meaning, similar in style and narration. I learned only through this book by T C A Raghavan that it is because Sir Jadunath finished, edited and probably rewrote Sir William’s work. 

Sir Jadunath was an academic whose fame came because of his definitive biography of Aurangzeb. Babur and Jahangir wrote their autobiographies. Humayun, who had a brief reign, was profiled by his sister Gulbadan Begum and Akbar was documented by Abul Fazl and also privately by Badauni. Shah Jahan was highly secretive but there is a visual history of his called the Padshahnama that survives. Aurangzeb had a half-century reign that was spent out of the court and mostly on the field. This means that his history needed to be put together differently, from material sourced from the field.

Aurangzeb died in 1707, having spent half his 50-year reign south of the Narmada (what is called Dakhan) trying unsuccessfully to subdue smaller rivals, especially Shivaji and the Marathas. The last of the great Mughals left behind an army for which salaries were about three years in arrears and dependent on the province of Bengal, also comprising Bihar and Orissa, to send in its revenues to pay off the bills. This means that there was a great deal of paperwork that was going around — hundis, letters, diplomatic couriers — all of which have gone into writing Sir Jadunath’s works.

The three men came together to weave the history of India that required more than one particular form of expertise. Sir Jadunath was obviously the moving force in this enterprise. He had Persian and a wonderful English. Sardesai was valuable because he provided documentation from the long Maratha period that began with the ascent of Shivaji around the 1670s and continued beyond Panipat, which came a century after that till the final British victory in 1818.

Sinh had access to material from Malwa and especially because of his privileged position was able to procure and hold on to papers that would have not been accessible easily. The book makes it clear how difficult it would have been for Sir Jadunath to gather and sift through the material that made up the core of his works.

The men spent, especially Sir Jadunath and Sardesai, a lot of time hunting for papers preserved by feudal families. Aurangzeb, Sarkar has written in his biography of him, engaged in long and patient negotiations with Maratha families that he wanted enlisted in the Mughal court. He negotiated directly and wrote out his responses to their letters diagonally across the same letter, perhaps so as not to waste paper, and often, this response took the form of a couplet.

The biographical part of this work is touched by sadness. Sir Jadunath had a series of tragedies towards the end of his life, losing most of his family. The chapter on Sardesai is also quite moving. He was more a popular historian, focussing on Marathi works. For most of his life he was employed by the great Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda, who funded B R Ambedkar’s studies in Columbia. When he retired, which happened because he wanted to pursue his research and writing over the tutelage of the Baroda family, the king cut his pension by half, Raghavan tells us. Though it was restored many years later by the next king, the arrears were never settled.

Let us turn to the work that was produced as a result of the joint efforts: Sir Jadunath’s The Fall of the Mughal Empire. It remains the classic work of Indian history that should be made compulsory in all of our schools. Why is it important? For the following reasons:

(1) It speaks of a period that few really know. The great Mughals are taught in our books and so is the British period. This work looks at what happened in the interim.
 

(2) Sarkar brings in the stories of the later Mughals, the Sikhs, Marathas, Rajput kingdoms and Bengal. There is scarcely a part of India that he does not touch upon.
 

(3) It is anecdotal and in that sense highly readable. It is not a dry work. 
 

(4) This is the most important aspect. The book tells us in direct and unvarnished fashion why India is the way that it is. In his foreword, Sir Jadunath warns us that it will be a difficult work to read and it is. If you are looking for whether venality is baked into our politics, you would do well to go through the pages of this work whose every chapter will validate our prejudices.

His classic work Aurangzeb, the one that made his reputation, is out of print in the full five volumes (an abridged one is available) but The Fall of the Mughal Empire is in reissue.

I had read Sir Jadunath’s works but had not realised the vast amount of work and rigour that had gone into writing his books. I had also not realised the perspective that he held on to so rigidly of being a historian without bias. I was glad that I read this book and you will be too.