Mughal historians and the memory of the Islamic conquest of India

Abstract

The Mughal historian ‘Abd al-Qadir Badauni wrote his work of history Muntakhab al-Tavarikh in the last decades of the sixteenth century. This work has been closely read only in its latter parts, and the resulting image of the author, as derived from the text, is one of a venomous and fundamentalist theologian who had opposed the conciliatory policies of the emperor Akbar towards his Hindu subjects. However, by analysing the first volume of this work, which deals with the pre-Mughal history of India, and comparing it with the work of the contemporary historian, Nizam al-Din Ahmad, one can detect a systematic pattern of editing by Badauni with far-reaching implications. Badauni was staunchly anti-absolutist and had displayed a kind of identification with India and its population from diverse status and persuasions that superceded dynastic and even strictly religious affiliation. To properly evaluate Badauni's contribution to Mughal intellectual and cultural history, we need to heed the older intellectual traditions to which he was heir, and place him in the context of the rise of absolutism and the religio-social upheavals (such as that of the millenarian mahdavi movement) in sixteenth-century western Eurasia.