Mughal Literature, Books and Historical Writing

From Babur’s arrival in northern India in 1526 to the end of Mughal rule in 1857, the Mughal dynasty governed a multilingual literary world. Writers and readers used books in several languages and settings. Persian became important for imperial administration and courtly writing, alongside Chagatai Turkic, the literary language Babur used, Sanskrit, a classical language of South Asia, Brajbhasha, a north Indian literary language, and Urdu. Court chronicles, memoirs, devotional writing and technical books preserved events, presented arguments about rule, taught subjects or gave patrons a lasting literary presence.

On this page5 sections

Histories made for different purposes

Babur wrote his Baburnama in Chagatai Turkic. At Akbar’s order, courtier and polyglot ʿAbd-al-Raḥīm Khān-e Khānān translated it into Persian in 1589, bringing the founder’s account to Persian-reading audiences at court. Akbar also commissioned Gulbadan Begum’s Humayun-nama, a family history shaped by a Mughal woman’s memory. Her account of Humayun’s 1541 marriage to Hamida Banu shows how household discussion and women’s counsel entered dynastic history.

Under Akbar, the court secretary Abu’l Fazl used two forms to record rule. His Akbarnama tells the emperor’s life and reign as a narrative; the Ain-i Akbari organizes information on the imperial household, offices, revenue and regions into a reference work. Abu’l Fazl drew on administrative records and access to court affairs while presenting Akbar as an exemplary ruler. The scholar and courtier Badauni wrote a competing history, the Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, criticizing the emperor’s religious and intellectual experiments. Together, the books give both information about government and rival arguments about kingship.

Other writers chose memoir. Jahangir’s autobiography moves between decisions, court events, judgments and observations of animals and plants; he says that he sent the text to other rulers. In the eighteenth century, Shah Nawaz Khan’s Maʾasir al-umara, a biographical dictionary, gathered the lives of nobles across several reigns. Mir Taqi Mir’s 1753 Persian Nikat al-shuʿara was a biographical anthology of Urdu poets, not his autobiography; his separate Persian Zikr-i Mir is the account later readers have often treated as autobiographical.

Persian and regional literary worlds

Persian connected Mughal officials and writers to a broad literary tradition, while its use in India developed through local authors and patrons as well as people arriving from Iran and Central Asia. Persian writing included poetry and histories, letters, ethical counsel, biographies of Sufi teachers in the Islamic mystical tradition, and technical works. A letter offered a model for persuasive prose; a Sufi biography preserved a teacher’s reputation and lineage; a court poem honored its patron.

Persian court writing coexisted with regional-language literature. Brajbhasha poets attracted Mughal patrons, and dhrupad, a form of Braj verse set to music, was performed in Mughal musical circles. In the eighteenth century, Urdu poetry gained ground in north India while Persian remained important for prose. Mir’s Urdu ghazals, or lyric poems, and his Persian poet anthology show how one author worked across languages and genres. Persian historical writing also continued as Mughal authority contracted: Ghulam Husayn Khan Tabatabai served both Shah Alam and the British and wrote a critical account of late eighteenth-century Bengal politics.

Translation as joint intellectual work

Akbar’s translation bureau brought Sanskrit works into Persian through collaboration between Persian-writing scholars and Sanskrit specialists. The Mahabharata, a long Sanskrit epic centered on conflict between related royal houses, became the Razmnama, or “Book of War,” for Persian-reading audiences. The accounts do not align exactly: the British Library catalogue dates completion of the translation to 1582, while historian Stephen Dale dates Badauni’s contribution to 1584; the catalogue separately places the first illustrated copy around 1585–86. The project required collaborators to explain names, concepts and stories to readers unfamiliar with Sanskrit traditions. Other translations included the Ramayana, the Sanskrit epic of Prince Rama; the Harivamsa, a narrative of Krishna’s life; and mathematical works. Faizi completed a Persian version of Bhaskara’s arithmetic text Lilavati in 1587.

Translation continued beyond Akbar’s court. In Lahore, now in Pakistan, Dara Shikoh’s secretary Chandar Bhan Brahman recorded in Persian discussions Dara held in Hindi with the Hindu sage Baba Lal Das in 1653. Dara later sponsored a Persian rendering of fifty-two Upanishads, Sanskrit religious and philosophical texts, completed in 1657 as the Sirr-i Akbar. He consulted Brahmans and pandits, learned scholars versed in Sanskrit, whose explanations helped make the texts available in Persian. The finished book expressed Dara’s argument about relationships between Hindu and Islamic thought, while the extent of his own direct translation remains debated by historians.

Copying, illustration and checking

A 1584 copy of Saʿdi’s Gulistan, made in Agra for Akbar, shows how patronage shaped a manuscript. Abd al-Muttalib Khan commissioned the calligrapher Muhammad Husayn to write the text on gold-flecked paper; artists added painted headings and an illuminated frontispiece. The present covers date from the eighteenth century: a seal from 1756 appears cropped on the pages, which the Royal Collection Trust says were trimmed before rebinding. A ca. 1600 folio from Jahangir’s Gulshan Album depicts other bookmaking work around a page of calligraphy: burnishing paper, stamping a leather cover, trimming folios, refining gold for paint and writing. The British Library holds leaves from a Razmnama manuscript copied in 1598; its catalogue names different painters for individual leaves. Those folios belong to a later illustrated copy, not the first illustrated version of the translation.

A detailed record of copying and correction survives in the music miscellany commissioned by Diyanat Khan, a Mughal officer and scholar. Begun in Delhi in 1662, the manuscript assembled Arabic and Persian treatises on musical modes, rhythm and instruments. Two specialist scribes copied the texts: Muhammad Amin of Agra wrote in Persian, while Samani of Samana copied Arabic. As the imperial party moved, some texts were copied in Ambala, in northern India, and Lahore, now in Pakistan; Diyanat Khan checked Arabic texts in and near Lahore and later in Srinagar, Kashmir. Colophons, brief notes at the end of a text, record where and when copying or checking took place and who did the work. They let readers follow the production of one manuscript across several cities and distinguish the scribes’ labor from their patron’s review.

Libraries, audiences and changing media

Abu’l Fazl describes Akbar’s library as divided between the private imperial household and spaces outside it, with books further arranged by value, subject and language. His account says experienced readers brought books daily and read them aloud before Akbar; the emperor marked the page where a session stopped, and rewarded readers according to the number of leaves read. The named works ranged from histories to poetry and philosophy. This was a court practice in which readers, rather than silent individual reading alone, brought texts to the emperor and kept a place for the next session.

Imperial libraries were one setting among many. Manuscripts also belonged to religious institutions, private collections and provincial centers. Persian histories appeared not only in Agra and Delhi but at courts in Bengal, Gujarat and the Deccan. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, Persian scholarship and historical writing continued through the eighteenth century and into British rule. Urdu gained prominence first in poetry and later in prose. In 1835, English replaced Persian as the colonial government’s official language. During the nineteenth century, lithography, a printing process using a flat inked surface, helped make India a major center for Persian books and journals. Hand copying and print therefore overlapped as authors, readers and institutions changed.