Book review: Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri,Beyond the Chronicles: ‘Recovering’ Histories of the Institutions and Families (Persian Documents in India,17th–19th C.)

As the title work indicates, the author brings together in ten chapters descriptions of the contents of Mughal-period Persian documents, mostly from localities in Uttar Pradesh, with some drawn from Goa and Cooch Bihar (Bengal). The individual chapters are really papers that, except perhaps for one, have been published over the years since 1983 in diverse publications, but it is good for readers to have access to them in one volume.

Mughal-period official documents tended to be written in Persian in cursive script, which only a small number of historians are now able to read. We are fortunate that the author possesses the necessary expertise, which has enabled him to calendar (and partly translate) numerous such documents. In general, these give us an insight into how the Mughal administration functioned at its lower or local levels. We thus catch here profoundly insightful glimpses into a world beyond the one that Mughal-period chronicles light up for us.