Description
The purpose of this book is to present to the readers a collection of Mughal documents that belong to the Jogi gaddi of jakhbar in the Punjab, and to share with them the excitement of their discovery. In a sense we retain to this day, nearly a year after having come upon these documents, a measure of that excitement, for a detailed examination of these has only deepened our belief in their significance. Discussions with kind and learned friends like Professor Nurul Hasan have persuaded us to believe also in the value of their publication. This publication owes itself then to the encouragement that we have received in the idea of bringing them to wider notice, on the one hand from several friends, especially Dr Niharranjan Ray, Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Simla, and on the other hand from the enlightened and generous attitude of the Mahant of jakhbar, Baba Brahm Nath, and his learned disciple and our friend, Mahant Shankar Nath. The jakhbar collection is not the only collection of Mughal documents on the subject of endowments of one kind or the other to non-Muslim establishments and individualsz but it is a collection distinguished from the others by its size and range and character. The seventeen documents presented here form a homogeneous group spread evenly over a period of more than two centuries and belonging to the reign of every major Mughal ruler; they also refer to the same madad-i-ma‘¢i.sh grant, enjoyed. almost undisturbed, over this long period, and in fact to this day by the jogis. We thought therefore of publishing these documents in their entirety. And if we appear to have been a little pretentious and tiresome in our presentation of these with a photograph and transcription and translation and annotation of each document, with a generous measule of appendices added, we have, we believe some justification for the weary detail that we inflict upon the reader in the fact that these are offered here essentially as sources for the student of Mughal India. We have drawn relatively few conclusions ourselves, throwing out only some suggestions at places, and have aimed generally at publishing these in as full a manner as possible so that they can be put to more learned use by other scholars. The only conscious effort we have made to save the reader, especially the general reader, from unbearable tedium, is by providing a short and, we hope, readable introduction, and by reducing to the very minimum such learned things as diacritical marks, retaining them only for unfamiliar words and names, and then following simply the easily accessible scheme that Steingass uses in his Persian-English Dictionary.