While Europe was inventing newspapers, Mughal India had its own news network.
From the late 16th Century, armies of scribes, agents and secretaries compiled akhbarat – brief news reports on court intrigue, military campaigns, appointments, finances and gossip.
Written in Persian on brittle paper in hurried hands, they formed the Mughal empire’s information network: part intelligence brief, part official circular, part news bulletin.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, circulated daily between the imperial and provincial courts, helping knit together an empire that, at its peak, ruled much of the Indian subcontinent and nearly a quarter of the world’s population. Many were read aloud before assembled officials, carrying news from the imperial court to distant corners of the empire.
For decades, tens of thousands of pages of these reports, orders and administrative records sat in libraries and archives across India and Britain. Historians knew they existed. Few ventured far into them.
Munis D Faruqui, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, spent almost two decades doing just that.
Pages from a Mughal akhbarat (news report), handwritten in Persian language [Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland]
Beginning in 2007, he immersed himself in the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mualla (Newsletters of the Exalted Court), a vast collection preserved in archives across India and Britain.
Working through more than 6,500 pages in Kolkata’s National Library, he followed princes, generals, courtiers, royal women, imperial eunuchs and many others through tens of thousands of entries.
The result is a forthcoming history of Aurangzeb (also known by his imperial name, Alamgir) and the Mughal empire in the late 17th Century. It offers not only a fresh portrait of India’s most controversial Mughal ruler, but also a rare glimpse of how one of the world’s great early-modern empires actually worked.
The Mughal news reports survive in at least four known collections – in London, Bikaner, Sitamau and Kolkata – though historians suspect others may be in private hands.
One cache was preserved in bundles in the cool, dry basement of Jaipur Fort. In the early 19th century, James Tod, an East India Company official and antiquarian, borrowed a large number of these reports and failed to return them when he left for Britain in 1823. He later donated the collection to the library of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The richest cache, in Kolkata’s National Library, consists of 21 volumes devoted to the reign of Aurangzeb, who ruled the Mughal empire from 1658 to 1707 and was its last great expansionist emperor. The volumes were once part of the personal library of pioneering Indian historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Aurangzeb’s most influential biographer.
At first glance, much of the material appears crushingly mundane: appointments, disputes, military movements, gifts, illnesses and endless administrative minutiae.
Yet taken together, the reports amount to something rare – a near-continuous record of an empire watching itself, says Faruqui.
Archival coverage of Aurangzeb’s first two decades on the throne is patchy. But the amount of surviving material from the early 1680s onwards is extraordinary, providing access to an almost daily flow of reports for years on end. All told, they illuminate roughly a third of the emperor’s nearly half-century reign
Historian Munis D Faruqui spent two decades studying Mughal news reports [BBC]
Faruqui has spent much of his academic life thinking about the late Mughal world in the late 17 century. At the time the empire was at its peak, yet also edging towards a decline that would eventually clear the way for British rule. The akhbarat gave him a new way of seeing that world.
“My whole experience of working with the akhbarat has been one big eureka moment after another!,” Faruqui told me. “It never ceases to amaze me how the density of the informational ecosystem was at the time”.
The news reports Faruqui studied were written for the Raja of Jaipur. Hundreds of other nobles, princes and officials likely received similar reports from agents across the empire, forming one of the early modern world’s most sophisticated information networks.
“I am floored when I think about the ecosystem that spawned such rich knowledge gathering and transference,” Faruqui says.
The sheer volume of information suggests that, by pre-modern standards, the Mughal state had a remarkably sophisticated grasp of its sprawling empire.
Faruqui believes its ability to act on that information varied, but its reach affected – “sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse” – the lives of tens of millions of people.
Again and again, the reports upended Faruqui’s assumptions.
He says he found little evidence of the widespread religious conversions often associated with Aurangzeb’s court. The imperial harem and the eunuchate were far more “politically influential than anyone imagined”.
The emperor appeared less distant and austere than expected, and the reports contained far fewer hostile references to groups such as the Sikhs than Faruqui had anticipated. This contrasted with a long-standing Sikh tradition that, by as early as 1711, held Aurangzeb responsible for persecuting their spiritual leaders and community.
Some discoveries emerged not from dramatic revelations but through repetition.
Faruqui found one name appearing again and again in the newsletters: Zinat-un-Nisa, Aurangzeb’s daughter. Historians knew of her, but little had been written about her role at court. Yet page after page, she surfaced in the record.
The richest surviving cache of Mughal news reports is held in Kolkata’s National Library [AFP via Getty Images]
Within weeks, Faruqui realised this was no minor royal figure.
Zinat-un-Nisa was a powerful political actor and an “extraordinarily influential and important political bulwark for her ageing and politically vulnerable” father toward the end of his life. Faruqui began noting every mention of her name. She would go on to feature prominently in his account of the Mughal harem.
Each discovery forced a rethink. “Many of the stories I had been telling myself since the 1990s [when I first heard about the akhbarat] required rethinking,” Faruqui says. The akhbarat, he says, offered an opportunity to reassess not just Aurangzeb, but the Mughal empire itself.
Why have historians largely steered clear of the akhbarat?
Faruqui says he understands the hesitation. Early in his career, he spent seven frustrating weeks wrestling with another vast Mughal archive before abandoning it. The experience left him wary of sprawling, unindexed collections for nearly a decade.
The akhbarat posed a similar challenge.
“Searching for anything in it is like hunting for a needle in a haystack,” he says.
With no index and tens of thousands of entries, the archive demands patience, stamina and a willingness to read page after page in search of patterns and relevant information.
The news reports illuminate roughly a third of the emperor’s nearly half-century reign [Universal Images Group via Getty Images]
One reason Aurangzeb continues to provoke fresh debate is the sheer abundance of material, says Faruqui.
While the evidentiary record for the early Mughal emperors left behind is relatively sparse, by Aurangzeb’s reign the documentary trail explodes: administrative archives, private correspondence, regional histories, biographical dictionaries, poetry, European trading company papers and travellers’ accounts are all abundant.
For Faruqui, the akhbarat were indispensable. But they are only one part of a much larger archive that remains surprisingly underused. “Dozens of books, if not more, can be written based on all the materials that are out there waiting for intrepid historians to come along and utilise them,” he says.
When Faruqui first opened the collection in Kolkata, he had little idea what awaited him.
“Upon turning the very first page of the first volume, I realised what an extraordinary resource this collection is,” he recalls. “I immediately saw storylines that had been long ignored or barely touched.”
He says his book explores only a fraction of them.
“There are so many, many others that remain to be explored by others.”