Medieval Literature: Sikh literature

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (1565-1612), the fifth Sultan of Golconda, came to the throne at fifteen in 1580 and ruled for thirty-one years, a high point of the Qutb Shahi dynasty; in 1591 he founded the city of Hyderabad on the south bank of the Musi. He was also an accomplished poet in Persian, Telugu and Urdu and is considered one of the first poets to write in Deccani Urdu, in genres ranging from the religious to the romantic and the profane. He composed in the Persian diwan manner, and his collected poems, the Kulliyat-e-Quli Qutb Shah, fill about 1,800 pages, more than half of them ghazals, with qasidas, masnavis and marsiyas. On this basis he is described as the first 'sahib-e-diwan' Urdu poet, that is, the first Urdu poet with a complete diwan to his name. The court of Golconda thus helped make Deccani a literary language a century before Wali's divan stirred the poets of Delhi.

Hasan Nizami left Nishapur in Khurasan when the region became unsafe during the Khwarazmian-Ghurid conflict and came to Delhi shortly before the death of Muhammad of Ghur in 1206. Friends advised him to compile a history of the Muslim conquest of India that would highlight the achievements of Qutbuddin Aibak, and Aibak, soon the first independent ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, issued a firman for it. The result, the Taj-ul-Maasir, is counted as the first official history of the Sultanate. It begins with the second battle of Tarain (1192) and says nothing of the first, a Ghurid defeat that would have displeased Aibak. Nizami was more a poet than a historian: his ornate prose is full of poetic exaggeration, yet medieval writers, Barani among them, counted him among the trustworthy historians. Its account of 1192-1196 is detailed; the later part, which runs into the reign of Iltutmish, appears to have been written in haste.

Ziauddin Barani (1285-1357) came from a family native to Baran (now Bulandshahr), hence his name, whose members held high posts under the Sultans: his maternal grandfather was an officer of Balban and his uncle was the kotwal of Delhi under Alauddin Khalji. Barani himself never held office, but he was a nadim (boon companion) of Muhammad bin Tughluq for seventeen years and was close to Amir Khusrau. After that Sultan's death he lost favour and, in what he called exile, wrote works he hoped would win the regard of Firuz Shah. His Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi (1357) carries the history of the Sultanate down to the first six years of Firuz Shah; it reads history as a lesson in which rulers who followed his principles prospered and sinners met their nemesis. Later historians such as Nizamuddin Ahmad, Badauni and Firishta leaned on it. He was not rewarded, died poor, and was buried at Nizamuddin's dargah near Khusrau.

Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani was born in 1193 in the region of Ghur, migrated to Uch in 1227 and then to Delhi, where he became the principal historian of the early Sultanate. His Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, named for Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud, was completed in 1260. It is a general history of the Islamic world arranged in 'tabaqat' (sections on dynasties), from the prophets through the Ghaznavids and Ghurids to the Sultans of Delhi, and its form set a pattern for later dynastic histories. Juzjani used books now lost, the oral reports of refugees who had fled to Delhi during the Mongol invasions of the 1220s, the accounts of merchants who travelled as far as Karakorum, and his own experience of fighting the Mongols in Khurasan. Its last volume deals with Genghis Khan and his successors up to 1259. The work is in prose. The 'Shahnama of Hind' was Isami's name for his verse history, the Futuh-us-Salatin, a century later.

Shah Jahan wanted the history of his reign written in the manner of Abul Fazl's Akbarnama. Muhammad Amin Qazvini wrote the first Padshahnama, but the commission passed to Abdul Hamid Lahori, whose Padshahnama covers the first twenty years of the reign; his pupil Muhammad Waris continued it. The Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi of Abbas Khan Sarwani was written at Akbar's command and is the main source for Sher Shah's reign and administration. Muhammad Hashim, titled Khafi Khan by the emperor Muhammad Shah, wrote the Muntakhab- ul-Lubab, a history of the Mughals completed about 1731-32. The Tabaqat-i-Akbari, however, is the work of Nizamuddin Ahmad, Akbar's Mir Bakhshi. Badauni built his own Muntakhab-ut- Tawarikh largely on it, which is why the two are often confused.

Muhammad Hashim, better known as Khafi Khan, was born about 1664, most probably in India. His father Khwaja Mir served prince Murad and later Aurangzeb, and Hashim himself held civil and military assignments in Gujarat and the Deccan under Aurangzeb and his successors, governing Champaner under Bahadur Shah. The emperor Muhammad Shah gave him the title Khafi (or Khwafi) Khan because his ancestors came from Khaf in Iran. His Muntakhab-ul-Lubab is a history of the Mughals completed about 1731-32; it is a major source for the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb and for Sikh history in the time of Guru Gobind Singh and Banda Singh Bahadur. Modern scholars such as M. Athar Ali have shown that it copied, without acknowledgement, the work of earlier writers. He was never Aurangzeb's official historian: that emperor had stopped official histories after his tenth year, and Khafi Khan finished his book a quarter of a century after Aurangzeb's death.

The four works span more than three centuries of Indo-Persian history writing. Minhaj-i-Siraj completed the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, named after Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud, in 1260. Isami composed his verse Futuh-us-Salatin at the court of the first Bahmani Sultan between December 1349 and May 1350. Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi wrote the Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi for the Sayyid Sultan Mubarak Shah (r. 1421-1434); it carries the story of the Sultanate forward to 1434, where it ends abruptly, and is the chief source on the Sayyids. Nizamuddin Ahmad, Akbar's Mir Bakhshi, wrote the Tabaqat-i-Akbari, a general history from the Ghaznavids to the 38th year of Akbar's reign (1593-94), quoting twenty-nine authorities, some of them now lost. The order of completion is therefore 2-4-3-1.

The official history of Aurangzeb's reign, the Alamgirnama of Muhammad Kazim, covers only the first ten years, because the emperor then forbade the writing of official histories. For the remaining four decades no court chronicle was kept. In 1707 Aurangzeb died, and his former secretary Inayatullah Khan, a senior noble, persuaded Saqi Musta'id Khan to write a history of the whole reign and opened the state archives to him. The Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri was completed in 1710, three years after the emperor's death; its first part is largely an abridgement of the Alamgirnama, and the rest rests on the archives and on the author's own long service at court. Because the ban had left the record of forty years unwritten, a chronicle of the full reign could come only after Aurangzeb was gone. Statement-II is thus the reason for Statement-I.