Persian literary sources of medieval India reflect the spirit of the age. Comment. (UPSC CSE Mains 2020 - General Studies Paper 1)
- Non-native people brought Arabic, Persian, and Turkish in India. Since Persian was the favourite language of rulers then, different creators of literary work used this language to impress them. The Delhi Sultanate greatly promoted it. That was the time when poetry enjoyed the patronage. Influential people used to like it. Amir Khusrau and Amir Hasan Dehlvi created excellent poetry in Persian. There were specific pieces of writing devoted to Alauddin Khalji.
- Qiran-us-Sa’dain, Miftah-ul-Futuh, Tughluq Nama, Khazain-ul-Futuh gave an account of the military success of Jalaluddin Khalji, Ghiyasuddin Tughluq’s rise to power and Alauddin Khalji’s conquest of the South respectively. Minhas-us-Siraj, Ziauddin Barani and Ibn Batuta, the famous historians, wrote in Persian to inform about rulers and main political episodes.
- Persian remained the official language of the Mughal court too, as it was in the case of the Delhi Sultanate. Babur, with his interest in literature, got his memoirs translated into Persian by Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan. A Persian diwan was composed by Humayun, whereas Dara Shikoh wrote a biographical version of the Sufi saint Mian Mir.
- It was the language of Mughal court chronicles. Mughal chronicles like the Akbar Nama were written in Persian.
- Besides, the Mughal emperors commissioned translations of Sanskrit texts, for example, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Persian. Abu’l-Fazl, the author of the Akbar Nama, was a dynamic arguer and liberated thinker who constantly opposed the views of the conservative ulama. His qualities impressed Akbar to consider him an adviser and a spokesperson for his policies. Abdul Hamid Lahori, the author of the Badshah Nama, commissioned by Shah Jahan to write a history of his rule modelled on the Akbar Nama.
- Persian being the language of administration all through that age, Europe knew India through the Jesuit accounts which reflected the details of state officials and general conditions of life in Mughal times given in Persian chronicles.
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