ASHA: Blast From The Past

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The expression “reliable source” is frequently used in historical writing, but it is also frequently misunderstood. A reliable source is not simply an old source, an official source, a famous source, or even a source written by someone who witnessed the events being described. Nor does reliability mean that everything contained in a particular text must be accepted as true. In professional historical practice, reliability is established through a process of source criticism: the historian asks who produced the evidence, when it was produced, for what purpose, for whom, under what circumstances, from what information, and whether its claims can be tested against other independent evidence. This distinction is fundamental because historians do not have direct access to the past. The Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire no longer exist as observable realities. What survives are their traces: manuscripts, chronicles, administrative documents, royal orders, revenue records, inscriptions, coins, buildings, paintings, objects, letters, literary compositions and descriptions written by travellers. The historian reconstructs the past by interrogating these surviving traces.

A source is therefore not reliable merely because it says something confidently. Indeed, some of the most valuable historical sources are deeply partisan. Ziya al-Din Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, Badauni’s Muntakhab al-Tawarikh and Bhimsen’s Nuskha-i Dilkusha were written by authors with very different intellectual commitments, political positions and personal experiences. None should be treated as a neutral recording instrument. Yet all are indispensable historical sources precisely because the historian can investigate the circumstances in which they were produced and compare their testimony with other evidence. The question that should be asked, therefore, is not simply “Is this source reliable?” but “Reliable for what?” A court chronicle may be unreliable about the number of soldiers in an enemy army but extremely valuable for understanding the political ideology of the court. A royal inscription exaggerating a ruler’s victory may tell us little about the actual scale of that victory but much about how kingship wished to represent itself. A European traveller may misunderstand an Indian social practice while nevertheless recording valuable observations about prices, roads, urban life or commercial activity. Reliability belongs not automatically to the source as a whole but to particular claims made by that source and to the questions historians ask of it.

This is why corroboration lies at the heart of historical method. If a chronicler describes a famine, the historian may compare the account with other chronicles, revenue documents, letters, price information and evidence of demographic or agrarian disturbance. If a text claims that an emperor destroyed or constructed a particular building, the historian should examine inscriptions, architectural remains, contemporary administrative records and independent narrative sources. Historical knowledge becomes stronger when evidence produced independently and for different purposes converges upon the same conclusion.

Primary and Secondary Sources

The distinction between primary and secondary sources follows from this understanding of evidence. A primary source is evidence originating from, or directly connected with, the historical period, institution, event or process being investigated. A farman issued by Shah Jahan is a primary source for Mughal government. An inscription placed upon a mosque during the reign of Sikandar Lodi is a primary source for the circumstances of its construction. A revenue document from Aurangzeb’s reign is primary evidence for seventeenth-century administration. A coin of Muhammad bin Tughluq is primary evidence for his monetary system and his claims to sovereignty. Primary does not, however, mean true. Abu’l Fazl was a contemporary of Akbar, but this does not mean that everything in the Akbarnama must be accepted literally. Badauni was also Akbar’s contemporary, yet his hostility towards many of Akbar’s religious and intellectual experiments shaped his account. The historian cannot resolve the disagreement merely by declaring one “reliable” and the other “unreliable”. Their accounts must be placed within their respective intellectual and political contexts and tested against other evidence.

A secondary source, by contrast, is a later scholarly reconstruction or interpretation based upon primary sources and usually upon previous historical scholarship as well. Modern works by historians such as Mohammad Habib, K. A. Nizami, Satish Chandra, Iqtidar Alam Khan, M. Athar Ali, Irfan Habib, Shireen Moosvi, Simon Digby, Muzaffar Alam or Catherine Asher are secondary sources for the Sultanate and Mughal periods. They do not become primary sources merely because they are authoritative works of history. The distinction nevertheless depends partly upon the question being asked. A twentieth-century historian’s book is a secondary source for the Mughal Empire, but the same book becomes a primary source if one is studying the development of Mughal historiography in twentieth-century India. “Primary” and “secondary” describe the relationship of evidence to a historical question; they are not permanent qualities inherent in a document.

Nor should primary sources automatically be regarded as superior to secondary sources. A contemporary witness may possess very limited information, whereas a modern historian can compare hundreds of documents scattered across different archives and languages. Primary sources supply the evidence from which historical reconstruction begins; secondary scholarship subjects that evidence to criticism, comparison and interpretation. For the history of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India, the range of primary evidence is exceptionally rich and can broadly be organised into several overlapping categories.

Narrative and Chronicle Literature

The most familiar primary sources are chronicles and narrative histories, especially those written in Persian, the principal language of administration and high literary culture under much of the Sultanate and Mughal periods. For the Sultanate, works such as Minhaj-i Siraj Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri, Amir Khusrau’s historical compositions, Ziya al-Din Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Shams-i Siraj Afif’s work of the same title, and Isami’s Futuh al-Salatin provide indispensable evidence. They record political events, court conflicts, campaigns, rebellions, appointments, ideas of sovereignty and relations among rulers and elites. But these texts must never be treated as newspapers from the Middle Ages. Barani was not simply describing the Sultanate: he possessed definite ideas about monarchy, social hierarchy, religion and political order. His Fatawa-i Jahandari makes his normative political concerns especially clear. Amir Khusrau wrote within structures of courtly patronage. Afif looked back upon Firuz Shah Tughluq from a particular political and emotional context. The historian must therefore distinguish between description, prescription, literary convention and political argument.

Mughal narrative sources are even more extensive. Babur’s Baburnama, Gulbadan Begum’s Humayun Nama, Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, Badauni’s Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, Jahangir’s Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, Abdul Hamid Lahori’s Padshahnama, Muhammad Kazim’s Alamgirnama, Saqi Musta’id Khan’s Ma’asir-i Alamgiri and numerous regional and biographical works provide different windows upon the empire. Their disagreements are themselves historically significant. Abu’l Fazl and Badauni, for example, were observing substantially the same court but understood Akbar’s policies through radically different intellectual frameworks. Their disagreement is not an inconvenience that the historian must eliminate; it is evidence for the contested intellectual world of Akbar’s reign.

Administrative and Documentary Sources

A second and in many respects even more important category consists of administrative documents. These include farmans, nishans, parwanas, sanads, dastaks, arzdashts, waqfnamas, revenue documents, appointment orders, grants, petitions, deeds of sale and other records produced through the activities of government and society. Such documents allow historians to move beyond the spectacular world of emperors, battles and court politics. They reveal how authority actually operated: how land was assigned, revenue collected, officials appointed, religious establishments supported, merchants regulated, property transferred and disputes negotiated. The Mughal administrative system generated an especially rich documentary culture. Records connected with mansabs, jagirs, madad-i ma’ash grants, zamindars, revenue assessment and provincial administration permit historians to reconstruct the institutional structure of the empire. The Ain-i Akbari, although part of Abu’l Fazl’s larger literary enterprise, occupies a distinctive position because it systematically records information concerning administration, revenue, prices, salaries, military organisation, provinces, social groups and imperial institutions. Here again caution is necessary. An administrative regulation tells us what the state ordered; it does not necessarily tell us what actually happened. A farman prohibiting a practice is evidence that the prohibition existed, not proof that the practice immediately disappeared. Norm and implementation must be distinguished.

Epigraphic and Numismatic Evidence

A third category is inscriptions, which survive on mosques, tombs, forts, gateways, stepwells, bridges, temples, sarais and other structures, as well as on individual objects. Inscriptions may supply dates, names of patrons, architects, officials or builders, religious formulae, royal titles and information concerning construction and repair. They can sometimes correct literary chronicles or establish facts not mentioned in narrative sources. Epigraphy is particularly important because inscriptions frequently survive in situ. Their physical relationship to a building can help establish chronology and patronage. But inscriptions too are rhetorical objects. A royal inscription was often designed to proclaim legitimacy, piety or conquest. Its claims therefore require the same critical scrutiny as those of a chronicle.

Coins constitute another major category of primary evidence. Sultanate and Mughal coins reveal much more than monetary history. Their metals, weights, denominations, mint places, dates, inscriptions and calligraphy provide evidence for political authority, territorial control, economic change and concepts of sovereignty. A ruler’s coinage was itself an assertion of power. The appearance of a ruler’s name at a particular mint may help establish political control over a region. Changes in weight standards or metallic composition can illuminate monetary policy and economic conditions. Muhammad bin Tughluq’s experiments with currency, Sher Shah’s monetary reforms and the elaborate coinage of Akbar and his successors cannot adequately be studied from chronicles alone. Coins have an additional methodological value: they may contradict narrative traditions. When textual and numismatic evidence disagree, the disagreement forces the historian to reconsider the chronology or political claims preserved in literary accounts.

Architecture, Archaeology and Material Culture

Buildings and archaeological remains constitute primary sources in their own right. Architecture is not merely an illustration placed beside textual history; it is historical evidence. The Qutb complex, Tughluqabad, Firuz Shah Kotla, the Lodi tombs, Fathpur Sikri, Agra Fort, the Taj Mahal, Shahjahanabad, provincial forts, mosques, temples, tombs, gardens, bridges, sarais and ordinary domestic structures contain information that no chronicle can fully provide. Plans, construction techniques, masonry, reused architectural material, water systems, spatial organisation, alterations and building sequences can reveal patterns of technology, patronage, labour, ritual practice and social organisation. Archaeological excavation and architectural survey may establish that a structure underwent several phases even when literary sources attribute it simply to a single ruler. Material evidence is especially important because textual sources disproportionately represent literate elites. Pottery, tools, domestic architecture, settlement remains, craft debris and ordinary objects can provide access to aspects of everyday life largely absent from court chronicles.

Literary, Religious and Intellectual Texts

Another large body of primary evidence consists of texts that were not written as histories. Poetry, Sufi malfuzat, tazkiras, theological works, legal compilations, religious polemics, philosophical writings and vernacular literature can all serve as historical sources. Works such as Amir Hasan Sijzi’s Fawa’id al-Fu’ad, recording the conversations of Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, reveal dimensions of Sultanate society that political chronicles barely notice. Sufi literature can illuminate urban life, charity, social relationships, religious practice and interactions across social boundaries. Similarly, the Fatawa-i Alamgiri is primarily a compilation of Hanafi jurisprudence rather than a narrative history of Aurangzeb’s reign. It therefore cannot simply be read as a description of how law actually operated throughout Mughal India. Yet it is indispensable for studying Islamic jurisprudential culture, legal reasoning and the intellectual environment in which Mughal legal institutions functioned. Vernacular works in Sanskrit, Hindi, Braj, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani and other languages further broaden the historian’s field of vision. They allow the history of medieval India to escape the artificial assumption that Persian court literature alone represents the period.

Biographies, Memoirs, Letters and Foreign Accounts

Memoirs and autobiographical writings provide another particularly revealing category. Babur and Jahangir wrote about themselves in ways unusual within the larger tradition of Persianate court historiography. Gulbadan Begum’s Humayun Nama provides perspectives upon the Mughal household and the experiences of imperial women that cannot be recovered from official chronicles alone. Collections of letters and correspondence can be even more revealing because they bring historians closer to the everyday operation of politics and administration. Letters between rulers, nobles, officials, scholars, merchants and religious figures illuminate patronage, political negotiation, personal networks and administrative practice. Yet personal testimony requires caution. Memory is selective, autobiography is self-fashioning, and letters are written for particular recipients. Their apparent intimacy does not make them automatically truthful.

The accounts of foreign visitors form another major body of evidence. For the Sultanate period, Ibn Battuta’s Rihla provides an extraordinary description of Muhammad bin Tughluq’s India. For the Mughal period, travellers and merchants such as François Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Niccolao Manucci, Peter Mundy, Thomas Roe and numerous Portuguese, Dutch and English observers provide accounts of court life, commerce, cities, roads, manufacturing, agriculture, customs and social practices. These sources are invaluable partly because outsiders noticed things that indigenous court historians took for granted. But foreignness does not produce objectivity. Travellers arrived with their own cultural assumptions and often possessed limited knowledge of Indian languages and institutions. Bernier’s interpretation of Mughal landholding, for example, profoundly influenced later European representations of India, but historians have demonstrated that his understanding of property and agrarian relations was shaped partly by European political debates and comparisons with France. The traveller’s account must therefore be read both as evidence about India and as evidence about the observer.

Visual and Regional Sources

Mughal India provides another remarkable category of evidence: paintings, illustrated manuscripts, maps, drawings and other visual representations. Mughal miniature painting can illuminate court ceremony, clothing, weapons, technologies, animals, buildings, gardens, occupations and material objects. Portraiture can help reconstruct the visual culture of nobility and sovereignty. Illustrated manuscripts demonstrate the relationship between literature, artistic patronage and imperial ideology. Yet paintings cannot simply be treated as photographs. They obey artistic conventions and were often carefully constructed representations of authority. An imperial audience scene shows not simply what a court looked like but how hierarchy and kingship were intended to be visualised.

Finally, the history of the Sultanate and Mughal periods cannot be reconstructed solely from sources produced at Delhi, Agra or Lahore. Regional archives and local traditions are indispensable. Rajasthani records, Marathi documents, Sikh sources, Jain writings, regional Persian chronicles, temple records, merchant papers, genealogies, inscriptions and local revenue documents reveal negotiations between imperial power and regional society. They are particularly important for studying zamindars, merchants, bankers, local elites, religious institutions and social groups whose activities may scarcely appear in imperial chronicles. This widening of the evidentiary field has profoundly changed the writing of medieval Indian history. Once historians move beyond dynastic chronicles, the Sultanate and Mughal periods cease to appear merely as sequences of rulers and wars. They emerge instead as complex histories of states, agrarian systems, cities, markets, technologies, religious communities, intellectual networks, families, artisans, merchants, peasants and everyday social relationships.

From Sources to History

The central methodological lesson is therefore that no category of evidence is inherently self-sufficient. Chronicles, documents, inscriptions, coins, architecture, archaeology, literature, paintings and travellers’ accounts answer different kinds of historical questions. The strongest historical reconstruction usually emerges from their combination. Suppose a historian wishes to reconstruct the reign of Akbar. Abu’l Fazl provides one perspective; Badauni another. Jesuit writings provide yet another. The Ain-i Akbari supplies administrative and statistical information. Farmans reveal particular acts of government. Coins illuminate sovereignty and monetary policy. Inscriptions establish patronage and chronology. Surviving buildings at Fathpur Sikri and elsewhere provide architectural and archaeological evidence. Paintings reveal the visual construction of the court. Regional documents show how imperial authority interacted with local societies. No single one of these is “the truth”. Historical knowledge emerges through their critical confrontation with one another.

This also explains why the historian must resist two opposite errors. The first is credulity: believing a source merely because it is contemporary. The second is arbitrary scepticism: rejecting evidence simply because it is inconvenient or because every source possesses some form of bias. Bias does not make a source useless. Indeed, bias itself is historical evidence. If Barani disliked certain social groups, the historian must not simply discard Barani; one must ask why he disliked them and what his hostility reveals about the political and social assumptions of his world. If Abu’l Fazl idealised Akbar’s sovereignty, that idealisation itself becomes evidence for the political theory being constructed around the Mughal emperor.

The historian’s task consequently resembles neither that of a believer nor that of a prosecutor. It is an act of disciplined interrogation. Who produced this evidence? When? Why? For whom? What did the author or maker know? What did they wish others to believe? What could they not have known? What have they omitted? Can their claims be corroborated? Does material evidence support them? Do independent sources disagree? Only after these questions have been asked can the historian decide how much weight a particular piece of evidence deserves. A reliable source, then, is not necessarily an unbiased source, because completely unbiased historical sources scarcely exist. It is a source whose provenance can be established, whose circumstances of production can be investigated, whose claims can be critically tested and whose evidentiary value can be assessed in relation to a particular historical question.

That understanding is especially important for the history of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal India. The period has left an exceptionally diverse archive, extending from royal chronicles and imperial farmans to coins, inscriptions, buildings, paintings, legal texts, Sufi conversations, travellers’ accounts and archaeological remains. To privilege one category while ignoring the others produces a distorted history. The historian therefore does not merely collect sources. The historian interrogates them, compares them, contextualises them and makes them speak to one another. It is through this critical conversation among different forms of surviving evidence that the fragments of the past are transformed into history.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Among the Hindu festivals and ritual practices encountered by the Mughal emperors in India, Raksha Bandhan occupies a particularly interesting place. It is tempting to view the festival entirely through its modern form, in which a sister ties a rakhi around her brother’s wrist and the ceremony affirms a relationship of affection and protection between them. The evidence from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, points towards a considerably wider range of meanings. The rakhi was certainly connected with protection, but the person tying it did not necessarily have to be a sister, nor did the recipient have to be a brother. Brahmins tied protective threads upon patrons and rulers, and the ceremony could express blessing, auspiciousness, protection and reciprocal obligation. It was principally in this wider sense that Raksha Bandhan found a place within the ceremonial world of the Mughal court.

This distinction is important because the history of Raksha Bandhan under the Mughals has often become entangled with the celebrated story of Rani Karnavati of Mewar sending a rakhi to the emperor Humayun and appealing to him for protection against Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. The story has acquired enormous popularity and has frequently been presented as one of the earliest examples of Hindu-Muslim fraternity under the Mughals. Unfortunately, contemporary evidence for the episode is extremely uncertain. There is, however, no need to depend upon this attractive but problematic story to establish a Mughal connection with Raksha Bandhan. The evidence from the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir is both contemporary and much more revealing. Abu’l Fazl knew of the festival and described its place within Hindu ritual life, while Jahangir himself recorded the practice of tying rakhis upon Akbar and described his own participation in the ceremony. The documented history is consequently more interesting than the legend.

The Sanskrit expression rakṣā-bandhana itself provides a useful point of departure. Literally a ‘bond of protection’, it belongs to an older body of ritual practices in which a consecrated thread, cord or amulet was tied to the body as a means of invoking protection and auspiciousness. Such practices were by no means restricted to relations between brothers and sisters. The full moon of Shravana, which usually falls in July or August, possessed particular ritual importance for Brahmins and was associated with Shravani, Upakarma and the renewal or performance of Brahmanical rites. One element within this ritual world was the tying of a protective thread upon another person, including a patron or ruler.

This older meaning helps explain what otherwise appears rather curious in the Mughal sources. Brahmins could approach a Muslim emperor and tie a rakhi around his wrist without either party imagining that they were thereby establishing a literal relationship of brother and sister. The Brahmin offered an auspicious and protective object; the ruler accepted the blessing and, through gifts and patronage, acknowledged the social relationship that the ceremony represented. Protection in this context could operate in both directions. The ritual specialist offered sacred protection to the ruler, while the ruler provided material and political protection to those who acknowledged his authority. Raksha Bandhan therefore possessed a symbolic vocabulary particularly well suited to kingship.

The Festival in Mughal Records

Abu’l Fazl’s Āʾīn-i Akbarī is particularly useful for recovering this older character of the festival. His discussion of Hindu beliefs, calendars and practices was part of a much larger intellectual enterprise through which the Mughal court attempted to understand the society over which it ruled. In discussing the full moon of Shravana, Abu’l Fazl refers to the practice of fastening the raksha-bandhan upon the right wrist of important persons. The thread could be made of silk, and among people of wealth and status the object could assume a more elaborate form. What Abu’l Fazl describes is therefore recognisably connected with the modern rakhi, but its social meaning was broader. The emphasis falls upon the protective thread and the relationship between Brahmin and patron rather than exclusively upon sibling affection.

It was under Akbar that this practice became incorporated into the ceremonial life of the Mughal court. This should not be regarded as an isolated eccentricity on the emperor’s part. Akbar’s reign witnessed a profound enlargement of the cultural vocabulary of Mughal sovereignty. The dynasty had entered India with a Timurid political inheritance and a court culture strongly shaped by Persianate traditions, but the empire that Akbar created could not remain culturally detached from the society over which it ruled. Rajputs and other Hindu groups entered the Mughal nobility in increasing numbers, while Indian languages, customs, festivals, intellectual traditions and forms of ritual gradually became familiar at court. The political integration of India was accompanied, though never completely or uniformly, by processes of cultural accommodation.

Akbar’s engagement with Hindu festivals has to be understood within this setting. Holi, Diwali, Dussehra and other Indian celebrations became known at the Mughal court, just as Indian astrology, calendrical practices, modes of dress and forms of ceremonial entered imperial life. Participation did not necessarily imply acceptance of the theological foundations of a particular festival. A ruler might acknowledge a religious or cultural practice because it possessed political, social or ceremonial meanings that extended beyond doctrine. Akbar’s willingness to participate in such practices was closely related to the changing conception of sovereignty articulated most systematically by Abu’l Fazl. The emperor was increasingly represented as the ruler of all his subjects rather than as the political representative of one religious community alone.

The principle of ṣulḥ-i kul, usually translated as ‘universal peace’ or ‘peace with all’, supplied an intellectual framework for this conception of government. It did not require the disappearance of religious differences. On the contrary, those differences continued to exist and were frequently quite pronounced. What it attempted to establish was the political superiority of justice and imperial loyalty over sectarian affiliation. Within such a conception of kingship, the emperor could receive a Hindu ritual object without becoming Hindu, just as a Hindu noble could serve a Muslim sovereign without necessarily abandoning his own religious and social world. The Mughal court became one of the spaces in which these identities met, negotiated and occasionally borrowed from one another.

The Evidence from Jahangir

Our most striking evidence for the rakhi at Akbar’s court comes, interestingly enough, from Jahangir. In the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, Jahangir recalled that during his father’s reign Hindu nobles and other important persons had taken to presenting and tying rakhis upon the emperor. As frequently happened when a relatively simple custom entered the intensely competitive ceremonial environment of the Mughal court, the offerings became increasingly magnificent. The rakhis could incorporate precious stones, pearls and other valuable materials. What had begun as a protective thread was thus transformed into an object of imperial display.

Akbar appears eventually to have become uncomfortable with this extravagance. His objection, however, was not necessarily to the ceremony itself. Jahangir’s account distinguishes between the increasingly costly rakhis offered by wealthy men and the simpler cotton or silk threads traditionally tied by Brahmins. Akbar curtailed the former while permitting the latter. The distinction is revealing because it suggests that the emperor recognised a difference between an established Indian custom and the competitive display of wealth that had grown around it at court. He was willing to accept the protective thread, but apparently saw little reason why it should become another occasion for nobles to demonstrate their wealth through jewels and precious objects.

Jahangir continued the practice in his own reign. His memoirs record an occasion in 1613 when he permitted Hindu nobles and leading men to fasten rakhis upon his arms and allowed Brahmins to tie their traditional cotton and silk threads. The passage is particularly valuable because it removes the subject from the realm of later anecdote. Here we have a Mughal emperor himself describing his participation in a ceremony that he understood to be associated with Hindu custom. He neither disguises its origins nor appears embarrassed by his participation in it. At the same time, there is no suggestion that he had adopted the religious beliefs of those performing the ceremony. The rakhi could enter Mughal imperial culture precisely because its meanings were capable of extending beyond a narrowly defined confessional boundary.

The role of Hindu nobles in this process deserves particular emphasis. By Jahangir’s reign, Rajputs occupied an established position within the Mughal ruling class. Their incorporation had not required them to erase their cultural identities. They retained dynastic traditions, marriage networks, religious affiliations and connections with their ancestral territories while simultaneously participating in the political and ceremonial life of the Mughal Empire. Court culture consequently could not remain exclusively Central Asian or Persianate. It became increasingly Indian without ceasing to be Mughal. The presence of the rakhi upon the emperor’s wrist is one small but revealing manifestation of this transformation.

Beyond Binary Categories

The ceremony also demonstrates why the cultural history of the Mughal period cannot satisfactorily be understood through a simple opposition between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. Such categories were obviously important, and religious differences were real. They could generate argument, conflict and exclusion. Yet the existence of boundaries did not prevent people from crossing them in particular contexts. Political service, patronage, music, literature, architecture, language, food, clothing and ceremonial all created spaces in which cultural practices circulated between communities. The interesting historical question is therefore not whether Mughal India was either completely ‘syncretic’ or permanently divided, but how particular practices travelled, what meanings they acquired in new settings, and where the limits of such accommodation lay.

Raksha Bandhan provides an especially good example because the ritual itself was concerned with the creation of a relationship. The thread established a bond, but that bond was capable of several interpretations. It might convey a Brahmin’s blessing to his patron, express the loyalty of a noble to his sovereign, invoke protection, or become part of an exchange of gifts and honours. In later social practice the brother-sister relationship became particularly prominent, but the Mughal evidence reminds us that the semantic world of the rakhi was once considerably wider.

This brings us back to the famous story of Humayun and Rani Karnavati. According to the familiar narrative, Karnavati, the widowed queen of Mewar, sent a rakhi to Humayun when Chittor was threatened by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat. Humayun accepted her as his sister and attempted to come to her assistance. The story has acquired such currency that it is frequently repeated as established fact. Yet it is not securely supported by contemporary Mughal or Rajput evidence, and its development owes much to later traditions concerning Rajasthan. The political events surrounding Bahadur Shah’s attack on Chittor and Humayun’s subsequent intervention in Gujarat certainly occurred, but the rakhi episode cannot be placed on the same evidentiary footing as Jahangir’s description of the ceremony.

Historical caution in this instance does not diminish the larger story of cultural interaction. It strengthens it. The temptation to retain the Karnavati episode arises partly because it appears to provide such an attractive symbol of Hindu-Muslim fraternity. Yet the actual historical evidence is richer. We do not need to imagine a Rajput queen sending a rakhi to Humayun when we possess the testimony of Jahangir that Hindu nobles tied rakhis upon Akbar and subsequently upon Jahangir himself. The latter evidence tells us not about an exceptional gesture during a political crisis, but about a practice sufficiently familiar to have become part of the ceremonial experience of two successive Mughal emperors.

The Later Mughal Period

For the reigns of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb the evidence is less explicit, and caution is again necessary. It would be misleading to assume that every practice associated with Akbar and Jahangir continued unchanged throughout the seventeenth century. Mughal court ceremonial evolved considerably from one reign to another. Shah Jahan developed his own highly formalised language of imperial sovereignty, while Aurangzeb altered or discontinued a number of practices that he considered inconsistent with his conception of kingship and religion. The absence of equally vivid imperial references to Raksha Bandhan in their reigns should therefore not be filled by conjecture.

At the same time, imperial participation and social observance must not be confused. A Hindu festival did not cease to be celebrated in Mughal India merely because the reigning emperor chose not to participate in it personally. The empire contained millions of Hindu subjects, as well as Rajput rulers, zamindars, merchants, officials and soldiers whose religious and social calendars continued to structure their lives. Festivals belonged to society before they belonged to the court. The remarkable feature of the Akbar and Jahangir evidence is therefore not that Raksha Bandhan existed under Muslim rule, which is hardly surprising, but that the ceremony travelled from Hindu ritual life into the highest ceremonial space of the Mughal Empire.

Nor should this be romanticised into an uncomplicated story of communal harmony. Mughal society contained tensions, inequalities and conflicts, just as it contained accommodation and exchange. The significance of the rakhi lies precisely in the fact that cultural interaction did not require religious identities to disappear. A Brahmin tying a protective thread upon Akbar’s wrist remained a Brahmin, while Akbar remained the Muslim-born descendant of Timur and Chinggis Khan who ruled through a political culture deeply indebted to Persian and Islamic traditions. Yet the two could participate in a ceremony whose meanings both could understand. Cultural accommodation worked not because differences ceased to matter, but because people sometimes found languages through which those differences could be negotiated.

A Thread Through Time

Raksha Bandhan therefore offers a useful corrective to the tendency to write Mughal history exclusively through battles, dynastic politics and administrative institutions. Empires are also sustained through gestures, symbols and ceremonies. The Mughal state had to make its sovereignty intelligible to the many communities that inhabited India, and Akbar in particular proved remarkably receptive to political languages that had not originated within the Timurid or Islamic traditions of his ancestors. The incorporation of Rajputs into the nobility, the translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian, participation in Indian festivals and the development of ṣulḥ-i kul were different aspects of this broader attempt to construct an imperial order capable of embracing diversity without demanding cultural uniformity.

Seen from this perspective, the rakhi tied upon the Mughal emperor’s wrist was a small object carrying a surprisingly large historical meaning. Its thread connected an ancient idea of ritual protection with the political language of patronage and sovereignty. In the hands of Brahmins it could confer blessing; in the hands of Hindu nobles it could express attachment to the sovereign; within the spectacular world of the Mughal court it could even become an object embellished with pearls and precious stones. Akbar accepted the older ceremony while attempting to restrain its ostentation, and Jahangir consciously continued the practice.

The history of Raksha Bandhan in Mughal India is therefore more interesting than the familiar legend of Humayun and Karnavati. It reveals something of the manner in which the Mughal Empire became Indian, not by surrendering every element of its earlier inheritance, nor by dissolving religious distinctions, but through a prolonged process of encounter and accommodation. Hindu and Muslim, Persianate and Indic practices could remain recognisably distinct while nevertheless entering a shared political and cultural world. Few objects illustrate that process more simply or more eloquently than the protective thread tied around the wrist of the emperor.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary Sources

· Abu’l Fazl. Āʾīn-i Akbarī. Translated by H. Blochmann and H.S. Jarrett. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1867–1877. The most important contemporary account of Akbar’s administration, including his discussion of Hindu festivals, calendars and ritual practices. Of particular relevance is the section dealing with the month of Shravana and Brahmanical observances.
· Abu’l Fazl. Akbarnāma. Translated by H. Beveridge. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1897–1921. The official chronicle of Akbar’s reign, providing the broader political and ideological context for his evolving conception of sovereignty and his engagement with non-Islamic religious and ceremonial practices.
· Jahangir. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri or Jahangirnama. Translated by A. Rogers and edited by H. Beveridge. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1909–1914. Jahangir’s memoirs are the most valuable source for the rakhi ceremony itself, containing his recollection of the practice under Akbar and his own description of continuing it during his reign.
· ʿAbd al-Qadir Badauni. Muntakhab-ut-Tawārīkh. Translated by W.H. Lowe. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1884–1925. An important contemporary source offering a frequently hostile perspective on Akbar’s engagement with non-Islamic religious and ceremonial practices, valuable as a counterpoint to Abu’l Fazl’s more sympathetic accounts.

Secondary Sources

· Ali, M. Athar. The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966; revised edition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. An essential study of the composition and character of the Mughal ruling class, including the place of Rajputs and other Hindu groups within imperial service.
· Ali, M. Athar. Mughal India: Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006. A collection of essays exploring Mughal political culture, including analyses of cultural accommodation and the ideological foundations of imperial rule.
· Chandra, Satish. Mughal Religious Policies, the Rajputs and the Deccan. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1993. Examines the relationship between Mughal religious policies and the incorporation of Rajput elites into the imperial system.
· Flores, Jorge. The Mughal Empire at War: Babur, Akbar and the Indian Military Revolution, 1500–1605. London: Routledge, 2018. Provides context for the political and military environment in which Mughal cultural policies developed.
· Habib, Irfan. The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1963; revised edition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. The foundational study of Mughal agrarian society, essential for understanding the social and economic context within which Hindu festivals and practices were observed.
· Kinra, Rajeev. Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Explores the intellectual and cultural world of Mughal India through the life and works of a Hindu secretary at the Mughal court, illuminating the intersection of Hindu and Persianate traditions.
· Koch, Ebba. Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Addresses the visual and material dimensions of Mughal sovereignty, including the ceremonial use of objects.
· Lefèvre, Corinne. Pouvoir impérial et élites dans l’Inde moghole: Les Sayyids de Barha (1556–1748). Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2020. Translated into English, Consolidating Empire, Power and Elites in Jahangir’s India. Permanent Black, 2022. Provides detailed analysis of court dynamics and ceremonial politics.
· Mukhia, Harbans. The Mughals of India. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. A comprehensive introduction to Mughal history that emphasises the processes of cultural interaction and the formation of an imperial society.
· Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The standard political history of the Mughal Empire, providing essential background for understanding the context of Akbar’s and Jahangir’s ceremonial practices.
· Sangari, Kumkum. The Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika, 1999. Offers insights into the interplay between textual traditions and social practices.
· Sharma, Sunil. Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Examines the Persian literary culture of the Mughal court and its relationship to Indian cultural traditions.
· Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Mughals and Franks: Explorations in Connected History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Contains essays that contextualise Mughal cultural and political practices within broader early modern global connections.
· Suvorova, Anna. Muslim Saints of South Asia: The Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries. London: Routledge, 2004. Provides background on Sufi traditions that mediated between Islamic and Indic religious cultures.
· Truschke, Audrey. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. An illuminating study of Sanskrit intellectual traditions at the Mughal court, demonstrating the depth of cultural exchange between Hindu learned traditions and Mughal patronage networks.
· Wink, André. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. 3 volumes. Leiden: Brill, 1990–2004. A sweeping examination of the interaction between Islamic and Indian civilisations that provides crucial background for understanding cultural accommodation under the Mughals.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The question whether history is a science has troubled historians for a very long time, and at first sight the answer might appear simple. Historians collect evidence, formulate arguments, test propositions and revise their conclusions when new evidence becomes available, and in all these respects their practice shares common ground with scientific inquiry. Yet a fundamental difference persists. The historian studies a world that no longer exists; the past cannot be placed in a laboratory, observed repeatedly or reproduced under controlled conditions. Historical events occur once and are irreversible, and for this reason history cannot be a science in the same sense as physics, chemistry or the experimental branches of biology. This does not reduce history to mere opinion, for it remains a disciplined and evidence‑based form of knowledge with its own rigorous methods for determining what may reasonably be asserted about the past. The significant distinction is therefore not between science and imagination, but between different ways of establishing knowledge.

The natural scientist can ordinarily observe phenomena that continue to exist: an experiment can be repeated, variables can sometimes be isolated and another researcher can attempt to reproduce the results. The historian possesses no comparable possibility. The Revolt of 1857 cannot be rerun; we cannot reconstruct Akbar’s court, remove Abul Fazl from it and discover whether sulh‑i kul would still have developed in the same manner; nor can we repeat the Partition of India while altering one political decision in 1946 to see whether Partition would still have occurred. What the historian possesses is not the past itself but the traces left behind by it, chronicles, letters, administrative documents, inscriptions, coins, buildings, archaeological remains, paintings, memoirs, newspapers, photographs, oral traditions and many other kinds of evidence. The historian begins with these surviving traces and attempts to reconstruct the circumstances in which they were produced and the world to which they belonged. The historian therefore works backwards from evidence towards explanation, whereas a scientist may formulate a hypothesis and design an experiment to test it; a historian asks a question and then examines whether the surviving evidence permits a particular answer. This difference is significant because it places limits upon what historians can claim to know.

These limits become especially clear when we consider counterfactual history – the attempt to ask what would have happened if a particular historical event had occurred differently. Such questions are often fascinating, and occasionally they can assist us in thinking about causation, but they cannot provide historical knowledge in the same sense as the study of events that actually occurred. Consider the frequently asked question: what would have happened if Dara Shukoh had defeated Aurangzeb and become the Mughal emperor? We know a considerable amount about Dara Shukoh: his interest in Sufism, his engagement with Hindu religious thought, his association with the translation of the Upanishads into Persian and his intellectual outlook are all matters that can be investigated historically because evidence survives for them. But there is no historical evidence for Emperor Dara Shukoh because Emperor Dara Shukoh never existed. The Dara whom history allows us to study was a Mughal prince who contested the succession and lost; we cannot know how twenty years of kingship might have changed him, what pressures he might have encountered, which alliances he might have formed, what rebellions he might have faced or what compromises the requirements of government might have forced upon him. To move from the ideas of Prince Dara to confident statements about the policies of an imaginary Emperor Dara is to cross the boundary between historical inference and speculation.

The same difficulty arises when we ask what would have happened if the British had not introduced railways into India. Historians can investigate why the railways were constructed, how they were financed and what effects they had upon trade, markets, military movement, migration, urbanisation and the circulation of people and ideas; they can debate whether particular consequences attributed to the railways have been exaggerated. What they cannot do is remove the railway from nineteenth‑century India and observe what happens next. Perhaps roads would have developed more rapidly, perhaps coastal shipping would have expanded, perhaps other technologies would have filled part of the gap; patterns of trade, industrialisation, migration and urbanisation might have followed quite different paths, but once one element is removed from a historical situation, other elements also begin to change, and there is no alternative nineteenth‑century India available for comparison with the India that actually existed.

Counterfactual questions can nevertheless serve a limited analytical purpose: if a historian argues that a particular development could not have occurred without the railways, asking what alternative mechanisms might have produced it can expose weaknesses in that causal argument. Counterfactual reasoning can therefore help historians think about necessity, contingency and causation, but what it cannot do is establish an alternative sequence of events as historical knowledge. Possibility is not evidence, plausibility is not proof, and an imagined alternative is not history.

This limitation arises partly because historians study human beings rather than objects governed only by physical laws. Human beings possess intentions, ambitions, fears, prejudices, beliefs and memories; they react to circumstances and to one another, and they may behave differently in apparently similar situations. A falling object does not know Newton’s laws and alter its behaviour because it has read them; human beings, by contrast, may read theories about society and change their behaviour because of them. History consequently cannot normally produce universal laws capable of predicting human events, which is why Marc Bloch’s famous description of history as the “science of men in time” needs to be understood carefully. The French word science has a broader intellectual meaning than the narrower modern English association with experimental natural science; Bloch was emphasising the systematic and critical nature of historical enquiry, not suggesting that the historian could reproduce the Battle of Waterloo or the French Revolution in a laboratory. Historians nevertheless share something important with scientists: a commitment to evidence. Historical arguments must be capable of being examined, challenged and, where necessary, rejected. If a historian claims that a Mughal emperor issued a particular order, another historian is entitled to ask where that order is to be found, whether the document is authentic, when it was written, whether contemporary sources mention it and whether administrative evidence suggests that it was actually implemented. A proposition unsupported by evidence does not become historical merely because it is confidently asserted.

The historian’s method is therefore based upon source criticism. A source is not accepted simply because it is old; the historian asks who produced it, when it was produced, for whom it was intended and why it was written. A court chronicler may exaggerate the achievements of his patron; an inscription may proclaim a victory more complete than the evidence suggests; a colonial official may describe Indian society through assumptions created by colonial administration; a nationalist writer may romanticise the past; a religious text may preserve important memories while serving purposes very different from those of a modern historical account. The historian must therefore interrogate the source: what could its author have known? What interests did the author possess? Is the account contemporary with the event? Can its statements be checked against independent evidence? Do coins, inscriptions, administrative documents or archaeological remains confirm or contradict it? Historical knowledge becomes stronger when different and independent forms of evidence converge. R. G. Collingwood placed this relationship between question and evidence at the centre of historical knowledge, observing that sources do not simply speak to us; historians ask questions of them. A royal chronicle praising an emperor may tell us something about the emperor, but it may tell us just as much about the conventions of kingship, the expectations of patronage and the political language of the court. The historian is therefore neither a passive collector of facts nor a novelist with complete freedom to construct a story.

This brings us to the difficult question of interpretation. Every serious historical account involves interpretation because evidence does not arrange itself into an explanation; historians decide which questions to ask, which connections are significant and how particular developments are to be explained. Two historians may study the same Mughal revenue system and reach different conclusions, one may emphasise agrarian extraction and pressure upon the peasantry, while another may place greater emphasis upon monetisation, commercialisation and economic expansion, and both interpretations may be legitimate if both are able to account seriously for the available evidence. Interpretation, however, is not the same as invention. The existence of disagreement among historians does not mean that every account of the past is equally valid; evidence places boundaries around interpretation. Historians may disagree about the character and consequences of the Mughal land‑revenue system, but one cannot reasonably argue that no such system existed, for the documentary evidence would make such a claim impossible to sustain. This distinction is particularly important when E. H. Carr’s description of history as an “unending dialogue between the present and the past” is invoked. Carr did not mean that every generation is free to create whichever past it finds politically or emotionally convenient; historians inevitably approach the past from the present, and they ask questions shaped by their own societies and intellectual concerns, and new questions can reveal aspects of the past overlooked by earlier generations. Yet the answers remain constrained by evidence; the present may ask the questions, but it cannot dictate the answers.

History therefore differs fundamentally from collective memory, mythology and propaganda. Memory tells us how individuals or communities remember the past, and those memories are themselves important subjects of historical enquiry; myth may reveal how societies understand their origins and identities; propaganda selects or manufactures versions of the past for present purposes. History must do something different: it asks what can reasonably be established about what happened, on the basis of evidence that can be examined and challenged by others. Historical knowledge is necessarily provisional. Documents disappear, archaeological discoveries produce new information and neglected sources may transform an established interpretation, so a historian may revise an earlier conclusion without undermining the discipline of history. Indeed, the willingness to change an interpretation when the evidence demands it is one of the strengths of historical scholarship. The absence of absolute certainty should not be confused with the absence of truth. A court record may be incomplete, a chronicler may be biased and an archaeological layer may permit more than one interpretation, but this does not mean that the historian knows nothing. Historical knowledge exists in degrees of probability and confidence: some conclusions are overwhelmingly supported by evidence, others remain probable, and still others must remain uncertain. Intellectual honesty requires the historian to distinguish between them.

There is consequently something misleading about asking simply whether history is or is not a science. If by science we mean an experimental discipline capable of reproducing phenomena, controlling variables and establishing universal predictive laws, history is clearly not a science; if, however, we mean a systematic form of enquiry governed by evidence, criticism, verification and rational argument, history possesses many qualities associated with scientific thought. It is perhaps more useful to describe history as a critical discipline for establishing and explaining what can reasonably be known about the human past. Its strength does not lie in reproducing the past experimentally, because that is impossible; its strength lies in the disciplined interrogation of the evidence the past has left behind. This understanding also defines the historian’s limits. Historians can explain why Dara Shukoh lost the war of succession; they cannot tell us what India would certainly have become had he won it. They can investigate what the railways did to colonial India; they cannot reconstruct with historical certainty an India in which the railways were never introduced. They can debate why an empire declined, why a revolution occurred or why a political movement succeeded, but they cannot rerun history with one variable altered and observe the result. The historian must therefore resist two temptations: the first is to pretend that history possesses the experimental certainty of the natural sciences; the second, and more dangerous, is to conclude that because such certainty is impossible, anything may be said about the past. Neither position is defensible. History occupies the demanding ground between them: it accepts uncertainty without surrendering to relativism, allows interpretation without permitting invention and recognises imagination as useful only when disciplined by evidence. The historian may ask what was possible, what contemporaries believed was possible and why one possibility prevailed over another; what the historian cannot do is convert a past that never happened into a past that can somehow be known. Ultimately, therefore, the distinction is quite simple. The past cannot be repeated, but it can be investigated; it cannot be experimentally recreated, but its surviving traces can be critically examined; it cannot tell us with certainty what might have happened, but it can tell us a great deal about what did happen and why. That is both the limitation of history and the source of its intellectual integrity.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

We live at a curious moment in our relationship with the past. History has perhaps never been so publicly visible, yet the historian’s craft has rarely been so poorly understood. Television studios debate medieval rulers, social media circulates claims about events supposed to have occurred centuries ago, monuments are made to testify to identities they may never have possessed, mythology is presented as documented fact, and inconvenient evidence is dismissed because it does not conform to the past we would prefer to possess. Increasingly, the question asked is not “What happened?” but “What should our past have been?” Once that shift takes place, history ceases to be history. It becomes memory, mythology, propaganda or political mobilisation. All these may themselves be legitimate subjects of historical enquiry, but they cannot substitute for history. It is therefore worth returning to a deceptively simple question: what actually is history?

The first distinction that must be made is between the past and history. The past consists of everything that has happened. History is our disciplined attempt to recover, reconstruct and explain that past from the evidence it has left behind. The past cannot be altered. Our understanding of it can and must change when new evidence is discovered, old evidence is reconsidered, or new questions are asked, but that revision must arise from historical method, not contemporary convenience. This distinction lies at the heart of E. H. Carr’s classic What Is History?, in which he rejected the comforting nineteenth-century notion that ‘historical facts’ simply lie waiting for the historian to collect them. Countless events occurred in the past, but only some become historically significant because historians ask questions of them, hence Carr’s celebrated description of history as “an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” The phrase is sometimes misunderstood. Carr was not suggesting that historians may construct whatever past suits their present. Quite the contrary: the historian approaches the past with questions, but the answers remain constrained by evidence. Interpretation is unavoidable; fabrication is not interpretation. There is an enormous difference between saying “this evidence can be interpreted differently” and saying “evidence does not matter,” and that distinction is particularly important today. And thus, every one with a pen, has started writing about the past!

Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft, offered another memorable definition: history is “the science of men in time.” For Bloch, history was not a catalogue of kings, battles and dates but the investigation of human societies across time. The historian seeks to understand institutions, economies, beliefs, social relationships, technologies, landscapes and mental worlds, and above all how they changed. Bloch also insisted upon something fundamental to historical method: sources must be interrogated. A document does not become true simply because it is old. A court chronicler may exaggerate the achievements of his patron; an inscription may proclaim a victory that was less complete than it claims; a colonial administrator may describe Indian society through categories produced by colonial assumptions; a nationalist writer may romanticise the past; a religious tradition may preserve an important collective memory without providing a literal account of an event. The historian’s responsibility is therefore neither to believe nor disbelieve automatically, but to ask questions. Who produced this source? When? For whom? Why? What did its author know? What interests did the author possess? Is the account contemporary with the event? Is it corroborated by independent evidence? What does archaeology suggest? What do coins, inscriptions, administrative records, literary texts and material remains tell us? This process is called source criticism, and without it there can be no professional history. R. G. Collingwood made the point differently in The Idea of History: historical knowledge, for him, arose from the relationship between question and evidence. Sources do not simply speak; historians question them. An imperial order tells us that something was commanded, but the historian asks why it was issued, what circumstances produced it, what assumptions informed it and how it was implemented. The historian is therefore not a stenographer of the past, but neither is the historian its novelist.

At this point we encounter one of the most difficult questions in historical practice: can a historian ever be entirely free of bias? The answer must be an emphatic no. Every historian belongs to a particular time and society. Historians possess languages, educations, intellectual traditions, political environments, moral assumptions and personal experiences. These inevitably influence the questions they consider important. A nineteenth-century colonial historian, a nationalist historian writing during the freedom struggle, a Marxist historian concerned with class and production, and a historian of gender writing today may approach precisely the same period with very different questions. This is not necessarily a defect. Some degree of perspective is unavoidable because history cannot be written without selection. The moment a historian chooses to study peasants rather than emperors, women rather than wars, technology rather than diplomacy, or religious interaction rather than dynastic succession, a choice has already been made. Carr’s “dialogue between the present and the past” recognises precisely this reality: we ask questions of the past partly because of concerns arising in our own time. But there is a fundamental distinction between having a standpoint and falsifying evidence. A historian may possess sympathies, and may even begin with a hypothesis, but what the historian may not legitimately do is suppress evidence because it is inconvenient, distort a translation because its actual meaning is embarrassing, quote selectively so as to reverse the meaning of a source, treat supportive testimony as unquestionably reliable while subjecting contrary testimony to impossible standards, or decide the conclusion before beginning the investigation. The problem, therefore, is not whether historians have biases, for they inevitably do. The real question is whether they possess the intellectual discipline to prevent those biases from determining their conclusions. There are biases that are practically unavoidable, arising from one’s historical location, and biases against which the historian must consciously guard, such as communal prejudice, racial assumptions, national chauvinism, ideological loyalty, personal hostility, hero worship, political expediency and the deliberate selection or suppression of evidence to produce a predetermined conclusion. These must be resisted. The true historian therefore develops habits of self-suspicion. Before questioning the prejudices of a source, the historian must remain conscious of his own; before asking why a medieval chronicler viewed an event in a particular manner, the historian should also ask why he himself finds one interpretation more immediately attractive than another. One of the most dangerous sentences in historical research is: “This must have happened.” Once we decide what must have happened, evidence easily becomes merely the material with which we prove what we already believe. The proper historical question is different: “What does the evidence permit me to say happened?” That small difference contains much of the ethics of historical scholarship.

There is a useful analogy which describes the historian as three persons in one. First, the historian becomes the lawyer for the prosecution, assembling the strongest possible evidence for one interpretation, asking what evidence supports it, how the sources can be read in its favour, and what arguments make it plausible. Then he must change sides and become the lawyer for the defence, subjecting his own first argument to the strongest possible criticism. What evidence contradicts it? Which sources were overlooked? Could apparently decisive evidence bear another interpretation? Are the witnesses reliable? Are there inconsistencies in their testimony? Has chronology been respected? Have later assumptions been projected backwards? Only after both exercises have been undertaken should the historian assume the third role, that of the judge. The judgement must then be based not upon which side the historian personally prefers, but upon the relative weight of the evidence. This is an extraordinarily useful discipline because the greatest danger in historical research is not always deliberate dishonesty; more often it is confirmation bias. We notice evidence that confirms what we already suspect and unconsciously minimise evidence that troubles our interpretation. The historian should therefore deliberately search for the evidence that might disprove his own argument, for that is one of the strongest safeguards against bias. Yet the courtroom analogy requires one important qualification: a historian’s judgement is rarely the equivalent of an absolute judicial verdict. Historical evidence is often incomplete. Sources disappear; witnesses contradict one another; documents survive accidentally; archaeological evidence may permit more than one interpretation. The responsible historian therefore gives not necessarily a final verdict but the most plausible judgement that the surviving evidence permits. Sometimes that judgement will be firm, sometimes provisional, and sometimes the only intellectually responsible judgement will be that the evidence is insufficient for us to know. There is no shame in that conclusion. On the contrary, the willingness to admit uncertainty is one of the marks distinguishing scholarship from propaganda. The propagandist must always possess an answer; the historian must sometimes possess the courage not to.

How, then, does a serious historian minimise bias if bias can never be eliminated completely? The first precaution is comprehensiveness of evidence: one must actively seek evidence that contradicts one’s hypothesis rather than merely accumulating material that supports it. The second is source criticism: sources must be examined for authorship, date, context, purpose, audience and reliability. A statement hostile to an emperor cannot automatically be accepted because the historian dislikes that emperor, any more than an official chronicle praising him can automatically be believed. The third is corroboration: wherever possible, one category of evidence should be tested against another, chronicles against documents, documents against inscriptions, textual evidence against archaeology, official claims against private testimony. The fourth is context: words, institutions and actions must be understood within the circumstances of their own time, and modern meanings cannot casually be projected backwards. The fifth is linguistic competence: whenever possible, historians should engage with sources in their original languages, for translation is itself interpretation, and dependence upon selective or inaccurate translations can reproduce another scholar’s assumptions without the historian even realising it. The sixth is comparison: a policy or event that appears extraordinary in isolation may look very different when compared with contemporary practices elsewhere. The seventh is transparency: the historian should show the reader where the evidence comes from, and footnotes and references are not decorative academic machinery but part of the discipline’s system of accountability, allowing another scholar to ask whether the evidence actually supports this claim. And finally there is peer criticism, for historical knowledge develops through disagreement. Another historian may notice evidence we overlooked, challenge our translation, question our chronology or expose an assumption we did not realise we possessed. A serious historian does not fear such criticism; it is one of the mechanisms through which historical knowledge improves.

These precautions have become particularly urgent in an age in which extraordinary historical claims can travel instantly to millions of people. A statement repeated ten thousand times on social media does not acquire evidentiary value through repetition; a viral video is not a primary source for an event five centuries earlier; a confident assertion is not evidence; nor does an interpretation become historically correct because it flatters the identity of those hearing it. History is not decided by applause. The methods developed by Bloch and the Annales historians remind us that evidence is far wider than written chronicles. Coins, buildings, pottery, inscriptions, maps, agricultural patterns, settlement remains, technologies, languages, revenue records, commercial documents and landscapes can all provide historical evidence. This is important because manufactured histories often depend upon extraordinarily selective evidence: a sentence is removed from a chronicle; a translation is circulated without context; an inscription is interpreted without palaeography; an archaeological claim is made without stratigraphy; a modern meaning is imposed upon a medieval term. The professional historian works in precisely the opposite manner. Evidence is multiplied and cross-examined. A Persian chronicle may be compared with a Sanskrit inscription; an imperial order may be placed alongside a revenue document; a traveller’s description can be tested against archaeological remains; a literary representation may be compared with administrative evidence; coins can contradict chronicles, and archaeology can overturn assumptions derived from texts. This is why historical training matters.

It is also why the contribution of Irfan Habib, particularly in works such as Agrarian System, and explained in his lectures at NEHU, published as Interpreting Indian History, remains so important. Habib insists upon history as an evidence-based discipline and simultaneously demonstrates that evidence does not exist independently of interpretation. The task is not to eliminate interpretation, which is impossible, but to distinguish interpretation grounded in evidence from assertion driven by ideology. Indian historiography provides an especially instructive example. James Mill famously divided Indian history into Hindu, Muhammadan and British periods. This classification was itself an interpretation, and it encouraged generations of readers to imagine centuries of Indian history primarily through the religious identities attributed to rulers. Once such categories become normalised, they begin determining the questions that are asked. A battle involving a Muslim ruler and a Hindu ruler can easily become Hindu-Muslim conflict, yet battles between Muslim rulers do not prove Muslim-Muslim civilisational conflict, nor do wars between Hindu kingdoms demonstrate an eternal Hindu-Hindu antagonism. The historian must therefore change sides repeatedly, like the two advocates in our courtroom analogy. If religious conflict appears to explain an event, assemble the evidence supporting that interpretation, then deliberately ask what evidence might undermine it. Were political alliances crossing religious boundaries? Were material interests involved? Did members of the supposedly antagonistic communities fight on both sides? Were revenue, territory, succession or local power actually at issue? Only then should judgement be offered. Consider the Mughal Empire. To describe it simply as “Muslim rule over Hindu India” may satisfy a contemporary ideological narrative, but it explains remarkably little about how the empire actually functioned. One must examine the mansabdari system, jagirs, zamindars, revenue structures, commercial networks, regional elites and the composition of the nobility. None of this requires romanticising the Mughal Empire. There were wars, coercion, exploitation, discrimination and religious conflict. Temples were destroyed in particular circumstances; others received patronage and grants. Political alliances were made and broken. Policies changed between rulers and sometimes during the reign of the same ruler. The historian’s responsibility is not to make the Mughals either heroes or villains; it is to understand them historically. The same principle applies to every period. History is not a court in which Ashoka, Akbar, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Tipu Sultan or the British are summoned before the political prejudices of the twenty-first century and simply declared innocent or guilty. And yet, in another methodological sense, the courtroom remains useful: evidence must be heard on all sides before judgement is reached. The difference is crucial: the historian must be a judge of evidence, not a judge passing retrospective moral sentences upon the past.

There is another danger in our present relationship with history: the desire for a glorious or convenient past. Every society understandably seeks pride in its heritage. India possesses an extraordinarily rich civilisational inheritance, but genuine achievements require no imaginary embellishment. The history of Indian mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, architecture, literature, metallurgy and state formation is impressive precisely because it can be studied through evidence. When modern scientific discoveries are casually projected thousands of years backwards, no honour is done to ancient India; on the contrary, its real intellectual achievements are obscured beneath claims that cannot withstand scrutiny. There is also an important difference between mythological truth and historical truth. Myths can possess profound cultural, philosophical and religious meaning, and they tell us how communities understand themselves and the universe. The historian studies mythology seriously for precisely this reason, but archaeology is not mythology, and mythology is not archaeology. The greatness of a civilisation does not require the falsification of its chronology.

Historical interpretations inevitably change, and this is not a weakness of history but one of its strengths. New documents appear; archaeological discoveries are made; previously neglected groups become visible; questions change. Histories once concerned almost entirely with kings and battles expanded to include peasants, workers, women, merchants, artisans, tribes, castes and marginal communities. Economic history, social history, gender history, environmental history and histories of technology have transformed our understanding of the past. This is legitimate revision of history. But revision based upon new questions or evidence must not be confused with rewriting the past to satisfy present political requirements. The distinction may be expressed very simply: the historian revises conclusions when evidence demands it; the propagandist revises evidence when conclusions demand it. That distinction goes to the heart of our present predicament. History has always been connected with power because control over representations of the past helps shape identities in the present. Nations require narratives; communities preserve memories; governments commemorate some events and neglect others; monuments are built, renamed and reinterpreted. The historian cannot exist entirely outside these processes. Carr was right: historians themselves inhabit the present. But precisely because historians possess perspectives and biases, the discipline developed methods intended to restrain them: citation, verification, source criticism, linguistic competence, archaeology, comparison, scholarly debate and the requirement that claims must be open to examination by others. A historian must, in principle, tell the reader: here is my evidence; here is how I have interpreted it; now examine both. That is what separates historical scholarship from propaganda.

This is perhaps the quality most endangered when societies become intensely politicised about their past. We increasingly want history to reassure us. We want our ancestors always to have been right, our community always tolerant, our opponents always oppressive, our civilisation always superior and our preferred political identity to have existed unchanged from antiquity. But the past owes us no such comfort. Human beings in earlier centuries did not live in anticipation of our political arguments. Their identities were multiple, their loyalties shifting and their worlds fundamentally different from ours. Terms such as nation, religion, caste, community and state have themselves changed historically. To impose our categories upon them is not to recover the past; it is to colonise it. What, then, actually is history? History is the disciplined reconstruction and explanation of human societies in time through the critical interrogation of surviving evidence. It begins with questions but does not predetermine answers. It recognises interpretation and acknowledges bias, but develops methods to restrain both. It distinguishes a historian’s standpoint from the deliberate distortion of evidence. It requires the historian to argue one case, then construct the strongest case against it, and finally to weigh the evidence as impartially as humanly possible. It acknowledges uncertainty without surrendering the possibility of knowledge. And above all, history requires an intellectual quality increasingly difficult to preserve in polarised times: the willingness to discover that the past was not what we wanted it to be. Carr’s dialogue between present and past must remain a dialogue: the present may question the past, but it cannot dictate the answers. Bloch’s historian must interrogate evidence, not torture it into confession. Collingwood’s questions must arise from enquiry rather than predetermined verdicts. And Habib’s insistence upon evidence and historical explanation reminds us that interpretations of India’s past must ultimately submit themselves to the discipline of historical method.

The defence of history therefore matters far beyond universities and history departments. A society that becomes accustomed to falsifying its past eventually loses the ability to recognise falsehood in its present. Once evidence ceases to matter for events five hundred years ago, there is little reason why it should matter for events five years ago, five months ago or yesterday. That is why the historian’s craft represents something larger than the study of bygone centuries. It represents a commitment to evidence, reason, argument, intellectual honesty and the possibility of establishing truths about human experience even when those truths are uncomfortable. A historian may never be completely free from bias, for no human being can be, but the integrity of the historian lies not in claiming to possess no bias, but in recognising it, controlling it, exposing one’s argument to contrary evidence and refusing to allow preference to become proof. The historian has no obligation to provide society with the past it desires; the obligation is far more demanding: to hear the evidence for the prosecution, hear the evidence for the defence, interrogate both, and then offer the most plausible judgement the surviving evidence allows. And even that judgement must remain open to reconsideration if new evidence appears. That is not the weakness of history; that is what makes history a discipline.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Anis Ashfaq, Khwab Sarab. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2018. 456 pp. ISBN 978-969-35-3171-7.

Dr Anis Ashfaq is a celebrated poet, critic and fiction writer, and the author of over twenty-four books. His novels, including Haich (2024), Dukhiyare (2014), Khwab-Sarab (2017) and Pari-Naaz Aur Parinde (2018), have received widespread acclaim, and his 2025 publication, Tarjume aur Mukālmey, extends his engagement with the cultural world of Lucknow through translations and dialogues that further illuminate the literary traditions of the city. His primary expertise, however, lies in literary criticism, and he has published five seminal critical collections that delve into the interpretation and analysis of both contemporary and classical literature: Urdu Ghazal Mein Alamat-Nigari (1995), Adab Ki Batein (1996), Bahas-wa-Tanqeed (2009), Ghazal Ka Naya Alamaati Nizam (2011) and Ghalib: Duniya-e-Ma’ani Ka Mutalea (2022). Although his critical essays began appearing in literary journals during his student days, it was the publication of Urdu Ghazal Mein Alamat-Nigari that solidified his reputation as a distinguished critic. Beyond criticism, he has made significant contributions through translations, sketches, monographs, reportage, travelogues and biographies. In 2022, he was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Khwab-Sarab, a recognition that affirmed what readers had long known: that here was a writer who had achieved something remarkable in the recovery of a vanished world. He is currently working on a book titled Mere Ladakpan ka Lucknow, which explores the conditions and characteristics of the city as he experienced them in his childhood, a project that promises to extend further his lifelong engagement with the place that shaped him.

I can say, without doubt, this novel is a primer for anyone to understand Lucknow and it’s Shi’a cultural ethos. Interwoven in this fascinating cultural setting is a story which is half autobiographical. Without doubt, Khwāb Sarāb is an excellent work of literature and a must read!

The autobiographical threads woven into Khwab Sarab are neither casual nor incidental, but emerge from the deepest wellsprings of the author’s identity. Anis Ashfaq belongs to a family whose generations have lived in Lucknow, and he traces his lineage to the royal house of Awadh, which makes the city’s history not merely a subject of study but an inheritance carried in the blood. His entire education, from beginning to end, was received in Lucknow, and in 1983 he joined the Urdu department of Lucknow University as a lecturer, remaining there for thirty-two years until his retirement as professor and department chair in 2012. It was in the company of the city’s major literary figures that his creative and critical abilities were nurtured, and this biographical grounding explains the unusual texture of the novel: it is not the work of a visiting scholar reconstructing a world from archives, but of a man who carries the city’s lanes, households, speech and rituals in his very bones. Ashfaq has stated that he was pained by the way present-day historians presented wrong facts and distorted stories of the Nawabi era, and it was this anguish that moved him to write a novel that would set the record straight. One might say that Khwab Sarab is the fruit of a lifetime spent walking the same streets its narrator describes, listening to the same soz, inhabiting the same cultural geography, and it is this lived inheritance that gives the novel its extraordinary authority and its quality of being not merely written but remembered from within.

I initially read this book in 2019 when Ashfaq gifted me a copy when he came to visit my house. But then, due to various engagements, it was but a cursory reading. A second reading more recently compels me to introduce it to those who may have missed on it. It is a recommended reading for all who are interested in Lucknow, or Shi’i culture of Awadh. The following is my assessment of this gem:

There are some literary characters who eventually escape the books in which they were created, passing into popular memory, acquiring alternative biographies and beginning to inhabit that uncertain territory between literature and history. Umrao Jan is one such figure. Since Mirza Hadi Ruswa published Umrao Jan Ada at the end of the nineteenth century, its heroine has been read as courtesan, poet, survivor, representative of a vanished Lucknow and, sometimes, almost as though she were an identifiable historical personality whose life Ruswa merely happened to record. Khwab Sarab begins precisely at this unstable frontier between the remembered and the imagined. It is neither simply a sequel to Umrao Jan Ada nor an attempt to imitate Ruswa, but instead a novel about the search for a story: about what happens when a fictional narrative has become so deeply embedded in cultural memory that subsequent generations begin looking for the historical person behind it. Yet to describe Khwab Sarab only in these terms would miss one of its greatest achievements, for the novel also emerges as an extraordinarily authentic account of the Shi’i cultural world of Lucknow. Its importance lies not merely in referring to imambaras, Muharram observances, old families, religious spaces and neighbourhoods associated with Shi’i life, but in the intimacy with which these details are woven into the fabric of everyday existence. The culture is not externally described but lived from within, and this distinction is crucial. Ashfaq does not present Shi’i Lucknow as a catalogue of rituals or monuments; what he evokes is a social world in which religious practice, domestic space, memory, family relationships, architecture, food, speech, etiquette, mourning, neighbourhood geography and inherited objects form parts of a single cultural continuum. The reader gradually acquires the feeling not of being instructed about this world, but of having entered it, and this is perhaps the most remarkable quality of Khwab Sarab: reading it produces something close to the sensation of lived experience. That effect is reinforced by Ashfaq’s preservation of an older Lucknowi vocabulary. Words such as kotha, soz-khwan, majlis, azadari ka saman, ‘alam, farsh, imambara and the vocabulary of old households and neighbourhood life occur not as antiquarian curiosities but as natural parts of speech. Some remain intelligible today; others have receded from ordinary urban Urdu or have lost the precise social meanings they once possessed, but in Khwab Sarab they recover their original environment.

The shadow of Umrao Jan Ada falls across the entire novel, yet Ashfaq wisely does not attempt simply to reproduce Ruswa’s narrative world. Instead, he begins with uncertainty about Ruswa’s own account. The narrator has heard stories about Umrao Jan from elderly people since childhood and gradually comes to suspect that the published narrative may not contain the whole story. Ashfaq states this suspicion with striking directness: “Batāne wāle batāte hain ki Ruswā ne woh musawwada jis mein unhon ne Umrāo Jān ke yahān aulād kā honā dikhāyā thā, apne sandūq mein is liye rakh diyā thā ki unhen ma’lūm thā ki paṛhne wāle Umrāo Jān ko mān kī shakl mein qabūl nahīn karenge.” The narrator then says that the thought gradually occurred to him that he should try to discover Umrao Jan’s “real” or other story and the manuscript supposedly left behind by Ruswa. The importance of the passage lies not in whether the claim about Ruswa can be historically established; the novel is not offering archival proof. Ashfaq is instead dramatising the very process through which literary memory becomes quasi-history, as a story heard from elders, a missing manuscript, a published novel and the narrator’s own desire to know begin to overlap. Khwab Sarab thus becomes a novel about the production of historical memory itself.

The historical sensibility of the novel becomes even more evident when the narrator turns from textual memory to the physical city. One of the most revealing passages begins almost casually: “Chowk aur mere mahalle ke bīch ek chauṛī sī saṛak hai jo Āsaf-ud-Daula ke Imāmbāṛe kī pusht se Talkatora tak…” The description then moves through the lanes, older houses, workshops and buildings surviving on either side of the road. This apparently ordinary topographical detail is fundamental to Ashfaq’s method. He does not introduce Lucknow by saying that it possesses an important Shi’i heritage; instead he locates his narrator inside its cultural geography. The Asafi Imambara is not presented as a monument to which the reader is transported for descriptive purposes; it is part of an everyday route. The reader learns how one moves from Chowk towards an imambara, how houses stand in relation to streets, how workshops occupy particular localities and how older architecture is absorbed into contemporary urban life, and geography becomes memory. Even a tiny domestic detail can carry an entire social world. Describing older houses in the locality, Ashfaq observes that on many entrances there remains a small plaque bearing words such as “Bighair ijāzat andar ānā man’ hai” – “Entry without permission is prohibited.” Such a phrase could easily be overlooked, yet it tells us about the organisation of domestic space, privacy, social hierarchy and the relationship between street and household. It is through precisely such minute observations that Khwab Sarab ceases to be merely a novel set in Lucknow and becomes a remarkably textured representation of how Lucknow was inhabited. The same is true of words associated with the older urban household. The novel repeatedly evokes the kotha not merely as an abstract “house of a courtesan”, but as a distinct social and cultural institution. Ashfaq recalls a world in which respectable men might attend kothas, where music was taught and heard and where tawa’if culture was integrated, however ambiguously, into elite urban sociability. One passage explicitly speaks of men going to kothas and of courtesans being taught rag-ragini. The word kotha itself illustrates the historical value of Ashfaq’s vocabulary; in contemporary speech it can easily become a crude synonym for a brothel, but in the older Lucknowi context evoked in the novel it carries a much more complex set of associations: performance, musical training, poetry, patronage, cultivated conversation and the socially ambiguous position of the tawa’if. Ashfaq restores that older semantic world rather than imposing the narrower modern meaning upon it.

One of the least immediately obvious but most valuable achievements of Khwab Sarab is therefore lexical. Ashfaq preserves terms that once belonged to the ordinary social vocabulary of Lucknow but are increasingly unfamiliar, altered in meaning or detached from the worlds that produced them. Consider soz-khwan. Early in the novel the narrator encounters references to recognised soz-khwans, men or women trained in the melodic recitation of soz during Muharram. The text remembers individual practitioners and even discussions of the proper rag or manner in which a soz was to be rendered. To translate soz-khwan merely as “elegy reciter” would flatten the term, for a soz-khwan belonged to a distinctive performative tradition situated between poetry, music and ritual mourning. Soz-khwani required voice, memory, repertoire and knowledge of melodic convention, and the fact that Ashfaq’s characters speak of particular soz-khwans by name gives us a glimpse of a world in which such performers possessed recognised social identities. Similarly, farsh in the Lucknowi context means more than “flooring”; when an imambara is prepared and the farsh is spread, the term points towards the ritual transformation of domestic or semi-domestic space, as a room becomes a place of majlis and physical arrangement and sacred commemoration become inseparable. The same is true of ‘alam. The word survives widely, but Khwab Sarab restores the material specificity of the object. Ashfaq speaks of large ‘alams, zari work, embroidery and the other objects collectively described as azadari ka saman. The phrase is difficult to translate adequately; “mourning paraphernalia” sounds almost dismissive and “ritual objects” is too clinical. Azadari ka saman belongs to the vocabulary of the household itself: things carefully stored, repaired, inherited and brought out when the ritual season returns. The language thus becomes an archive.

This quality becomes still more striking when Ashfaq enters explicitly into the world of Muharram and azadari. What he records is not an outsider’s picturesque description of “Shi’i rituals”. He notices the things that someone who has actually lived within the culture notices: the opening of an imambara, the spreading of farsh, the lighting arrangements, preparations for majlis, the wearing of black, the movements of mourners, the material objects associated with azadari, and the manner in which one family’s imambara is connected with another. At one point a character asks: “Azādārī kā sāmān tum gaye baras yahān chhoṛ gaye the; ab tak sāmān rakhā hai?” The ensuing description mentions large ‘alams, zari and embroidery work and other objects preserved for use in an imambara. This is exactly the kind of passage that gives the novel its documentary texture. Ashfaq does not stop to explain to an unfamiliar reader what an ‘alam is or why particular objects matter; his characters already know, and the objects belong to their world. An ethnographer might describe azadari from outside, but Ashfaq represents the everyday conversations through which preparations for azadari actually occur. The very phrase azadari ka saman carries a cultural density that is difficult to reproduce in English, referring not to a single ritual object but to an entire material repertoire accumulated, stored, repaired and brought out again according to the ritual calendar. Ashfaq also understands something fundamental about Lucknowi Shi’i culture: the imambara is not merely congregational space but can be inseparable from family history. In the same sequence, the conversation moves naturally between one household’s imambara and that of another. One character explains that there had been an imambara in her own family and refers to attending another family’s imambara before returning to her own. The significance is considerable. Formal histories of Lucknow understandably concentrate upon monumental imambaras – the Bara Imambara, the Chhota Imambara and other major architectural complexes. Khwab Sarab, by contrast, reveals the proliferation of smaller domestic and familial imambaras through which Shi’i ritual life actually penetrated neighbourhood society. This is where the novel becomes particularly valuable to the cultural historian, reminding us that Shi’i Lucknow cannot be reconstructed solely through royal patronage or monumental architecture. It also existed inside homes, courtyards, neighbourhoods and networks of families. Here again vocabulary matters. Imambara itself is a word so familiar that its historical richness can easily be overlooked. In Ashfaq’s world it may denote an imposing public structure, but equally a family space attached to a house, carrying the memory of ancestors, inherited ritual obligations and the annual cycle of mourning. The same word thus moves between monument and household.

One of the strongest sequences comes when the narrator observes an imambara being prepared as evening approaches. Lamps and lights transform the space; people change their ordinary appearance; black clothing begins to dominate; the sounds of lamentation gradually intensify. Ashfaq then reproduces a soz: “Āe ‘azādāro ke mātam ke din āe…” The precise force of such passages lies in their integration into the narrative. Ashfaq does not announce: “This is how Shi’is mourn during Muharram.” Instead the narrator hears the soz, watches the preparations, encounters people moving between imambaras and experiences the changing mood of the neighbourhood. The word soz itself is important. Literally associated with burning or inner pain, in Lucknowi Shi’i usage it denotes a particular form of elegiac recitation. Likewise soz-khwani is not interchangeable with marsiya-khwani, even though both participate in the larger culture of remembrance. Such distinctions, once part of the instinctive vocabulary of Lucknow’s Shi’i households, are increasingly opaque outside that cultural environment. Ashfaq assumes them rather than displaying them, and that is another mark of authenticity. Another brief passage is equally revealing. The narrator describes moving through the locality during days when participation in majalis structures his movements: “…mujhe dūsrī majlison mein sharīk honā hai…” and elsewhere observes that during those days an imambara remains open for extended periods as people gather and mourning continues. What matters here is the transformation of ordinary time. Muharram in Khwab Sarab is not an isolated ceremony inserted into everyday life; it temporarily reorganises everyday life itself. Visits, conversations, movement through the city and household schedules begin to follow the rhythm of majalis and mourning. The plural majalis itself belongs to this older idiom. Modern speech often substitutes the singularised colloquial majlis even when several gatherings are meant, but Ashfaq’s usage preserves the Persian-Arabic-inflected register that formed part of educated Lucknowi Urdu. This is a small linguistic point, but the novel is made up of precisely such small survivals.

Ashfaq’s language also preserves the vocabulary of the pre-modern and colonial urban social order associated with the tawa’if. The novel uses kotha, tawa’if, soz-khwan and related terms without modern embarrassment or retrospective moral simplification. At one point the discussion explicitly recalls men going to kothas, listening to music and tawa’ifs being taught rag-ragini. This vocabulary matters because modern social categories can easily distort the institution retrospectively. A tawa’if was not simply what English translations routinely call a “prostitute”. The term could designate an accomplished professional woman trained in music, poetry, etiquette and performance, even though sexuality and patronage might also form part of the institution. Similarly, the kotha was a cultural space as much as a physical one. Ashfaq needs neither sociological footnotes nor defensive explanations because his characters remember what these words once meant. The linguistic world of Khwab Sarab therefore resists the flattening of older Lucknow into modern moral categories. The novel’s attentiveness to material objects also deserves special notice. Ashfaq speaks of large ‘alams, zari and embroidery work and other objects used during azadari. This sensitivity is historically valuable. Objects of mourning have craftsmen, materials, forms, styles and histories; they belong simultaneously to religion, artisanal production, domestic patronage and family memory. The vocabulary itself preserves this artisanal world. Zari and related terms evoke not just decoration but skilled urban crafts whose products entered both courtly culture and religious material culture. When such words occur in the same domestic conversation as ‘alam and imambara, an entire economy of craftsmanship appears almost incidentally behind the ritual. Ashfaq notices all these levels without turning the novel into an academic catalogue. The ‘alam is sacred object, work of craftsmanship and inherited possession at once. The novel also captures the movement of azadari from domestic and semi-private space into the streets. One passage describes mourners, standards and processional arrangements in which “…logon ke hāthon mein zar-tār ‘alam the…” — people carried richly ornamented standards in their hands. Elsewhere water is distributed to participants, recalling the thirst of Karbala. The processional landscape brings animals, standards, mourners, water distribution and spectators into a single visual field. Here again Ashfaq’s strength lies in detail. For the historian, such details illuminate how ritual lays temporary claim to urban space. Streets cease for a while to be merely routes of commercial circulation; they become landscapes of remembrance.

The authenticity of Khwab Sarab ultimately depends as much upon language as upon architecture or narrative. Ashfaq’s Lucknow is reconstructed through speech. The forms of address, indirectness, domestic conversation and effortless use of terms such as imambara, majlis, ‘alam, azadari, soz, soz-khwan, farsh, kotha and tawa’if place the reader inside a linguistic world. These expressions are not italicised curiosities within the Urdu original; they belong to ordinary conversation. That matters because cultures survive in vocabulary. A city may retain its buildings while losing the words through which people once understood them. A kotha becomes reduced to “brothel”; a soz-khwan disappears as a recognised social type; azadari ka saman becomes merely “ritual material”; an imambara becomes a “heritage monument”. Each translation may be technically understandable, yet an entire network of lived associations disappears. Khwab Sarab preserves those associations. The novel therefore functions as a kind of lexical archive of Lucknow. Its old words are not decorative archaisms; they identify institutions, occupations, spaces, relationships and practices that no longer occupy the same position in everyday urban life.

Perhaps the greatest praise one can offer Khwab Sarab is that it does not merely describe Lucknow’s Shi’i culture; it makes the reader experience its rhythms. The short passages cited above explain why. “Chowk aur mere mahalle ke bīch…” and immediately we are walking through a known neighbourhood. “Bighair ijāzat andar ānā man’ hai.” and immediately we understand something about the threshold of an old Lucknow household. “Azādārī kā sāmān…” and immediately we enter the material preparations of Muharram. “Mujhe dūsrī majlison mein sharīk honā hai…” and immediately we recognise how ritual governs the movement of people through the city. “Āe ‘azādāro ke mātam ke din āe…” and suddenly the world that has hitherto been reconstructed through lanes, houses and conversations acquires sound. Add to these the kotha, the tawa’if, the soz-khwan, the farsh, the ‘alam and the innumerable other words whose precise cultural meanings are now fading, and one begins to see why Ashfaq’s Lucknow possesses such extraordinary density. These are small phrases and small words, but collectively they create civilisation. Ashfaq does not reconstruct Shi’i Lucknow retrospectively from a distance; he allows us to inhabit it through its vocabulary, routes, domestic spaces, objects and rhythms of remembrance.

Khwab Sarab deserves to be recognised not simply as a continuation of the imaginative world created by Mirza Hadi Ruswa, but as one of those novels in which literature becomes a form of cultural preservation. Its Lucknow is not the tourist’s Lucknow of great monuments, nor is it merely the nostalgic Lucknow of nawabs, courtesans and tehzeeb. It is Shi’i Lucknow as lived experience: imambaras and homes, lanes and rituals, mourning and memory, old families and fading houses, kothas and tawa’ifs, soz-khwans and majalis, farsh and ‘alams, speech and etiquette, objects and obligations, women’s recollections and inherited affiliations. Ashfaq records this world with extraordinary minuteness. The reader does not stand outside it but enters the lanes, sits inside the houses, hears the soz, recognises the soz-khwan, sees the ‘alams being brought out, moves from one majlis to another, encounters the elderly custodians of forgotten stories and gradually begins to understand how an entire culture can reside in words and details so small that conventional history scarcely notices them. This may ultimately be the most lasting achievement of Khwab Sarab. The search for Umrao Jan provides its narrative impetus. The vanished Lucknow provides its melancholy. But the living Shi’i culture of the city, its habits, spaces, language, memories and innumerable nuances, provides its soul. And it is precisely because Ashfaq writes that world from within that the novel acquires an unusual authenticity. One finishes Khwab Sarab with the feeling not merely of having read about a culture, but of having, however briefly, lived inside it.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

The Significance of 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal for the Followers of the Ahl al-Bayt

As the sun sets on 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal and the night of the ninth begins, a profound transition takes place in the devotional calendar of the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt. The extended season of mourning that began with Muharram has reached its conclusion. The black associated with azadari gives way to colour, sorrow gives way to thanksgiving, and the remembrance of martyrdom is joined by the affirmation of hope. The ninth of Rabiʿ al-Awwal, popularly celebrated as Eid-e-Zahra, is therefore not merely a day of festivity. It marks the movement from mourning to renewal, from Karbala to the continuing Imamate, and from remembrance of suffering to confidence in the ultimate triumph of justice.

A tradition widely cited in connection with the day is attributed to Imam Ali al-Hadi, the Tenth Imam, through Ahmad ibn Ishaq al-Qummi: “The ninth of Rabiʿ al-Awwal is the day of Eid. It is our Eid and the Eid of our followers.” Versions of this tradition describe Ahmad ibn Ishaq observing the day with ghusl, fine clothes and perfume, practices associated with celebration. The report has consequently played an important role in the devotional understanding of 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal.

At the same time, some caution is necessary when reconstructing the historical origins of Eid-e-Zahra. Several different traditions have become associated with 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal over the centuries, and they do not all possess the same degree of historical or hadith authentication. The significance of the day is therefore best understood by distinguishing between what can be established historically, what belongs to transmitted devotional tradition, and what the festival has come to mean in the lived religious culture of the Shiʿa.

The End of the Season of Mourning

Perhaps the most immediate meaning of Eid-e-Zahra in South Asian Shiʿi culture becomes clear only when it is placed beside 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal.

For more than two months, the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt have travelled symbolically with the family of the Prophet. Muharram brings the approach to Karbala, the martyrdom of Imam Husain on Ashura, the captivity of the women and children, and the suffering of Imam Ali Zain al-Abidin. Safar continues this landscape of grief through Arbaʿin and the commemorations associated with the Prophet and the Imams. Finally comes 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hasan al-Askari, the Eleventh Imam.

In the traditions of Awadh and much of the Indo-Shiʿi world, this is the culmination of the Ayyam-e-Aza. The Chup Taziya and other observances of 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal, as we have seen in my earlier post, give ritual expression to a final farewell to the martyrs of Karbala.

Then comes the ninth.

The contrast is deliberate and emotionally powerful. The azadar does not forget Husain when the black clothes are removed. The mourning ends, but the covenant with Karbala does not. What was expressed for two months through tears, majlis, marsiya, nauha and matam must now be expressed through conduct.

In this sense, Eid-e-Zahra asks an important question: what remains after the mourning of Husain is over?

The answer must surely be the principles for which Husain stood: justice, truth, dignity, resistance to oppression, loyalty to the Ahl al-Bayt and refusal to surrender one’s conscience before power.

Thus the transition from 8 to 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal is not a transition from remembrance to forgetfulness. It is a transition from mourning Karbala to living Karbala.

Why is it Called Eid-e-Zahra?

Popular tradition calls the day Eid-e-Zahra, the Festival of Fatima al-Zahra, the beloved daughter of the Prophet and mother of Imam Hasan and Imam Husain.

One explanation associates the festival with the punishment of those responsible for the tragedy of Karbala. After the martyrdom of Imam Husain in 61 AH, Mukhtar al-Thaqafi established control over Kufa and sought vengeance against a number of those who had participated in the killing of Husain and his companions. Among the principal figures associated with the forces at Karbala was Umar ibn Saʿd, who commanded the army confronting Imam Husain.

A powerful devotional tradition consequently grew around the idea that news of the punishment of Husain’s killers brought consolation to the surviving members of the Ahl al-Bayt, particularly Imam Ali Zain al-Abidin. In popular retellings of Eid-e-Zahra, the arrival of the news is remembered as the moment when happiness returned to a household overwhelmed by the tragedy of Karbala. Just as Fatima Zahra is supposed to have miraculously appeared in Karbala when Imam Husain was martyred and wailed over him, similarly, on getting the news of her son’s executioner being killed, brought her joy. It was on this occasion that her daughter, Zainab and other women of the Household, smile and expressed happiness after an year of intense mourning.

The underlying idea is readily understandable. Eid-e-Zahra represents the conviction that injustice does not have the final word.

Yet the precise chronology found in popular accounts needs qualification. Mukhtar’s revolt and the deaths of the principal figures responsible for Karbala occurred at different times, and the assertion that all the relevant events occurred specifically on 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal cannot simply be treated as established historical chronology. The tradition is better understood as part of the later devotional memory of the day.

Its religious message nevertheless remains powerful: the oppressed may suffer, but oppression is not eternal; power may temporarily belong to the tyrant, but moral victory belongs ultimately to the victim who refuses injustice.

Seen in this light, the joy of Eid-e-Zahra should never become simply joy at another person’s death. Its deeper meaning is rejoicing in the defeat of zulm, not delighting in cruelty; celebrating justice, not vengeance for its own sake.

The Beginning of the Imamate of Imam al-Mahdi

There is, however, another significance of 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal which gives the day a much deeper theological meaning for Twelver Shiʿas.

Imam Hasan al-Askari died on 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal 260 AH/874 CE. With his death, the Imamate passed to his son, Imam Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam. Shiʿi sources therefore connect the death of the Eleventh Imam with the emergence of the Twelfth Imam as his successor and with the beginning of the period of occultation.

For Twelver Shiʿism, Imam al-Mahdi is not simply a historical figure whose memory is commemorated. He is the Living Imam, the Imam of the Age, al-Hujjat and al-Qaʾim, whose reappearance is awaited. Twelver doctrine holds that he will ultimately establish justice and equity in a world overcome by injustice.

This transforms the meaning of 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal.

The previous day commemorates the martyrdom of an Imam. The following day affirms that the chain of divine guidance has not been broken.

The Eleventh Imam departs, but the Imamate continues.

For this reason, 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal may be understood not merely as Eid-e-Zahra but as a renewal of allegiance to the Imam of the Age, Imam Muhammad al-Mahdi.

And herein lies perhaps the greatest significance of the day for the followers of the Ahl al-Bayt.

What Does it Mean to Await the Imam?

To celebrate the beginning of the Imamate of Imam al-Mahdi cannot simply mean waiting passively for his appearance.

The idea of intizar, awaiting the Imam, carries a moral responsibility. If the Mahdi is awaited as the restorer of justice, then those who claim allegiance to him must themselves attempt to practise justice. If he represents truth, his followers cannot knowingly support falsehood. If he stands with the oppressed, allegiance to him cannot coexist comfortably with indifference towards oppression.

The celebration therefore invites self-examination.

What does it mean to say that we are waiting for the Imam if our conduct contradicts the society of justice we expect him to establish?

The true muntazir, the one who awaits, prepares himself morally for the Imam he claims to await. He cultivates truthfulness, knowledge, compassion, courage and justice. He protects the weak, resists prejudice and refuses to participate in oppression.

Thus Eid-e-Zahra connects Karbala with the Mahdi.

Karbala teaches why injustice must be resisted. The Mahdi represents the promise that justice will ultimately prevail.

Between the two stands the believer.

An Eid of the Ahl al-Bayt

There is another beautiful dimension to the name Eid-e-Zahra.

Fatima al-Zahra stands at the centre of the spiritual genealogy of the Imams. She is the daughter of the Prophet, wife of Imam Ali, mother of Hasan and Husain, and ancestress of the succeeding Imams. The tragedy of Karbala is therefore also the tragedy of the children of Zahra.

To call the ninth of Rabiʿ al-Awwal Eid-e-Zahra gives the festival an intimate familial character. After weeks in which the believer has shared symbolically in the grief of the Prophet’s household, the believer now shares in its joy.

This is an essential characteristic of Shiʿi devotion: to rejoice in the happiness of Muhammad and the Ahl al-Bayt and to grieve in their sorrow.

Eid-e-Zahra therefore belongs to the same emotional universe as Muharram. The tears of Ashura and the happiness of Eid are not opposites. Both arise from wilayah, love and loyalty towards the Prophet and his family.

Clarifying a Misunderstanding: Umar ibn Sa’d, Not Umar ibn al-Khattab

It is important to address a misunderstanding that has, unfortunately, tarnished the reputation of this beautiful festival. In some circles, 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal has been associated with the death of the second Caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab. This has led to allegations that Eid-e-Zahra is a festival of condemning the Khulafa, causing unnecessary sectarian friction and diverting attention from the day’s true significance.

The confusion arises from a simple but significant historical error: the similarity of names between Umar ibn Sa’d and Umar ibn al-Khattab. Let us be absolutely clear about the facts.

Umar ibn Sa’d was the commander of the Umayyad army that confronted Imam Husain at Karbala. It was he who led the forces that massacred the family of the Prophet. According to historical reports, he was killed on 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal by Mukhtar al-Thaqafi as part of the latter’s campaign to avenge the martyrs of Karbala.

Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Caliph, has no connection to this date whatsoever. Historical records, from both Shia and Sunni sources, are unanimous on this point. He was wounded on 26 or 27 Dhu al-Hijjah and died three days later, in the same month of Dhu al-Hijjah, not in Rabiʿ al-Awwal. The Caliph died in 23/24 AH, whereas the daughter of the Prophet, Fatima Al-Zahra died approximately 6 months of the Prophet’s death.

The renowned historian al-Tabari, in his famous history, explicitly records this event in late Dhu al-Hijjah of the year 23 AH. Ibn Sa’d, in his al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, also records his death in the same month of Dhu al-Hijjah. Most significantly, Shaykh al-Mufid, one of the towering figures of Shia theology and history, states clearly in his Masar al-Shi’a that the second Caliph was wounded on the twenty-sixth of Dhu al-Hijjah and died on the twenty-ninth of the same month.

This consensus among historians demonstrates that the association of this event with 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal is entirely without historical foundation. The root of this misunderstanding lies in a confusion of names and a conflation of events over time.

Therefore, the celebration of Eid-e-Zahra need not, and should not, become an occasion for insulting the sacred personalities of other Muslims or deliberately causing hurt to fellow believers. That is the practice of Mu’āwiya and the dynasty which he established. He fine tuned the art of cursing the Ahl al-Bayt.

Love for the Ahl al-Bayt is not strengthened by counter abuse.

Indeed, if Eid-e-Zahra commemorates liberation from oppression and allegiance to the Imam of Justice, then its celebration should embody the ethics of the Ahl al-Bayt: dignity in disagreement, generosity towards others, concern for the oppressed and restraint even towards one’s opponents.

The festival is at its noblest when it celebrates the Ahl al-Bayt rather than hatred of anyone else. As Ayatollah Bahjat wisely advised, in addressing the significance of this day, one should focus on reasoned argument and the demonstration of truth, stating that “neither abuse, nor insult, nor curse is necessary.” He encouraged using the occasion to present clear and convincing arguments for the truth, rather than engaging in practices that cause division.

Prominent Shia scholars and authorities do not consider it permissible to hold gatherings in which the holy figures of other Muslims are abused. The true spirit of this day lies in celebrating the Imamate of Imam al-Mahdi and the principles of justice he represents.

A Day of Joy, Not Sectarianism

The celebration of Eid-e-Zahra need not, and should not, become an occasion for insulting the sacred personalities of other Muslims or deliberately causing hurt to fellow believers. Love for the Ahl al-Bayt is not strengthened by abuse.

If it commemorates liberation from oppression and allegiance to the Imam of Justice, then its celebration should embody the ethics of the Ahl al-Bayt: dignity in disagreement, generosity towards others, concern for the oppressed and restraint even towards one’s opponents.

The festival is at its noblest when it celebrates the Ahl al-Bayt rather than hatred of anyone else.

From Tears to Hope

The real beauty of 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal lies in where it occurs in the sacred calendar.

For weeks the Shiʿa has remembered loss.

Husain has fallen at Karbala. Abbas has fallen beside the Euphrates. Ali Akbar and Qasim have been mourned. The infant Ali Asghar has been remembered. Zainab, also known as ‘Sāni e Zahra’, the second Zahra, has travelled from Karbala to Kufa and Damascus. The captives have returned. Arbaʿin has passed. The deaths of the Prophet and other members of the Ahl al-Bayt have been commemorated. Finally, on 8 Rabiʿ al-Awwal, Imam Hasan al-Askari is mourned.

And then, almost suddenly, the direction changes.

The ninth morning is a morning of hope.

That transition contains a profound theological statement. Shiʿism does not end at Karbala. Its ultimate message is not despair.

Karbala teaches that truth can apparently be defeated and still remain victorious. Eid-e-Zahra carries that lesson forward: oppression passes, but the cause of justice survives. An Imam may be martyred, but the Imamate continues. The world may be filled with injustice, but the believer must never surrender the expectation of justice.

That is why the most meaningful celebration of Eid-e-Zahra is perhaps not merely new clothes, perfume, sweets or gatherings, beautiful though these traditions may be. It is the renewal of one’s covenant with the Ahl al-Bayt and especially with the Living Imam.

After more than two months of saying:

“Labbaik Ya Husain”

the believer now asks what that declaration demands in everyday life.

And on 9 Rabiʿ al-Awwal, he renews another pledge:

“Labbaik Ya Mahdi.”

The message connecting the two is ultimately one and the same: we stand with justice against oppression, with knowledge against ignorance, with truth against falsehood, and with the Ahl al-Bayt in sorrow as well as in joy.

Thus, this occasion is not a celebration of death. It is not a festival of sectarian division. It is a profound affirmation of life, justice and hope. It marks the transition from mourning to living, from grief to action, from remembering Karbala to awaiting the Mahdi.

As we put aside our black clothes and gather with family and community, let us remember that the true spirit of this occasion lies in renewing our commitment to the principles for which Imam Husain stood and for which Imam al-Mahdi will rise. It is a day to rejoice in the continuity of divine guidance, to strengthen our bond with the Ahl al-Bayt, and to prepare ourselves to be worthy of the justice we await.

May Allah accept our azadari for Imam Husain and the martyrs of Karbala. May He grant us the tawfiq to translate our mourning into righteous conduct. May He keep alive in our hearts the wilayah and love of Muhammad and his progeny, strengthen our allegiance to the Imam of our Age, and count us among those who recognise him, await him and are worthy of assisting the cause of justice for which he will rise.

Eid-e-Zahra Mubarak!

Allahumma salli ʿala Muhammad wa Aali Muhammad.
Allahumma ʿajjil li-waliyyika al-faraj.