While Europe was inventing newspapers, Mughal India had its own news network. From the late 16th Century, armies of scribes, agents and secretaries compiled akhbarat – brief news reports on court intrigue, military campaigns, appointments, finances and gossip. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
Written in Persian on brittle paper in hurried hands, they formed the Mughal empire's information network: part intelligence brief, part official circular, part news bulletin. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, circulated daily between the imperial and provincial courts, helping knit together an empire that, at its peak, ruled much of the Indian subcontinent and nearly a quarter of the world's population. Many were read aloud before assembled officials, carrying news from the imperial court to distant corners of the empire.
For decades, tens of thousands of pages of these reports, orders and administrative records sat in libraries and archives across India and Britain. Historians knew they existed. Few ventured far into them. Munis D Faruqui, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, spent almost two decades doing just that.
Beginning in 2007, he immersed himself in the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mualla (Newsletters of the Exalted Court), a vast collection preserved in archives across India and Britain. Working through more than 6,500 pages in Kolkata's National Library, he followed princes, generals, courtiers, royal women, imperial eunuchs and many others through tens of thousands of entries.
The result is a forthcoming history of Aurangzeb (also known by his imperial name, Alamgir) and the Mughal empire in the late 17th Century. It offers not only a fresh portrait of India's most controversial Mughal ruler, but also a rare glimpse of how one of the world's great early-modern empires actually worked.
The Mughal news reports survive in at least four known collections – in London, Bikaner, Sitamau and Kolkata – though historians suspect others may be in private hands. One cache was preserved in bundles in the cool, dry basement of Jaipur Fort. In the early 19th century, James Tod, an East India Company official and antiquarian, borrowed a large number of these reports and failed to return them when he left for Britain in 1823. He later donated the collection to the library of the Royal Asiatic Society.
The richest cache, in Kolkata's National Library, consists of 21 volumes devoted to the reign of Aurangzeb, who ruled the Mughal empire from 1658 to 1707 and was its last great expansionist emperor. The volumes were once part of the personal library of pioneering Indian historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Aurangzeb's most influential biographer.
At first glance, much of the material appears crushingly mundane: appointments, disputes, military movements, gifts, illnesses and endless administrative minutiae. Yet taken together, the reports amount to something rare – a near-continuous record of an empire watching itself, says Faruqui.
Archival coverage of Aurangzeb's first two decades on the throne is patchy. But the amount of surviving material from the early 1680s onwards is extraordinary, providing access to an almost daily flow of reports for years on end. All told, they illuminate roughly a third of the emperor's nearly half-century reign.
Faruqui has spent much of his academic life thinking about the late Mughal world in the late 17 century. At the time the empire was at its peak, yet also edging towards a decline that would eventually clear the way for British rule. The akhbarat gave him a new way of seeing that world.
"My whole experience of working with the akhbarat has been one big eureka moment after another!," Faruqui told me. "It never ceases to amaze me how the density of the informational ecosystem was at the time".
The news reports Faruqui studied were written for the Raja of Jaipur. Hundreds of other nobles, princes and officials likely received similar reports from agents across the empire, forming one of the early modern world's most sophisticated information networks.
"I am floored when I think about the ecosystem that spawned such rich knowledge gathering and transference," Faruqui says.
The sheer volume of information suggests that, by pre-modern standards, the Mughal state had a remarkably sophisticated grasp of its sprawling empire. Faruqui believes its ability to act on that information varied, but its reach affected – "sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse" – the lives of tens of millions of people.
Again and again, the reports upended Faruqui's assumptions. He says he found little evidence of the widespread religious conversions often associated with Aurangzeb's court. The imperial harem and the eunuchate were far more "politically influential than anyone imagined". The emperor appeared less distant and austere than expected, and the reports contained far fewer hostile references to groups such as the Sikhs than Faruqui had anticipated.
Some discoveries emerged not through dramatic revelations but through repetition. Faruqui found one name appearing again and again in the newsletters: Zinat-un-Nisa, Aurangzeb's daughter. Historians knew of her, but little had been written about her role at court. Yet page after page, she surfaced in the record.