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BIBLIOTHECA INDICA:

A

COLLECTION OF ORIENTAL WORKS

PUBLISHED BY THE

ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL.

NEW SERIES, Nos. 910, 923, 929, 940, 957, 991, 1027 AND 1036.

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GL

13-25 0638

DEDICATION

IN MEMORY OF

J. H. B.

M. T. B.

L. S. B.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST VOLUME.

.

When the Asiatic Society of Bengal did me the honour of inviting me to translate the Akbarnāma, I replied that I doubted my ability to make a complete translation, and suggested that I might edit the manuscript version by Lieutenant Chalmers. My suggestion was accepted, and I accordingly obtained from the Royal Asiatic Society the loan of the Chalmers' manuscript and permission to print it. I soon found, however, that the translation was too abridged to be made the basis of my work, and that it was necessary to execute a new version, Chalmers' manuscript was of great service to Elphinstone and Count Noer, and it has also been of much use to myself, but there are many gaps in it, and Abul Fazl's language has throughout been greatly compressed. One gap near the beginning extends to over ninety pages of the printed text, and has the effect of omitting the account of Akbar's birth, with the prognostics and horoscopes appertaining thereto, as well as the notices of his ancestors from Adam down to his grandfather (Bābar). The reader may judge of the extent to which abbreviation has been carried, when I state that the Chalmers MS. consists of two thinnish volumes of foolscap, and that the Bibliotheca Indica edition of the Persian text occupies three large quartoes which aggregate 1,600 pages.

The task of translation has occupied me several years, and the work has not been very congenial, for Abul Fazl is not an author for whom one can feel much sympathy or admiration. He was a great flatterer and unhesitatingly suppressed or distorted facts. His style,

too, seems at least to Western eyes to be quite detestable, being full of circumlocutions, and both turgid and obscure. He is often prolix, and often unduly concise and darkly allusive. His one merit-and it is one which he specially claims for himself—is his laboriousness. He was an unwearied worker, and when we blame him and lament his deficiencies we shall do well to consider what a blank our knowledge of Akbar's reign would have been, had not Abul Fazl exerted himself during years of strenuous effort to chronicle events and institutions. His work also has the imperishable merit of being a

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