Bakhtawar Khan

Muhammad Bakhtawar Khan was a historian, poet and court official in the service of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Wikipedia gives his birth as 1620 in Persia, to a family that, like many Persian poets, traders and nobles of the time, had migrated to Mughal India. He was a eunuch, an enslaved attendant of the emperor. After Aurangzeb won the war of succession, he was promoted from a regular attendant to superintendent (daroga) of the khawases, a senior post in the imperial household. He died in Delhi on 19 February 1685.

His main work is the Mirat al-Alam, a history of the reign of Aurangzeb Alamgir. S. S. Alvi's edition (Lahore, 1979) has two volumes: the first is political history, and the second gives biographies of religious scholars, Sufis, calligraphers and poets.

He also brought up Musta'id Khan, who served him as diwan and munshi, and who finished the better-known Maasir-i-Alamgiri in 1710. Scholars note that the first part of the Maasir seems to draw on the Mirat.

What we can and cannot say

Bakhtawar Khan wrote from inside the court, so his chronicle gives the emperor's side of events and has to be read with that in mind. None of the sources we opened says what, if anything, the Mirat records about the Sikh Gurus, so this page makes no claim about that.