Khafi Khan

Khafi Khan, born Muhammad Hashim, was an Indo-Persian historian and Mughal official. Wikipedia gives his dates as about 1664 to about 1732. His family came from Khaf in Khurasan, which gave him the name, and the title Khafi Khan Nizam al-Mulki came later from Emperor Muhammad Shah. He began as a clerk in Bombay around 1693 to 1694, held civil and military posts under Aurangzeb and later emperors, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he ended as a diwan to Nizam ul-Mulk, founder of Hyderabad.

His Muntakhab-ul-Lubab ("selected records of the wise and pure") is a history of India in Persian, in three parts. The Encyclopaedia dates its completion to 1722, while Wikipedia puts the finished work at about 1731 to 1732 and notes that the manuscripts survive in several versions, so the two dates may describe different stages of the text. He claimed that for the last 53 years he covers, 1669 to 1722, he relied on what he saw himself or on eyewitnesses.

What it says about the Sikhs, according to the Encyclopaedia:

• Aurangzeb ordered the Guru's masands removed and Sikh temples razed.
• Bahadur Shah marched to the Deccan with Guru Gobind Singh, who rode with two or three hundred spear-bearing horsemen. Khafi Khan attributes the Guru's death to a dagger stab.
• On Banda Singh Bahadur his language is very harsh and abusive, yet he admits that government forces could not stand the Sikh attacks in parts of the Punjab. He notes that Banda wrote to Mughal faujdars before attacking, and that conquered areas had a short-lived but working civil administration.
• He credits Sikh determination and daring, above all in night attacks and desperate sallies during sieges, and records a young captive who refused release although his mother had obtained a royal order for it.

How to read him. The Encyclopaedia calls the book a valuable contemporary source for the age of Guru Gobind Singh and Banda Singh Bahadur, and stresses how hostile his tone toward the Sikhs is. Modern historians add other warnings. M. Athar Ali says he took material from Sadiq Khan and Abu'l Fazl Ma'muri without acknowledgement, which he calls gross plagiarism by modern standards. Ram Sharma argued in 1936 that he wrote as an eyewitness of events he could not have seen. Katherine Butler Brown points out that he was about four years old in 1668, so his memory of the 1660s cannot be trusted. Extracts of the work in English are in volume 7 of Elliot and Dowson's The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians.

Remembered for: a Mughal insider's record of the Khalsa's rise, in which even a hostile writer admits the Sikh successes; to be read with its bias and borrowings in mind.