The purpose of this book is to present to the readers a
collection of Mughal documents that belong to the Jogi
gaddi of jakhbar in the Punjab, and to share with them
the excitement of their discovery. In a sense we retain to
this day, nearly a year after having come upon these documents,
a measure of that excitement, for a detailed
examination of these has only deepened our belief in
their significance. Discussions with kind and learned
friends like Professor Nurul Hasan have persuaded us to
believe also in the value of their publication. This publication
owes itself then to the encouragement that we have
received in the idea of bringing them to wider notice, on
the one hand from several friends, especially Dr Niharranjan
Ray, Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced
Study at Simla, and on the other hand from the enlightened
and generous attitude of the Mahant of jakhbar, Baba
Brahm Nath, and his learned disciple and our friend,
Mahant Shankar Nath.
The jakhbar collection is not the only collection of
Mughal documents on the subject of endowments of one
kind or the other to non-Muslim establishments and individualsz
but it is a collection distinguished from the others
by its size and range and character. The seventeen documents
presented here form a homogeneous group spread
evenly over a period of more than two centuries and
belonging to the reign of every major Mughal ruler; they
also refer to the same madad-i-ma‘¢i.sh grant, enjoyed.
almost undisturbed, over this long period, and in fact to
this day by the jogis. We thought therefore of publishing
these documents in their entirety. And if we appear to
have been a little pretentious and tiresome in our presentation
of these with a photograph and transcription and
translation and annotation of each document, with a
generous measule of appendices added, we have, we believe
some justification for the weary detail that we inflict upon
the reader in the fact that these are offered here essentially
as sources for the student of Mughal India. We have
drawn relatively few conclusions ourselves, throwing out
only some suggestions at places, and have aimed generally
at publishing these in as full a manner as possible so that
they can be put to more learned use by other scholars.
The only conscious effort we have made to save the
reader, especially the general reader, from unbearable
tedium, is by providing a short and, we hope, readable
introduction, and by reducing to the very minimum such
learned things as diacritical marks, retaining them only
for unfamiliar words and names, and then following
simply the easily accessible scheme that Steingass uses in
his Persian-English Dictionary.