The last decade has seen a resurgence in the academic interest in Mughal history, which has complicated the received view of early modern India. On the one hand, some scholars have focused on the vernacular (Aditya Behl, Jonardon Ganeri, Allison Busch, Sandhya Sharma) and drawn attention to the emergence of regional literature and philosophy connected in complex ways with imperial patronization. Other scholars have emphasized the Mughal court culture as an aspect of a much larger Persianate phenomenon (Muzaffar Alam, Lisa Balabanlilar, A. Azfar Moin, Rajeev Kinra), and located commonalities in state structure, resource extraction, and literary culture in high Persian from the Iranian plateau through Central Asia and into India. What has emerged is a view of the Mughals that is not that of the historians of British India who first translated the great Mughal histories and formed the view of the dynasty that was little transformed by nationalist historians. Both these perspectives, the vernacular and the imperial, no longer assume the cartoonish assumption of a good Akbar anticipating a secular Indian state and a communal Aurangzeb laying the foundations for an Islamic Pakistan.

Wheeler M. Thackston enters this robust field with a new edition and translation of a portion of the first part of Abu'l-Fazl's Akbarnama, a book that consciously set the pattern for a new style of writing history in Persian. The text itself is perhaps the best-known primary source for the emperor Akbar (1556–1605), and was originally translated into serviceable English by H. Beveridge for Bibliotheca Indica in 1897. Abu'l-Fazl (d. 1602) famously wished in this “story of Akbar” to situate his patron as a monarch in touch with both God and reason, a duality expressed in an obtuse and exalted Persian, which has confounded generations of subsequent historians who have tended to use the text as a source for information on anecdotes, persons and dates rather than as a creative envisioning of history.

The Persian text is lightly edited and vigorously translated by Thackston, as is to be expected from the doyen of translators of pre-modern Persian. It is a fresh translation founded on the Persian text of the Calcutta edition, drawing carefully on occasion from a number of manuscripts. In addition to the text and translation, the book has an introduction, maps, index, bibliography, glossary and very helpful notes. The translator manages to catch Abu'l-Fazl's frustrating willingness to combine arcane Persian, as in his fawning introduction and attempt to situate Akbar within a horoscope and Adamic framework, with really quite simple and plodding annals of battles and court events, presumably taken from the archives by Abu'l-Fazl's assistants. The translation is first class and Thackston is to be congratulated on catching the shifting registers that so often obfuscate more than illuminate Abu'l-Fazl. At the same time, Thackston barely situates the Akbarnama itself, satisfying himself with an introduction of only ten pages. This is unfortunate, as Thackston has an ability to find the telling orientation of Abu'l-Fazl's larger project, as, for example, in his very brief excursus (pp. xiv–xv) on the importance of mystifying language such as shinasa'i (“knowingness”). But the introduction and notes are embedded more within a philology than a historiography. Is it really helpful for our understanding of the sixteenth century to see Abu'l-Fazl's worldview as “secular” (p. xi) or his adversary Bada'uni as “uncompromisingly orthodox” (p. xvii)? But students and scholars alike will welcome Thackston's fluent and accessible translation of the first portion of this important work.

The translation of this most Persianate of Indic works appears in the Murty Classical Library of India, which wishes to provide a classical foundation of translations to illustrate the breadth and depth of Indian civilization. It is wonderful to see Persian recognized as a classical Indic language, and it is hoped that the remaining two-thirds of the Akbarnama will subsequently be published in the series. The book is produced to very high standards, with an evocative and clear Persian typeface designed by Titus Nemeth. It is highly recommended for courses on premodern South Asia or the Persianate cosmopolis of the early modern period.