The British Library’s latest revelation a cache of 17th-century Mughal newsletters is enough to send a shiver down the spine of every Fleet Street editor who ever fancied himself a pioneer. These documents, known as ‘akhbārāt’, are not quaint curiosities. They are the living proof that the thirst for news, for the daily round of court intrigue, military disaster and economic rumour, was a constant of human civilisation long before the first Gutenberg press cranked out its Bible.
The collection, acquired by the Library in 2019 but only now fully catalogued, consists of reports from the Mughal Empire, covering the reigns of emperors from Akbar to Aurangzeb. They detail everything from the price of grain in Agra to the fall of a favourite minister. The British Library’s press release, with its breathless excitement, seems to suggest that this is a novelty. It is not. It is a corrective. For too long, the history of journalism has been a Whiggish tale of Western progress: the German pamphleteers, the Dutch corantos, the English Civil War newsbooks and finally The Times. The Mughal newsreports remind us that the impulse to gather and disseminate information is universal. The form may differ, but the function is eternal.
What is truly striking is the bureaucratic sophistication of these documents. They were compiled by official news-writers, the ‘waqia-navis’, who operated under imperial patronage. This was not the scrappy, subversive pamphleteering of the European model. It was state-sponsored, systematic and remarkably consistent. The parallels to the official gazettes of the Victorian era, or indeed to the government press releases of today, are obvious and uncomfortable. We like to think of journalism as a check on power. Here it was an instrument of power. The Mughal emperor could read the news from his provinces, assess the mood of his court, and measure the loyalty of his nobles. It was a tool of surveillance and control. Our modern obsession with ‘fake news’ and ‘media manipulation’ seems rather less novel in this light.
The timing of this announcement is, of course, exquisite. We are in the midst of a full-blown crisis of confidence in Western journalism. Circulation is falling, trust is eroding, and the business model is crumbling. The public no longer knows whom to believe. Into this morass comes a reminder that the very concept of news is older, stranger and more varied than our current parochial debates allow. It is a humbling thought. The Mughal newsreports do not solve our problems. But they do put them in perspective. They suggest that the current disarray is not the end of journalism. It is merely another turn of the wheel. The Mughal Empire fell. The akhbārāt vanished into archives. But the need for news, for someone to tell us what is happening beyond our own front door, endures.
The British Library’s archive is a treasure. But it is also a mirror. In these dusty reports of Mughal battles and bureaucratic reshuffles, we see our own contemporary obsessions: the rise and fall of celebrities (if we can call powerful nobles that), the obsession with scandal and the endless hunger for novelty. The Mughal news-writers knew that a story about a prince’s quarrel or a minister’s disgrace would sell. We have merely replaced princes with pop stars and ministers with politicians. Our grammar has changed. Our punctuation has improved. But the primal appeal of news remains unchanged.
Let us therefore greet this archive not with surprise, but with recognition. It is a reminder that the Fourth Estate, in its Mughal incarnation, was a creature of the state. It is a reminder that the line between information and propaganda has always been blurred. And it is a reminder that the news, in all its forms, is a permanent feature of the human landscape. The printing press did not invent journalism. It merely gave it a new lease of life. The Mughal newsreports prove that the urge to chronicle the present is as old as civilisation itself. We would do well to remember that, especially when we are tempted to think that our own media age is something entirely new under the sun.
