THE REIGN OF AKBAR (1556-1605) 81 
concluding section of the Akbarnama, presents very different 
features. Its purport, as described in the preface! is to 
record such of Akbar’s activities “as illustrate the worldly 
side of his nature and his greatness as a king,” his work as 
a spiritual leader being intentionally passed over; and the 
author adds, with entire justice, that he is offering students 
“a present, which may seem difficult to understand, but 
which is easy; or rather, which may seem easy, but is in 
reality difficult.” 
The work is heterogeneous. The latter portion consists 
mainly of a description of Hindu culture, and does not con- 
cern us; the earlier portion, which I shall speak of shortly 
as the Ain, presents an account of the action taken by Akbar 
in each of the different departments in which the adminis- 
tration was organised, and thus carries out the declared 
object. No one who has read the Ain and the Akbarnima 
side by side can regard them as the work of the same 
author: the Ain is a jumble of all styles? and no style at all, 
the lack of proportion is glaring, the diction is often crabbed 
and technical. Some small portions are clearly from the 
pen of Abul Fazl, as Blochmann pointed out in his preface 
to the text, but it is equally clear that those which most 
concern us are the work of very different writers. Taking 
the book as a whole, it must be regarded as a collection of 
official papers contributed by the various administrative 
departments, edited by Abul Fazl, and containing occasional 
matter from his pen; but in essence consisting of what the 
departments furnished and the editor did not reject. The 
chapters which deal with the agrarian system can be under- 
stood only as the work of one or more officials in the Revenue 
Ministry, too familiar with its routine to explain details, 
and, I think, inclined to be reticent over departmental 
failures; it is open to us to explain obscurity as the result 
either of faulty drafting, or of hasty editing, but we can 
never assume that the writers were ignorant of their subject. 
While the two works are distinct, they are not unrelated. 
[n some passages the Akbarnima gives a summary of the 
Ain; to which it refers for details: in others, the Akbarnima 
! Ain, i. 7; Blochmann, i. x. . 
' On the style see Blochmann'’s preface, i. 4.