Page:Shivaji and His Times.djvu/10

6 of Shah Jahan and Aurangzib, Muhammad and Ali Adil Shah, many historical letters in Persian, the entire letter-books of Jai Singh and Aurangzib, daily bulletins of Aurangzib's Court, and the full text of Bhimsen as well as another contemporary Hindu historian in Persian, viz., Ishwardas Nagar,—all of which were unknown to Grant Duff.

Secondly, he relied too much on the uncritical and often deliberately false Chitnis Bakhar, written 183 years after Shivaji's birth, while I have preferred the work of Shivaji's courtier, Sabhasad, and also incorporated whatever is valuable and above suspicion in the mass of Marathi materials published by a band of devoted Indian workers at Puna and Satara during the last 40 years. Grant Duff, moreover, worked on single manuscripts of the Marathi chronicles ; but we live in a happier age when these sources have been carefully edited with variations of reading and notes.

Thirdly, the English and Dutch Factory Records have been more minutely searched by me and every useful information has been extracted from them.

Two minor improvements which, I hope, will be appreciated by the reader, are the exact positions of all the places mentioned, traced with the help of the extremely accurate Government Survey maps, and the chronology, which is the most detailed possible in the existing state of our knowledge and corrects Grant Duff's numerous inaccuracies in this respect.......