Page:Shivaji and His Times.djvu/466

446 official despatch of Shivaji's time (except three letters concerning Tanjore affairs) has been unearthed after the devoted search of nearly half a century. (Rajwade, xv. does not really go against this view.) But thousands of private legal documents, deeds of grant, decisions of law suits, orders on petitions, etc., have been collected, and for the sufficient reason that they were kept not in the State archives (where they would have perished long ago) but in private families, which carefully preserved them as title-deeds. Hence, the Maratha kingdom before the Peshwa period utterly lacks the State-papers, detailed official histories, contemporary memoirs, and letter- books with which Mughal history is enriched. The only contemporary records of Shivaji's and even Shambhuji's times that now survive are in English and Persian and none at all in Marathi. In point of time the sole Marathi record of his reign, — if we may apply this dignified title to Sabhasad's brief and confused recollections written in 1694, — occupies the third rank, and in point of accuracy and authenticity its position is lower still. As regards Shambhuji's reign the situation is worse still. His earliest and only Marathi history is one of 10 short pages written more than 120 years after his death! On the other hand, the Persian (and to a lesser extent English) sources were absolutely contemporary, promptly recorded, fully detailed and dated, and carefully preserved. Their writers also belonged to a higher intellectual type than the Marathi