Photo: Royal Collection Trust · CC BY-SA 4.0
Chronicle · Covers 1628–1648; written in Shah Jahan’s reign

Badshahnama of Abdul Hamid Lahori

Found
The official history of Shah Jahan’s first twenty years, written at court by Abdul Hamid Lahori
Kept at
Persian text (Bibliotheca Indica, 1866–72); an illustrated copy is in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Shah Jahan’s court chronicle, year by year, with campaigns, buildings and orders of state.

What it says

Under the sixth year of the reign (1632–33), Lahori records that Shah Jahan ordered the temples begun in his father’s time and left unfinished to be pulled down, and that seventy-six temples had been destroyed in the district of Benares.

What it proves

It is the court’s own record that temple demolition at Kashi was state policy under Shah Jahan, a generation before Aurangzeb’s order of 1669.

Evidence for