Book Review – Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair ul Manazil

Shama Mitra Chenoy (edited, translated and annotated), Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair ul Manazil, Oxford University Press, 2018, 320 pages, Rs 995

In the discipline of history, working with primary sources in Persian is a daunting task. This emerges from the difficulty in locating the original version of the primary source and corroborating it with the other extant versions/recensions and doing a faithful translation of the text. Mirza Sangin Beg’s Sair ul Manazil written in the first half of the nineteenth century under the patronage of William Fraser is one such text which has caught the attention of scholars of both history and Persian literature in the twentieth century. First translated into English in the 1980s, the historical text has continued to be a subject matter of research among historians.