[1] He authored the controversial and in part "patently fictitious" Muntakhab-al Lubab – a Persian language book about the history of India during the Mughal period, completed in 1731.
[1] Khafi Khan's title Nizam al-Mulki suggests that during his last years, he served Nizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah I, a Mughal nobleman who established the Hyderabad State.
[1] According to M. Athar Ali, the manuscripts of Khafi Khan's works discovered later and the manuscripts of other Mughal era historians shows that this book incorporates without acknowledgment the work of other Muslim authors with pen names Sadiq Khan and Abu'l Fazl Ma'muri on emperors Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, in a manner that would be "regarded as gross plagiarism" in modern era scholarship.
[2] Large sections of Khafi Khan's Muntakhab-al Lubab, including those about the Aurangzeb period – such as the campaign in Bijapur – are plagiarized and "hopelessly incorrect", says historian A.J.
According to Sharma, writing in 1936, of all historical records available from late 17th-century and early 18th-century, Khafi Khan's work has been given the "place of honor" in the colonial era historiography on Mughal period and particularly Aurangzeb.
Khafi Khan does not mention that he himself compiled the information about Aurangzeb even when he started working for the Mughal Empire administration in late 1690s.
[7][8] Sharma states that he has stumbled into a manuscript in Rampur library that reads like Khafi Khan's book, but is written by Abu'l Fazl Ma'muri.
It is an important but questionable source, because Khafi Khan presents a one-sided Islamist view, one that portrayed "Hyderabad as an Islamic bastion in the Deccan".
[9] In contrast, in his letters to Hindu rulers such as Sawai Jai Singh II, seeking their continued support, the Nizam was diplomatically mellow and used language such as "our fight against .. misguided people" and the "partisans of Shahu" (the Marathas).
[9] Khafi Khan is regarded as an important source of Mughal-era events and motives, such as the resignation of the Nizam from all the imperial commissions of the Mughal empire years after the death of Aurangzeb.
[10] According to Faruqui, Khafi Khan explains that the Nizam resigned because Bahadur Shah was favoring and promoting the "low borns" in his court over those with a lineage in Mughal noble families.
This gap of years means that they "relied extensively on memory and hearsay to reconstruct events" and this must have "allowed unintentional errors to creep into their chronicles", says Truschke.