Abū al-Ghāzī Bahadur Khan’s Genealogical Narrative in Shajara-i Tarākima

Abstract

This study examines how Abū al-Ghāzī Bahadur Khan represents and evaluates historical events and the social and political relations surrounding them in Shajara-i Tarākima, focusing on passages in which his perspective as narrator is explicit. Employing a historical research design, the study first identified narrative units in which Abū al-Ghāzī’s position as narrator becomes explicit. These units were subsequently coded and analyzed thematically using a qualitative content analysis approach. The analysis focused on narrator-centered passages identified through indicators of self-reference, personal experience and eyewitness testimony, explicit narrative intervention, evaluative statements, and contextual inference. The findings show that social order in Shajara-i Tarākima is represented through six interrelated dimensions: political authority and moral responsibility; epistemic authority and critical verification; language, audience, and access to knowledge; genealogy and collective belonging; migration, settlement, and social order; and narrative management and the author–reader relationship. The findings further demonstrate that Abū al-Ghāzī does more than transmit genealogical knowledge: he selects, organizes, and evaluates lineage, status, knowledge, and communal belonging according to particular value-based and epistemic criteria. Accordingly, Shajara-i Tarākima can be understood not simply as a historical text that records lines of descent, but as a genealogical narrative that reconfigures the past through genealogical categories, social relations, and narrator positioning. The study therefore demonstrates that genealogical narratives provide insight not only into the transmission of lineage and descent, but also into the narrative construction of social order, belonging, and authority.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Genealogy, 2026 · DOI ↗