What the earliest written source actually says
The Anarkali legend enters the written record only once, twice — and both times through Englishmen, not Mughal chroniclers. William Finch, an East India Company merchant who lodged in Lahore in 1610–11, wrote that beyond the city walls stood "a faire monument for Don Sha his mother, one of the Acabar his wives, with whom it is said Sha Selim had to do (her name was Immacque Kelle, or Pomgranate kernell) upon notice of which the King caused her to be inclosed quicke within a wall in his Moholl, where shee dyed: and the King in token of his love, commands a sumptuous Tombe to be built of stone" [1]. Two things in that sentence are easy to miss on a fast reading. First, Finch says the monument belongs to "Don Sha his mother" — he does not explain who "Don Sha" is, and the identification is his alone — and only adds, as a separate and explicitly hearsay clause ("it is said"), that Prince Salim (the future Jahangir) "had to do" with her. The rumour of an affair and the identity of the tomb's occupant are, in Finch's own sentence, two different claims stitched together, not one settled fact. Second, Finch never uses the name "Anarkali": he gives "Immacque Kelle, or Pomgranate kernell" as a gloss on a woman's name, which later tradition contracted to the single word.
The only other near-contemporary European witness, the chaplain Edward Terry, who travelled through Mughal India in the same period, adds a variant with a different plot: "Achabar-sha had threatened to disinherit the present King [Jahangir], for abuse of Anar-kalee (that is Pomegranate Kernell), his most beloved wife; but on his death-bed repealed it" [harvard-anarkali-diss-terry, quoting Terry via Foster's edition]. Terry has no walling-up, no mirror, no death at all — only a threatened disinheritance, later withdrawn. Between Finch and Terry, within a single decade of English travel writing, the story already has two incompatible endings. Neither Englishman claims to have witnessed the events he reports in a foreign capital whose court records neither could read; only Finch marks his version explicitly as bazaar hearsay ("it is said"), while Terry states his differently-shaped version as flat narrative, with no such qualifier.
What the Mughals' own records do not say
This is the layer Wikipedia's two pages on the subject gesture at but do not press: Akbar and Jahangir, the two emperors at the centre of the story, are themselves silent about it. A summary of the historiography puts the negative plainly: "Neither Akbar nor Jahangir ever acknowledged Anarkali's existence in their writings" [15]. This is an argument from absence, and absence is weak evidence on its own — which is why the case for Anarkali has always had to be built from later, non-Mughal witnesses rather than from the dynasty's own record of itself.
The tomb: two inscribed dates, sixteen years apart
The building itself is real, datable, and still standing; it is only its occupant who is in dispute. The Lahore historian Syed Muhammad Latif transcribed its inscriptions directly in 1892: on top of the sarcophagus, the 99 names of God; on its sides, a Persian couplet Latif renders as "Ah! could I behold the face of my beloved once more, I would give thanks unto my God until the day of resurrection," which he states was "composed by Jahangir, her royal paramour" [5] [4]. Latif also transcribes a second inscription naming "the profoundly enamoured Salem, son of Akbar" (Jahangir's name before his accession) [6], and reads two dates cut into the marble: "1008 A. H. (1599 A. D.), which refers to the death of Anarkali," and, on another face, "1024, A. H. (1615 A. D.), which is the date of the building of the tomb" [2] — sixteen years apart. Latif's own transcription flags what that gap means for the emperor at the centre of the story: "Akbar died on the 13th October 1605, and thus the building was completed ten years after his death" [2].
The same identification is preserved on a frame displayed inside the tomb itself, credited to the Department of Archaeology: Imtiaz Ali Taj, translating it in the preface to his 1922 play, records that it names "Nadira Begum or Sharif al-Nisa Begum," recounts the identical mirror-and-smile plot, and gives the same two dates — 1599 for the immurement, 1615 for the tomb's completion [8]. That an official plaque and Latif's 1892 history tell the story in the same terms is less proof of the event than proof of how early — and how officially — the Latif version had already been fixed as "the" account by the time anyone else wrote it down.
The rival claimant: Sahib-i-Jamal, and a fight over whose heritage the tomb is
A separate and less publicised historiographic quarrel attaches to the same building, and it is this layer that most popular accounts, including Wikipedia's, treat as a settled correction rather than as the contested claim it is. A line of Pakistani historians — M. Baqir, Abdul Majid Salik, M. Abdullah Chaghatai and Muhammad Iqbal Chaudhry among them — has argued the tomb in fact belongs to Sahib-i-Jamal, a documented wife of Jahangir, and that "Anarkali" is a later misattribution grafted onto a legitimate Mughal burial. The stakes of that argument are not merely archaeological: the 2022 Harvard dissertation examining the debate observes that this reattribution project "goes beyond a desire to historically and archaeologically authenticate the inscribed dates" and amounts to "a conscious attempt to distance the Mughal monument from the qissa of Anarkali altogether," quoting the historian Chaudhry's own complaint that "the undue publicity attached by Urdu dramatists and fiction writers need be ignored which is to defame the Muslim rulers...It was exploited by the mythical writers and dramatists without any serious thought to the historical facts which would ultimately reflect on the Muslim culture and history in the subcontinent" [9]. The dissertation's own conclusion, however, cuts against both sides equally: "there is nothing in the historical sources that tells us that this tomb site was originally attributed to Sahib-i-Jamal or that it was later mis-associated with Anarkali" [7] — the Sahib-i-Jamal identification is itself an argument, not a discovery, made from the same absence of Mughal documentation that leaves Anarkali's own historicity open. Two unproven identities, not one myth and one correction, sit inside the same marble box.
From city history to stage play: the 19th and early 20th centuries
Between Finch's 1611 rumour and today's fixed narrative lies a long chain of retellers, and each one changes the story's shape. The Russian traveller Prince Alexy Soltykoff, visiting Lahore, retold the tale without even using the name Anarkali: "I think I have already told you of a miserable woman buried alive for adultery... They discovered later that she was innocent and a mausoleum as big as a church was erected over her remains" [11] — no emperor, no prince, no royal rank, just an anonymous wronged woman and a monument. It is Latif's 1892 city history — the same book that transcribes the tomb's inscriptions — that restores the version now taken as standard: named woman, named prince, named emperor, mirror, smile, burial alive [2] [3]. The playwright Imtiaz Ali Taj drew on exactly this local-history tradition, not on any Mughal source, when he wrote his landmark 1922 Urdu play Anarkali — and said so himself, in a preface that popular retellings of the legend routinely omit: "as far as could determine, story has no historical base" [14]. That same preface is where Taj records, in Urdu translation, the Department of Archaeology's frame text from inside the tomb [8] — the playwright who gave Anarkali her most famous literary form built it from an official plaque and a 19th-century colonial-era gazetteer entry, and told his audience as much.
The 1960 film that fixed it as "history"
K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960) is the layer that finally converted a disclaimed 1922 stage fiction into what most people today experience as historical fact — and it changed the ending again in the process. Where Finch, Terry, Latif and Taj all end with Anarkali's death, Mughal-e-Azam has Akbar secretly let her escape through a hidden passage rather than die in the wall [12]. Different sources put its budget at anywhere from ₹10.5 million to ₹15 million — more, either way, than any previous Indian film had cost to produce — and it took the record for India's highest-grossing Hindi film, a record it held until Sholay surpassed it in 1975; its cast included Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, Madhubala and Durga Khote, with Madhubala as Anarkali [16]. Its scale, not its accuracy, is what made this version canonical: a spectacle overwrote a disclaimed play, which had rewritten a colonial-era gazetteer, which had rewritten two contradictory pieces of English travellers' hearsay about a woman no Mughal source ever names. The tomb — repurposed at different points as a Mughal mausoleum and a British-era Protestant church known as St James's [2] — is today the Punjab Archives building, with public access limited [13], and has outlasted every one of its own explanations.
Dates in this essay
Tomb inscription dates (per Latif 1892, transcribing the marble directly, and independently corroborated by the same museum-department frame text translated in the 2022 Harvard dissertation): 1008 AH / 1599 CE inscribed as the date of Anarkali's death/immurement; 1024 AH / 1615 CE inscribed as the date the tomb building was completed — sixteen years apart, and, as Latif's own transcription states, ten years after Akbar's actual death in 1605. These are two different inscribed events, not a single contested date.
Latif's 1892 transcription states the tomb's inscribed couplet was 'composed by Jahangir, her royal paramour' [latif-lahore-1892, pp. 186–187]; no other source opened for this essay corroborates or disputes that attribution, so the essay treats it as part of the legend's own self-account — what the inscription's local reading and Latif's transcription of it claimed — not as an independently established fact of literary history.
Where authorities disagree about when a state began or ended, the archive follows one rule — a polity is dated from the assumption of sovereign power in its own capital, and to the settlement that extinguished it — and records the alternatives rather than hiding them.
Open questions
Whether the tomb was ever officially attributed to Sahib-i-Jamal before the 20th-century historians who argue for that identification, or whether 'Anarkali' is the tomb's only continuous attribution back to the earliest records (Finch, 1611) — the Harvard dissertation states no historical source settles this either way.
Whether William Finch's 'Don Sha his mother' and the woman rumoured to have 'had to do' with Prince Salim are, in Finch's own understanding, the same person or two people whose stories were already merging by 1611 — Finch's sentence structure leaves this genuinely ambiguous, no source opened for this essay glosses who 'Don Sha' was, and no later source resolves the ambiguity from an independent record.
The exact print history connecting Latif's 1892 account to the museum/Archaeological Department frame text quoted by Imtiaz Ali Taj in his 1922 preface — which came first, and whether the department's plaque was itself sourced from Latif, has not been traced to a primary archival record in the sources opened for this essay.
Whether the couplet inscribed on the tomb is in fact a pre-existing verse by another poet rather than an original composition, as some popular accounts claim — no source opened for this essay confirms or traces that claim, and Latif's own 1892 transcription attributes it to Jahangir; it is left open rather than asserted either way.
Kanhaiya Lal's 1884 and Noor Ahmed Chishti's 1906 Lahore histories are named in earlier research as carrying a second strand in which Anarkali is a serving-girl who died of illness rather than execution; these two texts were not reopened for this essay and the variant is not independently confirmed here.