The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur)

Pending the wide research work necessary to interpret Bābur’s Hindūstān poems which the Rāmpūr manuscript preserves, the following comments, some tentative and open to correction, may carry further in making the poems publicly known, what Dr. E. Denison Ross has effected by publishing his Facsimile of the manuscript.2826 It is legitimate to associate comment on the poems with the Bābur-nāma because many of them are in it with their context of narrative; most, if not all, connect with it; some without it, would be dull and vapid.

The contents of the Rāmpūr MS. are precisely what Bābur describes sending to four persons some three weeks after the date attached to the manuscript,2827 viz. “the Translation and whatnot of poems made on coming to Hindūstān”;2828 and a similar description may be meant in the curiously phrased first clause of the colophon, but without mention of the Translation (of the Wālidiyyah-risāla).2829 Hence, if the poems, including the Translation, became known as the Hindūstān Poems or Poems made in Hindūstān, such title would be justified by their author’s words. Bābur does not call the Hindūstān poems a dīwān even when, as in the above quotation, he speaks of them apart from his versified translation of the Tract. In what has come down to us of his autobiography, he applies the name Dīwān to poems of his own once only, this in 925 AH. (f. 237b) when he records sending “my dīwān” to Pūlād Sl. Aūzbeg.

There are three separate items of composition in the manuscript, marked as distinct from one another by having each its ornamented frontispiece, each its scribe’s sign (mīm) of Finis, each its division from its neighbour by a space without entry. The first and second sections bear also the official sign [ṣaḥḥ] that the copy has been inspected and found correct.

(1) The first section consists of Bābur’s metrical translation of Khwāja ‘Ubaidu’l-lāh Aḥrārī’s Parental Tract (Wālidiyyah-risāla), his prologue in which are his reasons for versifying the Tract and his epilogue which gives thanks for accomplishing the task. It ends with the date 935 (Ḥai. MS. f. 346). Below this are mīm and ṣaḥḥ, the latter twice; they are in the scribe’s handwriting, and thus make against supposing that Bābur wrote down this copy of the Tract or its archetype from which the official ṣaḥḥ will have been copied. Moreover, spite of bearing two vouchers of being a correct copy, the Translation is emended, in a larger script which may be that of the writer of the marginal quatrain on the last page of the [Rāmpūr] MS. and there attested by Shāh-i-jahān as Bābur’s autograph entry. His also may have been the now expunged writing on the half-page left empty of text at the end of the Tract. Expunged though it be, fragments of words are visible.2830

(2) The second section has in its frontispiece an inscription illegible (to me) in the Facsimile. It opens with a masnawī of 41 couplets which is followed by a ghazel and numerous poems in several measures, down to a triad of rhymed couplets (matla‘?), the whole answering to descriptions of a Dīwān without formal arrangement. After the last couplet are mīm and ṣaḥḥ in the scribe’s hand-writing, and a blank quarter-page. Mistakes in this section have been left uncorrected, which supports the view that its ṣaḥḥ avouches the accuracy of its archetype and not its own.2831

(3) The third section shows no inscription on its frontispiece. It opens with the masnawī of eight couplets, found also in the Bābur-nāma (f. 312), one of earlier date than many of the poems in the second section. It is followed by three rubā‘ī which complete the collection of poems made in Hindūstān. A prose passage comes next, describing the composition and transposition-in-metre of a couplet of 16 feet, with examples in three measures, the last of which ends in l. 4 of the photograph.—While fixing the date of this metrical game, Bābur incidentally allows that of his Treatise on Prosody to be inferred from the following allusive words:—“When going to Saṃbhal (f. 330b) in the year (933 AH.) after the conquest of Hindūstān (932 AH.), two years after writing the ‘Arūẓ, I composed a couplet of 16 feet.”—From this the date of the Treatise is seen to be 931 AH., some two years later than that of the Mubīn. The above metrical exercise was done about the same time as another concerning which a Treatise was written, viz. that mentioned on f. 330b, when a couplet was transposed into 504 measures (Section f, p. lxv).—The Facsimile, it will be noticed, shows something unusual in the last line of the prose passage on Plate XVIII B, where the scattering of the words suggests that the scribe was trying to copy page per page.

The colophon (which begins on l. 5 of the photograph) is curiously worded, as though the frequent fate of last pages had befallen its archetype, that of being mutilated and difficult for a scribe to make good; it suggests too that the archetype was verse.2832 Its first clause, even if read as Hind-stān jānibī ‘azīmat qīlghānī (i.e. not qīlghālī, as it can be read), has an indirectness unlike Bābur’s corresponding “after coming to Hindūstān” (f. 357b), and is not definite; (2) bū aīrdī (these were) is not the complement suiting aūl dūrūr (those are); (3) Bābur does not use the form dūrūr in prose; (4) the undue space after dūrūr suggests connection with verse; (5) there is no final verb such as prose needs. The meaning, however, may be as follows:—The poems made after resolving on (the) Hindūstān parts (jānibī?) were these I have written down (taḥrīr qīldīm), and past events are those I have narrated (taqrīr) in the way that (nī-chūk kīm) (has been) written in these folios (aūrāq) and recorded in those sections (ajzā').—From this it would appear that sections of the Bābur-nāma (f. 376b, p. 678) accompanied the Hindūstān poems to the recipient of the message conveyed by the colophon.