The Bābur-nāma

1675

A small matter of wording attracts attention in the preceding two sentences. Bābur, who does not always avoid verbal repetition, here constructs two sentences which, except for the place-names Dihlī and Āgra, convey information of precisely the same action in entirely different words.

1676

d. 1325 AD. The places Bābur visited near Dihlī are described in the Reports of the Indian Archæological Survey, in Sayyid Aḥmad’s As̤ār Sanādīd pp. 74-85, in Keene’s Hand-book to Dihlī and Murray’s Hand-book to Bengal etc. The last two quote much from the writings of Cunningham and Fergusson.

1677

and on the same side of the river.

1678

d. 1235 AD. He was a native of Aūsh [Ush] in Farghāna.

1679

d. 1286 AD. He was a Slave ruler of Dihlī.

1680

‘Alāu’u’d-dīn Muḥ. Shāh Khiljī Turk d. 1316 AD. It is curious that Bābur should specify visiting his Minār (minārī, Pers. trs. I.O. 217 f. 185b, minār-i-au) and not mention the Qut̤b Minār. Possibly he confused the two. The ‘Alāī Minār remains unfinished; the Qut̤b is judged by Cunningham to have been founded by Qut̤bu’d-dīn Aībak Turk, circa 1200 AD. and to have been completed by Sl. Shamsu’d-dīn Altamsh (Aīltimīsh?) Turk, circa 1220 AD. Of the two tanks Bābur visited, the Royal-tank (ḥauẓ-i-khāẓ) was made by ‘Alāu’u’d-dīn in 1293 AD.

1681

The familiar Turkī word Tūghlūq would reinforce much else met with in Dihlī to strengthen Bābur’s opinion that, as a Turk, he had a right to rule there. Many, if not all, of the Slave dynasty were Turks; these were followed by the Khiljī Turks, these again by the Tūghlūqs. Moreover the Panj-āb he had himself taken, and lands on both sides of the Indus further south had been ruled by Ghaznawid Turks. His latest conquests were “where the Turk had ruled” (f. 226b) long, wide, and with interludes only of non-Turkī sway.

1682

Perhaps this charity was the Khams (Fifth) due from a victor.

1683

Bikramājīt was a Tūnūr Rājpūt. Bābur’s unhesitating statement of the Hindu’s destination at death may be called a fruit of conviction, rather than of what modern opinion calls intolerance.

1684

120 years (Cunningham’s Report of the Archæological Survey ii, 330 et seq.).

1685

The Tārīkh-i-sher-shāhī tells a good deal about the man who bore this title, and also about others who found themselves now in difficulty between Ibrāhīm’s tyranny and Bābur’s advance (E. & D. iv, 301).

1686

Gūālīār was taken from Bikramājīt in 1518 AD.

1687

i. e. from the Deccan of which ‘Alāu’u’d-dīn is said to have been the first Muḥammadan invader. An account of this diamond, identified as the Koh-i-nūr, is given in Hobson Jobson but its full history is not told by Yule or by Streeter’s Great Diamonds of the World, neither mentioning the presentation of the diamond by Humāyūn to Taḥmāsp of which Abū’l-faẓl writes, dwelling on its overplus of payment for all that Humāyūn in exile received from his Persian host (Akbar-nāma trs. i, 349 and note; Asiatic Quarterly Review, April 1899 H. Beveridge’s art. Bābur’s diamond; was it the Koh-i-nūr?).

1688

320 ratīs (Erskine). The ratī is 2.171 Troy grains, or in picturesque primitive equivalents, is 8 grains of rice, or 64 mustard seeds, or 512 poppy-seeds, – uncertain weights which Akbar fixed in cat’s-eye stones.

1689

Bābur’s plurals allow the supposition that the three men’s lives were spared. Malik Dād served him thenceforth.

1690

Erskine estimated these as dams and worth about £1750, but this may be an underestimate (H. of I. i, App. E.).

1691

“These begs of his” (or hers) may be the three written of above.

1692

These will include cousins and his half-brothers Jahāngīr and Nāṣir as opposing before he took action in 925 AH. (1519 AD.). The time between 910 AH. and 925 AH. at which he would most desire Hindūstān is after 920 AH. in which year he returned defeated from Transoxiana.

1693

kīchīk karīm, which here seems to make contrast between the ruling birth of members of his own family and the lower birth of even great begs still with him. Where the phrase occurs on f. 295, Erskine renders it by “down to the dregs”, and de Courteille (ii, 235) by “de toutes les bouches” but neither translation appears to me to suit Bābur’s uses of the term, inasmuch as both seem to go too low (cf. f. 270b).

1694

aīūrūshūb, Pers. trs. chaspīda, stuck to.

1695

The first expedition is fixed by the preceding passage as in 925 AH. which was indeed the first time a passage of the Indus is recorded. Three others are found recorded, those of 926, 930 and 932 AH. Perhaps the fifth was not led by Bābur in person, and may be that of his troops accompanying ‘Ālam Khān in 931 AH. But he may count into the set of five, the one made in 910 AH. which he himself meant to cross the Indus. Various opinions are found expressed by European writers as to the dates of the five.

1696

Muḥammad died 632 AD. (11 AH.).

1697

Tramontana, n. of Hindū-kush. For particulars about the dynasties mentioned by Bābur see Stanley Lane-Poole’s Muḥammadan Dynasties.

1698

Maḥmūd of Ghaznī, a Turk by race, d. 1030 AD. (421 AH.).

1699

known as Muḥ. Ghūrī, d. 1206 AD. (602 AH.).

1700

sūrūbtūrlār, lit. drove them like sheep (cf. f. 154b).

1701

khūd, itself, not Bābur’s only Hibernianism.

1702

“This is an excellent history of the Musalmān world down to the time of Sl. Nāṣir of Dihlī A.D. 1252. It was written by Abū ‘Umar Minḥāj al Jūrjānī. See Stewart’s catalogue of Tipoo’s Library, p. 7” (Erskine). It has been translated by Raverty.

1703

bargustwān-wār; Erskine, cataphract horse.

1704

The numerous instances of the word pādshāh in this part of the Bābur-nāma imply no such distinction as attaches to the title Emperor by which it is frequently translated (Index s. n. pādshāh).

1705

d. 1500 AD. (905 AH.).

1706

d. 1388 AD. (790 AH.).

1707

The ancestor mentioned appears to be Naṣrat Shāh, a grandson of Fīrūz Shāh Tūghlūq (S. L. Poole p. 300 and Beale, 298).

1708

His family belonged to the Rājpūt sept of Tānk, and had become Muḥammadan in the person of Sadharān the first ruler of Gujrāt (Crooke’s Tribes and Castes; Mirāt-i-sikandarī, Bayley p. 67 and n.).

1709

S. L. – Poole p. 316-7.

1710

Mandāū (Mandū) was the capital of Malwā.

1711

Stanley Lane-Poole shews (p. 311) a dynasty of three Ghūrīs interposed between the death of Fīrūz Shāh in 790 AH. and the accession in 839 AH. of the first Khiljī ruler of Gujrāt Maḥmūd Shāh.

1712

He reigned from 1518 to 1532 AD. (925 to 939 AH. S.L. – P. p. 308) and had to wife a daughter of Ibrāhīm Lūdī (Riyaẓu’s-salāt̤īn). His dynasty was known as the Ḥusain-shāhī, after his father.

1713

“Strange as this custom may seem, a similar one prevailed down to a very late period in Malabar. There was a jubilee every 12 years in the Samorin’s country, and any-one who succeeded in forcing his way through the Samorin’s guards and slew him, reigned in his stead. ‘A jubilee is proclaimed throughout his dominions at the end of 12 years, and a tent is pitched for him in a spacious plain, and a great feast is celebrated for 10 or 12 days with mirth and jollity, guns firing night and day, so, at the end of the feast, any four of the guests that have a mind to gain a throne by a desperate action in fighting their way through 30 or 40,000 of his guards, and kill the Samorin in his tent, he that kills him, succeeds him in his empire.’ See Hamilton’s New Account of the East Indies vol. i. p. 309. The attempt was made in 1695, and again a very few years ago, but without success” (Erskine p. 311).

The custom Bābur writes of – it is one dealt with at length in Frazer’s Golden Bough– would appear from Blochmann’s Geography and History of Bengal (JASB 1873 p. 286) to have been practised by the Habshī rulers of Bengal of whom he quotes Faria y Souza as saying, “They observe no rule of inheritance from father to son, but even slaves sometimes obtain it by killing their master, and whoever holds it three days, they look upon as established by divine providence. Thus it fell out that in 40 years space they had 13 kings successively.”

1714

No doubt this represents Vijāyanagar in the Deccan.

1715

This date places the composition of the Description of Hindustan in agreement with Shaikh Zain’s statement that it was in writing in 935 AH.

1716

Are they the Khas of Nepal and Sikkim? (G. of I.).

1717

Here Erskine notes that the Persian (trs.) adds, “mīr signifying a hill, and kas being the name of the natives of the hill-country.” This may not support the name kas as correct but may be merely an explanation of Bābur’s meaning. It is not in I.O. 217 f. 189 or in Muḥ. Shīrāzī’s lithographed Wāqi‘āt-i-bāburī p. 190.

1718

Either yak or the tassels of the yak. See Appendix M.

1719

My husband tells me that Bābur’s authority for this interpretation of Sawālak may be the Z̤afar-nāma (Bib. Ind. ed. ii, 149).

1720

i. e. the countries of Hindūstān.

1721

so pointed, carefully, in the Ḥai. MS. Mr. Erskine notes of these rivers that they are the Indus, Hydaspes, Ascesines, Hydraotes, Hesudrus and Hyphasis.

1722

Āyīn-i-akbarī, Jarrett 279.

1723

pārcha pārcha, kīchīkrāk kīchīkrāk, āndā mūndā, tāshlīq tāqghīna. The Gazetteer of India (1907 i, 1) puts into scientific words, what Bābur here describes, the ruin of a great former range.

1724

Here āqār-sūlār might safely be replaced by “irrigation channels” (Index s. n.).

1725

The verb here is tāshmāq; it also expresses to carry like ants (f. 220), presumably from each person’s carrying a pitcher or a stone at a time, and repeatedly.

1726

“This” notes Erskine (p. 315) “is the wulsa or walsa, so well described by Colonel Wilks in his Historical Sketches vol. i. p. 309, note ‘On the approach of an hostile army, the unfortunate inhabitants of India bury under ground their most cumbrous effects, and each individual, man, woman, and child above six years of age (the infant children being carried by their mothers), with a load of grain proportioned to their strength, issue from their beloved homes, and take the direction of a country (if such can be found,) exempt from the miseries of war; sometimes of a strong fortress, but more generally of the most unfrequented hills and woods, where they prolong a miserable existence until the departure of the enemy, and if this should be protracted beyond the time for which they have provided food, a large portion necessarily dies of hunger.’ See the note itself. The Historical Sketches should be read by every-one who desires to have an accurate idea of the South of India. It is to be regretted that we do not possess the history of any other part of India, written with the same knowledge or research.”

“The word wulsa or walsa is Dravidian. Telugu has valasa, ‘emigration, flight, or removing from home for fear of a hostile army.’ Kanarese has valasĕ, ŏlasĕ, and ŏlisĕ, ‘flight, a removing from home for fear of a hostile army.’ Tamil has valasei, ‘flying for fear, removing hastily.’ The word is an interesting one. I feel pretty sure it is not Aryan, but Dravidian; and yet it stands alone in Dravidian, with nothing that I can find in the way of a root or affinities to explain its etymology. Possibly it may be a borrowed word in Dravidian. Malayalam has no corresponding word. Can it have been borrowed from Kolarian or other primitive Indian speech?” (Letter to H. Beveridge from Mr. F. E. Pargiter, 8th August, 1914.)

Wulsa seems to be a derivative from Sanscrit ūlvash, and to answer to Persian wairānī and Turkī būzūghlūghī.

1727

lalmī, which in Afghānī (Pushtū) signifies grown without irrigation.

1728

“The improvement of Hindūstān since Bābur’s time must be prodigious. The wild elephant is now confined to the forests under Hemāla, and to the Ghats of Malabar. A wild elephant near Karrah, Mānikpūr, or Kālpī, is a thing, at the present day (1826 AD.), totally unknown. May not their familiar existence in these countries down to Bābur’s days, be considered rather hostile to the accounts given of the superabundant population of Hindūstān in remote times?” (Erskine).

1729

dīwān. I.O. 217 f. 190b, dar dīwān fīl jawāb mīgūīnd; Mems. p. 316. They account to the government for the elephants they take; Méms. ii, 188, Les habitants payent l’impôt avec le produit de leur chasse. Though de Courteille’s reading probably states the fact, Erskine’s includes de C.’s and more, inasmuch as it covers all captures and these might reach to a surplusage over the imposts.

1730

Pers. trs. gaz=24 inches. Il est bon de rappeler que le mot turk qārī, que la version persane rend par gaz, désigne proprement l’espace compris entre le haut de l'épaule jusqu’au bout des doigts (de Courteille, ii, 189 note). The qārī like one of its equivalents, the ell (Zenker), is a variable measure; it seems to approach more nearly to a yard than to a gaz of 24 inches. See Memoirs of Jahāngīr (R. & B. pp. 18, 141 and notes) for the heights of elephants, and for discussion of some measures.

1731

khūd, itself.

1732

i. e. pelt; as Erskine notes, its skin is scattered with small hairs. Details such as this one stir the question, for whom was Bābur writing? Not for Hindūstān where what he writes is patent; hardly for Kābul; perhaps for Transoxiana.

1733

Shaikh Zain’s wording shows this reference to be to a special piece of artillery, perhaps that of f. 302.

1734

A string of camels contains from five to seven, or, in poetry, even more (Vullers, ii, 728, sermone poetico series decem camelorum). The item of food compared is corn only (būghūz) and takes no account therefore of the elephant’s green food.

1735

The Ency. Br. states that the horn seldom exceeds a foot in length; there is one in the B.M. measuring 18 inches.

1736

āb-khẉura kishtī, water-drinker’s boat, in which name kishtī may be used with reference to shape as boat is in sauce-boat. Erskine notes that rhinoceros-horn is supposed to sweat on approach of poison.

1737

aīlīk, Pers. trs. angusht, finger, each seemingly representing about one inch, a hand’s thickness, a finger’s breadth.

1738

lit. hand (qūl) and leg (būt).

1739

The anatomical details by which Bābur supports this statement are difficult to translate, but his grouping of the two animals is in agreement with the modern classification of them as two of the three Ungulata vera, the third being the tapir (Fauna of British India: – Mammals, Blanford 467 and, illustration, 468).

1740

De Courteille (ii, 190) reads kūmūk, osseuse; Erskine reads gūmūk, marrow.

1741

Index s. n. rhinoceros.

1742

Bos bubalus.

1743

“so as to grow into the flesh” (Erskine, p. 317).

1744

sic in text. It may be noted that the name nīl-gāī, common in general European writings, is that of the cow; nīl-gāū, that of the bull (Blanford).

1745

b:ḥ:rī qūt̤ās; see Appendix M.

1746

The doe is brown (Blanford, p. 518). The word būghū (stag) is used alone just below and seems likely to represent the bull of the Asiatic wapiti (f. 4 n. on būghū-marāl.)

1747

Axis porcinus (Jerdon, Cervus porcinus).

1748

Saiga tartarica (Shaw). Turkī hūna is used, like English deer, for male, female, and both. Here it seems defined by aīrkākī to mean stag or buck.

1749

Antelope cervicapra, black-buck, so called from the dark hue of its back (Yule’s H.J. s. n. Black-buck).

1750

tūyūq, underlined in the Elph. MS. by kura, cannon-ball; Erskine, foot-ball, de Courteille, pierre plus grosse que la cheville (tūyāq).

1751

This mode of catching antelopes is described in the Āyīn-i-akbarī, and is noted by Erskine as common in his day.

1752

H. gainā. It is 3 feet high (Yule’s H.J. s. n. Gynee). Cf. A. A. Blochmann, p. 149. The ram with which it is compared may be that of Ovis ammon (Vigné’s Kashmīr etc. ii, 278).

1753

Here the Pers. trs. adds: – They call this kind of monkey langūr (baboon, I.O. 217 f. 192).

1754

Here the Pers. trs. adds what Erskine mistakenly attributes to Bābur: – People bring it from several islands. – They bring yet another kind from several islands, yellowish-grey in colour like a pūstīn tīn (leather coat of ?; Erskine, skin of the fig, tīn). Its head is broader and its body much larger than those of other monkeys. It is very fierce and destructive. It is singular quod penis ejus semper sit erectus, et nunquam non ad coitum idoneus [Erskine].

1755

This name is explained on the margin of the Elph. MS. as “rāsū, which is the weasel of Tartary” (Erskine). Rāsū is an Indian name for the squirrel Sciurus indicus. The kīsh, with which Bābur’s nūl is compared, is explained by de C. as belette, weasel, and by Steingass as a fur-bearing animal; the fur-bearing weasel is (Mustelidae) putorius ermina, the ermine-weasel (Blanford, p. 165), which thus seems to be Bābur’s kīsh. The alternative name Bābur gives for his nūl, i. e. mūsh-i-khūrma, is, in India, that of Sciurus palmarum, the palm-squirrel (G. of I. i, 227); this then, it seems that Bābur’s nūl is. Erskine took nūl here to be the mongoose (Herpestes mūngūs) (p. 318); and Blanford, perhaps partly on Erskine’s warrant, gives mūsh-i-khūrma as a name of the lesser mungūs of Bengal. I gather that the name nawal is not exclusively confined even now to the (mungūs.)

1756

If this be a tree-mouse and not a squirrel, it may be Vandeleuria oleracea (G. of I. i, 228).

1757

The notes to this section are restricted to what serves to identify the birds Bābur mentions, though temptation is great to add something to this from the mass of interesting circumstance scattered in the many writings of observers and lovers of birds. I have thought it useful to indicate to what language a bird’s name belongs.

1758

Persian, gul; English, eyes.

1759

qūlāch (Zenker, p. 720); Pers. trs. (217 f. 192b) yak qad-i-adm; de Courteille, brasse (fathom). These three are expressions of the measure from finger-tip to finger-tip of a man’s extended arms, which should be his height, a fathom (6 feet).

1760

qānāt, of which here “primaries” appears to be the correct rendering, since Jerdon says (ii, 506) of the bird that its “wings are striated black and white, primaries and tail deep chestnut”.

1761

The qīrghāwal, which is of the pheasant species, when pursued, will take several flights immediately after each other, though none long; peacocks, it seems, soon get tired and take to running (Erskine).

1762

Ar. barrāq, as on f. 278b last line where the Elph. MS. has barrāq, marked with the tashdīd.

1763

This was, presumably, just when Bābur was writing the passage.

1764

This sentence is in Arabic.

1765

A Persian note, partially expunged from the text of the Elph. MS. is to the effect that 4 or 5 other kinds of parrot are heard of which the revered author did not see.

1766

Erskine suggests that this may be the loory (Loriculus vernalis, Indian loriquet).

1767

The birds Bābur classes under the name shārak seem to include what Oates and Blanford (whom I follow as they give the results of earlier workers) class under Sturnus, Eulabes and Calornis, starling, grackle and mīna, and tree-stare (Fauna of British India, Oates, vols. i and ii, Blanford, vols. iii and iv).

1768

Turkī, qabā; Ilminsky, p. 361, tang (tund?).

1769

E. D. Ross’s Polyglot List of Birds, p. 314, Chighīr-chīq, Northern swallow; Elph. MS. f. 230b interlined jil (Steingass lark). The description of the bird allows it to be Sturnus humii, the Himālayan starling (Oates, i, 520).

1770

Elph. and Ḥai. MSS. (Sans. and Bengālī) p: ndūī; two good MSS. of the Pers. trs. (I.O. 217 and 218) p: ndāwalī; Ilminsky (p. 361) mīnā; Erskine (Mems. p. 319) pindāwelī, but without his customary translation of an Indian name. The three forms shewn above can all mean “having protuberance or lump” (pinḍā) and refer to the bird’s wattle. But the word of the presumably well-informed scribes of I.O. 217 and 218 can refer to the bird’s sagacity in speech and be panḍāwalī, possessed of wisdom. With the same spelling, the word can translate into the epithet religiosa, given to the wattled mīnā by Linnæus. This epithet Mr. Leonard Wray informs me has been explained to him as due to the frequenting of temples by the birds; and that in Malāya they are found living in cotes near Chinese temples. – An alternative name (one also connecting with religiosa) allowed by the form of the word is bīnḍā-walī. H. bīnḍā is a mark on the forehead, made as a preparative to devotion by Hindus, or in Sans. and Bengālī, is the spot of paint made on an elephant’s trunk; the meaning would thus be “having a mark”. Cf. Jerdon and Oates s. n. Eulabes religiosa.