Kitabı oku: «The Bābur-nāma», sayfa 48

P. – REMARKS ON BĀBUR’S REVENUE LIST (fol. 292)

a. Concerning the date of the List.

The Revenue List is the last item of Bābur’s account of Hindūstān and, with that account, is found s. a. 932 AH., manifestly too early, (1) because it includes districts and their revenues which did not come under Bābur’s authority until subdued in his Eastern campaigns of 934 and 935 AH., (2) because Bābur’s statement is that the “countries” of the List “are now in my possession” (in loco p. 520).

The List appears to be one of revenues realized in 936 or 937 AH. and not one of assessment or estimated revenue, (1) because Bābur’s wording states as a fact that the revenue was 52 krūrs; (2) because the Persian heading of the (Persian) List is translatable as “Revenue (jama‘)²⁸¹⁵ of Hindūstān from what has so far come under the victorious standards”.

b. The entry of the List into European Literature.

Readers of the L. and E. Memoirs of Bābur are aware that it does not contain the Revenue List (p. 334). The omission is due to the absence of the List from the Elphinstone Codex and from the ‘Abdu’r-raḥīm Persian translation. Since the Memoirs of Bābur was published in 1826 AD., the List has come from the Bābur-nāma into European literature by three channels.

Of the three the one used earliest is Shaikh Zain’s T̤abaqāt-i-bāburī which is a Persian paraphrase of part of Bābur’s Hindūstān section. This work provided Mr. Erskine with what he placed in his History of India (London 1854, i, 540, Appendix D), but his manuscript, now B.M. Add. 26,202, is not the best copy of Shaikh Zain’s book, being of far less importance than B.M. Or. 1999, [as to which more will be said.]²⁸¹⁶

The second channel is Dr. Ilminsky’s imprint of the Turkī text (Kāsān 1857, p. 379), which is translated by the Mémoires de Bāber (Paris 1871, ii, 230).

The third channel is the Ḥaidarābād Codex, in the English translation of which [in loco] the List is on p. 521.

Shaikh Zain may have used Bābur’s autograph manuscript for his paraphrase and with it the Revenue List. His own autograph manuscript was copied in 998 AH. (1589-90 AD.) by Khwānd-amīr’s grandson ‘Abdu’l-lāh who may be the scribe “Mīr ‘Abdu’l-lāh” of the Āyīn-i-akbarī (Blochmann’s trs. p. 109). ‘Abdu’l-lāh’s transcript (from which a portion is now absent,) after having been in Sir Henry Elliot’s possession, has become B.M. Or. 1999. It is noticed briefly by Professor Dowson (l. c. iv, 288), but he cannot have observed that the “old, worm-eaten” little volume contains Bābur’s Revenue List, since he does not refer to it.

c. Agreement and variation in copies of the List.

The figures in the two copies (Or. 1999 and Add. 26,202) of the T̤abaqāt-i-bāburī are in close agreement. They differ, however, from those in the Ḥaidarābād Codex, not only in a negligible unit and a ten of tankas but in having 20,000 more tankas from Oudh and Baraich and 30 laks of tankas more from Trans-sutlej.

The figures in the two copies of the Bābur-nāma, viz. the Ḥaidarābād Codex and the Kehr-Ilminsky imprint are not in agreement throughout, but are identical in opposition to the variants (20,000 t. and 30 l.) mentioned above. As the two are independent, being collateral descendants of Bābur’s original papers, the authority of the Ḥaidarābād Codex in the matter of the List is still further enhanced.

d. Varia.

(1) The place-names of the List are all traceable, whatever their varied forms. About the entry L: knū [or L: knūr] and B: ks: r [or M: ks: r] a difficulty has been created by its variation in manuscripts, not only in the List but where the first name occurs s. a. 934 and 935 AH. In the Ḥaidarābād List and in that of Or. 1999 L: knūr is clearly written and may represent (approximately) modern Shahābād in Rāmpūr. Erskine and de Courteille, however, have taken it to be Lakhnau in Oudh. [The distinction of Lakhnaur from Lakhnau in the historical narrative is discussed in Appendix T.]

(2) It may be noted, as of interest, that the name Sarwār is an abbreviation of Sarjūpār which means “other side of Sarjū” (Sarū, Goghrā; E. and D.’s H. of I. i, 56, n.4).

(3) Rūp-narā[: i]n (Deo or Dev) is mentioned in Ajodhya Prasad’s short history of Tirhut and Darbhanga, the Gulzār-i-Bihār (Calcutta 1869, Cap. v, 88) as the 9th of the Brahman rulers of Tirhut and as having reigned for 25 years, from 917 to 942 Faslī(?). If the years were Ḥijrī, 917-42 AH. would be 1511-1535.²⁸¹⁷

(4) Concerning the tanka the following modern description is quoted from Mr. R. Shaw’s High Tartary (London 1871, p. 464) “The tanga” (or tanka) “is a nominal coin, being composed of 25 little copper cash, with holes pierced in them and called dahcheen. These are strung together and the quantity of them required to make up the value of one of these silver ingots” (“kooroos or yamboo, value nearly £17”) “weighs a considerable amount. I once sent to get change for a kooroos, and my servants were obliged to charter a donkey to bring it home.”

(5) The following interesting feature of Shaikh Zain’s T̤abaqāt-i-bāburī has been mentioned to me by my husband: – Its author occasionally reproduces Bābur’s Turkī words instead of paraphrasing them in Persian, and does this for the noticeable passage in which Bābur records his dissatisfied view of Hindūstān (f. 290b, in loco p. 518), prefacing his quotation with the remark that it is best and will be nearest to accuracy not to attempt translation but to reproduce the Pādshāh’s own words. The main interest of the matter lies in the motive for reproducing the ipsissima verba. Was that motive deferential? Did the revelation of feeling and opinion made in the quoted passage clothe it with privacy so that Shaikh Zain reserved its perusal from the larger public of Hindūstān who might read Persian but not Turkī? Some such motive would explain the insertion untranslated of Bābur’s letters to Humāyūn and to Khwāja Kalān which are left in Turkī by ‘Abdu’r-raḥīm Mīrzā.²⁸¹⁸

Q. – CONCERNING THE “RĀMPŪR DĪWĀN”

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.²⁸¹⁹ 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.

a. An authorized English title.

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,²⁸²⁰ viz. “the Translation and whatnot of poems made on coming to Hindūstān”;²⁸²¹ 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).²⁸²² 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.

b. The contents of the Rāmpūr MS.

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.²⁸²³

(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.²⁸²⁴

(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.²⁸²⁵ 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.

Close under the colophon stands Ḥarara-hu Bābur and the date Monday, Rabī‘ II. 15th 935 (Monday, December 27th 1528 AD.), the whole presumably brought over from the archetype. To the question whether a signature in the above form would be copied by a scribe, the Elphinstone Codex gives an affirmative answer by providing several examples of notes, made by Humāyūn in its archetype, so-signed and brought over either into its margin or interpolated in its text. Some others of Humāyūn’s notes are not so-signed, the scribe merely saying they are Humāyūn Pādshāh’s. – It makes against taking the above entry of Bābur’s name to be an autograph signature, (1) that it is enclosed in an ornamented border, as indeed is the case wherever it occurs throughout the manuscript; (2) that it is followed by the scribe’s mīm. [See end of following section.]

c. The marginal entries shown in the photograph.

The marginal note written length-wise by the side of the text is signed by Shāh-i-jahān and attests that the rubā‘ī and the signature to which it makes reference are in Bābur’s autograph hand-writing. His note translates as follows: – This quatrain and blessed name are in the actual hand-writing of that Majesty (ān ḥaẓrat) Firdaus-makānī Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzī– May God make his proof clear! – Signed (Ḥararā-hu), Shāh-i-jahān son of Jahāngīr Pādshāh son of Akbar Pādshāh son of Humāyūn Pādshāh son of Bābur Pādshāh.²⁸²⁶

The second marginal entry is the curiously placed rubā‘ī, which is now the only one on the page, and now has no signature attaching to it. It has the character of a personal message to the recipient of one of more books having identical contents. That these two entries are there while the text seems so clearly to be written by a scribe, is open to the explanation that when (as said about the colophon, p. lx) the rectangle of text was made good from a mutilated archetype, the original margin was placed round the rifacimento? This superposition would explain the entries and seal-like circles, discernible against a strong light, on the reverse of the margin only, through the rifacimento page. The upper edge of the rectangle shows sign that the margin has been adjusted to it [so far as one can judge from a photograph]. Nothing on the face of the margin hints that the text itself is autograph; the words of the colophon, taḥrīr qīldīm (i. e. I have written down) cannot hold good against the cumulative testimony that a scribe copied the whole manuscript. – The position of the last syllable [nī] of the rubā‘ī shows that the signature below the colophon was on the margin before the diagonal couplet of the rubā‘ī was written, – therefore when the margin was fitted, as it looks to have been fitted, to the rifacimento. If this be the order of the two entries [i. e. the small-hand signature and the diagonal couplet], Shāh-i-jahān’s “blessed name” may represent the small-hand signature which certainly shows minute differences from the writing of the text of the MS. in the name Bābur (q. v. passim in the Rāmpūr MS.).

d. The Bāburī-khat̤t̤ (Bābūr’s script).

So early as 910 AH. the year of his conquest of Kābul, Bābur devised what was probably a variety of nakhsh, and called it the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ (f. 144b), a name used later by Ḥaidar Mīrzā, Niz̤āmu’d-dīn Aḥmad and ‘Abdu’l-qādir Badāyūnī. He writes of it again (f. 179) s. a. 911 AH. when describing an interview had in 912 AH. with one of the Harāt Qāẓīs, at which the script was discussed, its specialities (mufradāt) exhibited to, and read by the Qāẓī who there and then wrote in it.²⁸²⁷ In what remains to us of the Bābur-nāma it is not mentioned again till 935 AH. (fol. 357b) but at some intermediate date Bābur made in it a copy of the Qorān which he sent to Makka.²⁸²⁸ In 935 AH. (f. 357b) it is mentioned in significant association with the despatch to each of four persons of a copy of the Translation (of the Wālidiyyah-risāla) and the Hindūstān poems, the significance of the association being that the simultaneous despatch with these copies of specimens of the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ points to its use in the manuscripts, and at least in Hind-āl’s case, to help given for reading novel forms in their text. The above are the only instances now found in the Bābur-nāma of mention of the script.

The little we have met with – we have made no search – about the character of the script comes from the Abūshqa, s. n. sīghnāq, in the following entry: —

Sīghnāq ber nū‘ah khat̤t̤ der Chaghatāīda khat̤t̤ Bāburī u ghairī kibī ki Bābur Mīrzā ash‘ār’nda kīlūr bait

 
Khūblār khat̤t̤ī naṣīb’ng būlmāsā Bābur nī tāng?
Bāburī khat̤t̤ī aīmās dūr khat̤t̤ sīghnāqī mū dūr? ²⁸²⁹
 

The old Osmanli-Turkish prose part of this appears to mean: – “Sīghnāq is a sort of hand-writing, in Chaghatāī the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ and others resembling it, as appears in Bābur Mīrzā’s poems. Couplet”: —

Without knowing the context of the couplet I make no attempt to translate it because its words khat̤t̤ or khaṭ and sīghnāq lend themselves to the kind of pun (īhām) “which consists in the employment of a word or phrase having more than one appropriate meaning, whereby the reader is often left in doubt as to the real significance of the passage.”²⁸³⁰ The rest of the rubā‘ī may be given [together with the six other quotations of Bābur’s verse now known only through the Abūshqa], in early Taẕkirātu ‘sh-shu‘āra of date earlier than 967 AH.

The root of the word sīghnāq will be sīq, pressed together, crowded, included, etc.; taking with this notion of compression, the explanations feine Schrift of Shaikh Effendi (Kunos) and Vambéry’s pétite écriture, the Sīghnāqī and Bāburī Scripts are allowed to have been what that of the Rāmpūr MS. is, a small, compact, elegant hand-writing. – A town in the Caucasus named Sīghnākh, “située à peu près à 800 mètres d’altitude, commença par être une forteresse et un lieu de refuge, car telle est la signification de son nom tartare.”²⁸³¹ Sīghnāqī is given by de Courteille (Dict. p. 368) as meaning a place of refuge or shelter.

The Bāburī-khat̤t̤ will be only one of the several hands Bābur is reputed to have practised; its description matches it with other niceties he took pleasure in, fine distinctions of eye and ear in measure and music.

e. Is the Rāmpūr MS. an example of the Bāburī-khat̤t̤?

Though only those well-acquainted with Oriental manuscripts dating before 910 AH. (1504 AD.) can judge whether novelties appear in the script of the Rāmpūr MS. and this particularly in its head-lines, there are certain grounds for thinking that though the manuscript be not Bābur’s autograph, it may be in his script and the work of a specially trained scribe.

I set these grounds down because although the signs of a scribe’s work on the manuscript seem clear, it is “locally” held to be Bābur’s autograph. Has a tradition of its being in the Bāburī-khat̤t̤ glided into its being in the khat̤t̤-i-Bābur? Several circumstances suggest that it may be written in the Bāburī-khat̤t̤:– (1) the script is specially associated with the four transcripts of the Hindūstān poems (f. 357b), for though many letters must have gone to his sons, some indeed are mentioned in the Bābur-nāma, it is only with the poems that specimens of it are recorded as sent; (2) another matter shows his personal interest in the arrangement of manuscripts, namely, that as he himself about a month after the four books had gone off, made a new ruler, particularly on account of the head-lines of the Translation, it may be inferred that he had made or had adopted the one he superseded, and that his plan of arranging the poems was the model for copyists; the Rāmpūr MS. bearing, in the Translation section, corrections which may be his own, bears also a date earlier than that at which the four gifts started; it has its headlines ill-arranged and has throughout 13 lines to the page; his new ruler had 11; (3) perhaps the words taḥrīr qīldīm used in the colophon of the Rāmpūr MS. should be read with their full connotation of careful and elegant writing, or, put modestly, as saying, “I wrote down in my best manner,” which for poems is likely to be in the Bāburī-khat̤t̤.²⁸³²

Perhaps an example of Bābur’s script exists in the colophon, if not in the whole of the Mubīn manuscript once owned by Berézine, by him used for his Chréstomathie Turque, and described by him as “unique”. If this be the actual manuscript Bābur sent into Mā warā’u’n-nahr (presumably to Khwāja Aḥrārī’s family), its colophon which is a personal message addressed to the recipients, is likely to be autograph.

f. Metrical amusements.

(1) Of two instances of metrical amusements belonging to the end of 933 AH. and seeming to have been the distractions of illness, one is a simple transposition “in the fashion of the circles” (dawā’ir) into three measures (Rāmpūr MS. Facsimile, Plate XVIII and p. 22); the other is difficult because of the high number of 504 into which Bābur says (f. 330b) he cut up the following couplet: —

 
Gūz u qāsh u soz u tīlīnī mū dī?
Qad u khadd u saj u bīlīnī mū dī?
 

All manuscripts agree in having 504, and Bābur wrote a tract (risāla) upon the transpositions.²⁸³³ None of the modern treatises on Oriental Prosody allow a number so high to be practicable, but Maulānā Saifī of Bukhārā, of Bābur’s own time (f. 180b) makes 504 seem even moderate, since after giving much detail about rubā‘ī measures, he observes, “Some say there are 10,000” (Arūẓ-i-Saifī, Ranking’s trs. p. 122). Presumably similar possibilities were open for the couplet in question. It looks like one made for the game, asks two foolish questions and gives no reply, lends itself to poetic license, and, if permutation of words have part in such a game, allows much without change of sense. Was Bābur’s cessation of effort at 504 capricious or enforced by the exhaustion of possible changes? Is the arithmetical statement 9 × 8 × 7 = 504 the formula of the practicable permutations?

(2) To improvise verse having a given rhyme and topic must have demanded quick wits and much practice. Bābur gives at least one example of it (f. 252b) but Jahāngīr gives a fuller and more interesting one, not only because a rubā‘ī of Bābur’s was the model but from the circumstances of the game:²⁸³⁴– It was in 1024 AH. (1615 AD.) that a letter reached him from Māwarā’u’n-nahr written by Khwāja Hāshim Naqsh-bandī [who by the story is shown to have been of Aḥrārī’s line], and recounting the long devotion of his family to Jahāngīr’s ancestors. He sent gifts and enclosed in his letter a copy of one of Bābur’s quatrains which he said Ḥaẓrat Firdaus-makānī had written for Ḥaẓrat Khwājagī (Aḥrārī’s eldest son; f. 36b, p. 62 n. 2). Jahāngīr quotes a final hemistich only, “Khwājagīra mānda’īm, Khwājagīrā banda’īm” and thereafter made an impromptu verse upon the one sent to him.

A curious thing is that the line he quotes is not part of the quatrain he answered, but belongs to another not appropriate for a message between darwesh and pādshāh, though likely to have been sent by Bābur to Khwājagī. I will quote both because the matter will come up again for who works on the Hindūstān poems.²⁸³⁵

(1) The quatrain from the Hindūstān Poems is: —

 
Dar hawā’ī nafs gumrah ‘umr ẓāi‘ karda’īm [kanda’īm?];
Pesh ahl-i-allāh az af‘āl-i-khūd sharmanda’īm;
Yak naz̤r bā mukhlaṣān-i-khasta-dil farmā ki mā
Khwājagīrā mānda’īm u Khwājagīrā banda’īm.
 

(2) That from the Akbar-nāma is: —

 
Darweshānrā agarcha nah as khweshānīm,
Lek az dil u jān mu‘taqid eshānīm;
Dūr ast magū‘ī shāhī az darweshī,
Shāhīm walī banda-i-darweshānīm.
 

The greater suitability of the second is seen from Jahāngīr’s answering impromptu for which by sense and rhyme it sets the model; the meaning, however, of the fourth line in each may be identical, namely, “I remain the ruler but am the servant of the darwesh.” Jahāngīr’s impromptu is as follows: —

 
Āī ānki marā mihr-i-tū besh az besh ast,
Az daulat yād-i-būdat āī darwesh ast;
Chandānki’z muẕẖ dahāt dilam shād shavad
Shadīm az ānki lat̤if az ḥadd besh ast.
 

He then called on those who had a turn for verse to “speak one” i. e. to improvise on his own; it was done as follows: —

 
Dārīm agarcha shaghal-i-shāhī dar pesh,
Har laḥz̤a kunīm yād-i-darweshān besh;
Gar shād shavad’z mā dil-i-yak darwesh,
Ānra shumarīm ḥaṣil-i-shāhī khwesh.