Babur - The Bābur-nāma

bīr kitta tāsh ātīmī ; var. bāsh ātīmī . If tāsh be right, the reference will probably be to the throw of a catapult.

Here almost certainly, a drummer, because there were two tambours and because also Bābur uses ‘aūdī & ghachakī for the other meanings of t̤ambourchi , lutanist and guitarist. The word has found its way, as tambourgi , into Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto ii, lxxii. H. B.).

Kābul-Ghaznī road (R.’s Notes index s. n. ).

var. Yārī. Tāzī is on the Ghaznī-Qalāt-i-ghilzāī road (R.’s Notes , Appendix p. 46).

i. e. in Kābul and in the Trans-Himalayan country.

These will be those against Bābur’s suzerainty done by their defence of Qalāt for Muqīm.

tabaqa , dynasty. By using this word Bābur shews recognition of high birth. It is noticeable that he usually writes of an Arghūn chief either simply as “Beg” or without a title. This does not appear to imply admission of equality, since he styles even his brothers and sisters Mīrzā and Begīm; nor does it shew familiarity of intercourse, since none seems to have existed between him and Ẕū’n-nūn or Muqīm. That he did not admit equality is shewn on f. 208. The T.R. styles Ẕū’n-nūn “Mīrzā”, a title by which, as also by Shāh, his descendants are found styled (A. – i-a. Blochmann, s. n. ).

Turkī khachar is a camel or mule used for carrying personal effects. The word has been read by some scribes as khanjar , dagger.

In 910 AH. he had induced Bābur to come to Kābul instead of going into Khurāsān (Ḥ.S. iii, 319); in the same year he dictated the march to Kohāt, and the rest of that disastrous travel. His real name was not Bāqī but Muḥammad Bāqir (Ḥ.S. iii, 311).

These transit or custom duties are so called because the dutiable articles are stamped with a t̤amghā , a wooden stamp.

Perhaps this word is an equivalent of Persian goshī , a tax on cattle and beasts of burden.

Bāqī was one only and not the head of the Lords of the Gate.

The choice of the number nine, links on presumably to the mystic value attached to it e. g. Tarkhāns had nine privileges; gifts were made by nines.

It is near Ḥasan-abdāl (A. – i-A. Jarrett, ii, 324).

For the farmān , f. 146b; for Gujūrs, G. of I.

var. Khwesh. Its water flows into the Ghūr-bund stream; it seems to be the Dara-i-Turkmān of Stanford and the Survey Maps both of which mark Janglīk. For Hazāra turbulence, f. 135b and note.

The repetition of aūq in this sentence can hardly be accidental.

t̤aur [ dara ], which I take to be Turkī, round, complete.

Three MSS. of the Turkī text write bīr sīmīzlūq tīwah ; but the two Persian translations have yak shuturlūq farbīh , a shuturlūq being a baggage-camel with little hair (Erskine).

brochettes , meat cut into large mouthfuls, spitted and roasted.

Perhaps he was officially an announcer; the word means also bearer of good news.

yīlāng , without mail, as in the common phrase yīgīt yīlāng , a bare brave.

aūpchīn , of horse and man (f. 113b and note).

Manifestly Bābur means that he twice actually helped to collect the booty.

This is that part of a horse covered by the two side-pieces of a Turkī saddle, from which the side-arch springs on either side (Shaw).

Bārān-nīng ayāghī. Except the river I have found nothing called Bārān; the village marked Baian on the French Map would suit the position; it is n.e. of Chār-yak-kār (f. 184b note).

i. e. prepared to fight.

For the Hazāra (Turkī, Mīng) on the Mīrzā’s road see Raverty’s routes from Ghaznī to the north. An account given by the Tārīkh-i-rashīdī (p. 196) of Jahāngīr’s doings is confused; its parenthetical “(at the same time)” can hardly be correct. Jahāngīr left Ghaznī now, (911 AH.), as Bābur left Kābul in 912 AH. without knowledge of Ḥusain’s death (911 AH.). Bābur had heard it (f. 183b) before Jahāngīr joined him (912 AH.); after their meeting they went on together to Herī. The petition of which the T. R. speaks as made by Jahāngīr to Bābur, that he might go into Khurāsān and help the Bāī-qarā Mīrzās must have been made after the meeting of the two at Ṣaf-hill (f. 184b).

The plurals they and their of the preceding sentence stand no doubt for the Mīrzā, Yūsuf and Buhlūl who all had such punishment due as would lead them to hear threat in Qāsim’s words now when all were within Bābur’s pounce.

These are the aīmāqs from which the fighting-men went east with Bābur in 910 AH. and the families in which Nāṣir shepherded across Hindu-kush (f. 154 and f. 155).

yamānlīk bīla bārdī ; cf. f. 156b and n. for its opposite, yakhshī bārdīlār ; and T. R. p. 196.

One might be of mail, the other of wadded cloth.

Chīn Ṣūfī was Ḥusain Bāī-qarā’s man (T.R. p. 204). His arduous defence, faithfulness and abandonment recall the instance of a later time when also a long road stretched between the man and the help that failed him. But the Mīrzā was old, his military strength was, admittedly, sapped by ease; hence his elder Khartum, his neglect of his Gordon.

It should be noted that no mention of the page’s fatal arrow is made by the Shaib ā n ī -n ā ma (Vambéry, p. 442), or by the T ā r ī kh-i-rash ī d ī (p. 204). Chīn Ṣūfī’s death was on the 21st of the Second Rabī 911 AH. (Aug. 22nd 1505 AD.).

This may be the “Baboulei” of the French Map of 1904, on the Herī-Kushk-Marūchāq road.

Elph. MS. f. 127; W. – i-B. I.O. 215 f. 132 and 217 f. 111b; Mems. p. 175; Méms. i, 364.

That Bābur should have given his laborious account of the Court of Herī seems due both to loyalty to a great Tīmūrid, seated in Tīmūr Beg’s place (f. 122b), and to his own interest, as a man-of-letters and connoisseur in excellence, in that ruler’s galaxy of talent. His account here opening is not complete; its sources are various; they include the Ḥab ī bu’s-siy ā r and what he will have learned himself in Herī or from members of the Bāī-qarā family, knowledgeable women some of them, who were with him in Hindūstān. The narrow scope of my notes shews that they attempt no more than to indicate further sources of information and to clear up a few obscurities.