The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: or, Memoirs of Jahangir (Volume 1 of 2)

Reproduced from a Miniature in the British Museum (MS. Add. 22.282. fol. 2)
The Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī
Or Memoirs of Jahāngīr
Translated by Alexander Rogers I.C.S. (Retired) Edited by Henry Beveridge I.C.S. (Retired)


Mr. Rogers translated the Memoirs of Jahāngīr several years ago from the edition which Sayyid Aḥmad printed at Ghazipur in 1863 and at Allyghur in 1864. Orientalists are greatly indebted to the Sayyid for his disinterested labours, but his text seems to have been made from a single and defective MS. and is often incorrect, especially in the case of proper names. I have collated it with the excellent MSS. in the India Office and the British Museum, and have thus been able to make numerous corrections. I have also consulted the MS. in the Library of the R.A.S., but it is not a good one. I have, with Mr. Rogers’s permission, revised the translation, and I have added many notes.
There is an account of the Memoirs in the sixth volume of Elliot & Dowson’s “History of India,” and there the subject of the various recensions is discussed. There is also a valuable note by Dr. Rieu in his “Catalogue of Persian MSS.,” i, 253. It is there pointed out that there is a manuscript translation of the first nine years of the Memoirs by William Erskine in the British Museum. I have consulted this translation and found it helpful. The MS. is numbered Add. 26,611. The translation is, of course, excellent, and it was made from a good MS.
When Jahāngīr had written his Memoirs for the first twelve years of his reign he made them into a volume, and had a number of copies made and distributed (Elliot, vi, 360). The first of these he gave to S͟hāh Jahān, who was then in high favour. The present publication is a translation of the first volume of the Memoirs, but the translation of the whole Memoirs, together with the additions of Muʿtamad K͟hān and Muḥammad Hādī, has been completed, and it is to be hoped that its publication will follow in due course.