Two circumstances have weight against rejecting the passage, its presence with the Ḥaidarābād Codex and its acceptance by Dr. Ilminsky and M. de Courteille.
That it is with the Codex is a matter needing consideration and this the more that it is the only extra matter there found. Not being with the Persian translations, it cannot be of early date. It seems likely to owe its place of honour to distinguished authorship and may well be one of the four portions (juzwe) mentioned by Jahāngīr in the Tuzūk-i-jahāngīrī,[2771] as added by himself to his ancestor’s book. If so, it may be mentioned, it will have been with Bābur’s autograph MS. [now not to be found], from which the Ḥaidarābād Codex shews signs of being a direct copy.[2772]
[The incongruity of the Rescue passage with the true text has been indicated by foot-notes to the translation of it already given. What condemns it on historic and other grounds will follow.]
On linguistic grounds it is a strong argument in its favour that Dr. Ilminsky and M. de Courteille should have accepted it but the argument loses weight when some of the circumstances of their work are taken into account.
In the first place, it is not strictly accurate to regard Dr. Ilminsky as accepting it unquestioned, because it is covered by his depreciatory remarks, made in his preface, on Kehr’s text. He, like M. de Courteille, worked with a single Turkī MS. and neither of the two ever saw a complete true text. When their source (the Kehr-Ilminsky) was able to be collated with the Elph. and Ḥai. MSS. much and singular divergence was discovered.
I venture to suggest what appears to me to explain M. de Courteille’s acceptance of the Rescue passage. Down to its insertion, the Kehr-Ilminsky text is so continuously and so curiously corrupt that it seems necessary to regard it as being a re-translation into Turkī from one of the Persian translations of the Bābur-nāma. There being these textual defects in it, it would create on the mind of a reader initiated through it, only, in the book, an incorrect impression of Bābur’s style and vocabulary, and such a reader would feel no transition when passing on from it to the Rescue passage.
In opposition to this explanation, it might be said that a wrong standard set up by the corrupt text, would or could be changed by the excellence of later parts of the Kehr-Ilminsky one. In words, this is sound, no doubt, and such reflex criticism is now easy, but more than the one defective MS. was wanted even to suggest the need of such reflex criticism. The Bābur-nāma is lengthy, ponderous to poise and grasp, and work on it is still tentative, even with the literary gains since the Seventies.
Few of the grounds which weigh with us for the rejection of the Rescue passage were known to Dr. Ilminsky or M. de Courteille;—the two good Codices bring each its own and varied help; Teufel’s critique on the ‘Fragments,’ though made without acquaintance with those adjuncts as they stand in Kehr’s own volume, is of much collateral value; several useful oriental histories seem not to have been available for M. de Courteille’s use. I may add, for my own part, that I have the great advantage of my husband’s companionship and the guidance of his wide acquaintance with related oriental books. In truth, looking at the drawbacks now removed, an earlier acceptance of the passage appears as natural as does today’s rejection.
GROUNDS FOR REJECTING THE RESCUE PASSAGE.
The grounds for rejecting the passage need here little more than recapitulation from my husband’s article in the JASB. 1910, p. 221, and are as follows;—