The following matters are added here because indirectly connected with what has been said and because not readily accessible.
a. Birth of Kāmrān.
Kāmrān’s birth falling in a year of one of the Bābur-nāma gaps, is nowhere mentioned. It can be closely inferred as 914 or 915 AH. from the circumstances that he was younger than Humāyūn born late in 913 AH., that it is not mentioned in the fragment of the annals of 914 AH., and that he was one of the children enumerated by Gul-badan as going with her father to Samarkand in 916 AH. (Probably the children did not start with their father in the depth of winter across the mountains.) Possibly the joyful name Kāmrān is linked to the happy issue of the Mughūl rebellion of 914 AH. Kāmrān would thus be about 18 when left in charge of Kābul and Qandahār by Bābur in 932 AH. before the start for the fifth expedition to Hindūstān.
A letter from Bābur to Kāmrān in Qandahār is with Kehr’s Latin version of the Bābur-nāma, in Latin and entered on the lining of the cover. It is shewn by its main topic viz. the despatch of Ibrāhīm Lūdī’s son to Kāmrān’s charge, to date somewhere close to Jan. 3rd 1527 (Rabī‘u’l-awwal 29th 933 AH.) because on that day Bābur writes of the despatch (Ḥai. Codex f. 306b foot).
Presumably the letter was with Kāmrān’s own copy of the Bābur-nāma. That copy may have reached Humāyūn’s hands
(JRAS 1908 p. 828 et seq.). The next known indication of the letter is given in St. Petersburg by Dr. Kehr. He will have seen it or a copy of it with the B.N. Codex he copied (one of unequaled correctness), and he, no doubt, copied it in its place on the fly-leaf or board of his own transcript, but if so, it has disappeared.
Fuller particulars of it and of other items accompanying it are given in JRAS 1908 p. 828 et seq.
K.—AN AFGHĀN LEGEND.
My husband’s article in the Asiatic Quarterly Review of April 1901 begins with an account of the two MSS. from which it is drawn, viz. I.O. 581 in Pushtū, I.O. 582 in Persian. Both are mainly occupied with an account of the Yūsuf-zāī. The second opens by telling of the power of the tribe in Afghānistān and of the kindness of Malik Shāh Sulaimān, one of their chiefs, to Aūlūgh Beg Mīrzā Kābulī, (Bābur’s paternal uncle,) when he was young and in trouble, presumably as a boy ruler.