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.[2826] 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,[2827] viz. “the Translation and whatnot of poems made on coming to Hindūstān”;[2828] 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).[2829] 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.[2830]
(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.[2831]