(3) The third section shows no inscription on its frontispiece. It opens with the masnawī of eight couplets, found also in the Bābur-nāma (f. 312), one of earlier date than many of the poems in the second section. It is followed by three rubā‘ī which complete the collection of poems made in Hindūstān. A prose passage comes next, describing the composition and transposition-in-metre of a couplet of 16 feet, with examples in three measures, the last of which ends in l. 4 of the photograph.—While fixing the date of this metrical game, Bābur incidentally allows that of his Treatise on Prosody to be inferred from the following allusive words:—“When going to Saṃbhal (f. 330b) in the year (933 AH.) after the conquest of Hindūstān (932 AH.), two years after writing the ‘Arūẓ, I composed a couplet of 16 feet.”—From this the date of the Treatise is seen to be 931 AH., some two years later than that of the Mubīn. The above metrical exercise was done about the same time as another concerning which a Treatise was written, viz. that mentioned on f. 330b, when a couplet was transposed into 504 measures (Section f, p. lxv).—The Facsimile, it will be noticed, shows something unusual in the last line of the prose passage on Plate XVIII B, where the scattering of the words suggests that the scribe was trying to copy page per page.
The colophon (which begins on l. 5 of the photograph) is curiously worded, as though the frequent fate of last pages had befallen its archetype, that of being mutilated and difficult for a scribe to make good; it suggests too that the archetype was verse.[2832] Its first clause, even if read as Hind-stān jānibī ‘azīmat qīlghānī (i.e. not qīlghālī, as it can be read), has an indirectness unlike Bābur’s corresponding “after coming to Hindūstān” (f. 357b), and is not definite; (2) bū aīrdī (these were) is not the complement suiting aūl dūrūr (those are); (3) Bābur does not use the form dūrūr in prose; (4) the undue space after dūrūr suggests connection with verse; (5) there is no final verb such as prose needs. The meaning, however, may be as follows:—The poems made after resolving on (the) Hindūstān parts (jānibī?) were these I have written down (taḥrīr qīldīm), and past events are those I have narrated (taqrīr) in the way that (nī-chūk kīm) (has been) written in these folios (aūrāq) and recorded in those sections (ajzā').—From this it would appear that sections of the Bābur-nāma (f. 376b, p. 678) accompanied the Hindūstān poems to the recipient of the message conveyed by the colophon.
Close under the colophon stands Ḥarara-hu Bābur and the date Monday, Rabī‘ II. 15th 935 (Monday, December 27th 1528 AD.), the whole presumably brought over from the archetype. To the question whether a signature in the above form would be copied by a scribe, the Elphinstone Codex gives an affirmative answer by providing several examples of notes, made by Humāyūn in its archetype, so-signed and brought over either into its margin or interpolated in its text. Some others of Humāyūn’s notes are not so-signed, the scribe merely saying they are Humāyūn Pādshāh’s.—It makes against taking the above entry of Bābur’s name to be an autograph signature, (1) that it is enclosed in an ornamented border, as indeed is the case wherever it occurs throughout the manuscript; (2) that it is followed by the scribe’s mīm. [See end of following section.]
c. The marginal entries shown in the photograph.
The marginal note written length-wise by the side of the text is signed by Shāh-i-jahān and attests that the rubā‘ī and the signature to which it makes reference are in Bābur’s autograph hand-writing. His note translates as follows:—This quatrain and blessed name are in the actual hand-writing of that Majesty (ān ḥaẓrat) Firdaus-makānī Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzī—May God make his proof clear!—Signed (Ḥararā-hu), Shāh-i-jahān son of Jahāngīr Pādshāh son of Akbar Pādshāh son of Humāyūn Pādshāh son of Bābur Pādshāh.[2833]
The second marginal entry is the curiously placed rubā‘ī, which is now the only one on the page, and now has no signature attaching to it. It has the character of a personal message to the recipient of one of more books having identical contents. That these two entries are there while the text seems so clearly to be written by a scribe, is open to the explanation that when (as said about the colophon, p. lx) the rectangle of text was made good from a mutilated archetype, the original margin was placed round the rifacimento? This superposition would explain the entries and seal-like circles, discernible against a strong light, on the reverse of the margin only, through the rifacimento page. The upper edge of the rectangle shows sign that the margin has been adjusted to it [so far as one can judge from a photograph]. Nothing on the face of the margin hints that the text itself is autograph; the words of the colophon, taḥrīr qīldīm (i.e. I have written down) cannot hold good against the cumulative testimony that a scribe copied the whole manuscript.—The position of the last syllable [nī] of the rubā‘ī shows that the signature below the colophon was on the margin before the diagonal couplet of the rubā‘ī was written,—therefore when the margin was fitted, as it looks to have been fitted, to the rifacimento. If this be the order of the two entries [i.e. the small-hand signature and the diagonal couplet], Shāh-i-jahān’s “blessed name” may represent the small-hand signature which certainly shows minute differences from the writing of the text of the MS. in the name Bābur (q.v. passim in the Rāmpūr MS.).
d. The Bāburī-khat̤t̤ (Bābūr’s script).