[2720] A closer translation would be, “I have taken up the burden.” The verb is bardāshtan (cf. f. 349, p. 626 n. 1).
[2721] See Erskine’s History of India ii, 9.
[2722] At this point attention is asked to the value of the Aḥmad-i-yādgār interpolation which allows Bābur a year of active life before Humāyūn’s illness and his own which followed. With no chronicle known of 936 AH. Bābur had been supposed ill all through the year, a supposition which destroys the worth of his self-sacrifice. Moreover several inferences have been drawn from the supposed year of illness which are disproved by the activities recorded in that interpolation.
[2723] E. and D.’s History of India v, 187; G. B.’s Humāyūn-nāma trs. p. 28.
[2724] dar khidmat-i-dīwānī-i-buyūtāt; perhaps he was a Barrack-officer. His appointment explains his attendance on Khalīfa.
[2725] Khalīfa prescribed for the sick Bābur.
[2726] khānwāda-i-bīgānah, perhaps, foreign dynasty.
[2727] From Saṃbhal; Gul-badan, by an anachronism made some 60 years later, writes Kālanjar, to which place Humāyūn moved 5 months after his accession.
[2728] I am indebted to my husband’s perusal of Sayyid Aḥmad Khān’s As̤ār-i-ṣanādīd (Dihlī ed. 1854 p. 37, and Lakhnau ed. 1895 pp. 40, 41) for information that, perhaps in 935 AH., Mahdī Khwāja set up a tall slab of white marble near Amīr Khusrau’s tomb in Dihlī, which bears an inscription in praise of the poet, composed by that Shihābu’d-dīn the Enigmatist who reached Āgra with Khwānd-amīr in Muḥarram 935 AH. (f. 339b). The inscription gives two chronograms of Khusrau’s death (725 AH.), mentions that Mahdī Khwāja was the creator of the memorial, and gives its date in the words, “The beautiful effort of Mahdī Khwāja.”—The Dihlī ed. of the As̤ār-i-ṣanādīd depicts the slab with its inscription; the Lakhnau ed. depicts the tomb, may show the slab in sitû, and contains interesting matter by Sayyid Aḥmad Khān. The slab is mentioned without particulars in Murray’s Hand-book to Bengal, p. 329.
[2729] Lee’s Ibn Batuta p. 133 and Hirāman’s Tārīkh-i-gūālīārī. Cf. G. B.’s Humāyūn-nāma trs. (1902 AD.), Appendix B.—Mahdī Khwāja.