Mr. Rogers translated the Memoirs of Jahangir several years ago from
the edition which Sayyid Ahmad printed at Ghazipur in 1863 and at
Allyghur in 1864. Orientalists are greatly indebted to the Sayyid for
his disinterested labours, but his text seems to have been made from
a single and defective MS. and is often incorrect, especially in the
case of proper names. I have collated it with the excellent MSS. in the
India Office and the British Museum, and have thus been able to make
numerous corrections. I have also consulted the MS. in the Library
of the R.A.S., but it is not a good one. I have, with Mr. Rogers's
permission, revised the translation, and I have added many notes.
There is an account of the Memoirs in the sixth volume of Elliot &
Dowson's "History of India," and there the subject of the various
recensions is discussed. There is also a valuable note by Dr. Rieu
in his "Catalogue of Persian MSS.," i, 253. It is there pointed out
that there is a manuscript translation of the first nine years of the
Memoirs by William Erskine in the British Museum. I have consulted this
translation and found it helpful. The MS. is numbered Add. 26,611. The
translation is, of course, excellent, and it was made from a good MS.
A translation of what Dr. Rieu calls the garbled Memoirs of Jahangir
was made by Major David Price and published by the Oriental Translation
Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1829. The author of this
work is unknown, and its history is an unsolved problem. It is
occasionally fuller than the genuine Memoirs, and it contains some
picturesque touches, such as the account of Akbar's deathbed. But it
is certain that it is, in part at least, a fabrication, and that it
contains statements which Jahangir could never have made. Compare, for
instance, the account of the death of Sohrab, the son of Mirza Rustam,
near the end of Price's translation, pp. 138-9, with that given in the
genuine Memoirs in the narrative of the fifteenth year of the reign,
p. 293, and also in the Iqbal-nama, p. 139. Besides being inaccurate,
the garbled or spurious Memoirs are much shorter than the genuine
work, and do not go beyond the fifteenth year. Price's translation,
too, was made from a single and badly written MS. [1] which is now in
the R.A.S. library. Dr. Rieu remarks that it is to be regretted that
so poor a fabrication as the garbled Memoirs should have been given
to the world as a genuine production of Jahangir. This being so, it
is appropriate that the present translation of the genuine Memoirs
should be published by the Royal Asiatic Society.
When Jahangir had written his Memoirs for the first twelve years
of his reign he made them into a volume, and had a number of copies
made and distributed (Elliot, vi, 360). The first of these he gave to
Shah Jahan, who was then in high favour. The present publication is a
translation of the first volume of the Memoirs, but the translation
of the whole Memoirs, together with the additions of Mu`tamad Khan
and Muhammad Hadi, has been completed, and it is to be hoped that
its publication will follow in due course.
Jahangir reigned for twenty-two years, but ill-health and sorrow
made him give up the writing of his Memoirs in the seventeenth
year of his reign (see Elliot, vi, 280). He then entrusted the task
to Mu`tamad Khan, the author of the Iqbal-nama, who continued the
Memoirs to the beginning of the nineteenth year. He then dropped
writing the Memoirs in the name of the emperor, but he continued
the narrative of the reign, to Jahangir's death, in his own work,
the Iqbal-nama. Muhammad Hadi afterwards continued the Memoirs down
to Jahangir's death, but his work is little more than an abridgment
of the Iqbal-nama. Sayyid Ahmad's edition contains the continuations
of the Memoirs by Mu`tamad and Muhammad Hadi, and also Muhammad
Hadi's preface and introduction. But this preface and introduction
have not been translated by Mr. Rogers, and I do not think that a
translation is necessary. Muhammad Hadi is a late writer (see Elliot,
vi, 392), his date being the first quarter of the eighteenth century,
and his introduction seems to be almost wholly derived from the
Ma'asir-i-Jahangiri of Kamgar Husaini (Elliot, vi, 257). It consists
mainly of an account of Jahangir's life from his birth up to his
accession.
It is perhaps unnecessary to say anything about the importance of
Jahangir's Memoirs. They give a lively picture of India in the early
decades of the seventeenth century, and are a valuable supplement to
the Akbar-nama. I may be allowed, however, to end this preface with
the following remarks which I contributed to the Indian Magazine for
May, 1907:--
"The Royal authors of the East had more blood in them than those kings
whose works have been catalogued by Horace Walpole. To find a parallel
to them we must go back to Julius Cæsar, and even then the advantage
is not upon the side of Europe. After all, the commentaries of the
famous Roman are a little disappointing, and certainly the Memoirs of
Babar and Jahangir are far more human and fuller of matter than the
story of the Gallic Wars. All Muhammadans have a fancy for writing
chronicles and autobiographies, and several Muhammadan kings have
yielded to the common impulse. Central Asia has given us the Memoirs
of Tamarlane, Babar, and Haidar, and the chronicle of Abu-l-ghazi;
Persia has given us the Memoirs of Shah Tahmasp, and India the Memoirs
of the Princess Gulbadan and Jahangir. In modern times we see the
same impulse at work, for we have the biography of the late Ameer of
Afghanistan and the diary of the Shah of Persia.
"The contributions to literature by Royal authors which come to
us from the East form a department by themselves, and one which
is of great value. Nearly all Eastern histories are disfigured
by adulation. Even when the author has had no special reason for
flattery and for suppression of truth, he has been dazzled by the
greatness of his subject, and gives us a picture which no more
reveals the real king than does a telescope the real constitution
of the Morning Star. But when Eastern monarchs give us chronicles,
the case is different. They have no occasion for fear or favour,
and mercilessly expose the failings of their contemporaries. Not that
they are to be trusted any more than other Orientals when speaking of
themselves. Babar has suppressed the story of his vassalage to Shah
Isma`il, of his defeat at Ghajdawan, and his treatment of `Alam Lodi;
and Jahangir has glossed over his rebellion against his father, and
the circumstances of Shir-afgan's death. But when they have to speak
of others--whether kings or nobles--they give us the whole truth, and
perhaps a little more. An amiable Princess like Gulbadan Begam may
veil the faults and weaknesses of her brothers Humayun and Hindal;
but Babar strips the gilt off nearly every one whom he mentions,
and spares no one--not even his own father.
"The Memoirs of Babar, Haidar, and Gulbadan have been translated
into English, and those of Tahmasp have been translated into German;
but unfortunately Jahangir's have never been fully translated, [2]
though there are extracts in Elliot & Dowson's History, and Major
Price many years ago gave us from an imperfect manuscript a garbled
account of a few years of his Memoirs. Yet in reality Jahangir's
Memoirs are not inferior in interest to those of Babar. Indeed, we
may go further and say there is twice as much matter in them as in
Babar's Memoirs, and that they are by far the most entertaining of
the two works. Not that Jahangir was by any means as remarkable a man
as his great-grandfather. He was a most faulty human being, and his
own account of himself often excites our disgust and contempt. But he
had the sense not to confine his narrative to an account of himself,
and he has given us a picture of his father, the great Akbar,
which is a bigger 'plum' than anything in Babar's Memoirs. But his
account of himself has also its charm, for it reveals the real man,
and so he lives for us in his Memoirs just as James VI--to whom,
and to the Emperor Claudius, he bears a strange and even ludicrous
resemblance--lives in the 'Fortunes of Nigel' or Claudius in Suetonius
and Tacitus. Jahangir was indeed a strange mixture. The man who could
stand by and see men flayed alive, and who, as he himself tells us,
put one man to death and had two others hamstrung because they showed
themselves inopportunely and frightened away his game, could yet be a
lover of justice and could spend his Thursday evenings in holding high
converse. He could quote Firdusi's verse against cruelty to animals--
'Ah! spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain--
He lives with pleasure, and he dies with pain';
and be soft-hearted enough to wish that his father were alive to
share with him the delicious mangoes of India. He could procure the
murder of Abu-l-fazl and avow the fact without remorse, and also
pity the royal elephants because they shivered in winter when they
sprinkled themselves with cold water. 'I observed this,' he says,
'and so I ordered that the water should be heated to the temperature
of luke-warm milk.' And he adds: 'This was entirely my own idea;
nobody had ever thought of it before.' One good trait in Jahangir
was his hearty enjoyment of Nature and his love for flowers. Babar
had this also, but he was old, or at least worn out, when he came to
India, and he was disgusted by an Indian attempt to poison him, and
so his description of India is meagre and splenetic. Jahangir, on the
other hand, is a true Indian, and dwells delightedly on the charms of
Indian flowers, particularises the palas, the bokul, and the champa,
and avows that no fruit of Afghanistan or Central Asia is equal to the
mango. He loved, too, to converse with pandits and Hindu ascetics,
though he is contemptuous of their avatars, and causes the image of
Vishnu as the boar avatar to be broken and flung into the Pushkar lake.
"It is a remark of Hallam's that the best attribute of Muhammadan
princes is a rigorous justice in chastising the offences of others. Of
this quality Jahangir, in spite of all his weaknesses, had a large
share, and even to this day he is spoken of with respect by Muhammadans
on account of his love of justice. It is a pathetic circumstance that
it was this princely quality which was to some extent the cause of the
great affront put upon him by Mahabat Khan. Many complaints had been
made to Jahangir of the oppressions of Mahabat in Bengal, and crowds
of suppliants had come to Jahangir's camp. It was his desire to give
them redress and to punish Mahabat for his exactions, together with
his physical and mental weakness, which led to his capture on the
banks of the Jhilam.
"One of the many interesting observations in his Memoirs is his account
of an inscription he saw at Hindaun. He says that in the thirteenth
year of his reign, as he was marching back to Agra, he found a verse
by someone inscribed on the pillar of a pleasure-house on an islet
in the lake at Hindaun. He then proceeds to quote it, and it turns
out to be one of Omar Khayyam's! This is FitzGerald's paraphrase:--
'For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his vintage Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.'
"The same quatrain has also been quoted by Badayuni in his history,
and the interesting thing about Jahangir's quotation of it is that
he could see the beauty of the verse and at the same time did not
know who was the author. There is also an interest in the fact
that the third line contains a different reading from that given in
Whinfield's edition of the text. Hindaun is in the Jaipur territory,
and one would like to know if the inscription still exists.
"Among other things in Jahangir's Memoirs there is the description
of the outbreak of the Plague, given to him by a lady of his court
[which has been quoted by Dr. Simpson in his book upon Plague], and
there is a very full account of Kashmir, which is considerably superior
to that in the Ayin Akbari, which Sir Walter Lawrence has praised."
With reference to the portrait of Jahangir prefixed to this volume,
it may be interesting to note that it appears from Mr. E. B. Havell's
"Indian Sculpture," p. 203, that the British Museum possesses a
drawing by Rembrandt which was copied from a Moghul miniature,
and which has been pronounced by Mr. Rouffaer to be a portrait
of Jahangir. Coryat (Purchas, reprint, iv, 473) thus describes
Jahangir's personal appearance:--"He is fifty and three years of
age, his nativity-day having been celebrated with wonderful pomp
since my arrival here. On that day he weighed himself in a pair of
golden scales, which by great chance I saw the same day; a custom he
observes most inviolably every year. He is of complexion neither white
nor black, but of a middle betwixt them. I know not how to express
it with a more expressive and significant epitheton than olive. An
olive colour his face presenteth. He is of a seemly composition of
body, of a stature little unequal (as I guess not without grounds of
probability) to mine, but much more corpulent than myself."
As regards the bibliography of the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, I have to
note that there is an Urdu translation by Munshi Ahmad `Ali Simab of
Rampura, that is, Aligarh in Tonk. It was made from Muhammad Hadi's
edition under the patronage of Muhammad Ibrahim `Ali Khan Nawab of
Tonk, and was published by Newal Kishor in 1291 (1874). There is also
a Hindi translation by Munshi Debi Prasad which was published in 1905
at Calcutta by the Bharat Mitra Press. The Urdu translation referred
to by Mr. Blumhardt in his Catalogue of Hindustani MSS., p. 61, and
noticed by Elliot, vi, 401, and Garcin de Tassy, iii, 301, is, as the
two latter writers have remarked, a translation of the Iqbal-nama. The
MS. referred to by Elliot vi, 277, as having been in the possession
of General Thomas Paterson Smith, and which is described in Ethé's
Catalogue of the India Office MSS., No. 2833, p. 1533, was made by
Sayyid Muhammad, the elder brother of Sayyid Ahmad. At the end of the
MS. the copyist gives some account of himself and of his family. He
made the copy from copies in the Royal Library and in the possession
of Rajah Roghu Nath Singh alias Lal Singh Jalpur. He finished it in
October, 1843. Sayyid Muhammad was Munsif of Hutgam in the Fathpur
district. He died young in 1845. My friend Mr. T. W. Arnold, of the
India Office, informs me that Sayyid Ahmad told him that he found
a valuable illustrated MS of the Tuzuk in the débris of the Delhi
Royal Library, and took it home, but that it was lost when his house
was plundered by the mutineers. There is in the Bodleian a copy in
Sayyid Ahmad's own handwriting. He states that he made use of ten
good MSS. The Englishman at whose request he made the copy was John
Panton Gubbins, who was once Sessions Judge of Delhi. This copy is
described in the Bodleian Catalogue, p. 117, No. 221. The MS. No. 220
described on the same page was brought home by Fraser, and is a good
one, but only goes down to the end of the 14th year.
H. Beveridge.
March, 1909.
Postscript.--Since writing this Preface I have been enabled by the
kindness of Mr. Irvine to examine the Hindi Jahangir-nama of Debi
Prasad. It is not a translation, but an abstract, and I do not think
it is of much value. Being a Jodhpur man he has been able, perhaps,
to correct some spellings of places, but he does not seem to have
consulted any MSS., and when he comes to a difficulty he shirks
it. The most valuable adjunct to the Tuzuk, after the Iqbal-nama,
is the Ma'asir-i-Jahangiri of Kamgar Husaini. It is important as
giving the early history of Jahangir, that is, of the time when he
was Prince Selim. There are three copies of his work in the British
Museum, but the so-called Maathir-i-Jahangiri of the India Office
Library, No. 3098, or 324 of the new Catalogue, is only a copy of
the Iqbal-nama.
I regret that the number of Errata and Addenda is so large, but when
I began the revision I did not know that Sayyid Ahmad's text was so
incorrect. It will be seen that at pp. 158 and 162 I have made two
erroneous notes.