Note 2513 — SECTION III. HINDŪSTĀN (continued 4)

mīndīn bītī tūrgān waqāī'. This passage Teufel used to support his view that Bābur’s title for his book was Waqāī‘, and not Bābur-nāma which, indeed, Teufel describes as the Kazaner Ausgabe adoptirte Titel. Bābur-nāma, however, is the title [or perhaps, merely scribe’s name] associated both with Kehr’s text and with the Ḥaidarābād Codex.—I have found no indication of the selection by Bābur of any title; he makes no mention of the matter and where he uses the word waqāī‘ or its congeners, it can be read as a common noun. In his colophon to the Rāmpūr Dīwān, it is a parallel of ash‘ār, poems. Judging from what is found in the Mubīn, it may be right to infer that, if he had lived to complete his book—now broken off s.a. 914 AH. (f. 216b)—he would have been explicit as to its title, perhaps also as to his grounds for choosing it. Such grounds would have found fitting mention in a preface to the now abrupt opening of the Bābur-nāma (f. 1b), and if the Malfūzāt-i-tīmūrī be Tīmūr’s authentic autobiography, this book might have been named as an ancestral example influencing Bābur to write his own. Nothing against the authenticity of the Malfūzāt can be inferred from the circumstance that Bābur does not name it, because the preface in which such mention would be in harmony with e.g. his Walidiyyah preface, was never written. It might accredit the Malfūzāt to collate passages having common topics, as they appear in the Bābur-nāma, Malfūzāt-i-tīmūrī and Z̤afar-nāma (cf. E. & D.’s H. of I. iv, 559 for a discussion by Dr. Sachau and Prof. Dowson on the Malfūzāt). (Cf. Z.D.M. xxxvii, p. 184, Teufel’s art. Bābur und Abū’l-faẓl; Smirnow’s Cat. of Manuscrits Turcs, p. 142; Index in loco s.nn. Mubīn and Title.)