Читать книгу The Bābur-nāma - Babur - Страница 17

The Haidarabad Codex may have been inscribed under Aurang-zib Padshah (1655-1707). So many particulars about it have been given already that little needs saying here.18 It was the grande trouvaille of my search for Turki text wherewith to revive Babur’s autobiography both in Turki and English. My husband in 1900 saw it in Haidarabad; through the kind offices of the late Sayyid Ali Bilgrami it was lent to me; it proved to surpass, both in volume and quality, all other Babur-nama MSS. I had traced; I made its merits known to Professor Edward Granville Browne, just when the E. J. Wilkinson Gibb Trust was in formation, with the happy and accordant result that the best prose book in classic Turki became the first item in the Memorial —matris ad filium– of literary work done in the name of the Turkish scholar, and Babur’s very words were safeguarded in hundred-fold facsimile. An event so important for autobiography and for Turki literature may claim more than the bald mention of its occurrence, because sincere autobiography, however ancient, is human and social and undying, so that this was no mere case of multiplying copies of a book, but was one of preserving a man’s life in his words. There were, therefore, joyful red-letter days in the English story of the Codex – outstanding from others being those on which its merits revealed themselves (on Surrey uplands) – the one which brought Professor Browne’s acceptance of it for reproduction by the Trust – and the day of pause from work marked by the accomplished fact of the safety of the Babur-nama.