The
Tūzuk-i-Jahāngīrī
[Contents]
[Contents]
Reproduced from a Miniature in the British Museum
(MS. Add. 22.282. fol. 2)
Or
Memoirs of Jahāngīr
Memoirs of Jahāngīr
[vii]
[Contents]
Preface.
Mr. Rogers translated the Memoirs ofJahāngīr several years ago from the edition which SayyidAḥmad printed at Ghazipur in 1863 and at Allyghur in 1864.Orientalists are greatly indebted to the Sayyid for his disinterestedlabours, but his text seems to have been made from a single anddefective MS. and is often incorrect, especially in the case of propernames. I have collated it with the excellent MSS. in the India Officeand the British Museum, and have thus been able to make numerouscorrections. I have also consulted the MS. in the Library of theR.A.S., but it is not a good one. I have, with Mr. Rogers’spermission, revised the translation, and I have added many notes.
There is an account of the Memoirs in the sixth volumeof Elliot & Dowson’s “History of India,” andthere the subject of the various recensions is discussed. There is alsoa valuable note by Dr. Rieu in his “Catalogue of PersianMSS.,” i, 253. It is there pointed out that there is a manuscripttranslation of the first nine years of the Memoirs by William Erskinein the British Museum. I have consulted this translation and found ithelpful. The MS. is numbered Add. 26,611. The translation is, ofcourse, excellent, and it was made from a good MS.
A translation of what Dr. Rieu calls the garbled Memoirsof Jahāngīr was made by Major David Price and published bythe Oriental Translation Committee of the Royal Asiatic Society in1829. The author of this work is unknown, and its history is anunsolved problem. It is occasionally fuller than the genuine Memoirs,and it contains some picturesque touches, such as the account[viii]of Akbar’s deathbed. But it is certainthat it is, in part at least, a fabrication, and that it containsstatements which Jahāngīr could never have made. Compare, forinstance, the account of the death of Sohrāb, the son ofMīrzā Rustam, near the end of Price’s translation, pp.138–9, with that given in the genuine Memoirs in the narrative ofthe fifteenth year of the reign, p. 293, and also in theIqbāl-nāma, p. 139. Besides being inaccurate, the garbled orspurious Memoirs are much shorter than the genuine work, and do not gobeyond the fifteenth year. Price
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