(o. Discomfiture of a reconnoitring party.)
The begs were appointed in turns for scouting-duty. When jt was 'Abdu'l-'azlz's turn, he went out of Slkri, looking neither before nor behind, right out along the road to Kanwa which is 5 kuroh (iom.) away. The Rana must have been marching forward ; he heard of our men's moving out in their reinless (jaldii-siz) way, and made 4 or 5,000 of his own fall suddenly on them. With 'Abdu'l-'azlz and Mulla Apaq may have been 1000 to 1500 men; they took no stock of their opponents but just got to grips ; they were hurried off at once, many of them being made prisoner.
On news of this, we despatched Khalifa's Muhibb-i-'all with Khalifa's retainers. Mulla Husain and some others aubriiqsilbruqx* were sent to support them,2 and Muhammad 'All Jangjang also. Presumably it was before the arrival of this first, Muhibb-i-'all's, reinforcement that the Pagan had hurried off 'Abdu'l-'azlz and his men, taken his standard, martyred Mulla Ni'mat, Mulla Daud and the younger brother of Mulla Apaq, with several more. Directly the reinforcement arrived the pagans overcame Tahir-tibn, the maternal uncle of Khalifa's Muhibb-i-'all, who had not got up with the hurrying reinforcement [?].3 Meantime Muhibb-i-'all even had been thrown down,
1 This phrase has not occurred in the B. N. before ; presumably it expresses what has not yet been expressed ; this Erskine's rendering, '' each according to the speed of his horse," does also. The first Persian translation, which in this portion is by Muhammad-quli Mughal Hisari, translates by az dambalyak digar (I. O. 215, f. 205*); the second, 'Abdu'r-rahim's, merely reproduces the phrase ; De Courteille (ii, 272) appears to render it by (amirs) que je ne nomme pas. If my reading of Tahir-tibri's failure be correct (infra), Erskine's translation suits the context.
* The passage cut off by my asterisks has this outside interest that it torms tne introduction to the so-called " Fragments ", that is, to certain Turk! matter not included in the standard Babur-nama, but preserved with the Kehr - Ilminsky - de Courteille text. As is well-known in Baburiana, opinion has varied as to the. genesis of this .matter; there is now no doubt that it is a translation into TurkI from the (Persian) Akbar-nama, prefaced by the above-asterisked passage of the. Babur-nama and continuous (withAlight omissions) from Bib. Ind. ed. i, 106 to 120 (trs. H. Beveridge 1. 260 to 282). It covers the time from before the battle of Kanwa to the end of Abu'l-fazl's description of Babur's death, attainments and Court; it has been made to seem Babur's own, down to his death-bed, hy_changing the third person of A.F.'s narrative into the autobiographical first person. (Cf. Ilminsky, p, 403 1. 4 and P- 494; Mimoires ii, 272 and 443 to 464 ; JRAS. 1908, p. 76.)
A minute point in the history of the B.N. manuscripts may be plated on record here ; viz. that the variants from the true Babur-nama text which occur in the Kehr Ilminsky one, occur also in the corrupt Turk! text of I. O. No. 214 (JRAS 19°°, P- 455)-
3 chapSr kumak yitmas, perhaps implying that-the speed of his horses was not equal to that of Muhibb-i-'ali's. Translators vary as to the meaning of the phrase.
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