The Rashīdī History 3.1
The Tarikh-i-Rashidi (Elias, Ross) 3.1
- Language
- English
3.1.1
The Poet wandering on, through Arabie And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste, And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down Indus and Oxus from their icy caves, In joy and exultation held his way; Till in the vale of Cashmire, .... he stretched His languid limbs. — Alastor. The object of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, as the author tells his readers, is to preserve the memory of the Moghuls and their Khans, which, at the time he wrote, stood in danger of being altogether lost through the want of a chronicler. It was a race that he knew to be not only declining, but speedily approaching an end: its power was a dream of the past; its numbers were dwindling at a rapid rate, chiefly through absorption into the neighbouring tribes then rising to influence; while he himself had been a witness of the events and an actor in the scenes, which had resulted in the remnant of his people being ousted from their own country, to find an asylum in a strange land. In short, the Moghuls of Moghulistan—the eastern branch of the Chaghatai—had been nearly blotted from existence, while their Khans, through a long course of intermarriage with other races, had ceased to be Moghuls in anything but the name.
3.1.2
Mirza Haidar foresaw, therefore, that there might soon be nobody left to tell the story of a people who, only a few generations earlier, had regarded themselves with pride as the descendants of Chingiz's conquering hordes, who made themselves feared if not respected, by their neighbours, and who gloried in the independence of the wide steppe-land which was their home. All this had been changed when our author — himself an exile and serving a foreign monarch — had to constitute himself the historian of their fall. Whether he was able to appreciate the changes that were taking place around him, where they did more than affect his own people, is perhaps doubtful. It may be supposed that he was regarding events from too close a standpoint to be able to judge of their true proportions ; but it has become evident to later observers that he had, for the period of his history, a time of gradual but extensive change, which brought results of the greatest importance to the future of a large section of Asia. Mr. Erskine, the historian of the rise of the Moghul dynasty in India, has pointed to this period, as that which gave Transoxiana to the Uzbegs, Moghulistan to the Kirghiz, and India to the Moghuls — but to the descendants of a branch of the Moghuls quite separate from that of Moghulistan.
3.1.3
In Central Asia it was a period full of incident : wars were on foot on every side: states were being overrun and cities besieged, while rulers arose or went down, almost from day to day, according to their fortune in war or intrigue. The princes and the descendants of exiled ruling families, together with most of the Khans and Begs of the various tribes, found themselves forced to take a side, either in support of their house or their relations, or in self-defence ; and in many cases they seem to have changed sides with as little consideration for the rights and wrongs of the cause, as when they first took a part in the quarrel. When they were strong they attacked a neighbour with or without reason ; if successful, they enjoyed, usually, a short period of bloody revenge and debauchery, but soon had again to "mount" — as the phrase was — for a new campaign ; if beaten, they fled to some other neighbour, and if not put to death by him, waited, in exile, till a turn of fortune's wheel should afford a fresh chance of aggrandizement or plunder. "In the space of about 120 years," writes Sir H. Yule, "no less than thirty descendants or kinsmen, of Chaghatai are counted to have occupied his throne ; and indeed revolutions, depositions, murders, and usurpations seem to have succeeded each other with a frequency unusual even in Asiatic governments."
3.1.4
Here, then, were times that could hardly fail to make a historian of any soldier of fortune, who happened to have a taste for recording the events of his own life. Baber, the first of the Moghuls of India, and our author's cousin, especially answered to this description, and left behind him a picture of his age which is almost, if not quite, unique among the works of Asiatic authors. He has been represented as at once a soldier, a historian, and an autobiographer ; and his kinsman, Mirza Haidar, may justly be described in the same way. Baber, however, was a better autobiographer than Mirza Haidar, and he was incomparably a greater soldier, as history proves. But, on the other hand, his cousin may be fairly acknowledged the better historian. While Baber made history incidental to his own memoirs, the reverse was the case with Mirza Haidar. The Mirza wrote the history of his race and family with a definite purpose ; and when he came to his own days, he wove in his personal adventures as those of an actor and participator in the events he was recording — making the one illustrate the other ; so that it may, with truth, be said that his life belongs to his history. Though they differed in remote origin, Mirza Haidar was, to all intents and, purposes, of the same nation and country as Baber ; yet he wrote in Persian, while the latter wrote in the Chaghatai Turki (as the modern name is), current then, as now, all over Central Asia.
3.1.5
Baber was a descendant of Amir Timur (or Tamerlane), and was, consequently, on one side of his family, more a Turk than a Moghul, for Timur belonged to the Barlas, a Turki tribe of distinguished lineage. Following the common usage of the day, however, Mirza Haidar would have called Baber a "Chaghatai," while the latter would have spoken of his cousin as a "Moghul." Mirza Haidar came of the Dughlat tribe — a sub-division, or sept, of the true Moghuls of Chaghatai's line — and one that was accounted about equal, in point of nobility, to the Barlas. By the end of the fifteenth century the members of all the Moghul and Chaghatai ruling families had become much scattered, and mixed in blood, through frequent intermarriages with aliens. Many of them had, for several generations, lived in Turki countries, where they had become Turks in manners and language. So much was this the case with Baber and his kindred, that he had come to look upon himself as more of a Turk than a Moghul, and in his Memoirs mentions, more than once, his aversion and contempt for the Moghul race. The Dughlat had remained more distinctively Moghul, though among its members, also, much intermixture with Turki tribes appears to have taken place.
3.1.6
Thus the Turki in which Baber wrote his Memoirs, must have been the natural language of Mirza Haidar also, who probably knew little or nothing of the Moghul tongue, and in his capacity of Musulman, would have despised it as something appertaining to infidels and barbarians. But however this may be, when he wrote in Persian, he was certainly using a foreign language, and it is for this reason, perhaps, that his style is wanting in the simplicity which (it is said) characterises that of Turki writers—a simplicity that Baber loved, and impressed upon his son, Humayun, as an accomplishment to be cultivated. That the Tarikh-i-Rashidi was not written for effect, or for the indulgence of a taste for literature, need hardly be remarked after what has been said above. The work is an earnest one, and the author, no doubt intended that it should be, before everything else, a clear and complete exposition of the times he had set himself to chronicle. On the whole he has been successful, and has produced a record that, in point of usefulness, will bear comparison (as far as can be judged from translations) with most of those of Asiatic authors who have occupied themselves in the same field, from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. His task was not an easy one, for much of the history of the times is complicated and obscure, and would require infinite care and method to present it to the reader with perfect clearness. All was change and disorder.
3.1.7
Princes and members of reigning families wandered and married in every direction, and their houses dovetailed into one another in a manner almost calculated to set at defiance any method of narration, however systematic : the limits of countries were nowhere fixed, while, unlike in any other part of the world, many of the nations dealt with were nomads, who sometimes migrated en masse from one region to another, or sometimes were found divided in their political subordination, as well as in their abodes. Even the names of the countries were not defined ; and in some cases the tribe and the region it occupied, were confused under one name. In others, the country and the chief town were not distinguished ; while in some, again, a place or a people might be known by different names to different neighbouring nations. The author who could construct from these confused materials an intelligible and fairly consecutive narrative, can scarcely be blamed if his reader should occasionally be perplexed in linking the various incidents together, or in distinguishing between some of the actors who took part in them. More especially should he be treated with leniency, when it is considered that what was clear to him at the time, and on the spot, must necessarily bear an entirely different complexion when viewed by the Western reader, after a lapse of more than three hundred years, and after all the changes that have taken place in the interval.
3.1.8
It may be said that the art of the historian consists in overcoming these difficulties, and in leaving behind him a narrative that will be clear for all time ; but this would be too much to expect from an Asiatic author, even though he might be an experienced writer, and not, as in Mirza Haidar's case, a roving adventurer or soldier of fortune, exposed to all the vicissitudes of the times. To the most practised among them, systematic arrangement and clearness of statement, as we understand the terms, are unknown, and even if they thought it worth while to consider the convenience of the readers they knew of, they could hardly have contemplated their works being studied by foreigners, from countries of which they had scarcely heard even the names.