The Rashīdī History 3.1.1

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.