The Memoirs of Bābur 936.3.7

936.3.7

His name may have found its way into Niẕāmu'd-dīn Aḥmad's story as a gloss mistakenly amplifying the word _dāmād_, taken in its less usual sense of brother-in-law. To Bābur's contemporaries the expression "Bābur Pādshāh's _dāmād_" (son-in-law) would be explicit, because for some 11 years before he lay on his death-bed, he had one son-in-law only, _viz._ Muḥammad-i-zamān Mīrzā _Bāī-qarā_,[2732] the husband of Ma`ṣūma Sulṯān Begīm. If that Mīrzā's name were where Mahdī Khwāja's is entered, the story of an exclusion of Bābur's sons from rule might have a core of truth. It is incredible however that Khālīfa, with or without Bābur's concurrence, made the plan attributed to him of placing any man not a Tīmūrid in the position of Pādshāh over all Bābur's territory. I suggest that the plan concerned Hindūstān only and was one considered in connection with Bābur's intended return to Kābul, when he must have left that difficult country, hardly yet a possession, in charge of some man giving promise of power to hold it. Such a man Humāyūn was not. My suggestion rests on the following considerations:—