The Memoirs of Bābur 936.5.5

936.5.5

he, however, may have known no more than others knew of her descent; the second, that Māhīm forcibly took Dil-dār's child Hind-āl to rear; she was the older wife and the mother of the heir, but could she have taken the upper hand over a Mīrān-shāhī? A circumstance complicating the question of Salīma's maternal descent is, that historians searching the _Bābur-nāma_ or its Persian translation the _Wāqi`āt-i-bāburī_ for information about the three daughters of Maḥmūd _Mīrān-shāhī_ and Pasha _Bahārlū Turkmān_, would find an incomplete record, one in which the husbands of the first and second daughters are mentioned and nothing is said about the third who was Bābur's wife and the grandmother of Salīma. Bābur himself appears to have left the record as it is, meaning to fill it in later; presumably he waited for the names of the elder two sisters to complete his details of the three. In the Ḥaidarabad Codex, which there is good ground for supposing a copy of his original manuscript, about three lines are left blank (f. 27) as if awaiting information; in most manuscripts, however, this indication of intention is destroyed by running the defective passage on to join the next sentence. Some chance remark of a less well-known writer, may clear up the obscurity and show that Sālḥa was Dil-dār.