Page:The Tarikh-i-Rashidi - Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát - tr. Edward D. Ross (1895).djvu/9

vi summarised more or less briefly; and in others, again, mere memoranda, or headings, are given to show the drift of the author's narrative; while, finally, considerable sections of the book, at various places, are omitted altogether.

The document, therefore, valuable though it is, can scarcely be regarded as a translation of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi. Rather, it appears to me, after a close acquaintance with it, to have been prepared less with a view to producing a complete English version of Mirza Haidar's history, than for some other and more special purpose. Whether Mr. Erskine ever contemplated publishing the Tarikh-i-Rashidi in an English dress, there is nothing to indicate, but there are several circumstances connected with the MS. at the British Museum, which lead me to conjecture that it was intended rather as a preparatory study for the compilation of his second important work—The History of India under the Moghuls—of which the first and second volumes (the only ones ever completed) appeared in 1854. In the first place, the passages, or sections, of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi devoted to the dynastic history of the Moghul Khans and their transactions, are usually those which are translated in full in the manuscript. Secondly, the Tarikh-i-Rashidi is not only frequently cited in the two volumes of the history, but, in many parts of them, passages from the MS. are found transcribed word for word, while the author mentions, in his preface, that he has based his knowledge of the Moghuls and their chronicles chiefly on Mirza Haidar's evidence. Indeed, the greater part of Mr. Erskine's introduction is a summary of the Moghul annals as put forward by Mirza Haidar, and by Mirza Haidar alone, for no other Asiatic author deals with the subject in any but a merely incidental way. A third circumstance pointing to the same conclusion is, that bound up in the same volume of MSS. with the fragmentary translation of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, we find a second document, which consists of a similar condensed translation, in Mr. Erskine's handwriting, of the third volume of the Ikbál Náma Jahángiri of Mutamad Khan, a work that seems to have been studied with a view to another—probably the fourth—volume of the History of India. Thus it seems very likely that the précis (if it may be so called) of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, was drawn up as a preliminary study for the historical works the author was at that time planning; and if this is the case, no better proof could be offered of the care and thoroughness he devoted to the task,