Vol. VII, No. 1.] A dubious passage in the Baburnama. 7 
[N.S.] 
of fact, she died 14 or 15 years previously, in the beginning, 
namely, of 911 A.H., or July, 1505. This at once disposes of 
the idea that the paragraph is the work of Babur. Nor can 
we get out of the difficulty by supposing that Hazrat Walida 
is equivalent to WAlida-i-Sultan, mother of the king, or of the 
heir, and that it is Mahim the wife of Babur and mother of 
Humayin to whom the words refer. Against this interpreta- 
tion there is the fact that Pavet de Courteille, the experienced 
Turki scholar, has taken the words to refer to Babur’s mother, 
and there is the still more convincing circumstance that the para- 
graph ends by saying that the result of the arrangement was 
that the writer (i.e., Babur) got both a younger brother and a 
son. If the child was made over to the grandmother, that is, 
to Babur’s mother, he might say that the child became his 
younger brother. But the expression has no meaning if the 
infant was givén to his wife. It certainly seems to me that 
the writer of the paragraph, whoever he was, had forgotten or 
never knew that Babur’s mother had died in 911. He also, 
I think, imagined that Mahim was the name of Babur’s mother! 
The paragraph is valuable as a note, and we are indebted to 
whoever wrote it. But it seems impossible that either Babur 
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Nor do I think that strict Sunnis like Babur and Huma- 
yun would in exemplifying the names written on pieces of 
paper have only referred to three specially Shi‘a names, viz., 
Fatima, ‘Ali and Hasan. It is possible that Jahangir wrote 
the paragraph, but one would expect him to have been better 
informed about the date of death of his great grandfather’s 
mother. 
