127 
1893.] Gf. A. Grierson — A specimen of the Padumdwati. 
the old building. The main walls of the buildings are brick in lime, 
the minor walls are brick in mud. The parade ground is paved with 
brick on edge over one flat, covered with six inches of concrete. Its 
level was visible everywhere in section. If we reckon the level of the 
curb stone of the footpath in Dalhousie Square as 100 ft. then the level 
of the parade ground would be 98'07 ft., i. e., a little less than 2 ft. 
lower down. The level of the floors of the rooms varied. The level 
of the floor over the subterranean vault was 99'24 ft. At about the 
middle of the set of rooms built along the east curtain it was 
98-5 ft. 
A Specimen of the Padumdwati. — Py 
G. A. G-rierson, B.A., I.C.S. 
The following is an attempt to give a correct text of a portion of 
the Padumawati, 1 or Padmavatl of Malik Muhammad of Jayas in Oudh. 
He flourished under Sher Shah in the year 1640 A. D., and numerous 
MSS. of his great poem are in existence. 
The value of the Padumawati consists chiefly in its age. Malik 
Muhammad is, I believe, the oldest vernacular poet of Hindustan of 
whom we have any uncontested remains. Chand Bar’dai was much 
older, but the genuineness of his Prithiraj Ray’sa is denied by many 
competent scholars. "Vidyapati Thakur, who lived in the year 1400 
A. D. has only left us a few songs which have come down to us through 
five centuries of oral transmission, and which now cannot be in the 
form in which they were written. The preservation of the Padumawati 
is due mainly to the happy accident of Malik Muhammad’s religious 
reputation. Although profoundly affected by the teaching of Kablr, 
and familiarly acquainted with Hindu lore, and with the Hindu Yoga 
philosophy, he was from the first revered as a saint by his Muham- 
madan co-religionists. 
He wrote his poem in what was evidently the actual vernacular 
of his time, tinged slightly with an admixture of a few Persian words 
and idioms due to his Musalman predilections. It is also due to his 
religion that he originally wrote it in the Persian character, and lienee 
1 The author himself invariably spells the word thus. 
