TARIKH-I-RASHIDI.
INTRODUCTION.
SECTION I.
THE AUTHOR AND HIS BOOK.
The Poet wandering on, through Arabie
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o’er the aërial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves,
In joy and exultation held his way;
Till in the vale of Cashmire,…
.............................he stretched
His languid limbs.
—Alastor.
The object of the Tarikh-i-Rashidi, as the author tells his readers, is to preserve the memory of the Moghuls and their Khans, which, at the time he wrote, stood in danger of being altogether lost through the want of a chronicler. It was a race that he knew to be not only declining, but speedily approaching an end: its power was a dream of the past; its numbers were dwindling at a rapid rate, chiefly through absorption into the neighbouring tribes then rising to influence; while he himself had been a witness of the events and an actor in the scenes, which had resulted in the remnant of his people being ousted from their own country, to find an asylum in a strange land. In short, the Moghuls of Moghulistan—the eastern branch of the Chaghatai—had been nearly blotted from existence, while their Khans, through a long course of intermarriage with other races, had ceased to be Moghuls in anything but the name. Mirza Haidar foresaw, therefore, that there might soon be nobody left to tell the story of a people who, only a few generations earlier, had regarded themselves with pride as the
