Babur – Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor

Title: Babur – Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor 1483-1530

Author: Stephen Frederic Dale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781107107267
Pages: 242

Zahir al-din Muhammad Babur (1483 – 1530) was a prominent invader of India in its millennia-old history, He established the Mughal dynasty that lasted for only three centuries, but offered lasting contributions to India’s society as a whole. As a conqueror, Babur’s legacy is surprisingly scant and he had not left behind many monuments that evoke his memory. Rather, he is still remembered for the destruction he had caused in India. Babur suddenly acquired relevance in the last decade of the twentieth century for two contradictory reasons. In India, a sixteenth-century mosque attributed to him was razed to the ground by militant Hindu nationalists in 1992 which they claimed was built on top of a destroyed temple dedicated to Lord Ram, one of Hinduism’s most revered divinities. Even though the temple destruction was masterminded by Mir Baqi, Babur’s local commander, the mosque was named in honour of his master. At the same time, the Soviet Union disintegrated into several national republics that quickly faced an urgent need to stitch together a national narrative to bind their people together. The newly formed Uzbekistan found its rallying cry behind its medieval heroes like Timur, Ulugh Beg and Babur. This book is a toned down version of one of the author’s thoroughly researched book that was difficult for ordinary readers to enjoy. Stephen Frederic Dale is Professor Emeritus of South Asian and Islamic History at Ohio State University.

Babur inherited the most exalted ancestry imaginable to a medieval central Asian warlord. He descended from Timur on the father’s side and from Chingiz Khan on the mother’s. This gave him legitimacy in the fiercely tribal society of those times. At the same time, Dale narrates characteristics of a barbarian polity showing no respect for kinship relations. When Babur’s father Umar Shaikh Mirza died in 1494, Babur became the ruler of Ferghana with his capital at Andijan. He was soon attacked by close relatives on all sides. Ahmad Mirza of Samarqand, who was his own father-in-law, attacked from the west; his maternal uncle, the Chaghatai Mongol Mahmud Khan of Tashkent, attacked from the northwest and a Mongol kinsman and ruler of Kashgar Abu Bakr Dughlat, from the east. Babur repulsed all of them, but this lust for power cast a long shadow on the dynasty he founded in India. Their affections often followed personal whims than paternal obligations. Muhammad Baranduq Barlas, Babur’s ancestor, much loved the hawk such that if a hawk died or was lost, it would have mattered more than if one or another son had died or broken his neck (p.74).

The author describes the sorry plight of Babur in his native Ferghana and Samarqand against powerful enemies. Babur occupied Samarqand three times – which he considered to be his legacy attributable to his Timurid ancestry – but lost out to Uzbeks on all three occasions. Babur fled each time he had had to cross swords with Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Finally, he occupied Kabul as to make the best out of a hopeless situation. He conquered Kabul not by conquest, but by legitimacy. His Timurid uncle Ulugh Beg Kabuli who had ruled there had died in 1502. But he found the Afghan tribes too independent as to refuse taxes or tributes. Compared to the economically poorer province of Kabul, the wealthy plains and compliant farmers of India was a very alluring prospect. However, Babur matured in Kabul and enjoyed a considerable degree of stability for the first time in his life. The two decades he spent there was full of great personal and intellectual accomplishment. In that congenial life, eighteen children were born to him of his four wives! The poor resources of the province comprised only of custom duty. Dale presents a comparison of Kabul with Agra. While the latter collected 2.9 million shahrukhis in taxes, Kabul could produce only 0.8 million. Still, Babur loved life in Kabul so much that he regretted ever leaving Kabul’s cool forested countryside and its cascading streams for the hot, humid and arid planes of India.

However hard you may analyse the impact of Babur on India, the modern Indian society think of him as another marauding, nomadic barbarian from the central Asian steppes. The feeling of ill will is mutual. Babur found Indians black and ugly. He viewed India with contempt and he does not even allude to Indo-Muslim clerics in his religious musings. As compared to the slave lineage of Delhi’s first sultanate dynasties, Babur trumpeted his heritage and resultant legitimacy derived foremost from his prestigious Timurid lineage. As a true Hanafi Sunni Muslim and a representative of Perso-Islamic society, he criticized the lack of social life in India and the isolating Hindu ways of caste which in his view lacked the civilized traits of congenial social intercourse. In a sustained effort of cultural imperialism, Babur worked constantly to Persianize India.

In his later years, Babur stuck to a puritanical way of life, giving up intoxicating drinks and opium as a thanks-giving offer for victory against Rana Sanga at the Battle of Khanwa. Anyhow, he was a rank opportunist when he could enjoy power by compromising on his religious beliefs or morals. Shaibani Khan was an Uzbek warlord who scattered Babur’s troops whenever they met in battle. This Khan was killed by Shah Ismail Safawi of Persia who offered a gift to Babur which he could not refuse – the rulership of Samarqand. Babur readily reciprocated with fealty and submission to the Shah and his Shii faith. When he took Samarqand, the Shah’s name was read in Friday prayers and the Shii profession of faith ‘Ali wali Allah’ was stamped on coins. But the people of Samarqand rebelled against this apostasy, which was one of the reasons for his getting ousted from the city. Babur also continued to use the name of the Turko-Mongol pagan god Tengri (blue sky) as a synonym of Allah. In fact he uses the term Tengri more often than the Islamic god (p.130).

Dale gives pride of place to Babur’s literary achievements like poems and ghazals. Most of them are of the expected variety of unrequited love or frustrated infatuation. However, he does not enjoy an exalted poetic reputation but his poems are important as evidence of his literary ambitions and cultured personality. Many character sketches of the Timurids in Afghanistan as Babur consolidated his position in Kabul are given. A long list of poets and philosophers are also included. The discussion loses focus here and falls to the level of a summary of Babur’s autobiography called Baburnama.

The author marvels at the candidness with which Babur had approached his own self and at the objectivity of his observations of others. He also hints at the trait of homosexuality seen in the Mughal founder. Babur talks about his infatuation with a youth he calls Baburi. His emotionally affected prose depicts a distant and unresolved infatuation as if from the side of a girl. He writes that he was ‘tongue-tied when he met Baburi in the bazaar out of modesty and bashfulness’. In this case, Babur is unable even to open a conversation with the young man who aroused in him emotions of ‘desire’ and ‘love’. Dale opines that all these references generate unanswerable, psychological questions in readers. Another instance that pointed to this trait of Babur’s personality occurred in 1519 when we see him write a two-couplet verse a few days after he sent his long-term companion Khwajah Kalan as the governor of Bijaur. It contains the same imagery of separated lovers found in ghazals.

This book takes Babur at face value as far as his autobiography is concerned. It provides such an uncritical evaluation of the historical text that had Dale been alive in Babur’s time, he would have honoured the American professor with a khilat (honorary robe) and perhaps several villages as tax-free grant! This book always refers to India as Hindustan even in contexts not related to the descriptions in Babur’s text. This feels awkward with an impression that the modern Indian state does not faithfully reflect the legacy of the medieval country. Dale is a Turkish language scholar too, but his frequent use of Chaghatai Turkish words from the original text is troublesome for easy readability. This makes the book appear scholarly, but without much use for ordinary readers. The author takes extraordinary care not to disclose Babur’s religious bigotry and sanitizes such references as temple destruction and forced conversions. He uses the word ‘pagan’ instead of ‘kafir’ even though he liberally quotes from the original text.

To sum up this review, let me reproduce a quatrain from Babur.

‘O Breeze, if thou enter the sanctuary of that Cypress
Remind her heart of the wound of separation
May god have mercy; she does not recall Babur
God grant mercy to her heart of steel’

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star