Babur

• 1. Introduction

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  Babur was born on the 14th of February 1483 in Andijan, a city in the Fergana Valley of what is now Uzbekistan. His given name was Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, meaning Defender of the Faith, chosen for him by the Sufi saint Khwaja Ahrar. But the name that stuck, the one his Central Asian army could actually pronounce, was Babur. It comes from the Persian word for tiger or panther, appearing repeatedly in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.

  At twelve years old, Babur inherited a kingdom. By twenty, he had conquered and lost the fabled city of Samarkand twice. At forty-three, he founded an empire that would reshape the Indian subcontinent for generations. He did all of this while writing what scholars consider one of the earliest true autobiographies in Islamic literature, raising a family, planting gardens, and drinking more than was probably advisable.

  Who was this man who lost everything several times over and kept going? What drove him east to India after decades of failure in Central Asia? And how did a prince from a small valley in Uzbekistan become the founder of the Mughal Empire? The answers begin with a dovecote that collapsed into a ravine.

• 2. A Kingdom Won and Lost

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  Umar Shaikh Mirza II died in 1494 in an unusual fashion. He fell with his dovecote into a ravine below his palace, and his twelve-year-old son Babur suddenly found himself ruler of Fergana. The throne was immediately contested. Two hostile uncles moved against him, and a faction of nobles preferred his younger brother Jahangir. His survival in those early years owed much to his maternal grandmother, Aisan Daulat Begum, whose political skill helped stabilize his position.

  Every neighboring kingdom was ruled by a relative, either a descendant of Timur or of Genghis Khan, and they were constantly fighting each other. The prize they all wanted was Samarkand, and Babur wanted it most of all. In 1497, at the age of fifteen, he besieged the city for seven months and finally took it. He held it for only 100 days. He fell seriously ill, and while he was weakened a rebellion broke out back in Fergana. Trying to save one territory, he lost the other.

  For three years Babur rebuilt his forces, recruiting heavily among the Tajiks of Badakhshan. In 1500-1501 he laid siege to Samarkand again and briefly took the city, only to face his most formidable rival: Muhammad Shaybani, Khan of the Uzbeks. The situation became desperate enough that Babur was compelled to give his sister Khanzada to Shaybani in marriage as part of the peace terms. The city was lost for the second time. Babur then lost Fergana too. He wandered the mountains of central Asia with a small band of followers, finally writing from Tashkent, where his maternal uncle gave him an unwelcoming reception: "During my stay in Tashkent, I endured much poverty and humiliation. No country, or hope of one!"

  Ten years after becoming a ruler, he was destitute. But in October 1504, he crossed the snowy Hindu Kush mountains and seized Kabul, and with it a foothold that would eventually carry him to a different continent.

• 3. Kabul and the Shaping of a Conqueror

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  Kabul in 1504 was ruled nominally by an infant heir, with real power held by the Arghun chieftains, whom Babur drove south to Kandahar. He would remain its ruler until 1526. Though the mountain kingdom generated little revenue, it gave him time, stability, and access to new ideas.

  In 1505, citing his desire for Hindustan, Babur led his first brief raid across the Khyber Pass. He wrote in his memoirs, "My desire for Hindustan had been constant. It was in the month of Shaban, the Sun being in Aquarius, that we rode out of Kabul for Hindustan." That raid was a probe, not a conquest. What would reshape his military thinking came from a different direction.

  Babur visited Herat in 1506 after a proposed alliance with Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqarah against the Uzbeks fell apart with Husayn's death. He found a city he described as "filled with learned and matched men", though he was privately disgusted by its vices and luxury. There he encountered the Chagatai poet Mir Ali Shir Nava'i, whose mastery of the Chagatai language as a literary medium may have influenced Babur's own decision to write his memoirs in that tongue. Two months later, diminishing resources forced him to leave. Shaybani then overran Herat.

  The death of Shaybani in 1510, killed by Shah Ismail I of Safavid Persia, opened a new opportunity. Babur allied himself with Ismail and in 1513 captured Samarkand for the third and final time, also taking Bukhara. He lost both again to the Uzbeks. Shah Ismail returned his sister Khanzada, who had been imprisoned after Shaybani's death. Babur returned to Kabul in 1514 with no Central Asian territory but a clarified purpose, and with something equally valuable: Ottoman military technology.

  Through the matchlock commander Mustafa Rumi and other Ottoman soldiers in his service, Babur absorbed the tactic of deploying matchlocks and cannon in open field battles, not merely in sieges. That knowledge would prove decisive.

• 4. The Battle That Made an Empire

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  Babur crossed the Indus River and reached the Chenab in 1519. For several years his aim was limited to Punjab, largely to follow the legacy of his ancestor Timur, who had ruled that region. The Delhi Sultanate under Ibrahim Lodi of the Lodi dynasty was crumbling, and invitations arrived from Daulat Khan Lodi, the Governor of Punjab, and from Ala-ud-Din, Ibrahim's uncle. Babur sent an ambassador to Ibrahim claiming the throne by right of descent; the ambassador was detained at Lahore for months.

  The situation turned chaotic. In 1524 Babur marched to Lahore, found Daulat Khan Lodi had already been defeated by Ibrahim's forces, fought and lost an engagement, then burned Lahore for two days. He installed a governor who was promptly overthrown. The reinforced rebel coalition assembled perhaps 30,000 troops to besiege Ibrahim at Delhi; the sultan defeated them easily. Babur understood he had to go himself.

  In November 1525, he learned at Peshawar that Daulat Khan Lodi had switched sides. Babur drove him out and marched on Delhi. He reached Panipat on the 20th of April 1526. Facing him was Ibrahim Lodi's numerically superior army of roughly 100,000 soldiers and 1,000 elephants. The battle began the following day.

  Babur deployed the tactic he called Tulugma, encircling the larger force and compelling it to face artillery fire head-on. Along his front he lashed together 700 baggage carts with rawhide ropes in what he called the Ottoman, or Rumi, fashion, leaving gaps for cavalry charges. His matchlock men and field guns positioned behind this barricade were commanded by two Ottoman master-gunners, Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa Rumi. The war elephants, terrified by the artillery, turned back into their own ranks. Ibrahim Lodi died in the battle, ending the Lodi dynasty. Babur wrote of the outcome: "By the grace of the Almighty God, this difficult task was made easy to me and that mighty army, in the space of a half a day was laid in dust." He occupied Delhi, Gwalior, and Agra, and took the throne of Lodi.

• 5. Holding What Was Won

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  Winning India and holding it were separate problems. Many of Babur's Central Asian followers wanted to leave, finding Hindustan hot and alien. His close friend Khwaja Kalan was among those who returned to Kabul. His daughter Gulbadan Begum later recalled that "the treasures of five kings fell into his hands" and that "he gave everything away": soldiers, traders, scribes, and nobles received gifts; relatives and holy men in Samarkand and Khurasan were sent presents; and every person in the country of Kabul received a silver coin. This generosity, consistent with his self-image as a qalandar, a wandering open-handed dervish, helped bind his following.

  The Rajput ruler of Mewar, Rana Sanga, then advanced on Babur at the head of a grand coalition of Rajput and Afghan warlords, intending to push out what he considered a foreign occupier and extend his own territories to include Delhi and Agra. The armies met at Khanwa on the 16th of March 1527. On the eve of the battle, with his troops unsettled by an astrologer's prophecy of defeat, Babur recast the campaign in religious terms. He denounced Rana Sanga as a kafir, proclaimed the fight a jihad, and in a public ceremony smashed his gold and silver wine vessels, distributing the fragments to the poor. The Rajput cavalry charges were broken by culverin fire directed by the Ottoman gunner Mustafa Rumi, positioned behind linked carts as at Panipat. The Hindu chief Silhadi defected to Babur's side, bringing 6,000 soldiers. Babur won a decisive victory and assumed the title of ghazi.

  A year later, on the 20th of January 1528, Babur offered the ruler of Malwa, Medini Rai, an exchange of territories at Chanderi as a peace overture; Rai refused. The outer fortress fell that night, the upper fort within an hour the following morning. Seeing no hope, Medini Rai organized a jauhar in which the women and children of the fortress immolated themselves. Babur recorded the event without admiration.

  By the spring of 1529, most major opposition had collapsed. At the Battle of Ghaghra in May 1529, Babur's forces defeated the combined Afghan-Bengal coalition under Sultan Mahmud Lodi and Sultan Nusrat Shah of Bengal. Nusrat Shah sued for peace. Organized Afghan resistance to Babur effectively ended. At his death the realm stretched from the Oxus and Kabul across the Punjab and the Gangetic plain to the frontiers of Bengal and Bihar.

• 6. The Writer Who Ruled

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  Babur carried his library with him everywhere. In his memoirs, when cataloguing a conquered land, he listed poets, musicians, and scholars alongside sovereigns and nobles. He died at forty-seven, but the literary and intellectual output he left behind is remarkable for any life, let alone one spent mostly in the field.

  The Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkic, which Babur called Turki, stands as one of the earliest true autobiographies in Islamic literature. The historian Stephen Dale characterized its author as "a relentlessly ambitious, humorous, casually violent, articulate, heavy drinking, personally engaging, highly cultured Muslim." The book is frank to the point of self-incrimination, documenting failures alongside triumphs and offering close observations of the peoples, plants, animals, and landscapes Babur encountered. It was translated into Persian by Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan in November 1589, during the reign of Babur's grandson Akbar, and was repeatedly illustrated by Mughal painters.

  Beyond the Baburnama, Babur wrote ghazals, a treatise on Muslim jurisprudence called the Mubayyin, a work on poetics called the Aruz risolasi, and a work on music. He devised a personal calligraphic script, the khatt-i Baburi, in which he had a copy of the Quran made. The contemporary historian Mirza Haidar ranked him a Turki poet second only to Mir Ali Shir Nava'i, and Babur was confident enough in his poetics to write his own essay on Turkic metre, which he considered superior to Nava'i's treatment of the same subject.

  He also composed poetry in the aftermath of his Indian victories. One ruba'i, celebrating his ghazi status, reads in translation: "For Islam's sake I wandered barren wastes; Against unbelievers and the land of Hind I mustered force. Having vowed to make myself a martyr, By God's leave I took up the sword as a ghazi." Many of his poems later became popular folk songs in Uzbekistan, particularly as performed by Sherali Jo'rayev.

• 7. Gardens, Mosques, and Memory

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  The Baburnama dwells on gardens far more than on any building project. Babur never mentions building or praying in a mosque, yet he describes his gardens at length and gives them evocative names. His earliest Indian gardens were laid out on the banks of the Yamuna at Agra, where he introduced the symmetrical four-part charbagh, or paradise garden, watered from the river. This rationally ordered form, which he regarded as concrete evidence of his Timurid heritage, became one of the enduring trademarks of Mughal architecture. A garden he designed himself near the Ghaggar river was completed in 1528-29, and the quarter of Agra developed by his nobles was nicknamed Kabul by local people.

  Few of Babur's buildings survive. His chief architectural monuments are three congregational mosques: one at Sambhal erected in 1526, and two dated 1528-29, the Kabuli Bagh Mosque at Panipat, and a mosque at Ayodhya. The Ayodhya mosque, built by his officer Mir Baqi, incorporated carved black-stone columns from an earlier temple and stood on a site venerated by many Hindus as the birthplace of the deity Rama.

  That mosque, the Babri Masjid, became the center of a prolonged dispute in Indian politics. In December 1992, activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party demolished it, triggering communal rioting in which more than a thousand people were killed. As its reputed builder, Babur is reviled by many Hindu nationalists in modern India. In Uzbekistan the valuation runs the other way: he is honoured as a national hero, commemorated on stamps issued on the 14th of February 2008 to mark the 525th anniversary of his birth. Pakistan named a cruise missile after him in October 2005.

  Babur died in Agra and was first buried at Chauburji there. As per his wishes, his remains were later moved to Kabul and reburied in the Bagh-e Babur, his own garden, sometime between 1539 and 1544.

• 8. The Man Behind the Emperor

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  Babur's first marriage, to his paternal cousin Aisha Sultan Begum, was arranged when both were children; he was five when they were betrothed. They married around 1498-99. He described himself as "bashful" in her company, unable to look at her. The couple had one daughter, Fakhr-un-Nissa, who died within a year in 1500. Three years after his first defeat at Fergana, Aisha left him and returned to her father's household.

  His autobiography also records, with unusual candor, an infatuation with a boy named Baburi, about three years younger, who was in his camp at roughly the same time. Babur wrote: "Occasionally Baburi came to me, but I was so bashful that I could not look him in the face, much less converse freely with him." The honesty with which he recorded these feelings is characteristic of the Baburnama's self-portrait.

  Over the years Babur married several more times. Maham Begum, whom he married in 1506, was his chief and favourite consort; their son Humayun survived infancy while their other children did not. Gulrukh Begum bore him Kamran and Askari. Dildar Begum was the mother of his youngest son, Hindal, and of the author Gulbadan Begum. Babur also married Bibi Mubarika, a Pashtun woman of the Yusufzai tribe, and received two Circassian concubines, Gulnar Aghacha and Nargul Aghacha, as gifts from Tahmasp Shah Safavi, the Shah of Persia.

  During the years of relative peace in Kabul, Babur first drank alcohol at the age of thirty and then drank regularly, hosting wine parties and consuming opium preparations. He quit drinking before the Battle of Khanwa for health reasons, just two years before his death. He did not quit chewing narcotic preparations, and he retained his irony about the whole episode, writing: "Everyone regrets drinking and swears an oath (of abstinence); I swore the oath and regret that."

  In 1530, his son Humayun fell dangerously ill at Sambhal. According to an account preserved by Gulbadan Begum, Babur walked three times around the sick-bed and prayed that the illness be transferred to him. Humayun recovered. Babur's own health soon declined. In his final advice to Humayun, he urged him to deal gently with his brothers and divided his dominions among his sons in roughly a six-to-five ratio between Humayun and Kamran. That injunction to forbearance would shape, and trouble, Humayun's dealings with his brothers for years to come.