Baburnama
The Baburnama is the autobiography of Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, born in 1483, who conquered northern India and founded the Mughal Empire. It is one of the most intimate royal memoirs to survive from the medieval world. Babur wrote in Chagatai, the Turkic language of his Timurid ancestors, which he called Türki. He was a great-great-great-grandson of Timur, and he wrote not like a conqueror posturing for posterity, but like a man genuinely curious about the world around him. The book ranges across astronomy, geography, military tactics, plants and animals, wine parties, poetry, and the monuments he visited. One passage confesses a teenage infatuation so precisely felt that it reads almost like a diary entry. The questions this documentary will pursue are straightforward: how did a memoir written in an obscure Central Asian tongue become a landmark of world literature, what happened to the manuscripts that carried it, and why did a Mughal emperor commission an extraordinary set of illustrated copies decades after Babur's death?
Babur took and lost Samarkand twice before he was twenty-five. Those reversals of fortune are recorded in the Baburnama with the same plain energy he brought to descriptions of melons and moonlit gardens. Historian Stephen Frederic Dale has noted that Babur's Chagatai prose is heavily Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary, and that it also contains many phrases and shorter poems in Persian. The result is a text that sits between two literary cultures without fully belonging to either. Babur himself seems to have started writing around the time he moved to Kabul in 1504. All surviving manuscripts contain a gap between 1508 and 1519. Scholar Annette Beveridge and others believed those missing years were written but that the relevant portion of the manuscript was lost, possibly during the turbulent years of his son Humayun's reign. The final section of the text covers the years 1525 to 1529, taking in the decisive First Battle of Panipat in 1526 and the founding of an empire that his descendants would hold for three centuries. After that battle, Babur turned to long, patient descriptions of India's people, fauna, and flora, as if conquest obliged him to understand the land he had just won.
At pages 120 and 121, the Baburnama preserves one of the most candid personal disclosures in any royal memoir. Babur writes of a boy in the camp-bazaar whose name, Baburi, happened to echo his own. He describes the experience with unusual precision: he could not look straight at the boy, could not manage conversation, and on one occasion passed him in a lane and felt so confused he nearly went right off. He quotes his own Persian couplets, including one he translated roughly as: 'May none be as I, humbled and wretched and love-sick.' He also quotes a couplet by a poet named Muhammad Salih that came to mind during that meeting. Babur frames this episode alongside his account of his first marriage, to Ayisha-sultan Begum, noting that his mother had to push him to visit her once every ten, fifteen, or twenty days. The passage is not confessional in a modern therapeutic sense; it reads more like a naturalist's field note, recording an interior state with the same attention Babur gave to the wildlife of Hindustan.
Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, a courtier in the court of the emperor Akbar, completed a Persian translation of the Baburnama in 1589-90, rendering a Central Asian Turkic text into the prestige literary language of the Mughal court. Akbar received the finished translation in November 1589 and immediately ordered illustrated copies to be produced. Over the following decade or so, four illustrated manuscripts were made under his supervision. Akbar's artists had no confirmed contemporary portraits of Babur to work from. Despite that, they settled on a fairly consistent image: a figure with a roundish face and a droopy moustache, wearing a Central Asian-style turban and a short-sleeved coat over a long-sleeved robe. These illustrated Baburnamas came out of a workshop that had already developed a new Mughal painting style. The scenes show landscape recession influenced by Western art seen at Akbar's court, and they are generally less crowded than earlier historical miniatures. Babur appears at the centre of most compositions, a visual choice that reinforces the text's first-person insistence on his own direct experience.
The first of Akbar's four illustrated copies was broken up and sold in 1913. Roughly 70 miniatures from that copy now sit in collections around the world, with 20 held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The three remaining Akbar-era manuscripts survive in varying states of completeness. The copy in the National Museum in New Delhi is almost complete and dated to 1597-98. The British Library holds 143 miniatures from what was originally a set of 183, probably made in the early 1590s, and one page from that manuscript is in the British Museum. A fourth copy, largely stripped of its text, has its largest portions divided between the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, which holds 57 folios, and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which holds 30 miniatures. The original Chagatai text itself fared no better. Few copies were ever made, and those that survive are mostly partial. The copy that was in the Mughal Library in the 1620s, which was presumably the source from which Abdul Rahim made his Persian translation, appears to have been lost entirely.
John Leyden and William Erskine produced the first English translation from the Persian version, publishing it under the title Memoirs of Zehir-Ed-Din Muhammed Baber: Emperor of Hindustan. The British orientalist Annette Beveridge produced a later English translation, and Wheeler Thackston, a professor at Harvard University, made the most recent one. The Baburnama fits into a long tradition of imperial autobiography in South Asia, one that reaches back to ancient texts such as the Ashokavadana and the Harshacharita, continues through the medieval Prithviraj Raso, and runs forward through the Mughal dynasty's own subsequent works: the Akbarnama, the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, and the Shahjahannama. Akbar's ancestor Timur had been celebrated in a genre of texts called Zafarnama, meaning Book of Victories, and the best-known of these was also produced in an illustrated version by Akbar's workshop in the 1590s. A text that claimed to be Timur's own autobiography surfaced in Jahangir's library in the 1620s; scholars now regard it as a fake produced around that time. The Baburnama's standing is altogether different: Annette Beveridge's husband, the historian Henry Beveridge, praised it in terms cited by later scholars, and Bamber Gascoigne wrote admiringly about Babur's observations on India at the moment of his arrival.
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Common questions
What language did Babur write the Baburnama in?
Babur wrote in Chagatai, the Turkic spoken language of the Timurids, which he called Türki. It was later translated into Classical Persian by the courtier Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan in 1589-90 during the reign of his grandson Akbar.
Why is there a gap in the Baburnama between 1508 and 1519?
All surviving manuscripts contain this gap. Scholar Annette Beveridge believed those years were written but that the relevant portion of the manuscript was lost, possibly during the disruptions of the reign of Babur's son Humayun.
Who commissioned the illustrated versions of the Baburnama?
The emperor Akbar ordered illustrated copies as soon as he received the finished Persian translation in November 1589. Four illustrated manuscripts were produced under his supervision over the following decade or so.
Where are the illustrated Baburnama manuscripts today?
The first copy was broken up for sale in 1913 and its roughly 70 miniatures are dispersed among various collections, with 20 in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The other three are in the National Museum in New Delhi, the British Library, and split between the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Who has translated the Baburnama into English?
Three English translations have been made: first by John Leyden and William Erskine from the Persian version, then by the British orientalist Annette Beveridge, and most recently by Wheeler Thackston, a professor at Harvard University.
What is significant about the passage concerning the boy named Baburi?
On pages 120 and 121, Babur describes an intense infatuation with a boy in the camp-bazaar whose name happened to echo his own. He records his inability to speak or look directly at the boy and quotes the Persian couplets he composed during this period, making it one of the most candid personal passages in any royal memoir of the era.