Babur

Zahir al-Din Muhammad, known to history as Babur, was born on February 14, 1483, in Andijan, the chief town of the Fergana Valley in what is now Uzbekistan ^[1]. His father, Umar Shaikh Mirza, ruled Fergana as one of many Timurid princes competing over the fragments of Timur's old empire. Through his father Babur descended from Timur himself; through his mother, Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, he traced his line to Genghis Khan ^[2]. That double inheritance shaped his ambitions for the rest of his life, though he identified culturally as a Timurid and wrote with open scorn about steppe Mongol customs.

Any question of who was Babur begins with a childhood cut short. In June 1494, when the boy was eleven, Umar Shaikh died in a bizarre accident: the dovecote he was tending collapsed and carried him down a ravine ^[1]. Babur inherited Fergana at once, along with a crowd of ambitious uncles and cousins who saw a child ruler as an opportunity. His grandmother Aisan Daulat Begum and a small circle of loyal begs guided him through the first dangerous years, and he later credited her political judgment in his memoirs ^[3].

He was raised in the Persianate court culture typical of the late Timurid world. He learned Persian, the language of administration and high literature, but his mother tongue was Chaghatai Turkic, and it was in Chaghatai that he would later write both his poetry and his autobiography ^[3].

Babur's early career was a study in persistence rather than triumph. Samarkand, Timur's old capital, obsessed him. He captured the city in 1497 at the age of fourteen, only to lose both Samarkand and Fergana within months when his nobles back home defected ^[2]. He took Samarkand a second time in 1500, then lost it in 1501 to Muhammad Shaybani Khan, the Uzbek leader whose armies were sweeping the Timurids out of Central Asia altogether ^[1].

The years that followed were the lowest of his life. For a time he wandered the hills of Fergana with a few hundred followers, a king without a kingdom. In the Baburnama he described this period frankly, recording hunger, humiliation, and moments when he considered abandoning ambition entirely ^[3]. The candor of those passages is one reason the memoir has fascinated readers for five centuries.

His fortunes turned south. In 1504, exploiting a succession dispute, the twenty-one year old prince seized Kabul with a small force and finally had a durable base ^[2]. He adopted the title of padshah (emperor) in 1507, a deliberate claim to leadership of the surviving Timurids ^[1]. One final attempt on Samarkand, made in 1511 with Safavid Persian backing after Shaybani's death, ended in defeat at Ghazdewan in 1512. After that, Babur accepted that his future lay not in Central Asia but beyond the mountains, in Hindustan ^[4].

From Kabul, Babur probed India repeatedly, raiding across the Khyber region and taking Kandahar after a long contest. The decisive opening came when discontented nobles of the Delhi Sultanate, including Daulat Khan Lodi, invited him to intervene against Sultan Ibrahim Lodi ^[2]. Babur needed no second invitation; he regarded the Punjab as rightful Timurid territory, since Timur had sacked Delhi in 1398.

On April 21, 1526, at Panipat north of Delhi, Babur's army of roughly 12,000 met Ibrahim Lodi's far larger force. Babur lashed carts together into a defensive line, positioned matchlock men and field cannon behind it, and sent his cavalry wheeling around the flanks, a combination of gunpowder and mounted archery that broke the Lodi army. Ibrahim died on the field ^[4]. Panipat is usually counted first among Babur achievements, and it marks the conventional founding date of the Mughal Empire.

Victory at Panipat settled little by itself. In March 1527 at Khanwa, west of Agra, Babur faced a formidable Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga of Mewar. Before the battle he renounced wine, smashing his drinking vessels in front of the army, and declared the fight a holy war; the gamble on morale worked, and his guns and entrenched center again prevailed ^[1]. A further victory over the Afghan lords at the Ghaghara river in 1529 secured the Gangetic plain ^[2]. In four years an exile from Fergana had made himself master of northern India from the Indus to Bihar.

Babur's sword built an empire; his pen built something arguably more durable. The Baburnama, his memoir in Chaghatai Turkic, is startlingly modern in tone: he admits fear, mocks himself, assesses friends and enemies with equal bluntness, and pauses mid-narrative to describe fruit, flowers, and wildlife ^[3]. Historians treat it as the first true autobiography in Islamic literature, and translators from Annette Beveridge to Wheeler Thackston have kept it continuously in print ^[5]. He was also an accomplished poet in both Turkic and Persian, and he devised a script of his own, the khatt-i Baburi, for copying religious texts ^[4].

Gardens were his other passion. Babur found the flat, dusty plains of Hindustan uncongenial and said so in writing, complaining about the heat and the absence of running water. His answer was to impose order on the landscape: he laid out charbagh gardens, four-part enclosures with channels and fountains, at Agra and elsewhere ^[6]. The Bagh-e Babur in Kabul, where he was eventually buried, survives as a restored public garden today. The Mughal garden tradition he planted culminated generations later in the grounds of the Taj Mahal ^[6].

Babur married several times, beginning with Aisha Sultan Begum in his teens, a match he confessed left him indifferent. His marriage to Maham Begum produced his eldest son and heir, Humayun, born in Kabul in 1508 ^[1]. Other sons included Kamran, Askari, and Hindal, whose later rivalries would nearly destroy the young empire. His daughter Gulbadan Begum became a writer herself, composing the Humayun-nama, a family chronicle that preserves an intimate picture of Babur's household ^[5].

He was convivial by nature and honest about his vices. The Baburnama records years of wine parties and his fondness for majun, a narcotic confection, alongside his eventual renunciation of alcohol before Khanwa in 1527, a vow he kept with visible difficulty ^[3].

The final years were spent consolidating: distributing treasure to his soldiers (a generosity that earned him the nickname qalandar, or wandering dervish), organizing revenue, corresponding with Kabul, and revising his memoirs. His health declined through 1530. A famous story, told by Gulbadan and by later Mughal chroniclers, holds that when Humayun fell gravely ill, Babur walked in prayer around his son's sickbed and offered his own life in exchange; Humayun recovered while the father sickened ^[5]. Whatever the truth of the tale, Babur died at Agra on December 26, 1530, at forty-seven. He was buried first at Agra, and later, in accordance with his wishes, his remains were moved to his beloved garden in Kabul ^[2].

Babur ruled Hindustan for barely four years, yet the state he founded outlasted him by 331 years. His son Humayun nearly lost everything to the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri, but the dynasty recovered, and under Babur's grandson Akbar the Mughal Empire grew into one of the wealthiest and most populous states on earth ^[4]. Every subsequent Mughal emperor, down to Bahadur Shah II in 1857, traced legitimacy back to the victor of Panipat.

His literary legacy has proven just as long. The Baburnama was translated into Persian at Akbar's court in 1589 and lavishly illustrated by imperial artists; manuscript paintings from those copies now hang in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Walters Art Museum ^[6]. Modern historians rely on the memoir not only for Babur's own life but for its unmatched eyewitness detail on Central Asia, Afghanistan, and early sixteenth century India ^[3].

Any fair set of Babur facts must note that his memory is contested as well as celebrated. In Uzbekistan he is honored as a national literary figure, with a park and museum in Andijan. In India his name became a flashpoint: the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, attributed to one of his commanders, was demolished by activists in 1992, an event with lasting political consequences ^[7]. Five centuries on, the poet-king of Fergana remains vividly present, in gardens, in libraries, and in argument, which is perhaps what the restless author of the Baburnama would have expected ^[4].