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  • Babur, the first Moghul emperor

    Babur, the first Moghul emperor

    Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
    Babur, the first Moghul emperor: Wine and tulips in Kabul | The Economist

    ON A bright winter’s morning lines of plane trees and immaculately tended rose bushes fall away down terraces where men crash out on carpets and sheepish young couples sit as close together as they dare. The plants are fed by a central water channel, the signature feature of a Moghul garden. Below is the brown smog of Kabul; beyond, snowy mountains.

    The tomb of Babur, the first Moghul emperor, blasted and pock marked during the civil war of the 1990s, has been lovingly restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Some visitors come because it is now Kabul’s most tranquil public space; some because Babur is emerging as an unlikely national hero in a country short of leaders worth admiring. People pray at the foot of his low, simple grave. One enthusiast sacrifices a buffalo to him every year, and distributes the meat to the gardeners who tend the place.

    Born far to the north of modern Afghanistan, Babur went to Kabul only because he had failed in Central Asia. It was Samarkand he dreamed of capturing. Yet when the demands of building an empire drove him south, he yearned to return to Kabul.
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    * Asia
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    For a man who achieved so much, he is strangely unknown outside Afghanistan. Not only did he create a dynasty whose empire stretched from Afghanistan to southern India and which gave the world some of its greatest cultural riches, but he also wrote an autobiography which, though half a millennium old, is a far better read than most of the political and business memoirs churned out today. The Baburnama recounts the barbarity and hardship of a princeling’s life in a chaotic world; but it is also full of delight and humanity. Sometimes self-aggrandising, sometimes self-critical, Babur emerges from his autobiography as a real person, in a way no other great leader except Churchill does. And because the author is so open, and the style so clear, the book offers an intimate view of a world the reader would otherwise struggle to imagine. “Rarely can such a sophisticated mind”, says Bamber Gascoigne in “The Great Moghuls”, “have recorded so wild an existence which combined to an extraordinary degree the romantic and the sordid.” It was first translated into English in 1922 by Annette Beveridge, mother of William Beveridge, architect of Britain’s welfare state; “The Garden of the Eight Paradises”, a recent biography of Babur by Stephen Dale, has done it more than justice; yet it still lacks the fame it deserves.

    Babur’s pedigree primed him for greatness. On his father’s side he was descended from Timur-i-lang (Tamburlaine), whose empire stretched from the Caucasus to Delhi, and on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan, who conquered Asia from the Black Sea to Beijing. But by the time Babur was born, in 1483, the empires had crumbled and the emperors’ descendants had multiplied into a horde of princelings fighting for loot and territory. The problem was not unique to Central Asia. As E.M. Forster put it, “At the time that Machiavelli was collecting materials for ‘The Prince’, a robber boy, sorely in need of advice, was scuttling over the highlands of Central Asia. His problem had already engaged the attention and sympathy of the Florentine; there were too many kings about and not enough kingdoms.”

    They got going early in those days. Babur’s father died when he was 11, while tending pigeons in an ill-constructed dovecote that toppled into the ravine below the palace, leaving his son in charge of a small province, Fergana. At 13, Babur headed off to capture Samarkand—the former imperial capital, a jewel built by craftsmen Timur had kidnapped from raids into India, Persia and Arabia. When he got there, he found a couple of young cousins already besieging the place (though one was more interested in the daughter of a local noble than in the city). The lover got the girl, but Babur did not get Samarkand.

    He tried again the next year, succeeded briefly and was ejected three months later. In the meantime, a Mongol enemy put his 12-year-old brother on the throne in Fergana. So Babur was homeless; most of his followers had left him; treacherous relations had murdered his tutor. “It was very hard for me. I could not help crying a good deal.” He was, after all, only 14.

    Babur struggled on in Central Asia for a while, but was crushed between Uzbeks, Mongols and Timurid princes. His lowest moment came when he was chased into the hills and caught by enemies, who were careful with their valuable prize. “It was winter. It was very cold. They found an old sheepskin coat; I put it on. They found a cup of millet soup; I drank it. I was greatly comforted.” How he got out of that particular pickle is unclear; but soon he decided to try his luck elsewhere. He considered going east to the lands of his Mongol relations, but regarded them as savages (and would have been horrified to learn that the Persian word for Mongol stuck to his dynasty). Hearing that Kabul was vulnerable, he set off southwards.

    Though homeless, he was not alone. In this formerly nomadic society, which had only recently acquired the habit of settlement, princes moved around with soldiers, retainers and relations. But Babur’s entourage was not grand. He had 200-300 people with him, “mostly on foot, holding staves, wearing rough boots and poor cloaks”, and two tents, one of which his mother occupied.

    Then, in an astonishing reversal of fortune inconceivable in the modern world but commonplace in those uncertain times, Babur gained an army. It happened because of the collapse of a noble who, amid tough competition, was an outstandingly nasty man. Khusrau Shah, formerly a retainer of one of Babur’s relations, had taken Kunduz, murdered one of Babur’s cousins (Baysunghur Mirza, a famous poet) and blinded another (the lover from Samarkand, his ward). He was unpopular even among his own people, many thousands of whom, faced with sustained attacks from Uzbeks, defected from him to an ambitious princeling with a decent reputation and a lineage that gave him a claim to Kabul. Khusrau Shah was beheaded by the Uzbeks; Babur, with his new following in tow, virtually walked into Kabul.

    He was not impressed by his new dominion. It was, he said, a “trifling place”; but, with Uzbeks and Timurids threatening all around, it had its advantages. Surrounded by mountains that were impassable for most of the year, it was “a fastness hard for a foreign foe to make his way into.”

    To cement his power, Babur needed to see off rivals. He attacked Kandahar, where Kabul’s previous occupants hailed from, and beat them soundly. He was distinctly pleased with his generalship: “I prepared an excellent order of battle. Never before had I arranged things so well.” He also needed to give his subjects security—especially from his own troops. When one of the defectors from Khusrau Shah—an undisciplined lot—stole some cooking oil from a local, he had the man beaten to death. “His example kept the rest down.” But early on he made a serious mistake. To feed and reward his huge retinue, he took 30,000 donkey-loads of grain from Kabul and Ghazni. He soon regretted it. “The tax was excessive, and under it the country suffered very badly”. That a new ruler bled the land he had conquered was not surprising; that he had the honesty to admit it, and the wit to learn from it, is.

    Though Kabul was not rich in grain, it was a cosmopolitan city—Babur reckoned that 11 or 12 languages were spoken—on the trade route between Central Asia and India. “Up from Hindustan come ten, fifteen, twenty thousand caravans bringing slaves, cotton cloth, refined and unrefined sugar and aromatic roots. Many merchants are not satisfied with 300% or 400% profit.” Mr Dale reckons that merchants provided most of the revenues for Babur’s remarkably sophisticated taxation system. They were taxed at 5% on gold coins and 2.5% on silver. There was also a tariff on foreign trade (of 5% or 10%, depending on whether the merchants were Muslim or not) an income tax on harvests (a third to a half) and a progressive wealth tax on flocks (one sheep from a herd of 40-120, and two from herds of 120 and up).

    But Babur’s orderly state-building could not solve a problem that has troubled Afghanistan’s rulers through the ages: the tribes. They not only failed to pay their taxes, but also, by holding up caravans, threatened the prosperity of the merchants who did. And the mountains that protected Babur from foreign invaders also protected the tribes from Babur. He had no sympathy for them. Although he had spent much of his youth wandering around Central Asia with a tent, he was at heart a city boy. He prized the civilised pursuits—literature, science and music—that flourished in an urban environment and regarded tribesmen as “stupid peasants”.

    Babur’s approach to the problem was not constrained by modern notions of human rights. Shortly after his arrival in Kabul, he attacked Kohat and killed hundreds of tribesmen. Some of the survivors put grass into their mouths—a way, locals explained to him, of saying “I am your cow.” But he had them killed anyway, and a tower built of the victims’ heads. Many similar raids followed, and similar towers were built, to encourage submission to Babur’s authority.

    But it was not all fiscal policy and decapitation. Babur enjoyed himself too. He loved nature, and describes the local flora and fauna in exquisite detail. “The flying squirrel is found in these mountains, an animal larger than a bat, with a curtain, like a bat’s wing, between its arms and legs…Tulips of many colours cover these foothills: I myself counted 32 or 33 different sorts.” He developed a lifelong passion for gardening. He bought some land at Istalif, north of Kabul. He loved the place: “Few villages match Istalif, with vineyards and orchards on either side of its torrent, its waters cold and pure”. But the zig-zagging stream offended his sense of order: “I had it made straight and regular, so the place was very beautiful.” His grandson Akbar had this scene illustrated for an edition of the Baburnama (see picture).

    Istalif is still beautiful; deodar trees still grow in the garden. But these days it overlooks Bagram airbase, where 40,000 American servicemen live on imported burgers and where locals have been beaten to death. In the management of recalcitrant tribesmen, brutality has not entirely gone out of fashion.

    Unlike the despised Mongols, the Timurids were cultured. Babur longed to be a great poet, writing admiringly of the fame of his unfortunate cousin Baysunghur Mirza. His diary is scattered with poems, his own and others’. His poems are not, unfortunately, much good, but his advice on prose style is. In a letter to his son Humayun, he complains about the obscurity of the young man’s vocabulary: “In future write without elaboration; use plain, clear words. It will be less trouble for you and for the reader.”

    Poetry went with another taste Babur developed in Kabul: for wine. As a young man, he did not drink. When on a visit to Herat his cosmopolitan cousins encouraged him to: “Up to then, I had not committed the sin of wine-drinking or known the cheering sensation of comfortable drunkenness.” He would have tried it, but his prime minister, who was travelling with him, told the cousins to lay off. During an 11-year gap in the narrative (his son seems to have lost that bit of the diary), he took to the bottle with an enthusiasm that in the modern age would have seen him shipped off to rehab before he could say “Cheers”. It was not just alcohol that he enjoyed: he also munched on ma’jun, the Afghan equivalent of hash brownies.

    Babur’s life became a long series of parties interspersed with brief interludes of warfare and administration. There was music, poetry, beauty—and vast quantities of alcohol. In October 1519, for instance, Babur rode out to Istalif with friends: “Its lawns were one sheet of trefoil; its pomegranate trees yellowed to autumn splendour, their fruit full red.” They drank, off and on, for several days. At one point one man said some “disturbing” things, fell down drunk and was carried away. Another could not mount his horse. At that moment some Afghans approached. Somebody suggested that, rather than leave the drunk to the tribesmen, they should chop his head off and take that home. That was, Babur points out, a (rather 16th-century) joke; eventually they got the man back in the saddle and headed for home. Once Babur was so drunk that he was sick and could not remember riding home the night before. Oddly, his grandson had that episode illustrated too (see picture). Babur struggled with his habit—though not very hard. He wrote that he was planning to give up in his 40th year, so “I was drinking to excess, now that there was less than a year left.”

    At one party Babur saw a very surprising sight: a woman drinking. She made a pass at him: “I got rid of her by pretending to be drunk.” Babur was not much interested in women. He explains that he had married early, and neglected the girl. He uses that to introduce the subject of his passion for a boy called Baburi whom he sees in the bazaar. Until then, he says, he had “no inclination for anybody, and no knowledge of love or desire”. His passion for Baburi drives him to distraction. Shyness prevents him from approaching the boy. He quotes a Persian couplet:
    “I am ashamed when I see my friend; My companions look at me; I look the other way.”

    Whether he got anywhere with Baburi is not clear.

    But poetry and parties were not enough. Babur was ambitious, and his dominion in Kabul was limited by the Afghans’ insubordination. He needed to expand elsewhere. He tried again to take Samarkand, and was again beaten back. So he raided what is now Pakistan, found the people of the plains easier meat than the mountain tribes, and by 1523 pretty much controlled Lahore.

    Delhi was in his sights. Because it had been part of Timur’s domains, Babur maintained that it was legitimately his, and wrote to the ruler (a Lodi, originally from Afghanistan) to stake his claim. Sultan Ibrahim, understandably, ignored him, so Babur marched south and defeated him at the battle of Panipat. The sultan was killed, along with 15,000-16,000 of his troops.

    Babur stayed in Delhi to consolidate his power, but he hated India. His list of complaints offers a good indication of the things that mattered to a 16th-century emperor:
    Hindustan is a country of few charms. There are no good-looking people, there is no social intercourse, no receiving or paying of visits, no genius or manners. In its handicrafts there is no form or symmetry, method or quality. There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food cooked in the bazaars, no hot baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

    The only things Babur liked about India were the abundance of gold and silver and the weather after the monsoon. He built gardens to remind him of Kabul, but flowers do not do as well in India as in the crisp Afghan air. His friends could not stand the heat, and went back to Kabul. As ruler, he was stuck there, pining for the jollity of the old days. In 1528 he wrote to one of his oldest friends, Khwajah Kalan, “With whom do you spend time? With whom do you drink wine?”

    It was not just the friends that Babur missed. He had given up drinking because of his health, and admits that “the craving for a wine-party has been infinite and endless for two years, so much so sometimes that it has brought me close to tears.” The knowledge that wine was forbidden sharpened his yearning for “the permitted flavours of melons and grapes” that flourished in Kabul. When he cut open a melon, he wept. “How can one forget the pleasures of those lands?” Once he had got his affairs sorted in India, he wrote, he would “set out immediately”.

    He never did. His health failed, and two years later he was dead, at 47. He was buried at Agra, disinterred sometime between 1539 and 1544 and buried again on a green hillside with a stream running through it. An inscription placed there by his great-great-grandson Shah Jahan, creator of the Taj Mahal, describes it as “this light garden of an angel king”.

    from PRINT EDITION | Christmas Specials
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    The Tower Of Babur: The Legacy Of Babur The Great
    Kandahar's famous Forty Steps, built by Babur the Great.

    The Tower Of Babur: The Legacy Of Babur The Great - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty © 2011
    December 27, 2010
    The Julian calendar marks December 26, 1530, as the day Babur the Great died. Though the Central Asian monarch didn’t know it at the time, the Moghul Dynasty he founded would survive until 1857.

    The current issue of “The Economist” includes a feature titled “Babur, The First Moghul Emperor, Wine and Tulips in Kabul.” The piece profiles Babur the Great, a Kabuli who founded the Moghul (Mongol) Dynasty in South Asia in the 16th century. At heart, Babur longed for the Afghanistan where he spent much of his adult life.. He chose to be buried there rather than in the Indian lands he also conquered.

    Babur became a minor Moghul prince in the Ferghana Valley at the tender age of 11 when his father died suddenly. By age 13, he was already waging war against Samarkand. Eventually, he settled on Kabul as his first capital and fell in love with the city. He consolidated his power there before launching an invasion of northern India -- Hindustan, as it was then known -- which was under the rule of a dynasty of Lodi Pashtun tribesmen.

    Between military conquests, parties, and naturalist expeditions, Babur recorded his life in the “Baburnama“ -- or “Book of Babur” -- hailed as the earliest example of an autobiography in the Islamic world. Mysteriously, over a decade of his life is missing. The missing text covers much of Babur’s time in Kabul and is, ironically, the period which is the focus of “The Economist” feature.

    Babur’s Kabul, as "The Economist" notes, was a stronghold surrounded by mountains, impassible during winter. Indeed, the ebb and flow of warfare in Afghanistan is almost just as beholden to the seasons today. "The Economist" points out that Kabul was an important stop for goods from India. Herbs, sugar, textiles, and slaves were brought to Kabul for destinations in Central Asia and beyond. Yet “The Economist” leaves out the most valuable Central Asian good traded in Kabul: horses.

    Oil is the strategic commodity of our time. Ready access to cheap oil has launched empires, and much blood has been shed to control it. But in Babur’s day, horses were the great resource upon which states were built.

    Harvard History professor Scott Levi says, "By the Moghul period, cavalry had become arguably the most important element in the Indian military." Jos Gommans, a Dutch Historian, maintains that at its peak in the 18th century the number of war horses in India ranged between 400,000 and 800,000.

    Today, Afghanistan has yet to realize the full potential of its strategic location vis-a-vis regional petroleum markets. Afghan pipelines -- like the agreed-upon TAPI pipeline linking Central Asian gas with South Asian outlets -- are just as imaginary as Babur’s dream of controlling Samarkand.

    During the Moghul era, Afghanistan capitalized on its location, becoming the hub of a blossoming horse trade. In "Baburnama," Babur explains that 7,000 to 10,000 horses arrived in Kabul annually, while several thousand more arrived in Kandahar and other Afghan locales. While waiting for the snows to melt in the mountain passes, the horses were fattened in pastures surrounding Kandahar and Kabul.

    Over the next centuries, the trade grew to such an extent that some records claim that as many as 100,000 horses could be purchased in a single season by Indian merchants in Afghanistan. The 17th-century French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier estimated that 60,000 Uzbek horses were brought to Kabul each year.

    Babur used the expansive horse trade to provide his army with war horses and to fill his coffers with taxes. In turn, he provided traders with a secure atmosphere in which to conduct business. The Lodi Dynasty that Babur’s invasion displaced in India had also risen to prominence by dominating the horse trade. Only 19th century advances in infantry weapons changed these dynamics and broke the geopolitical significance of Kabul.

    As it often does, trade liberalization promoted tolerance. Kabul -- like so many other trading centers -- became a center for religious and cultural tolerance. “The Economist“ notes that Kabul was home to speakers of 11 or 12 different languages during Babur’s rule and was more religiously tolerant when compared to many of its contemporary states in Europe. Babur forged marriage ties to the Sunni Sufi Naqbashandi orders in Kabul while also maintaining close ties with the Shi'a Sufi Qizbilash troops in his army. Babur had a similar approach to ethnic groups as well. Babur’s army was also diverse, containing Pashtuns, Arabs, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian ethnic groups.

    “The Economist” article is one of an increasing number of works over the last decade that have focused on Babur. In Afghanistan, Babur remains popular despite his foreign origin and often irreligious attitudes. Stephen Dale, a historian of the Moghul period, notes that, “Some Afghans think that Babur personified the qualities that they vocally admire in themselves: spontaneous bravery, social informality, and a refined appreciation of natural beauty."

    Babur was a talented and brutal military leader. But his legacy should not be that of a great military hero.

    Instead, Babur offers more important lessons. Under Babur, Afghanistan flourished. He unlocked growth by encouraging trade, enforcing a simple and clear taxation system, embracing pluralism, and raising an army reflective of the diverse groups he ruled.

    Modern state builders in Afghanistan would do well to recall these aspects of Babur’s legacy.

    -- Joseph Hammond
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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    • #3
      'Baburnameh' - an interesting read.

      Im about 2/3'ds through reading a translation of Babur's autobiography by Wheeler Thackston. I have to say its a very informative, but at times tedious read too (altho thats primarily to do with Babur listing so many names of relatives, companions, enemies etc throughout the book that it gets confusing and brakes the narrative flow). Whats interesting reading the book now is that so many places in modern Afghanistan and FATA that have become familiar to those of us who folllow the war against the Taliban are some of the exact same places that Babur campaigned in on numerious occassions; places such as Bajaur and Mohmand in FATA for example, or Konduz, Ghazni, Qandahar etc in modern Afghanistan.

      Babur's work gives a detailed account of the ethnic make-up of what is today Afghanistan and pretty much lists all of the different tribes and roughly their territories that made-up the Afghan people, which incidently in those days were all Pashto-speaking tribes as the term "Afghan" did not apply to any other ethnic group and the Afghanistan of Babur's day was much further to south and east than today's Afghanistan is - it did not include Kabul which was considered a separate region. In fact, the Afghanistan of Babur's day was more centred in what is now Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and to certain areas to the south of Kabul and in the northern districts of what is now Baluchistan in Pakistan, including Quetta. I had mistakenly thought before that Afghans had migrated en-mass into what is now Pakistan's northwest only within the past few centuries but actually it is Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan which is pretty much the historic 'Afghanistan' (or Afghan homeland), moreso than the modern state Afghanistan is (most of what is now Afghanistan wasnt 'Afghanistan' in those days; it was Khorassan/Badakhshan, Bamyan/Zabolestan, Kabul, Kafiristan).

      Whats remarkable also about Babur's work is that the inter-ethnic strife and divisions that existed in his day are almost entirely unchanged and still exist to this day in Afghanistan. He discusses his campaigns/dealings with warring communities such as the Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks/Sarts, Turkmen, Baluch and Afghans alongside communities which appear to have disappeared in today's World such as the 'Kaffirs' (modern Nuristanis) Moghals (Mongols - Babur does not consider himself to be a "Moghal"), 'Negudaris' - another Mongoloid people close to the Hazaras, and his own Turkic people (known to history as the Temurids and Chagatay Turks)

      Babur at times comments about his opponents and appears to have had a low opinion of Afghans and an even lower opinion of 'Hindustanis' (Indo-Pakistanis from modern-day Pakistan Punjab and northern India - at times he names them as Gujjars, Jats and others, other times just generially as Hindus/Hindustanis, occassionly contemptuously as 'infidels'). He gives the impression of a kind of Turkic superiority, particularly with regards to it being his right to rule over 'lesser' peoples like the Afghans and Hindustanis who had been crushed and subjugated by Temur a century before. He writes more derogatory observations about the latter than other other people. But with that said the roles are reversed in a way with regards to Afghanistan and it is the Pashtuns who now view themselves as the pre-eminent people of that country, whereas in Babur's day it was the Turks who felt this.

      Definitely a good background read to the complexities of ethnic divisions and conflict still faced today in modern Afghanistan and to understanding who the historic Afghans actually are and what constituted the historic Afghanistan.

      Although indirectly, i feel so far that its a littler easier to see from reading through this book how that whole Durrand line issue between Afghanistan and Pakistan actually has divided the Afghan/Pashtun nation right down the middle and how incredibly volatile the modern Afghanistan and Pakistan actually are given the north-south and east-west internal ethnic fault-lines respectively and the overlapping Pashtun issue which the Pakistani neo-Taliban of today in some respects is likely or partly a manifestation of.
      Last edited by 1980s; 19 Jun 11,, 23:31.

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      • #4
        The Garden of Eight Paradises is a good read if you has the money.
        To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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        • #5
          Babur is credited with introducing cannons in warfare when he invaded India. During the 1st Battle of Panipat, he has about 15,000 troops and 24 odd cannons. Ibrahim Lodi the Sultan of Delhi had about 40,000 troops and 100 war elephants. Babur is said to have used his cannons to good effect. The battle ended with the Delhi Sultan and 15,000 of his troops dead.

          The battle field was funnel shaped, and Ibrahim Lodi's troops charged into the narrow end of the funnel, and were met with cannon fire.

          Cheers!...on the rocks!!

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