The rise of the Mughal empire centres on the career of an extraordinary personality, Zahir al-Din Babur (d. 1530). Deprived of his father’s kingdom in the Central Asian highlands, Babur famously descended on the plains of India from his base in Kabul and, in a celebrated battle fought in 1526, defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last ruler of the last dynasty of Delhi sultans. He then went on to launch India’s most splendid empire, which at its height would dominate nearly all of South Asia. Babur’s place in Indian history is rendered even more vivid thanks to his very personal and self-revealing memoir, the Babur-nama, which combines elements of a diary, a gazetteer, a chronicle and a father’s advice to his son. Much of this fascinating text was drafted by lamplight or a flickering campfire before being packed in saddlebags, as Babur and his men rode from Samarqand to Kabul, and then on to Delhi [see Map 5].
Much larger themes lie behind this tale. Babur’s mother was directly descended from Genghis Khan and, although she was separated from her illustrious ancestor by fourteen generations, that ancestry explains the name by which outsiders would call the dynasty launched by her son: the word ‘Mughal’ is simply Persian for ‘Mongol’. But Babur identified more powerfully with his father’s political and cultural inheritance. As his father was a great-great-grandson of Timur, Babur was much closer in descent to the storied warlord of Samarqand than he was to the founder of the Mongol empire. Moreover, during the century following his death in 1405, Timur’s descendants continued to rule parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, where they upheld their forebear’s tradition of generously patronizing the Persianate arts. For Babur was, first and foremost, a proud Timurid. As destructive as Timur’s sack of Delhi had been – bitter memories of which certainly lingered on in north India – Babur prized his Timurid ancestry. He would doubtless have preferred to govern a kingdom from Timur’s city of Samarqand than to spend his remaining days in the plains of north India, about which he had little good to say. Hindustan, he flatly declares in his memoirs, did not possess much charm. ‘There is no beauty in its people,’ he grumbled, ‘no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets. There are no baths and no madrasas. There are no candles, torches, or candlesticks.’1
As dismayed as he was over north India’s lack of melons or good horses, Babur was much impressed with the country’s wealth. Immediately upon seizing control of Delhi, he addressed his weary, homesick kinsmen and retainers, imploring them to abandon thoughts of marching back to Afghanistan. ‘For some years’, he reminded them:
we have struggled, experienced difficulties, traversed long distances, led the army, and cast ourselves and our soldiers into the dangers of war and battle; through God’s grace we have defeated such numerous enemies and taken such vast realms. What now compels us to throw away for no reason at all the realms we have taken at such cost? Shall we go back to Kabul and remain poverty-stricken? Let no one who supports me say such things henceforth. Let no one who cannot endure and is bound to leave be dissuaded from leaving.2
Having secured a foothold on the Indo-Gangetic plain, Babur sent letters back to Central Asia urging his kinsmen and their supporters to come and settle in India. For in the end, Babur understood his conquests in terms of reclaiming a piece of his Timurid patrimony. Although Timur had returned to Samarqand after sacking Delhi, for some time afterwards he continued to exercise an indirect rule in the Punjab. What history has called the ‘Mughal’ empire, then, was in the eyes of its founder an attempt to restore Timurid rule in north India after a lapse of more than a century.
Babur’s conquest also represented an historic moment in the relations between two very different ecological worlds. Central Asia’s semi-pastoral culture was based on rearing livestock and mastering horse-based warfare, and it assessed wealth largely in terms of movable assets: sheep, horses, goats, camels. The Indian world Babur encountered, by contrast, was one of ploughs and bullocks, a sedentary and agrarian society that understood wealth mainly in terms of fixed resources: harvested grain, manufactured goods, precious metals. If the kingdom that Babur established in India was initially a transplant of Central Asia’s semi-pastoral oasis culture, his descendants would root the state ever more deeply in India’s agrarian economy, its socio-religious culture and its political life. Evolving gradually over several centuries, this process is often overlooked by historians seeking to capture the character of the Mughal empire in static essences such as ‘centralized bureaucratic state’, ‘Oriental despotism’, ‘feudal kingdom’ or ‘Islamic empire’. No such facile characterization is satisfactory, not least because that empire was never static: its history was one of a progressive fusion of two very different worlds.
That said, Babur’s Indian kingdom was never purely agrarian, just as the Central Asian world of his youth and early manhood was never purely pastoral. Although the broad grasslands north of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains were ideally suited for nomadic pastoralism, for centuries Turko-Mongol pastoral culture had interacted with that of Persianized oasis towns and cosmopolitan cities such as Samarqand or Bukhara. Babur’s native Ferghana valley was itself a fertile region of sedentary agriculture and urban settlement, in close touch with the great centres of Persian cultural production. His own parentage epitomized the mixing of pastoral, Mongol–Timurid with sedentary, Persianate culture. When sitting with his Turco-Mongol kinsmen or retainers, Babur’s father would wear a Mongol cap. But when holding court in the small principality he governed in the Ferghana valley, he would wear a turban in the fashion of a member of the Persianized ruling elite.3 Such headgear was associated with the more urbanized, socially stratified and literary Persianate world. Notwithstanding this mixed Mongol and Timurid/Persianate inheritance, it is telling that the Mughals understood themselves as Timurids – or, more precisely, ‘Indo-Timurids’, indicating the prestige they associated with Timur’s career and legacy, and more broadly with Persianate culture, in contrast to the Mongols’ lingering association with the devastation that had driven so many Central Asians from their homelands in the thirteenth century.
By the time the processes Babur set in motion came to an end, the Mughals had shed all but a few trappings of their former pastoral and semi-nomadic identity, and become a thoroughly agrarian state. A kingdom originally run by a mainly foreign governing class – ethnically Turko-Mongol, Persianate in literary and aesthetic traditions, Sunni Muslim by religion, Timurid in dynastic identity – would put down roots and, in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, become an essentially Indian polity.4