Babur was just eleven years old in 1494 when, on his father’s death, he ascended the throne of Ferghana, a small Central Asian principality 350 kilometres east of Samarqand, the jewel of Timurid Central Asia. From the very start, young Babur faced fierce resistance from his nobles and even his uncles, who tried to replace him with his more malleable younger brother. Nonetheless, when only fifteen he managed to seize control of Timur’s former capital of Samarqand. It proved a brief reign, however, for within just a few months he lost the city to a rival while trying to recover his base at Ferghana, which hostile elements had meanwhile snatched from his grasp. Finding himself now with no territory to rule, he spent several dismal years wandering about hills and valleys seeking kinsmen and supporters. In 1501 he made a second attempt at Samarqand, but was repulsed this time by a powerful confederation of ascendant Uzbeks, Turkish-speakers ethnically distinct from Timur’s Chagatai lineage of Turko-Mongols. One by one, Uzbek armies commanded by Muhammad Shaybani Khan (r. 1500–10) overthrew Babur’s kinsmen in the successor states of Timur’s former empire. Shaybani Khan had seized Samarqand just a year before Babur’s second attempt to recover the city, and in several years’ time he would take other flourishing centres of Persianate culture formerly under Timurid control, notably Bukhara. For his part, Babur was reduced to utter destitution, accompanied by a small band of loyal retainers and his mother, Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, who in their worst times was given the use of the only tent they possessed.
In 1504, sensing the futility of ever recovering his patrimony in Central Asia, Babur, his mother and 300 lightly armed men marched southwards across the snowy passes of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains in search of a base safely distant from the growing Uzbek threat. They set their sights on Kabul, then ruled by an unpopular strongman generally considered a usurper, enabling Babur to capture the city in fairly short order. Kabul straddled several strategic crossroads: east–west caravan trade routes linking north India with Iran, and north–south routes linking India with Central Asia. Through this choke-point long caravans of Central Asian war-horses were sent through the mountain passes leading to India’s horse markets, on which so many states vitally depended for their cavalries. Making their way through Kabul from the opposite direction were caravans of Indian textiles and spices destined for markets in Iran, Central Asia and beyond. The Afghan city therefore presented an ideal staging site for raids across the Khyber into India.
As early as 1505 Babur waged his first such expedition in the Punjab, then held by Afghan chieftains nominally loyal to Sultan Sikandar Lodi (r. 1489–1517). But events in Central Asia and Iran awakened his dormant ambition to recover Samarqand from Uzbek control. Timur’s immediate successors had shifted their capital to Herat, at the time a brilliant centre of Persianate culture. In 1506, however, the city’s last Timurid ruler died, and a year later it, too, was taken by Uzbek Turks. Especially distressing was that the Uzbeks had seized and imprisoned Babur’s female relatives, including his sister Khanzada, his only full sibling, who was forced to marry his perennial nemesis, Shaybani Khan. These events not only humiliated and embittered Babur, they also left him the sole reigning Timurid anywhere in Timur’s former empire. Many of the remaining Timurid princes and their retainers, their own hopes dashed by the ascendant Uzbeks, now took refuge with him at Kabul. Aware that the survival of Timur’s legacy rested on his shoulders, in 1508 Babur adopted the exalted Persian title padshah, or ‘supreme king’. With so many disenfranchised Timurids looking to him for political leadership, his fading hopes of recovering his Central Asian patrimony were suddenly rekindled. Moreover, he would have a powerful ally in such an undertaking. Shah Isma‘il Safavi (r. 1501–24), the charismatic and seemingly invincible founder of Iran’s Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), was just then consolidating his authority across the Iranian plateau. Alarmed by Shaybani Khan’s 1507 conquest of Herat, Isma‘il defeated an Uzbek army in 1510, resulting in the death of Shaybani Khan and the fall of Herat to the Safavids. He also freed Babur’s imprisoned relatives, leading to Babur’s joyful reunion with his sister Khanzada.
With his long-standing Uzbek adversary out of the way, a grateful and indebted Babur collaborated with Shah Isma‘il in a joint project of conquering Uzbek territories for their respective kingdoms. Safavid assistance also helped Babur recover Samarqand, if only briefly. But collaboration came at a price. Isma‘il’s self-proclaimed semi-divine status horrified Babur’s fellow Sunni Muslims, who considered the shah a dangerous heretic. And in return for receiving material assistance from Isma‘il, Babur had to act as his junior partner, which involved wearing the Safavids’ twelve-pointed headgear, indicating the wearer’s identity as an ardent member of Shi‘ism’s dominant Twelver sect. Babur was painfully aware that he appeared to have renounced his Sunni identity and become a Shi‘i. Moreover, having recently proclaimed himself a padshah, it was especially humiliating publicly to acknowledge his subservient status to the Iranian shah, whose name was proclaimed on Samarqand’s coins and in its mosques. In the end, the city’s Sunni population rejected both Shi‘ism and nominal Iranian sovereignty, preferring instead another Uzbek overlord to Babur, who yet again proved unable to hold on to Samarqand. It is due to his long record of suffering at the hands of his Uzbek and other enemies that Babur’s memoirs are pervaded by themes of defeat, humiliation, displacement and exile.5
In 1514, abandoning the possibility of ever regaining Samarqand, Babur returned to his base in Kabul and again began to look to the north Indian plain, this time not as an object of plunder, but as territory for building a sovereign domain large and stable enough to preserve the threatened Timurid house from extinction. This was his foremost objective. Moreover, the only way a warlord could recruit and retain armed followers was by demonstrating success in obtaining and distributing resources from sedentary societies, and he was aware that in India, a land of fabulous wealth, the Lodis’ governing structure was rapidly crumbling. In 1517 Sikandar Lodi had died and was succeeded by his son Ibrahim, who unwisely replaced senior nobles in his service with younger men who were supposedly loyal but were also less experienced. When Babur’s expeditions of 1519 and 1520 took him as far as the Punjab’s Chenab River, some of those recently dismissed senior Lodi nobles, including the governor of the Punjab and even the sultan’s own uncle, began to see the Mughal commander as a viable alternative to the unpopular Ibrahim. In 1524 they invited him to invade and assume sovereign rule. Again he entered the Punjab, this time with the intent of challenging Sultan Ibrahim Lodi. But on reaching Lahore and Dipalpur, he found that he could not trust the Lodi turncoats nominally under his command, and so he returned to Kabul.
In late 1525 Babur, aged forty-two, launched his fifth and final invasion of India, marching from Kabul at the head of an army of 8,000 men, composed of subordinate Timurid princes and their retainers, Pashtun allies from south-eastern Afghanistan and artillery and matchlock contingents advised by Turkish officers from Anatolia. Crossing the Indus in mid December, his force faced little resistance as it advanced across the Punjab, where Lodi authority had already collapsed. By April 1526 he reached Panipat, sixty-five kilometres north-west of Delhi, and secured his defences. On the twenty-first he was met by a Lodi force much larger than his own, but far less disciplined. The Mughals also possessed the relatively new technology of matchlock and cannon firepower, which Ibrahim lacked. Most importantly, Babur deployed the same flanking cavalry tactics that Uzbek cavalries had used to defeat him decades earlier in his struggles over Samarqand. By midday, the decisive Battle of Panipat had left Sultan Ibrahim dead on the battlefield, with no obstacle standing between Babur and Delhi. Far from plundering that city as his Timurid ancestor had done, however, Babur took care to secure its palaces, guarantee the safety of its population, arrange for a pension for the mother of the slain Lodi sultan, and pay his respects to the shrines of the city’s most prominent Sufi saints – the Chishti shaikhs Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki (d. 1236) and Nizam al-Din Auliya. Such measures signalled that the Mughals not only would remain in north India, but that they would patronize the same ‘invisible sovereigns’ as had several centuries of Delhi’s rulers, thereby establishing a spiritual continuity between themselves and previous Delhi-based dynasties. There was no going back to Samarqand. India would be Babur’s home and the seat of his kingdom, which he was determined to pass on to his descendants.
IMAGE The Mughal empire to the mid seventeenth century
From Delhi, Babur sent his son Humayun down to Agra, the Lodi capital since 1506, in order to secure the defeated regime’s treasury and government palaces. Several days later he joined his son in Agra and, making that city his own capital, set himself to governing the fledgling kingdom. He soon realized, however, that he had stepped into a fierce struggle between two large ethno-political blocs contending for supremacy over the fertile north Indian plain: Afghans and Rajputs. The founding of Lodi rule in the mid fifteenth century had seen many Afghans pour through the mountain passes and become rooted in north India’s socio-political landscape as long-distance horse merchants, cavalrymen, petty traders and landholders. Challenging them for hegemony across northern and western India were confederations of martial lineages that, by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had become organized by common descent lines, like their Afghan rivals. But whereas the Afghans’ identification of clan with territory had become distorted by migration from their ancestral homelands, Rajput lineages tended to be displaced on to territory. In the early sixteenth century, one lineage in particular was making a bid for supremacy over north India and the Delhi sultanate itself – the Sisodiyas, based in Mewar in southern Rajasthan and led by the renowned Rana Sanga (r. 1508–28). In fact, at the very time that Babur was waging his final, decisive invasion of north India, Rana Sanga was preparing for his own assault on Delhi.
In 1527, only a year after defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, Babur confronted Rana Sanga at Khanua, sixty-five kilometres west of Agra. The Sisodiya raja had under his command some 80,000 cavalry, augmented by contingents of surviving Afghans recently defeated by Babur, including Ibrahim Lodi’s brother Mahmud, who made common cause in trying to expel the Mughals from India. Although vastly outnumbered in cavalry, the Mughals again carried the day, and again the opposing commander, this time Rana Sanga, was killed in action. Babur’s memoirs reveal much about his state of mind before and after this battle. Although up to this point he had regularly participated in rousing drinking parties with his men, on the eve of his contest with Rana Sanga the new sovereign of Delhi and Agra solemnly vowed to renounce wine. Associating alcohol with his lower self, he felt it necessary first to subdue his baser part in order to gird himself for the approaching contest. And since Rana Sanga’s was a mainly non-Muslim army, Babur expressed his ideas in religious terms, comparing the breaking of wine goblets with the breaking of Hindu images. On achieving victory over Rana Sanga, he referred to his army as an ‘army of Islam’ and himself as a ghazi, or ‘holy warrior’, a title he now added to his seal.6 Immediately after the contest, though, the title disappeared from his vocabulary.
After his twin victories at Panipat and Khanua, Babur swiftly moved to consolidate his authority in a strip of territory stretching from eastern Afghanistan through the central Punjab to the mid-Gangetic plain. For personnel and models of governance he drew on his Central Asian and Timurid past, placing Turks and Mongols in the kingdom’s governing core. Although he was thoroughly conversant in Persian as a medium of cosmopolitan culture, his principal supporters were fellow Turkish-speakers. Having spent nearly his entire life leading a steppe-based band of warriors, he saw himself as the first among equals, very much in the tradition of Bahlul, the founder of the Lodi dynasty. Like his ancestor Timur, he governed on a personal and informal basis: men who had sworn allegiance to him received his unqualified protection and shared in any booty gained from successful military expeditions. But equally, men who had broken sworn compacts of loyalty were subject to severe punishments. For Babur, like Timur, was capable of inflicting severe cruelty, such as impaling defeated enemies or erecting towers filled with their skulls. Above all, although he held neither India nor Indians in very high regard, he was pragmatic, being well aware of his precarious position as an outsider in a large and politically volatile land. He was therefore quick to reach agreements with the Sisodiya lineage after defeating Rana Sanga at Khanua, as he did with other Rajput leaders in Awadh, Malwa and the Punjab.
The dynastic change in north India from Lodi to Mughal was accompanied by a change in royal patronage of Sufi orders. The dominant Sufi order in Babur’s homeland, the Naqshbandis, had been led by the eminent Shaikh Ubaid Allah Ahrar (d. 1490) who, thanks to the lavish patronage heaped on him by Timurid princes, also happened to be the largest single landowner in Central Asia. Babur’s father had been one of his many disciples, and Babur himself, while still a young man in Central Asia, once dreamt that Shaikh Ahrar appeared before him and allowed him to seize Samarqand, which he actually did soon after that dream. From his capital in Agra, Babur maintained close ties with Naqshbandi shaikhs in Central Asia, even though Chishti shaikhs were then dominant in Delhi, thanks to patronage by the erstwhile Lodi regime. At the Battle of Panipat, Delhi’s leading Chishti shaikh of the day, ‘Abd al-Quddus Gangohi, had prayed for the success of his Lodi patrons. But when the latter were defeated, the Mughal victors captured the shaikh and forced him to walk the sixty-five kilometres back to Delhi.7 Babur’s attitude to living Chishtis who had opposed him obviously differed from his respect for the shrines of revered Chishti saints.
Although he reigned in India for just under four years, Babur left a solid foundation for his descendants to build on: a ruling structure dominated by Mongols and Turks, a court guided by a Timurid ruling ideology, the spiritual direction of Naqshbandi shaikhs, and durable ties between India and the Persianate world. He left no grand monuments, apart from mosques at Panipat, Sambhal and Ayodhya, but he did bequeath to his successors a refined aesthetic sensibility and a fascination with the natural world, as is graphically reflected in his memoirs. He established gardens nearly everywhere that he could, recreating in India the same green, symmetrical and carefully laid-out spaces that might recall a Central Asian oasis. One of his first acts upon seizing Agra was to plant Afghan melons and grapes in his ‘Garden of the Eight Paradises’. Although surviving today only in fragments, the garden’s interlocking canals and raised walkways introduced to India the Timurid, and ultimately Persianate, scheme of a walled-in garden divided into quarters.8 And his Babur-nama gave subsequent dynastic rulers – most immediately, his son Humayun – a narrative lesson on proper governance and leadership. Its gazetteer quality also sketched out the idea, more fully developed later in the dynasty’s history, that, to rule a kingdom, its peoples and places must be identified, located and enumerated.