Babur

Babur, born Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, was a Central Asian prince who founded the Mughal Empire in India. Descended from Timur on his father's side and from Genghis Khan on his mother's, he spent most of his life losing and regaining small kingdoms before his victory at Panipat in 1526 made him master of northern India. He is also remembered for the Baburnama, a frank and vivid memoir that is one of the great autobiographies of the pre-modern world.

Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in Andijan, in the Fergana Valley of present-day Uzbekistan. His father, Umar Shaikh Mirza, was a minor Timurid ruler of Fergana; his mother, Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, was the daughter of Yunus Khan, a Chinggisid ruler of Moghulistan. The family belonged to the Barlas, a Turkic tribe of Mongol origin that had long since become Muslim and Persianised in its culture. Babur's first language was Chagatai Turkic, but he was equally at home in Persian, the language of Timurid courts. His nickname, by which he is known, is usually taken from a Persian word for a tiger or panther.

In 1494 his father was killed when a dovecote on the palace walls collapsed into a ravine, and Babur, aged eleven, became ruler of Fergana. Hostile uncles and nobles who preferred his younger brother threatened him from the start, and he survived largely thanks to the guidance of his maternal grandmother, Aisan Daulat Begum.

The great prize of the region was Samarkand, Timur's old capital. Babur took it in 1497, at fifteen, after a siege of seven months, but while he lay ill there a revolt at home cost him Fergana, and in trying to recover it he lost Samarkand too. He took the city again in 1500–1501, only to be besieged by Muhammad Shaybani, khan of the Uzbeks, and forced out; as part of the settlement he had to give his sister Khanzada to Shaybani in marriage. By 1502 he had lost Fergana as well and was wandering the mountains with a small band of followers, an episode he later described as a time of poverty and humiliation.

In 1504 Babur crossed the Hindu Kush and seized Kabul, which had fallen into the hands of a family regarded locally as usurpers. Kabul became his base for the next twenty-two years. After Shaybani was defeated and killed by Shah Ismail I of the Safavid Empire in 1510, Babur allied with the Safavids, accepting their overlordship in exchange for help, and in 1511 took Samarkand for the third time. The alliance with a Shia shah was unpopular with the Sunni population, and in 1512 the Uzbeks drove him out once more. He never returned to Central Asia.

From Kabul, Babur extended his power over the Afghan tribes, took Kandahar in 1522 and raided across the Khyber Pass. He regarded the Punjab as his by inheritance, since Timur had once sacked Delhi, and northern India was ruled by the weakened Delhi Sultanate of Ibrahim Lodi, whose own nobles were in revolt. Some of them, including Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of the Punjab, invited Babur in.

After several campaigns, Babur met Ibrahim's army at Panipat, north of Delhi, on 21 April 1526. His force was far smaller, but he had matchlock muskets and field guns, which he placed behind a line of carts chained together in what he called the Ottoman fashion, with gaps for his cavalry to charge through. Two gunners trained in the Ottoman Empire directed his artillery. Flanking cavalry wheeled round Ibrahim's army and drove it in on itself while the guns fired and frightened the war elephants. Ibrahim was killed, the Lodi dynasty ended, and Babur occupied Delhi and Agra.

The victory at Panipat did not end the fighting. In March 1527 Babur faced a much larger coalition of Rajput rulers and Afghan chiefs led by Rana Sanga of Mewar at Khanwa, west of Agra. With his men alarmed by an astrologer's prediction of defeat, he cast the battle as a holy war, publicly renounced wine and had his drinking vessels broken up. Artillery and disciplined cavalry again decided the day, and afterwards he took the title of ghazi, warrior for the faith. In 1528 he stormed the fortress of Chanderi, where the defenders chose mass suicide over surrender, and in May 1529 he defeated an alliance of eastern Afghans and the sultan of Bengal on the Ghaghra river.

Babur changed little in the government he inherited. He made Agra his capital, handed out conquered districts as revenue assignments to his commanders and to Afghan chiefs who submitted, and left local landholders and much of the old fiscal system in place. Many of his Central Asian followers disliked the heat and wanted to go home, and he held them by distributing the captured treasure lavishly.

Babur's memoir, written in Chagatai Turkic, covers his life with large gaps from his accession in 1494 to 1529. It is remarkably candid: he records his defeats, his drinking parties, his doubts and his affections alongside battles and politics, and he describes the plants, animals, peoples and customs of the lands he passed through with a naturalist's curiosity. He was not impressed by much of India, complaining about the climate and the lack of good fruit, horses and running water. His grandson Akbar had the work translated into Persian in 1589–90, and illustrated copies became treasures of Mughal painting. Babur also wrote poetry in Turkic and Persian.

He was a passionate maker of gardens. At Agra and elsewhere he laid out formal four-part gardens divided by water channels, the charbagh, which became a hallmark of Mughal architecture. Few of his buildings survive. Among the mosques built in his name was one at Ayodhya, put up in 1528–29 by his commander Mir Baqi and later known as the Babri Masjid; its demolition by Hindu nationalist activists in 1992 made Babur a target of modern political controversy in India.

In 1530 his eldest son, Humayun, fell gravely ill. According to the account of Babur's daughter Gulbadan Begum, the emperor walked three times around his son's bed and prayed that the illness be passed to him; Humayun recovered and Babur soon sickened. He died in Agra on 26 December 1530, by the calendar then in use, and was later reburied, as he had wished, in a garden in Kabul, today's Bagh-e Babur.

The state he left was fragile. Humayun lost it to the Afghan Sher Shah Suri in 1540 and regained it only in 1555, shortly before his death. Under Akbar the Mughal Empire became one of the largest and richest states in the world, and Babur's descendants ruled at least nominally in India until 1857. Through them the Persianate culture of the Timurid courts became deeply rooted in South Asia. Babur is honoured as a national hero in Uzbekistan and is widely admired in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while in India his reputation divides opinion. Historians tend to see him less as a religious conqueror than as a talented, restless Timurid adventurer who, having failed to win back his homeland, found a far larger kingdom to the south.