The Baburnama: The First Mughal Emperor's Own Account of His Life

In June 1494 a boy in the Ferghana Valley of Central Asia inherited a small kingdom after his father’s death. More than three decades later, as ruler of Kabul and of much of northern India, he was still writing about himself in the same book. Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) is remembered as the founder of the Mughal dynasty, but for many readers his more lasting creation is the Baburnama, a first-person record of his life written in his own Turkic language. Its translator Annette Beveridge put its distinction plainly: it is “boyish in his boyhood, grows with his growth, matures as he matured.”¹

A prince writing in his own language

Babur was a Timurid, a descendant of the conqueror Timur, and through his mother a grandson of Yunas Khan of the Chaghatai khans.¹² He wrote in Chaghatai Turkic, which the Victoria and Albert Museum describes as his “first language,” rather than in Persian, which under his grandson Akbar was the language of the Mughal court and administration.²³ The book opens without preamble: “In the month of Ramẓān of the year 899 (June 1494) and in the twelfth year of my age, I became ruler in the country of Farghāna.”¹

What survives is a damaged text. Beveridge calculated that Babur’s life covered nearly 48 years, from his birth on February 14, 1483 to his death on December 26, 1530, but that the surviving text records only about 18 of them, broken by gaps. The largest lies between 1508 and 1519, and the diary breaks off again for almost six years before the Indian campaign of 1525. It stops for good in September 1529.¹ Even so, William Dalrymple notes that a modern Turki critical edition still runs to some 600 pages.⁴

The book changes form as it goes. The early parts are annals, written up later; the later parts read like a diary kept day by day. In between come set-piece descriptions of regions, such as Ferghana, Kabul and Hindustan, and obituary portraits of relatives and nobles.¹ Dalrymple calls it “at once a diary, a history, a collection of nature notes, a gazetteer, a family chronicle and book of advice,” and places it within a longer tradition of autobiographical writing in the Islamic world rather than treating it as a solitary marvel.⁴

Losses, wanderings and a plain admission of failure

Much of the first section is a story of failure. Babur took Samarkand, the old Timurid capital, and lost it; he lost Ferghana as well; and for a time he and a small band of followers moved from place to place with no secure base. He records his own state of mind without dressing it up: “It passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, without country or abiding-place, had nothing to recommend it.”¹ The Kabul section opens in 1504, when he left Ferghana behind and took Kabul, which became his base for the next two decades.¹

Babur also tells the reader what kind of record he means to keep. After a passage in which he criticizes members of his own family, he writes: “In this History I have held firmly to it that the truth should be reached in every matter, and that every act should be recorded precisely as it occurred.” He adds that he has set down “the known virtues and defects” of father, brother, kinsman and stranger alike.¹

That candour extends to his private life. He describes an adolescent infatuation with a boy named Baburi in the camp bazaar, the Persian couplets he wrote about it, and his helplessness when the boy came to see him: “out of modesty and bashfulness, I could never look straight at him.”¹ Elsewhere he records his drinking parties at length, and then, in February 1527, his decision to give up wine before battle. He had the gold and silver drinking vessels broken and the pieces given to “deserving persons and to darwīshes,” and his verse on the occasion ends: “Thus eased I my heart by renouncement of wine.”¹ Readers who come for a conqueror’s chronicle find instead a man who reports his own embarrassments, regrets and appetites as carefully as his victories.

Conquest in the conqueror’s words

The same refusal to tidy the record applies to violence, which is one reason the book is uncomfortable reading. In January 1519 Babur’s army stormed the fortress of Bajaur, using matchlocks against defenders who at first, he says, mocked the noise of the guns. He justifies what followed on religious grounds, calling the Bajauris rebels and enemies of Islam, and states that “they were put to general massacre and their wives and children were made captive.” He estimates more than 3,000 dead and describes walking through the fort afterward: “On the walls, in houses, streets and alleys, the dead lay, in what numbers!” Days later he ordered a tower of heads set up on a rise in the valley.¹

At Panipat, north of Delhi, in April 1526, Babur’s army defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi. Babur’s description is brisk: “In one half-day, that armed mass was laid upon the earth.” He gives his own count of 15,000 to 16,000 dead on the field, adds that people in Agra later put the figure at 40,000 or 50,000, and records that Ibrahim’s head was brought to him that afternoon.¹ In March 1527 he defeated a coalition led by Rana Sanga of Chitor at Kanwa. Much of the account of that battle, with its language of holy war against “pagans,” is a formal letter of victory composed by his secretary Shaikh Zain, which Babur says he inserted “without addition or deduction.” But Babur’s own diary for the following days notes an order “to set up a pillar of pagan heads” near the battlefield, and the capture of a rebel, Ilyas Khan, who was brought to Agra “where I had him flayed alive.”¹ Of the fortress of Chanderi in 1528 he writes, in his own voice, “we made general massacre of the Pagans in it.”¹

These passages are evidence, not decoration. They show what a ruler of Babur’s world thought fit to record about himself, and in what terms. Dalrymple, who admires the book, concludes that Babur was “the most refined of aesthetes,” with “a sophisticated and sensitive mind,” and “also what we today might regard as a war criminal,” and he notes that the memoir’s frankness now supplies material to those in India, especially on the Hindu right, who portray Babur as a bloodthirsty invader.⁴ The Baburnama does not settle that argument, but it makes clear that the violence is not a later accusation. It is in his own account.

Hindustan through a stranger’s eyes

Babur arrived in India as an outsider, and his long description of Hindustan, placed in his narrative just after Panipat but mentioning events as late as 1528, mixes curiosity with contempt. Its most quoted passage begins: “Hindūstān is a country of few charms.” He goes on to complain that its people lack good looks, manners and social visiting, and that it has no good horses, grapes, musk-melons, ice, bathhouses or candles.¹ The passage reveals the homesickness and prejudice of a Central Asian prince more reliably than it describes the country, and a few paragraphs later Babur himself adds a list of “advantages”: the size of the land, its gold and silver, its endless supply of workmen of every trade, and the air during the rains, which he calls “remarkably fine, not to be surpassed for healthiness and charm.” He also notes the drawback that the damp ruins a bow brought from his homeland, along with “armour, book, cloth, and utensils.”¹

The natural history is where the book is at its most attentive. Babur describes elephants that can haul a gun-cart needing four or five hundred men, and the rhinoceros, which he says roamed in large numbers in the jungles around Peshawar and Hashnagar, then part of his route into India. He tests a popular belief against what he has seen: the idea that a rhinoceros can lift an elephant on its horn “seems mistaken.” He compares the animal’s anatomy with the horse’s and judges it “more ferocious than the elephant.”¹ On fruit he is a careful critic. “Mangoes when good, are very good, but, many as are eaten, few are first-rate,” he writes, and yet “taking it altogether, the mango is the best fruit of Hindūstān.”¹ He gives the same treatment to birds, aquatic animals and flowers, and to the Indian seasons, divisions of time, measures and modes of counting.

His grandson’s painters took up these pages. The illustrated copies made in the late sixteenth century include pages devoted to plants, among them a folio in the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogued as “Three Trees of India.”²⁵

From Turki to Persian to English

By the time Babur’s grandson Akbar ruled, the language of the memoir had become a barrier. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that eastern Turki was “a language that few at the Mughal court still knew.” Akbar ordered the scholar Abd al-Rahim, his Khan-i khanan, to translate it into Persian, partly to help the court historian Abu’l-Fazl. The translation was presented to the emperor in November 1589, on his way back from visiting Babur’s tomb at Kabul, and illustrated copies followed, conventionally dated to about 1590. The V&A holds 17 folios from one of them; one painting by Ram Das records that it took 50 days to finish.¹²³ Beveridge observed that the surviving Turki text is essentially what Abd al-Rahim had in front of him in 1589, with the same gaps.¹

English readers met Babur in 1826, in the Memoirs of Zehir-ed-Din Muhammed Baber, Emperor of Hindustan, credited on its title page to “the late John Leyden” and to William Erskine.⁶ Beveridge, who later read Erskine’s papers, gave a more exact account. Leyden, a Scottish physician and linguist, had begun studying Turki around 1805 and left a rough partial translation when he died in 1811. Erskine had been translating from the Persian version; he combined his work with Leyden’s, then received a Turki manuscript from Elphinstone, a British official who had obtained it when he went to Peshawar on an embassy to Kabul, and, in his own words as quoted by Beveridge, “though heartily sick of the task,” started his revision again. He finished in 1813, but publication was delayed until 1826.¹ The two translations differ in tone even in Babur’s sharpest lines: where Beveridge has “a country of few charms,” Erskine has “a country that has few pleasures to recommend it.”¹⁶

Annette Beveridge’s own version was made directly from the Turki, chiefly from a manuscript known as the Haidarabad Codex. It came out in four parts between 1912 and 1921 and was collected in two volumes in 1922, with long notes and appendices that remain useful for readers who want to follow the textual problems.¹ In 1996 Wheeler M. Thackston published a new annotated translation with the Freer and Sackler galleries of the Smithsonian and Oxford University Press, reissued by the Modern Library in 2002 with an introduction by Salman Rushdie.⁷⁸

The end of the record

The diary stops in September 1529, about fifteen months before Babur’s death in Agra. What is told about his last illness comes from others. Beveridge summarizes later family and court accounts, including the memoir of his daughter Gulbadan Begim and Abu’l-Fazl’s history, which describe Babur offering his own life for that of his sick son Humayun and dying soon after, in December 1530.¹ That story belongs to the family tradition, not to Babur’s book, and it should be read that way.

The Baburnama itself ends mid-sentence, with arrangements about a fort. It is an incomplete record by a man who killed and enslaved on a large scale, who wrote with obvious pleasure about fruit, poetry and gardens, and who tried, by his own stated rule, to set down what happened. Its value as a historical source lies in that combination: a ruler’s account in which conquest, private feeling and close observation of the natural world sit side by side, in his own words.

Footnotes

1. Babur, trans. Beveridge, The Babur-nama in English (1922); text and translator’s preface, notes and note on 936-937 AH. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹ ↩²⁰ ↩²¹ ↩²² ↩²³ ↩²⁴

2. Victoria and Albert Museum, object record O209612 (IM.271-1913). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Victoria and Albert Museum, object record O153114 (IM.275-1913). ↩ ↩²

4. Dalrymple, introduction to The Babur Nama (Everyman’s Library, 2020), as excerpted in Literary Hub. ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession no. 2013.576. ↩

6. Leyden and Erskine, Memoirs of Zehir-ed-Din Muhammed Baber (1826), title page and “Defects of Hindustan.” ↩ ↩²

7. Thackston, The Baburnama (Freer and Sackler / Oxford University Press, 1996). ↩

8. Thackston, The Baburnama (Modern Library, 2002). ↩