The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor
Translated by Wheeler M. Thackston
Smithsonian Institution and Oxford University Press, 480 pages, $39.95
He was the leader of what may be called “a steppe aristocracy,” a marauding 16th Century band, sometimes as small as a platoon, sometimes the size of an army, that prowled through Central Asia, seizing and sacking whatever prizes lay in its path. He encouraged his men to believe that “To die among friends is as good as a feast” and that they should “never allow another man to string his bow if you can kill him with a shot from your own.”.
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, born in 1483, was by birth a prince of Fergana in Transoxiana. Transoxiana embraced modern Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan, areas of the world not known for their tranquility. Babur belonged to the dynasty of the Timurids and was a descendant of its founder, Tamburlaine, Temur-i-Lang, Tamur the Lame, who died 80 years before Babur’s birth. Babur became king at the age of 12, inheriting Samarkand as his capital, but was early driven from it and spent 30 years–he died at 47–leading his followers farther and farther southward in a ceaseless series of campaigns that took him to the conquest of Kabul, Delhi and Agra. In India, three years before his death, he laid the foundations of the Mogul Dynasty that would reign in Delhi for more than three centuries.
Babur was a remarkable man, and not the least remarkable thing about him was that he compiled what has been called the first true autobiography in Islamic history, described by an earlier editor as “ranking with the Confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau, and the Memoirs of Gibbon and Newton.” Babur’s memoirs have now been retranslated by Wheeler M. Thackston and presented in an exceptionally handsome and sumptuously illustrated volume. Thackston adopts a vigorous, clean, hard-driving style that admirably suits the original, using plain and sturdy language that does not hesitate to employ the earthy epithet and the modern slang phrase. He brings Babur’s pages vividly to life.
Babur certainly produced an astonishing and wonderfully exciting piece of work. With typical Eastern diffidence he speaks of “his modest pages,” but elsewhere tells us, and the tone and quality of his pages support it, that “I have not written all this to complain. I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.”
Babur spares no one, including himself. His sketches of the members of his family and the vignettes of his friends, officers and individual soldiers are extraordinarily sharp, acute and frank. What must strike the reader above all is his photographic memory. He recalls the smallest and most remote detail.
We learn how methodically he worked on his book. He relates how, on an occasion in Bengal, “in the fifth ghari of the first watch when the monsoon clouds appeared, and within an instant such a storm brewed and fierce wind arose that few were the tents that did not blow down, I was in my tent writing. There was no time to gather my papers and notebooks. The wind brought down the tent and its awning on my head. The smoke vent broke in pieces. God kept me safe, and no harm was done, but my books and papers were drenched. We gathered them together with difficulty, wrapped them up in a woolen bedspread, and put them under the cot and spread kilims on top.”
After the wind died down and he and his men had a tent erected, Babur relates, they “lit a candle, and with great difficulty got a fire going and then got busy drying out the papers and notebooks until dawn with no sleep.”
Babur and his men were professional fighters, and most of the book is concerned with accounts of ambushes, skirmishes, marches and countermarches, spectacular chases across plains and through mountains, full-scale battles and all-out sieges. On every page there is violent death, illness and unrelenting combat with the elements. Babur and his men, and their female camp-followers, demonstrate incredible hardihood and endurance. They are assailed by hunger and thirst, by terrible earthquakes and monsoons, by snow and frost and floods.
Sickness was a constant. At one time or another Babur himself suffered from the effects of wounds and falls from horses, from sundry boils, abcesses, pains in the eyes and ears, sciatica, the consequences of attempts to poison him and what sound like lingering bouts of malaria or sleeping sickness.
The illnesses did not lessen the appetite of Babur and his men for combat. They were well-equipped. To their sieges, which might last for as long as three or four months, they brought an array of modern-
sounding techniques: sapping, tunneling, the use of artillery, mortars and catapults. Their strategy and tactics were well-plotted. They possessed squadrons of cavalry, battalions of infantry swordsmen, matchlockmen and units of soldiers wielding hatchets, flails and axes.
Babur and his cohorts were pitiless. They gave no quarter and expected none. Defeat meant death–Babur’s pages reek of it. In the laconic, matter-of-fact language characteristic of him, he catalogs the deaths that–in addition to those suffered in battle–he inflicted on his prisoners, or on those who had incurred his displeasure or had attempted to assassinate him.
And yet, paradoxically, Babur the remorseless executioner was also a poet and a musician, his entourage filled with artists of every kind. Composing poetry was his chief passion, but his camps and courts rang with laughter, song and dancing–and the cheers that accompanied boxing matches, wrestling, horse racing and hawking. Intellectual debate and learned conversation were especially prized. So were good vintages and drinking bouts. Babur, as a young man, had been temperate, even austere in the orthodox Islamic fashion, but as he aged and the pressures of existence grew more arduous, he took to drinking in earnest. Three years before his death, he found it necessary to take a pledge of temperance:
“On Monday the twenty-third of Jumada it occurred to me that the thought of repenting from drinking had long been on my mind, and that my heart had continually been clouded by committing this illegal act. I said, `O my soul, how long will you be polluted by sin? How long will you follow your lusts? How long will you waste your life?’ I had brought the goblets and silver vessels and broke them all and distributed the pieces among the deserving and the poor. Abandoning wine, I gave my heart rest.”
What, then, are we to make of this sophistication allied to savagery? This reviewer has come to the conclusion that there exists an intermediate condition between civilization and savagery. Babur may be classified, perhaps, as a brilliant barbarian, his “steppe aristocrats” falling into the same category as, say, the Aztecs or the Samurai. Splendid specimens, admittedly, but not ones that one would wish to encounter on a dark night.
This is a splendid book, a remarkable piece of scholarship, a pleasure to handle. It is a treat for all those readers who harbor in their hearts a taste for the braying of the trumpets, the clashing of the steel and the thunder of the hoofs.
