Resplendent: ‘Babur receives a courtier’ (1589) by Farrukh Baig. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Babur was a sensitive memoirist with the rare ability to distance himself from his writing
Babur’s memoir did not have a name but is referred to as Baburnama or Tuzuk-e-Baburi. It is the first autobiography from the subcontinent and one of the first in the world. Babur came from two different cultures, of which one was literate and aspired to high culture. This was his father’s ancestral family, which was Timurid. His mother came from the nomadic Mongols, who weren’t literate. Babur describes his maternal uncles in his memoir.
The Timurids had a tradition of poetry, hawking, music, and, of course, war. Babur was from a family of minor nobles who had inherited the governorship of Ferghana. His autobiography begins with a description of the geography and tells us that his father, Umar Shaikh Mirza, died in an accident when he was 39 and Babur 12. The young Babur struggled to hold on to his inheritance, losing several battles, including one in Ferghana, which he had to give up to the victor.
Babur describes these decades of his life in an unemotional and direct way: he hardly valorises his own achievements. Like the great Caesar, whose books on his wars in Gaul and against Pompey may as well have been written by a non-partisan observer, Babur has the ability to distance himself from his life.
Keen naturalist
Babur’s life turns when he is found to be the only living heir to the throne of Kabul. He takes it and turns his eyes to India. For 20 years, he campaigns against India, being held back at the borders each time.
Then, as we know, he defeated the Lodi dynasty (introducing firearms to the subcontinent for the first time) and captured north India in 1526 after a decisive battle at Panipat. Babur died four years later, spending much of this time travelling across India and writing his memoir in the afternoons.
These paragraphs show how much of a keen naturalist he was. “The elephant, which the Hindustanis call hathi, is one of the wild animals peculiar to Hindustan. It inhabits the western borders of the Kalpi country… the elephant is an immense animal and very sagacious. If people speak to it, it understands. If they command anything from it, it does it. Its value is according to its size — the larger it is, the higher the price. On some islands an elephant is rumoured to be as tall as 20 or 30 feet, but here it is not more than 10 feet. It eats and drinks entirely with its trunk. If it loses the trunk, it cannot live. It has two great teeth (tusks) in its upper jaw, one on each side of the trunk. By setting these against trees and walls, it is able to bring them down; with these it fights and does whatever hard tasks fall to it. These teeth are called ivory and are highly valued by Hindustanis.’
‘Like a goat, the elephant has no skin hair. It is relied on to accompany every troop of their armies. It crosses rivers with great ease, carrying a mass of baggage, and three or four can drag without trouble a special piece of artillery that takes four or five hundred men to haul. But its stomach is large. One elephant eats as much as a dozen camels.
Elegant and clean
Babur’s book was not freely available till a British amateur linguist named Annette Susannah Beveridge translated it. She taught herself the particular version of Turkish that Babur wrote in (later Mughals wrote in Farsi) and published it in four volumes from 1912 to 1922.
At the time of the first British census a century and a quarter ago, India was 4% literate. Most Indians even today don’t have four generations of literacy: in fact, the proportion of those of us who can claim to have had great-grandparents who could write is tiny. Babur came from a tradition that already had centuries of literacy.
His is elegant and clean writing of the sort that one would expect from a very literate and sensitive person. Babur’s daughter, Gulbadan Begum, sister of Humayun and aunt of Akbar, also wrote a lovely memoir in which she describes her father’s attention to detail which he passed on to his family.
These two works, along with Jahangir’s autobiography, are some of the best material available on the Mughals. It’s a shame that these books are not taught in India’s schools today.
Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books – Leather Bound / by Aakar Patel / January 16th, 2020
Colourful life: Jahangir preferring a Sufi sheikh to kings, a miniature painting by Mughal artist Bichitr, ca. 1620 | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Were the Mughals the most literary dynasty that ever ruled India?
The Mughals have garnered many adjectives over the centuries. Once, when the world looked in awe at the power and wealth of Hindustan, they were simply ‘Great’. More recently, as Hindustan locks itself in a manic tussle with its past, they are ‘foreign’ or ‘invaders’, often both. Perhaps it’s time for a calming epithet: the Mughals were, without question, literary.
The first of them, Babur, is known for defeating Ibrahim Lodi in Panipat, but almost equally renowned for his autobiography. It’s not that kings hadn’t written before. Julius Caesar was composing accounts of his Gallic campaigns in 1 BC. The earliest autobiography — an account of a person’s life, not a record of events — was St. Augustine’s Confessions, written circa 400 AD. Babur, living a millennium later and a world away, invented the form for himself with Baburnama, the first personal memoir in Islamic literature. And he did it with flair — “both a Caesar and a Cervantes”, as Amitav Ghosh has described him — writing with lucid ease, whether of the pangs of his first love or his battle strategies. (The first autobiography in an Indian language, incidentally, may be Ardhakathanak (‘Half Life’) by Banarasidas, a Jain merchant who wrote in Braj Bhasha, and in verse, in the 17th century.)
The urge to write
In the centuries after Panipat, the Mughal empire grew into a global superpower, then shrunk to a wretched speck. The last Mughal ruled little besides the Red Fort, but he did preside over an efflorescence of Urdu poetry: Ghalib, Momin and Zauq shone bright in his court, and Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’ was no mean poet himself. Imprisoned and exiled after the Uprising of 1857, the frail emperor would write Na wo taj hai na wo takht hai, na wo shah hai na dayar hai (‘No crown remains no throne remains, neither ruler nor realm remains’). The urge to write, however, that remained: Bahadur Shah is said to have etched his verses on the walls of his prison, with charcoal, when he was denied paper and pen.
Babur may not have been entirely displeased. In a letter to his son, Humayun, Babur offers equally urgent advice on how to rule and how to write. The unfortunate Humayun is ticked off on both counts: his desire for solitude is “a fatal flaw in kingship”, and his prose is convoluted. “Who has ever heard of prose designed to be an enigma?” writes Babur, exasperated. Humayun must write, instead, “with uncomplicated, clear, and plain words”.
Father and son
Humayun was unable to meet his father’s exacting standards, both as ruler (he lost the fledgling empire) and as writer (even if he did die in a library), but the literary gene stayed with the dynasty. It blossomed in Gulbadan, one of Babur’s daughters, who wrote the Humayun-nama; it gestated in Akbar, who was as famously illiterate as he was fond of commissioning histories and translations; and, most notably, it flowered in Jahangir, whose literary talents equalled, if not exceeded, his great-grandfather’s.
William M. Thackston, who has translated the Baburnama, admits that despite its many surprises and charms, the memoirs can sometimes lag a bit: the “reader may skip or skim at will”. The Jahangirnama, on the other hand, flows like a breeze — so much as to attract the criticism to which ‘popular’ writing is prone. Thackston, who has also translated the Jahangirnama, writes that while much of this work is “fascinating…for the general reader” much is also “of little or no historical significance”. Fun to read, that is, but inadequately serious. As Jahangir himself is often accused of being: lightweight.
Playful tone
It’s true enough that the Jahangirnama is marked by a sometimes startling whimsy. Once, marching with his nobility along a rivulet, its banks overgrown with oleanders, Jahangir had them all arrange the blossoms on their turbans so that “an amazing field of flowers was… made!” Another time, having caught a dozen-odd fish, Jahangir released them all with pearls pinned to their noses. Even when he is writing of seemingly sober matters, Jahangir can’t help a certain playfulness.
Near the beginning of the book, for example, Jahangir lists a set of decrees that he issued when he became emperor. Among these worthy orders — abolishing certain taxes and punishments, building wells and hospitals — was one that banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Here, however, Jahangir adds a caveat: he has been drinking — and has often been drunk — since he was 18. Later, he offers a detailed account of his alcoholism and de-addiction (his hands shook so much, others poured the liquor down his throat; a doctor told him he wouldn’t last six months; he diluted his arrack with wine and raised his spirits with opium) — a remarkable confession made even more so by the fact that Jahangir makes it immediately after describing the “great persistence” it took for him to get his son, Shahjahan, to down a birthday drink.
A drinking problem is not all the emperor disclosed. The Jahangirnama also contains a frank account of murder; or, at least, an order to murder, which led to the ambush and assassination of Akbar’s friend and biographer, Abu’l Fazl.
Murder most murky
The plot is murky and tangled, but in brief it was thus: as prince, Jahangir felt threatened by Abu’l Fazl’s influence over the emperor, Akbar, and so had him killed. It was a ruthless decision, and reveals a man of steely ambition under the drunken haze and oleander blossoms.
It’s an ambition that’s often overshadowed by Jahangir’s acute sense of beauty and delight in nature. He could describe the weather such that you can feel it, “the air was so fine, a patch of cloud was screening the light and heat of the sun, and a gentle rain was falling”. Spring flowers in Kashmir would make his heart “burst into blossom”.
Among the best-known passages in the Jahangirnama are those about the mating, nesting and eventual parenthood of Jahangir’s pet saras cranes, Laila and Majnu. So intense is his joy in their rituals — “I immediately ran out to watch” he writes of the dawn on which they mated; then of how Majnu would guard his mate all night, and scratch her back with his beak at dawn to relieve her of nesting duties — that one gets the sense Jahangir would have sat on those eggs himself, if he could.
Writers’ prerogative
It’s passages like this that prompted Henry Beveridge, editor of a 19th-century translation of the Jahangirnama, to declare that Jahangir would have been a “better and happier man” as the “head of a Natural History Museum”. And yet, would the head of a museum have commissioned the painting of Inayat Khan? This, too, is a story in the Jahangirnama. A hard-drinking nobleman appeared before Jahangir, asking for sick leave.
Inayat Khan was emaciated beyond belief. “How can a human being remain alive in this shape?” the emperor exclaimed. Jahangir let Inayat Khan go home, gave him a generous grant, but also, he summoned his painters. Like the extinct dodo, of which Jahangir’s atelier has produced the most authentic record, so the painters now created a terribly vivid portrait of a dying man.
Such single-mindedness is, of course, the prerogative of emperors — and also, perhaps, of writers. Both to rule and to narrate requires a certain distance, even coldness. In fact, of late, Jahangir’s writings, and therefore his rule, are being re-evaluated.
The historian Corinne Lefèvre, for example, does not read the Jahangirnama as a record of imperial fancies, but finds it “a masterpiece of… imperial propaganda”. Jahangir himself suggested as much when he ordered copies of his book sent to other kings as a “manual for ruling”.
Unlike his father, Jahangir did not create the intricate foundations of a nation-state. Unlike his son, Jahangir did not build the Taj Mahal. No lasting administrative reforms, no carved blocks of marble, it’s a book that Jahangir left us to read. Just words.
No wonder he’s so open to interpretation.
The writer’s most recent book is Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books – The Lead / by Parvati Sharma / November 09th, 2018
Many Indian dishes can be traced back, indirectly, to a 16th-century, food-obsessed ruler named Babur.
Babur Being Entertained in Ghazni, from the Baburnama, the memoirs of Ẓahīr al-din Muhammad. PUBLIC DOMAIN
ZAHIR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD, THE 16TH century Central Asian prince better known as Babur, is renowned for his fierce pedigree and proclivities. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he used military genius to overcome strife and exile, conquer northern India, and found the Moghul dynasty, which endured for over 300 years. He was a warlord who built towers of his enemies’ skulls on at least four occasions. Yet he was also a cultured man who wrote tomes on law and Sufi philosophy, collections of poetry, and a shockingly honest memoir, the Baburnama, in which he appears to us as one of the most complex and human figures of the early modern era.
Through the Baburnama, we learn that Babur was versed in courtly Persian speech and custom, yet nonetheless a populist who built strong ties with nomads and championed the vernacular Chagatai Turkic tongue in the arts. He was a pious man, but was also given to libertine escapades, including massive, wine-fueled parties.
But the first—and arguably one of the most culturally consequential—personal details he reveals is that he was a food snob. Babur loved the foods of his homeland and hated those he found when he had to reestablish himself in India, which to him was mostly a way station on the bloody road back to the melon patches of his youth. He didn’t just whinge about missing foods from home, though. He imported and glorified them in his new kingdom, laying the groundwork for his descendants to warp Indian cuisine so profoundly that they redefined that culinary tradition, as many know it worldwide, to this day.
A depiction of Babur meeting Sultan ‘Ali Mirza near Samarqand, from the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
The Baburnama opens with a description of Ferghana, a region now split between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, where Babur grew up. Known then and now as the breadbasket of Central Asia, it follows that Babur would touch on agriculture. But in introducing his hometown of Andijan, Babur opens with a note on the quality of its grapes and melons before turning his attention to its layout and fortifications. He then ducks back to praise its game meats, especially its pheasants, which “are so fat, that the report goes that four persons may dine on the broth of one of them and not be able to finish it.” Only then does he tell us of the people who live there.
Almost anytime he describes a place back home, he starts with vittles. Margilan is known for its dried apricots, pitted and stuffed with almonds. Khojand’s pomegranates are proverbially good, but they pale next to Margilan’s. And Kandbadam is tiny and insignificant, but it grows the best almonds in the region, so it’s worth mentioning.
“Early sections of his Baburnama,” writes Fabrizio Foschini, in a report on Afghanistani melons authored in 2011, “really sound like a consumer guide to the fruit markets of Central Asia.”
A detail of date trees illustrated in the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Babur doesn’t forget food once he gets into the meaty war stories, either. He breaks one narrative to note that the area around a castle he just besieged grew a unique melon with puckered yellow skin, apple-like seeds, and pulp as thick as four fingers.
The Baburnama is not solely concerned with food. The bulk of it is a painstaking record of families and feuds, and Babur dwells on other seemingly random details that tickled him, such as a courtier’s talent at leapfrog. Since we don’t have a similarly honest accounting from his peers, it’s hard to say whether Babur’s epicureanism was atypical.
Given the chaos he grew up in, though, it’s incredible that Babur could spare any thought for food. Thrust to power at age 11 (by the Gregorian calendar), in 1494, he had to navigate bloody infighting amongst his relatives. Known as the Timurid princes after their conqueror-ancestor Timur, they jockeyed against each other for regional control. Babur became an active participant in this Central Asian game of thrones—he seemed particularly obsessed with taking the regional cultural capital of Samarkand. While he seized it in 1497, he lost the city almost immediately, as well as Ferghana, and (a very long story short) spent the rest of his teenage years reclaiming or losing bits of territory, fleeing into exile with remote nomadic tribes, and trying to court new followers and surge back. Although he never stopped trying to reclaim Samarkand and his homeland, by 1504, at age 21, he’d effectively been forced out of the region for the rest of his life.
A portrait of Babur. PUBLIC DOMAIN
That year, he pulled off a fantastic feat of warlord jiujitsu, flipping a rival’s forces into his service and marching on Kabul, which was vulnerable after undergoing its own contentious power shift. Babur took the city, and, naturally, set to cultivating its produce scene. In and around the city, he built at least 10 grand gardens that included a fair number of fruiting plants.
While Babur’s writings suggest a personal obsession with food, it’s hard to disentangle this obsession from homesickness. There were also political reasons for him to pay so much attention to cuisine: Food snobbery was a standard way for a Timurid prince such as Babur to make his mark and prove his elite bona fides in a new land. “The Timurids, while ethnically Turkic, based their legitimacy to a large extent on their being champions of Persianate ‘high’ culture,” says Central Asian historian Richard Foltz, “which included taste in food.”
Kabul proved ill endowed to support a successful campaign back to Ferghana, though. So Babur turned his attention to neighboring India. He got a lucky break when a new king—an inept man who clearly had dissenters and rebels in his ranks—came to power in the northern Sultanate of Delhi. Babur struck at this weakness, invading the region through the early 1520s. Despite being outmanned by a ratio of perhaps five-to-one in his final standoff with the sultan, he usurped the throne in 1526.
Babur entering Kabul. PUBLIC DOMAIN
According to Foltz, Central Asians mostly looked down on Indians, who were neither Muslims nor Persianate. Babur, his recent biographer Stephen Dale notes, was also still deeply homesick. These factors, and possibly personal tastes, led him to dismiss his new territory, and especially its food: “Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. … [There is] no good flesh, no grapes or muskmelons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food in their bazaars.”
Babur shouldn’t have had time for food in India either. He spent the last four years of his life fighting local insurgencies and consolidating his power. In 1530, he died at the age of 48, in Agra, the north Indian city where his great-great grandson Shah Jahan (lived 1592–1666) would later build the Taj Mahal. But he wrote letters in those years expressing his desire to return home, or at least taste its grapes and melons. He describes receiving a melon from Kabul and weeping as he ate it. He planted Central Asian grapes and melons in India, which brought him some joy. He even asked local chefs to make Persianate food for him, although one of them tried to poison him.
By establishing supply chains that brought his native agriculture and cuisine to the region, Babur left a lasting legacy. “He probably played a role in bringing Central Asian influences into the elite, courtly Indian life,” says Elizabeth Collingham, a food historian who explored Babur’s life and influence in her history of curries .
Babur, on the Way to Hindustan, Camping at Jam, from the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Granted, Babur was not the first Central Asian lord in what is now India. From 1206 to Babur’s day, five prior Central Asian dynasties ruled from Delhi. They too imported foods from home, cooked dishes they knew, and even did some fusion cooking. Trade and migration also meant there’d always been interplay between the regions, including culinary influence. Glimpses of this cultural mingling include the first mentions of samosas in the region’s written record—in accounts of those earlier medieval sultans’ feasts.
But according to Rukhsana Iftikhar, a historian of social life amongst the Mughals, the Persian word for “Mongols” by which Babur’s descendants came to be known, many of these dishes differed in style and flavor profile from the Persian-influenced Central Asian cuisine Babur preferred. They likely had not caught on with the general Indian population by the time Babur arrived, and few of them would sound familiar to fans of global Indian fare today.
Historians like Dale and Foltz chalk this up to the fact that previous dynasties—while they had some cultural influence—seemed to see India mostly as a piggy bank. They didn’t like to mix with local elites, and their culture was not grand or stable enough to invite mimicry and adaptation.
A banquet with roast goose. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Babur, by contrast, was more statesman than raider. His pedigree and strong connections to Iran also gave him and his descendants more cultural cachet, and those descendants mixed more readily with the local populace. And for over a century after his death, Mughal rulers continued to praise the same foods Babur praised and keep the caravans of his beloved Central Asian fruits and nuts flowing. Babur’s successor Humayun brought Persian cooks to Delhi, and Humayun’s son, Akbar, was notably cosmopolitan and curious in the kitchen. Later descendents were not as invested in Persianate culture and the foods of Ferghana as Babur. But either as a means of displaying their wealth or of brandishing the superiority of their heritage, they carried on the culinary trajectory Babur set up.
Babur’s descendants also spent lavishly on their kitchens, elevating food as a status symbol. But unlike Babur, they made it a point to round up chefs from around their Indian domains, a practice that invited fusion. The grandeur and duration of their courts, argues Collingham, led local elites to copy their Persianate and Central Asian motifs and augment their own kitchens, leading to parallel fusion work in places like Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Lucknow. Over the centuries, these innovations coalesced into Mughlai food, a stable cuisine common across, although not ubiquitous in, northern India by the early 20th century.
This cuisine was defined by, among other things, aromatic, creamy curries, often incorporating the nuts and dried fruits Babur adored. It includes many dishes familiar to Western diners today: Korma, a blend of Central Asian nuts and dairy with Persian and Indian spices. Rogan Josh, a slow-cooked, Persian-style meat spiced up in the kitchens of Kashmir. And tandoori grilling, facilitated by Mughal tweaks to said grills and to marinades and spicing styles.
These dishes became ubiquitous in the West, Collingham says, because haute Indian chefs have long viewed Mughlai cooking the same way Western cooks used to see Le Cordon Bleu. Indians who set up restaurants abroad made Mughlai food the template of Indian food in the U.S. and U.K.—to the chagrin of Indians who grew up eating many other cuisines that remain hard to find outside their homelands.
None of this was a conscious project for Babur. But by setting up shop in Agra and Delhi, he created a wave that shook the foundations of India, culinary and otherwise. His tastes indirectly fueled 300-plus years of kitchen innovation. It’s no Central Asian dynasty of skulls and melons. It’s something more widespread and enduring, if unexpected or unwanted.
Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
source: http://www.atlasobscura.com / Atlas Obscura / Home> Stories / by Mark Hay / November 15th, 2017
