204. Babur: The First Mughal Emperor

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. He's sounding so spry considering he's on the other side of the world in Australia, having just come off stage, having just wowed thousands of people. And it's now almost midnight where you are, isn't it? It is, but I've had quite a few espressos. I'm quite wide awake and perky, actually. I know. Slightly worries me, actually, your yin and yang, because you sort of started, we were doing our tech check and you had a gin and tonic, and then you said, oh, just a moment, and you got yourself an espresso. So this cocktail is going to play havoc with your stomach.

1:02I find that it's a very good cocktail, uppers and downers. Are you going to be able to sleep after this? I mean, what are you going to do? That is more of a worry than how articulate I'm going to be after the gin and tonic. But let's see. You're going to be fabulously articulate. And there's no one better to talk about this because this is right in your wheelhouse. Because we are talking about barber. Now, this is all sort of, you know, entwined with there's a fantastic exhibition at the Victorian Albert Museum in London. If you get a chance to go, the great moguls, art, architecture and opulence.

1:32And arguably, one of the greatest names, and certainly the first name, is Babur. And someone you know so well, because you wrote an introduction to something called the Babur Nama. Now, first of all, tell everybody, what is the Babur Nama? So the Babur Nama, Babur is the name of the guy, and Nama is the story of. It just means the history of. And we are talking about the man who founded the Mughal Empire, but who, bizarrely, in his own eyes, was a refugee in a failure. And that's the strange irony about this man. He's always sort of held up there. The later Mughals look back to him as the founder of their line.

2:11There are a million images of him bestriding the world. But in his own eyes, he never forgave himself for having lost his family estates, which were the other side of the world from India where he ended up, which were in Central Asia, what's now Uzbekistan. And he lost them to the Uzbeks. To the Uzbeks, exactly. So, I mean, this is an origin story and is also very divisive in Asia because you've got, you know, those who say absolutely extraordinary founding of an extraordinary empire that lasted for centuries and left behind such things as the Taj Mahal and the monuments around Delhi. The glitterest glitter ever, including, of course, our old friend the Koh-i-Noor, which has probably passed through Babersand or may pass through Babersand.

2:57But then you've got the other side, and particularly in India these days, that kind of want to repudiate that Mughal past and say, you know, invaders, invaders, they sort of changed anything. And the best thing was when they were sort of kicked out. So, I mean, really interesting and divisive and controversial. I've got a theory about that. I mean, I think in a sense, they got the wrong guy. I mean, Baba clearly was an invader. Free the Baba one. Is that what you're saying? Baba did obviously invade India and did take it. And in that sense, yes, he was Niveda. But he's come to represent, for a whole series of reasons which are not to do with him, he's come to represent, along with his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson Orang Zeb, everything that Hindu nationalists don't like about Muslims and Muslim rule in Indian history.

3:51and because his name was associated with something called the Barbary Masjid, which is this controversial mosque at a place called Ayodhya, which is the site supposedly of the original Ayodhya, which is the capital of Lord Ram, one of the greatest of all the Hindu gods. He has come to represent subsequently to many people all that is worst about Muslim rule. He's meant to be an iconoclast, a jihadi. And yet, if you actually read his autobiography, which is the fullest, most revealing, most well-penned, pre-modern biography, probably anywhere before Peeps, and it's that good and that extraordinary.

4:37He is none of these things. He is an East he loves images he loves nature he waxes lyrical about fields of flowers or the smell of trees or the smell of leaves burning on a fire he is incredibly frank about his own very complicated sexuality the fact that he's quite keen on boys but has to marry girls to produce heirs and to make diplomatic marriages. And in a sense, he couldn't be more different from the jihadi image that he has for Hindu nationalists. I mean, there are many Muslim rulers who were in India, who did terrible acts of iconoclasm and destroyed temples. And Aurangzeb, his great-great-great-great grandson, was one of those.

5:24But Babur is kind of not. For a start, he loves alcohol. He drinks too much. He loves parties. In almost all his writings in Turkic, he calls God Tengri, which is the old animist name for God rather than Allah. That's fascinating. And there's this one moment when his back is really against the wall, when he thinks he's going to be defeated right at the end of his career, when he makes a vow to give up alcohol if he wins the battle. And he wins the battle, And he's stuck with this vow. He writes his memoirs about how miserable life is without being able to have a drink. I'm healthier, but I hate it.

6:03Can I also say, I mean, you know, wholeheartedly believe and trust what you say. But it was also reinforced to me when I was doing research on this. I came across my great friend, your great friend, Margaret Macmillan, who has declared Baba as the greatest primary source in history and absolutely loves the Baba Nama and his own writings about himself and the frankness of them and the humanity of them. And so I thought that was very exciting that Margaret Macmillan, for those of you who don't know, is a very esteemed historian. The Peacemakers was one of her massive successes. Won the first Samuel Dotson Prize, I think.

6:39So look, what we're going to do is we're going to split this story up. We're going to start with the origin story. You know how I love my Marvel origin stories and take you right back to the beginning. We'll have another episode on development. But I should also say, if you are a regular listener to Empire, you can hear these things as they drop. But if you can't wait for this great unfolding story, you need to sign up to our club, empirepoduk.com. And then when we do these mini series, you get them in one thwacken. So, you know, you could walk your dog till the little thing's legs fall off and you'll still be with us and we'll still be talking to you.

7:11So, there we are. There's an incentive. So, shall we start with even before talking about Barbara's birth, this idea that he was a Mughal, because he would not have liked to be described as a Mughal, would he? Because Mughal is the bastardization of the term Mongol. So the Mongols of Genghis Khan and around Mongolia, and he would have really rather that part of his history was slightly dampened down. Well, that's not quite true, but it wasn't the bit he was most proud of. So Babu, it was his fate to be descended from, well, depending on who you're talking to, the two greatest conquerors in Asian history, or the two most massive mass murderers in the same breath.

7:54His mother was descended from Genghis Khan, who was the man who turned the original Mongols in the 12th century and 13th century into this extraordinary world-changing army that just sort of swept all the way from Mongolia through China through, well, right through to Poland and Hungary. His father was descended from someone we've dealt with in the pod before, Timur. And he is, whatever it is, the great, great, great grandson of Timur. And that was something he was far more proud of, because by the time that Babur was born, the Timurids, far from being this sort of raggedy-taggedy, genocidal, mobile Mongol army were associated, certainly in his mind and in the eyes of many historians, with high urban Central Asian culture.

8:46Some of the great monuments of Samarkand and the area around there. We've dealt with all this in earlier pods, extraordinary feats of astronomy, wonderful paintings, and this incredibly urbane society. And it's Babur's fate to be descended from both of these and to lose this patrimony. He captures some of it when he's 14. He takes Samarkand. Wait, can I get all very excitable about something? Because he's the age of my teenager, 14 years old. Can I say, if I can get him to take a used mug downstairs, it is a huge achievement. But there is a series, a really lavish Indian production called The Empires, which goes through the Mughal dynasty.

9:30And it begins with the voice of this young boy saying, I was 14 years old and I had defeated death already many times. What else was there to do? That's rather good. This is just the trailer. I mean, it's really exciting. And one of the great sort of grand dams of Indian cinema, Shabana Asmi appears in it as well, very regal. And at the end of it, You just have this one shot of him on his feet charging towards a war elephant. So it's all very, very exciting. That was one exciting thing because I was sort of struck when you said Genghis Khan, because people will know that as Genghis Khan, the Mongol terror Genghis Khan of the steppes.

10:09And on the other hand, Timur, which is a name that will not resonate with you unless you've read your Shakespeare and you think of Tamburlaine. Or listen to Empire Pod. Or listen to us. I mean, of course, if you listen to us. But the way in which those names are transmitted, both as terrors, both as sort of slightly horrifying. One, you can thank Shakespeare. And the other, you can thank numerous historians who thought that Genghis Khan was a barbarian. So there we are. So two barbarian lines. I'll stop getting excited now. I loved your quote. And it sounds a wonderful way to open the series. I defeated to death.

10:39But the wonderful thing about reading Babur's own memoirs, and he writes this beautiful prose. He loves gardens. He loves sunsets. He loves colors. He loves, I mean, he's just such an attractive character. And in his memoirs, he's not this great conqueror who's defeated death. No, he's self-fulfilled with self-doubt. He's human. I'll read you this little quote, one of my favorite little quotes. Aged, I think, 21, he lost everything. He lost everything his family had built up. He inherits these two great lineages, and he loses the whole bloody lot by 21. You're doing spoilers, mate. But read your bit.

11:19Read your touching bit. Go on. And for, I think, two or three years, he's living in a tent just as a brigand because he has to feed himself and feed his family. Yes. And there's this lovely little paragraph at the end of this section about how they got stuck in a snow drift and everything has gone horribly wrong. I mean, I was literally under strict instructions. Do not let William jump ahead in the story, which is what you're doing. So I'm just saying. But. But. But. What? But. This little sentence. And it says, it passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and helpless, has little to recommend it.

11:55Isn't that lovely? But there are lots of very humanizing lines in this. As I say, the trailer makes him sort of almost godlike. But in reality, a very human account, a very human memoir. We should actually just anchor this in years, shall we? Because this is a man who was born on the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, as it turns out, 1483, in a place called Fergana, which is in, as William says, modern-day Uzbekistan. I mean, it's a place of plenty when we hear him talking about it, you know, sort of grains, fruits, trees laden with the sweetest of offerings. And pheasants so fat, they can barely walk, let alone, you know, sort of jump up off the ground.

12:38I remember that was the first sentence that first attracted me to this book. And just this image of this fat pheasant just sitting there. A pheasant so fat. What does he say? He could feed four people. Four people. One pheasant for four people. Exactly right. And this is all, of course, with the hindsight of someone that's lost it. This is him describing this place, which I've been to Fagana in his footsteps. I'm so obsessed with him that I actually went and did a trip to Uzbekistan specifically to see his childhood, the place of his birth, the place where he had his education, the place where he lived, and then where he lost it all.

13:15And the extraordinary thing about Fagana was that it was this place of bounty and beauty. And then when I was growing up and first discovered Babur, everyone told me that it had become this hideous Soviet hellhole, that they had mass farmed cotton as a monoculture. They destroyed the soil. The soil was dead. And there were just dead industrial remains of former cotton cultivation. but I never got there at that period of my life and I only got there what seven or eight years ago when my sister-in-law as chance would have it was the UN rep in Tashkent wow and so it was very well situated for borrowing her car and going off and driving around all the places where he he was based and it was brilliant timing because in the sort of 20 years since the fall of the Soviet world, everything that was associated with the Soviets had gone.

14:14The crumbly old factories had been taken down. What? Blown up and removed? Like actually the masonry removed from the skyline? Everything removed. And it had reverted just by default back into this Kashmir-like paradise. So it's now, again, a gorgeous place to visit. It's reclaimed. How interesting. Exactly. And you go there and it's between the two great rivers of Central Asia that the Greeks called the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And it's very green. It's very gorgeous. The fortress where he spent his childhood, where his father fell from his pigeon house, which is a lovely detail, is now a place surrounded by marshes where you can't hear each other if you're walking around with a friend because there are so many frogs singing to each other and ducks sort of calling to roost, now for the first time in probably 100 years, can actually experience the plenty and the beauty and the sense of sort of green heaven that Babur remembers from his childhood and in middle age writing his memoirs, writes so nostalgically about.

15:23Now, I have to say, because you know this inside, outside, sideways and diagonally, I cannot let you throw in little phrases like his dad who fell off a roof. There is a beautiful story attached to this. So, Babur, as I said, born in 1483, his father, Umar Sheikh, was the ruler of Fogana. And we've described how wonderful it was. And as a young prince inheriting this is a great prospect, except he inherits it really early on in life. His father, who he describes a little bit like the pheasants as short and stout, like that, round bearded, a fleshy faced person, he says, loved pigeons, like my friend here, William and is a really enthusiastic, what do you call them?

16:03Kabutabahs. Kabutabahs, that's it, a kabutabahs. So one day in this place, in the rugged fort of Akshi, the fat king is tending his birds on the outer wall. And this is so sweet, as Barbara puts it. And it's sort of overlooking a precipice and the precipice starts to crumble. And this is what Barbara says, and Umar Sheikh Mirza flew with the pigeons and their house and became a falcon. Ladies and gentleman he fell off he basically fell off and plummeted to his death is such a great writer took off like a falcon no fell like a rock poor man anyway but that is how barbara you know as a young boy is sort of promoted to be a ruler of a place like for ghana when he's actually arguably just as still a little boy and then he writes in middle age these gorgeous descriptions i'm just going to read you a little bit he talks about spring mornings spent in hillsides dotted with wild violets, tulips and roses, cold running water passing through a shady delightful clover meadow where every passing traveler takes a rest, beautiful little gardens with almond trees and the orchards, pomegranates renowned for their excellence, good hunting and fouling.

17:14And here's our favorite sentence, pheasants which grow so surprisingly fat that rumor has it that four people could not finish one which they were eating with its stew. So he's nostalgic and these are the happiest days of his life melded together with an unhappy thing. Let's talk a little bit more about what he thought of himself. So he would have spoken and he did write in a language called Turki, T-U-R-K-I, which, I mean, it is obviously shows, you know, sort of the strength of lineage there because it is a Turkic language. But also that would have been and will prove to be very, very useful in the court.

17:50It becomes the official Mughal language. But it means you can have a great deal of secrecy when you're invading because not many people speak it in the places that he's going to go and invade. Well, that's not entirely true because Turki is obviously, as its name implies, one of the Turkish languages. And it's related to this whole body of languages all the way from Istanbul up to Kashgar today. And a lot of the basic words are understood across that. But yes, it's a very particular dialect that these guys speak. I thought it was that you didn't even need decipher because people didn't, you know, in the court.

18:25That's why it was the chosen thing. But all right, Stan corrected. He's 11 years old when his dad takes off like a falcon. And there's one other nice little description of the dad. I know I go backwards, but I just love it so much. My father, he writes, wore his tunic so tight that to fasten the ties he had to draw in his belly. If he let himself go, it happened that the ties tore away. I know that tunic. Oh, sweet. Oh, sweet. Later on, he used to have a party once or twice a week. He was good company, talkative, and a well-spoken man. He was fun to be with in a gathering and good at reciting poetry to his companions.

19:00We should also say at this point that the very beautiful translation from which I'm reading is the work of somebody called Annette Beveridge, whose grandson went on to find the National Health. Really, that beverage? Oh, that is interesting. So 11-year-old Babur takes over for Ghana, but he finds himself in a patchwork of provinces that are governed by various relatives, uncles, cousins. I mean, describe the back. It's not like a union. I think a nest of vipers is actually probably as good as any because he inherits all this. And immediately, every uncle who hasn't inherited wants his castle. So from the very beginning, he is at war with everybody.

19:45Among the many people that love the Babur Nama, there's E.M. Forster. Oh, yes. Who wrote a wonderful essay on Babur. And I think we should quote him here because it gives an impression of what happened when Babur inherited this. He says, there were simply too many kings about, often not enough kingdoms. Kamalain and Genghis Khan had produced between them so numerous a progeny that a frightful congestion of royalties had resulted in the upper waters of the Jaxartis and Oxus in Afghanistan. One could scarcely travel two miles without being held up by an emperor. And Baba himself puts the same thought more succinctly.

20:20Ten dervishes can sleep under a single banquet, he wrote, but two kings cannot find room under one climb. Isn't that great? Isn't that terrific? So, you know, it is a tenuous hold that a little boy may have. How does he weather the storm? And I just wanted to know, actually, because is it a nomadic lifestyle or are they anchored to their various fortresses, the uncles and cousins and Barbara himself? It's somewhere in between the two. These are, on both sides, peoples who have been traditionally nomadic and now are conquerors holding territory through castles. So they spend a lot of the time in the saddle fighting each other.

21:00They do have fortresses. But in Babo's case, as we will hear, he loses it quite quickly, because as well as all these guys fighting each other, there soon appears on the horizon, the man who will be the nemesis of Babo, the Timurids, and the man who wrecks this idyllic childhood. And this is this character, the Uzbek warlord, who's one of the most successful warlords, and who's basically the reason that Uzbekistan is called Uzbekistan today is because of this guy. And his full name is Mohammed Shaibani Khan. And he's the one who just one by one takes out each of Babur's warring cousins and kinsmen.

21:41And none of them, because they're so busy fighting each other, seem to realize the seriousness and that they've got to get themselves together. And Babur writes as the person who, he says, realized it. They went to pieces, he writes, and were unable to do anything. Neither could they gather their men or were they able to array their own forces. Instead, each set out on his own. I tried to erase the alarm. An enemy like Shaibani Khan had arrived on the scene and posed a threat to Turk and Mughal alike, he wrote. He should be dealt with now, I urged. And while he had not yet totally defeated the nation or grown too strong, as has been said, and then he writes a little verse, Put out a fire when you can, for when it blazes high, it will burn the wood.

22:25Do not allow an enemy to string his bow while you can pierce him with an arrow. Isn't that great? Isn't that great? So look, Shabani Khan is now introduced unto you. Join us after the break when we find out just how everything gets taken away from what is still a young boy. Join us after the break.

22:49welcome back so we left you with the introduction of this nemesis character shabani khan who is after all of the lands not just of baba but all of his rallies can i just point out that in the train going back to this but it's very beautiful in this televisual feast that has been created in India of this Barbara story. Shabani Khan is hot, hot. I mean, he's very good looking. That's a description from our producer, Anishka, by the way. You can't get around it like that. You have a reputation as the boy crazy leader. It's entirely fake news. I know you've made that reputation. But Anishka, true or not, did you not describe him as hot?

23:28She did. So tell me, I mean, what do we know of Shabani Khan? How old is he when he's sort of picking off Barbara relatives? So I think what you have is you have on one hand all these sort of old aristocrats who've got used to hunting and feasting and writing poetry and squabbling with each other. And on the other hand, you have a guy who's a real nomad, who's a real nomad prince, who actually is rather more like the Genghis Khans and Timur's that had proceeded in previous generations. and these old fat aristocrats with their buttons bursting out from their seams like Barbour's dad busy with their pigeons and their poetry simply aren't a match for the ruthlessness of this guy's and the final stand I mean he picks off every one of these warring uncles and cousins so the climax comes for poor Barbour who is how old at this point Anita?

24:2013 years old so he is still just a boy when he has to face Sharani Khan. But his first challenge, even before he faces this big bad figure who's taking all the lands of his family, happens in Samarkand. And we ought to say that Samarkand is the prize for many, if not all, of the Timurid leaders because it is a place of beauty. It is full of bazaars, enchanted gardens, pavilions. The architecture is gorgeous. There are murals depicting Timur's victory, Chinese porcelain tiles. I mean, it is stunning. It really is. And what has happened is that Timur, 50, 60 years before this, has sort of raided the whole world and destroyed the old order, the whole global order around this whole region, and hauled back everything lovely to Samarkand.

25:14So Samarkand reaches its sort of just a generation before Babur. And Timur literally hauls back to Samarkand the greatest craftsmen, the artists, intellectuals from every region he conquers. And through their captive labor, turns the steppe land capital, which before this is quite a minor place, into literally one of the great cities of the world. And it's on his death that you get this extraordinary cultural renaissance again, just before Babur is born. and the early Timurids who follow Timur, such as Shah Rukh, after whom Shah Rukh Khan is named. Who's a great Bollywood actor. Yeah, are known by my great hero, Robert Barron, as the Oriental Medici.

25:58And they are these sort of refined literatures, connoisseurs of painting, poetry and calligraphy, scientists, mathematicians and astronomers. Remember we talked about the amazing observatory in Samarkand? Yes, yes, yes. And that all the intellectuals were attracted to Samarkand to learn and read from their books and their libraries and so on. Exactly that. So when Babur is growing up, he's growing up. It's like being, you know, growing up in early Renaissance Florence and Dorotello and all these sort of early Renaissance artists are there studying young Ucello, young Piero della Francesca. And in the case of Babur, it's the greatest of all painters, Bizard, who we talked about.

26:37And there's this lovely phrase that Shah Rukh's sons argued over the superior talents of Khosrow or Nizami, comparing poems line by line, wrote Babur. It's lovely and it's romantic. And it is, ironically, for as yet still 13-year-old Babur, it is kind of the thought of romance or love, or at least coupling up with a woman that takes him to Samarkand when he is 13. He marches on the city. And remember, this is not unusual for these relatives to march on each other's territory. So 13-year-old Barbara, filled with the first flush of testosterone, in 1496 marches on Samarkand. He's already seen off two uncles who tried to throw him out by this point.

27:22Who tried to kill him and murder him and take Fergana, right? So he marches to this walled city of Samarkand. And there are two of his cousins who live there. And he wants to marry one of these cousins, because cousin marriage is a thing, but they're both promised to other people. And so what he does, and just put this in your head, this 13-year-old kid lays siege to Samarkand, the jewel in the Timurid crown. He's aware with all of this, and also the loyalty of your army that they will do this for you. Seven months is a very, very long time. And he turns 14, and finally, Samarkand falls to him.