207. The Stargazing Hippie vs The Lion King

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durhampool. Now, the last episode, we left you with Baba having exchanged his life with Hermione, his son, in the eyes of God. I mean, it was a very sort of sweet and actually quite touching promise that he makes to God, that if you spare my sick son, then just take me instead. It is said, I think this is really interesting, really, that Baba's last words to his son are, Do not against your brothers, even though they may deserve it. Isn't that interesting? That's his advice to his son. This is a crucial bind for Humayun because Humayun, who realizes in his view that his father has given his life for him, is not willing throughout his life to forget his father's last request.

1:14And as we will see, this is the single biggest flaw in Humayun's rule, that he is continually messed around by his kid brothers who are always rebelling against him. And he's always forgiving them. And this goes on and on and on, until eventually his own followers take the law into their own hands and sort the problem out. Don't blow the end. I'm not saying a thing. Yes, I mean, you just did. But it's okay. Let's pretend you didn't. But let's just remind people of Humayu because we sort of described him as this batik wearing hippie on a gap yard. We're talking about a man who was actually very glamorous.

1:50I mean, he was a glamorous man who liked colorful clothes. I'm not trying to say glam, but he was certainly lively and dreamy, I think is the word I'd probably use. We talked last time about how Babur shows this sort of odd mixture of pride and extreme irritation with this boy. Like so many Indian dads. Like so many Indian dads, exactly. And the son is brave, dashing, intelligent, but also kind of unfocused, unambitious, and like me, perennially unpunctual. Except that while I'm often sort of half an hour late. Half an hour late? How are you not bursting into flames? Oh my lord. Okay, we'll let that slide.

2:35I have never turned up three weeks late, which is what Humayun does when Babur's trying to invade India. But when you and I first worked together on our Koh-i-Noor book, I wrote quite a lot about Humayun in that. And I was very much of the view that he was this hippy-dippy, charming, dashing, but rather hopeless boy. But since then, there has been a very important intervention by my wonderful friend, Ebba Koch. Ah, yes. She's the greatest living scholar of Mughal architecture, and she's a particular expert on the early Mughal period. And in the year following our Koh-i-Noor book, Ebba came out with a wonderful book called The Planetary King, Humayun Padshah, Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne.

3:20And this has completely changed all our views on Humayun. And if I was writing that book again, I would write a very different portrait now, having read Ebba's work. Because Ebba has shown that the kind of horoscope-loving Humayun, who we always thought was just the hippy-dippy, I mean, the story that is always told of him is he fires arrows in the air randomly and sees where they land and decides on his policy, depending on where they land. Now, that all sounded kind are completely bonkers to us. But she has shown that, in fact, he is, by the standards of the time, this sort of visionary mystic stroke astronomer stroke mathematician, who, like everyone at this time, looks to the heavens for the answers.

4:08This is not unique to Humayun. This is absolutely part of the course in both Indian and in Islamic thought. And this whole science, as it was thought of then, which the ancient Indians in Sanskrit called Jyotisa, which is both a mixture of astronomy and astrology and mathematics, was something that Humayun was a great expert in. And while he spent most of his life fighting and a lot of his life fighting against his brothers, in between times, he comes up with extraordinary inventions, which I had no idea about until I read Ebba's book. So what we're going to be talking about over the next two episodes is profoundly altered by Ebba's work.

4:48And I recommend anyone who wants to know more about Humayun or anyone who wants to have a completely new take on one of the six famous mogul rulers to go and buy the planetary king because it's completely changed my view of this man. So anyway, let's go ahead. We're using Ebba's work. Ebba's work is fabulous. I'll just give you a little bit of a pen portrait of the man himself. So he was born on the 6th of March in 1508 in Kabul to Barbara's favourite wife. But he is the first of Barbara's children to survive infancy because infant mortality is so very terrible. And the couple that he is born into is very different to the one that Barbara first encounters in 1504.

5:30He's beloved but will become infuriating to his father because his father will have numerous wives. He'll have four other sons, five daughters, a number of other children who died childbirth or as infants. But we should talk about the three most prominent brothers, that dark sort of muttering from Barbara on his deathbed, you know, do not act against your brothers even if they deserve it. The three brothers in question are Kamran, Asghari, and Hindle. Tell us a little bit about the family relationship. What are the personalities of these people? Well, these three between them behave so badly in Humayun's rule that it subsequently changes the entire course of Mughal history.

6:09And it becomes the norm in Mughal rule henceforth to imprison younger sons within the fort. And this remains true right up until the time of the end of the Mughal dynasty in the 1850s as a whole. By that stage, there's a whole half of the Red Fort, which is the princely quarter. And these guys lead a very circumscribed life. They have to seek special permission to leave the fort. They're basically expected to live in great luxury, but within it, within this world, within the world. And this is all because Kamran, Asghari, and Hindul between them make Humayun's life completely impossible. It's a lesson which subsequent moguls take to heart, and they're never going to suffer the same as Humayun.

6:51It would have been easier if Babur would have just named a successor, you know, that Humayun is going to be the one who takes over, you know, using a system that the others, I mean the Ottomans, they killed their brothers, didn't they? They killed any other challenger. But in this system that Humayun inherits, the kingdom's kind of carved up into separate territories. So these other sons, I mean, Hermione is the main man, he's going to be the main man, but the others get regions where they can plot and fulminate against the fact that they haven't been the main man and have a chance to act against him.

7:24I think you can find examples in the previous reigns of both approaches. There are examples where brothers are kept strongly under a leash, so to speak. There are other examples where people have taken the view that their brothers are their most useful allies and that keeping governorates within the family is the best way of keeping the whole empire together. So when Humayun is ruling, I don't think that he's breaking a precedent. I think it's just that from this point, the system has changed to make sure that what happens during Humayun's rule is never repeated. It's a very important part of Humayun's story, and it's one that alters subsequent history completely.

8:02So Humayun is 18 when his father goes to India. And Humayun has a good war. We've described him as this sort of hippy-dippy character, but he doesn't seem like that during the invasion of India. Although he's very late setting off, he distinguishes himself at the Battle of Panipat and then races on to capture Agra. And remember, it's Humayun who captures the diamond that may be the Koh-i-Noor when he takes Lodi Agra and captures the Raja of Gwalior and his jewels. And in other periods, Babur has placed Humayun in charge of Badakshan, which is one of the richest provinces in Afghanistan. Badakshan rubies, we've talked about so many times.

8:42Badakshan rubies and Badakshan lapis. Lapis Lazuli comes from there, exactly. Despite his sort of tendency to get excited about astronomy and the heavens, is a very successful general. It's one of the things he does very well. And we talked last time about the crucial battle of Kanua, when Babur just manages to defeat Rana Sangha, partly due to his canon, partly due to the fact that Rana Sangha is subsequently betrayed by his own people. And after that, while Babur is sort of mopping up resistance in India, Babur sends Humayun back to Kabul to maintain his interests in that whole region. And there's this wonderful moment when Humayun gets a bit bored in Afghanistan.

9:29Remember, his father longs to be back in Kabul and thinks he's done the kindest thing a father can do by sending Humayun back there. Humayun suddenly turns up in Agra in 1529 when he's meant to be governing Central Asia. And there's a famous miniature, I think, in one of the Babu Namas of Humayun turning up unexpectedly at court and his mother and all the other ladies sort of falling on him and giving him a kind of group hug. So Humayun is around in India, and it is in India that he gets his fever, and it is in India that he recovers as Babur falls ill and dies. Also, I mean, we should really mark this because I think this is important, that the Hindustan that Hamaya will inherit has only been taken by Babur four years before.

10:19So, you know, what he is, he is not a ruling. It's a very fresh conquest. and in the minds of many people who live in India. The Mughals are still a military occupation. They are not a government. They haven't been accepted as a ruling family at all, yes. So, you know, Homayu is on pretty shaky foundations, even if Barbara has been remarkably successful. He's not inheriting a state. He's inheriting a state in flux. We look at history always with the eyes of hindsight because we know that the Mughals would go on until 1858 or 1857. and we always sort of forget how much is contingent on chance. And what Humayun inherits at the age of 22 is, as you say, an incredibly unstable India.

11:01There are warring Afghans who do not want the Mughals anywhere near Hindustan running the whole of Bengal. Bengal has been in Afghan hands for a couple of hundred years. and Humayun has to go straight into battle when on December 29th, 1530, his father dies. And his first battles are in Gujarat. He leads a campaign to Gujarat. He faces off against the Sultan of Gujarat, Sultan Bahardo, and Humayun besieges the great fortress of Champana. Have you ever been to Champana in Gujarat? I actually have never been to Champana, so tell me what I'm missing. So there's this whole world that is almost never visited by outsiders of these extraordinary sultanate buildings in Gujarat.

11:47And the architecture of Gujarat so impresses Humayun's son Akbar, a generation on, the style of Fatipur Sikri and the style of Akbari architecture is very much borrowed and in a sense plagiarized from that of Champana and the Gujarati sultanates. But this is one of the most innovative Indo-Islamic kingdoms and one of the richest because it has a very rich trading merchant class that trade along the Arabian Ocean and sail across to Africa and to Egypt at this period. This is what Humayun now is gunning for. As far as he's concerned, his father has successfully first defeated and then collaborated with the Rajputs.

12:32And so beyond Rajasthan, he now wants to go to war with the Gujaratis. And he defeats them. It's a success. 1535, he defeats Sultan Bahadur, takes Champina, takes the treasury. He's so impressed by Champina and enjoys so much the architecture and the glorious world of gardens and delights that he finds that he remains there, indulging in all sorts of astronomical interests and pleasures. I'm going to say more about his superstition in a second, but interestingly, he doesn't kill Sultan Bahadur because Sultan Bahadur pegs it to the coast. Actually, it's the Portuguese who are there already who protect him.

13:14He takes refuge with the Portuguese. It's not a vanquish forever because he doesn't manage to kill the man. It is though at a time when people start realizing just how superstitious this fella is and you start saying, he's a bit weird because, as said of Hermione, he never placed his left foot first in any house or mosque. If anyone else did, he would send them out and tell them to come back again. He's flexing, he's winning military things, but people think he's decidedly odd at this time as well. There are those like Ebba Koch who defend this. And as far as she's concerned, it isn't weird that he actually has a deep engagement with both Indian and Islamic traditions of astronomy.

13:54me. Ebba has found a whole series of new sources for Humayun's reign that point to what he was up to in a way that we didn't understand before. And he's trying to build, we did say he was a bit of a hippy-dippy, a utopian society favored by the heavens. And Ebba depicts Humayun as a ruler whose fixations were first and foremost intellectual. He's besotted by numbers and geometry. No other The ruler organises his court like he does according to planetary cosmology. He designs court costumes, court gates. Based on this system, he conceives astronomical tents and carpets, which sound to me a bit – can you remember that game Twister?

14:39Did you ever do Twister when you were around? I played drunk Twister. That's something. Well, there's a kind of version of that that he comes up with, this carpet organized into different astronomical realms that you have to move yourself into. But what's also fascinating is that this period in Champaner and at the beginning of his reign, he begins to construct movable palaces as sort of boats, floating bazaars and gardens, boat palaces and movable bridges. It's all quite exciting stuff. Let's talk about his sort of innovations in a bit. But I just want to talk about that moment, in that sort of honeymoon period after he takes Champana because he really wants to party with the troops.

15:22Well done, boys. You've done really, really well. And so he sits, this is a lovely detail, in the new fortress that now belongs to him and he wears the red clothing of Mars and he sits on the throne and he says, let us celebrate. And they do, and they get really quite raucously drunk. And what happens is the army, because it's drunk and out of control, decide to lead their own expedition. They just go off, thinking, oh, Hamayu's asleep. He's probably asleep in his red. Let's go off and do something ourselves. Hamayu is incensed because it's the kind of like, give him an inch, those bloody troops, and they take a mile.

16:00When they come back, and he orders them back, and they do come back, he orders a really savage punishment for anyone involved in this expedition, this extrajudicial expedition that he did not order, even the imam who he suspected of criticizing him and sort of egging these drunken troops on. And do you know what the punishment is? He orders elephants to trample them to death. So hippy-dippy he may be, but not like a hippy that you and I recognize who is all peace and love, because there is a darkness about this as well. Well, I don't think he regards it as a darkness. He sees it as trying to keep the proper order, the proper cosmological order.

16:39He dresses each day in planetary colors so that it was red for Mars the day that that happened. The quarters of each of his seven daughters are arranged in planetary formation and Humayun visits them in the Pacific order. And we catch glimpses of Humayun's sort of weird mathematical astronomical mind in the structure of the Monumentary Commission, in these movable palaces and bridges and floating bazaars and all the rest of it. But it's something which is very much the source of Mogul style in the future. His architecture is very ornate and built with this sort of geometrical precision that he insists on maintaining at court.

17:21In the surviving buildings, you see the use of all these different colors in the way that he lays it down in his planetary system. So it all looks a bit weird to us, but the result is Mogul architecture. And Ebercock has made a very good case that all this sort of strange rules about color and geometry ends up with ultimately Humayun's tomb, which is the seed from which the Taj Mahal grows. You've just jumped straight to his tomb. We are jumping, but it's important. What I'm trying to say is that all this sort of weird color and geometry that he imposes on the court ends with the Taj Mahal. So we can't complain too much.

18:04But this is where all these ideas begin. And she makes the case, Ebba makes the case, that without Humayun, we'd never have any of those beautiful gardens, any of those beautiful... Can I put it this way, in conclusion? He's pretty weird, but his weird is pretty. Okay, we'll leave it at that. But he's sort of sitting there comfortably. He's trampled his unruly troops to death, so no one's going to do that again. But while he's sort of sitting pretty and thinking he's done very, very well, there is a threat that is on the horizon. And that is an Afghan warlord called Cher Shah. So join us after the break and we'll talk about what happens when he has to face another challenge, which is not as easy to defeat.

18:45It doesn't go running off to the Portuguese. It is a real present danger to Hermione's short rule.

18:58Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about this impending threat that is coming to Himayas rule in the shape of somebody I called Sheshah, but he's not Sheshah at the time because he's still Shere Khan. That's a name we all know if we've read our Jungle Book, Shere Khan, but he is the lion, the lion king, if you like. And tell us a little bit, because he's an Afghan warlord, is he not, William? And tell us a little bit about his story. What's up with him and where is he? There is a whole world of supporters of Shere Khan, particularly, I think, in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, who make the case that, in fact, many of the things for which the Mughals are remembered, such as the Grand Trunk Road, some of the greatest buildings in Delhi, are the result of Sher Khan or Sher Shah, not the Mughals.

19:44He's from one of these Pashtun Afghan tribes who have come down to Hindustan and settled in what's now Bihar and Bengal. He is a remarkable leader, and he becomes the biggest thorn in Humayun's side along with his brothers. Which should we deal with first because they're kind of simultaneous? Shall we start with Kamran and Hindle? Shall I do you a Kamran and then you do me a Hindle? Okay, so Kamran is the jealous second son and who is a right pain in Humayun's bottom. Kamran believed that Babur and Humayun should have given him more, greater lands, greater power. He really resented his older brother for not doing him the justice that he felt he deserved.

20:27He's occupied Punjab from his base in Kabul. He's got lots of officers who were formerly loyal to his father who are very, very loyal to him. So while Hamaya is looking at the threat of Shere Khan in the distance in Bengal… And moving towards eastern India, yeah, importantly. In the meantime, while he's looking at Bengal, you remember Sultan Bahadur, the man who was in Champaner and who sort of gives up Champaner and has gone into the arms of the Portuguese, he just moves back to Champaner while he's gone. You know, sort of, Hermione is otherwise occupied. He moves back in. The Portuguese kind of help him to take back his city and then they calmly kill him and take over that territory altogether.

21:06So you've got this sort of encroaching colonialism going on in the background of Hermione's rule. And Hermione's going to have to deal with this at a later date. And they will actually hang onto that territory for a lot longer than Bahadur does. Anyway, so we go back to Kamran, the pain in the bum, malcontested brother. Younger brother. Younger brother, jealous brother. He's four years younger and he looks like his brother. He looks like the emperor. And you see him in paintings. He's often depicted the same way that his brother's depicted in paintings. He's sort of sitting cross-legged. He's thoughtful.

21:37He's staring away into the distance. But there is a difference. Whereas Hamayu still are tie-dye hippie, even by those standards, Mughal standards. This guy has always got little small knives attached to his belt. So it is very clear for everyone to see that he is a stabby brother. So that's sort of Kamran. Hindle, on the other hand, is the youngest brother of this group. And he believes he is born to a destiny because Barber has given him the name Hindle. That is Turkish for taker of India. So this is before at all there is any chance that this is going to be a reality. Hindle has the name and the destiny, Hind the taker of India.

22:20So he too feels really miserable and sidelined. And the fact that his manifest destiny is being thwarted by his tie-dye brother, and that is a very irritating thing for him. He's very close to Gulbuddin Begum, the daughter I told you, who's also a chronicler of the court at this time. Gulbadan is a wonderful character. I love her. And Ruby Lal has just written a wonderful book about her. And she's, one of the things that I think might surprise people that don't know about the Mughals is how much the Mughal court women are incredibly highly educated. And over again, generation after generation, you get these princesses who are writers.

22:59And Gulbadan is one of the first. Princess rose body is how it translates. Yes, the body of roses. But Hindle has always been. I mean, he has a reason to be aggrieved because he has been his father's favorite. His father loves him, even when he's getting really cross with Hermione and Hermione's writing style and lack of, you know, sort of good grammar. He loves Hindle. And it's on his deathbed in Agra where he's desperately asking, yes, where is Hindle? Please bring me Hindle. And Hindle can't get back. Hermione is close enough to get back in time. But Hindle is not back in time because he's fighting in Kabul.

23:32He's doing, you know, the work that makes his father proud. So all of these unresolved things are in Hindle's mind. That is his blueprint. It should have been me. So these two brothers will team up and not once, but on several occasions, they will unite against Humayun. And that is coming. Now, Humayun is heading eastwards. You can remember that when Babur first got to India, he had, in a sense, two enemies to choose from. He could either take on the Rajputs or he can take on the Afghans. Now, he decides to take on the Rajputs and he defeats them, but it leaves the Afghans still at large in Bengal.

24:11And Humayun has gone to Gujarat and he still hasn't grasped his nettle. So in July 1537, after Humayun has been rolling around enjoying himself in Gujarat, he suddenly wakes up to the threat that's coming from the east. And this is from the Afghans who had been running Bengal and Bihar, that's the great chunk of eastern India, for several centuries before the Mughals turned up. And these guys had no intention of some new Mughals coming in, some Timurids coming in from Central Asia and taking what they thought was their part of the world. And Humayun sets off eastwards to combat Shere Khan. This is an epic battle between two very capable generals.

25:06And initially, Humayun is successful. He goes to Bengal. He captures Shere Khan's capital, which is called Gore. It's the most gorgeous area. I've been there a few years ago. And it's this beautiful green landscape of meandering rivers and orchards and mango groves with these beautiful Bengali-style mosques in red brick and tile work. Today, it's cut in half by the border between West Bengal and India and East Bengal and Bangladesh. And you have to sort of make a 200-mile detour to see both sides of the city. You can't just go through a border there. But after capturing it, he likes it so much, which is entirely understandable, because it's this beautiful green expanse.

25:54And he spends too long enjoying himself in the mango orchards. And he allows time for Sher Shah to regroup and recapture his old territories. And it's during a negotiation for a peace treaty that Sher Khan suddenly falls on Humayun's camp. And to everyone's surprise, he defeats him. And Humayun has to take flight. He's never been defeated before. He's not used to this. And after he is defeated on the battlefield of Kanoj, which is some way now into Uttar Pradesh, not far away from Lucknow, that this famous incident takes place. And Humayun is driven into the river and is starting to drown when a humble water carrier who happens to have an inflatable hide.

26:52An inflated hide. I've seen these relatively from about 112 years ago. I've got one of those, you know, those stereoscopes which have two pictures. And I think it may even be in Bengal, but of people crossing the river on inflated cow carcasses. I've done it. You've done it. It's like an inner tube, but with legs coming out of it. Oh, mad. No, I've actually done it on the Indus. Have you? They've got four or five of these roped together and then they have a very kind of primitive raft and they punch you across the Indus at a place called Thakot. But anyway, so what Humayun is saved by is just one guy who has his water skin.