Both a Caesar and a Cervantes

The greatest memoirist you’ve never heard of? Quite possibly. The most enchanting read you least expected? Most definitely. Those readers who have yet to discover Babur and his Baburnama, the sixteenth-century memoirs of the opium-eating, hashish-smoking, wine-drinking, chess-playing poet, diarist, gardener, warrior, calligrapher, conqueror and founder of the Mughal Empire are in for the greatest treat. Think Pepys, Tamerlane, Machiavelli and Montaigne rolled into one.

Is this overegging it? I don’t think so, and let it be said that Babur has had his fans for centuries. Sir Edward Denison Ross, the polylingual first director of London’s School of Oriental Studies, thought the Baburnama ‘among the most enthralling and romantic works in the literature of all time’. E. M. Forster rightly noted that ‘sanguine and successful conquerors’ are generally intolerable on the page. ‘But what a happiness to have known Babur! He had all that one seeks in a friend.’ More recently, the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh hailed Babur’s memoirs as ‘one of the true marvels of the medieval world’. In his full-blooded introduction to the new Everyman edition, William Dalrymple reckons it ‘one of the most fascinating autobiographies ever written . . . almost Proustian in its self-awareness.’ If the work is unique as the Muslim world’s first fully fledged autobiography, its author is scarcely less exceptional, a one-man empire builder and genre-bending writer – in Ghosh’s words ‘both a Caesar and a Cervantes’. The American historian Stephen Dale summarizes him thus: ‘a memoirist, poet, warrior, politician, administrator, nominal Muslim, hypocrite, drunkard, drug user, chronicler, gardener, aesthete, betrayer, avenger, social critic, correspondent, loving father, bisexual, literary critic, nominal Sufi, egotist, bigot, self-flagellant and philanthropist’. So much for the admirers and the critics. Born in the Ferghana Valley – today’s Uzbekistan – in 1483, Zahirud-Din Babur was a Timurid prince, the great-great-great-grandson of Timur, better known in the West as Tamerlane. Conquest, you could say, was in the blood. A voracious reader, he was writing from an early age. The memoirs begin in 1494 when, ‘in the twelfth year of my age I became ruler in the country of Ferghana’. And they continue in a stream of effervescent prose until their abrupt end in 1529, a year before his death. So what does he write about? In a word, everything. This is what makes him so compelling. There are skirmishes and battles, of course, as our itinerant, throneless hero slogs around Central Asia seeking a kingdom, having lost his own as a child prince. We hear about sieges and occasional slaughter, but really that is the least of it – and the least interesting. Just as the digressive personal asides of Pepys and Montaigne make their diaries and essays sing across the centuries, so the bristling, infectious humanity of Babur’s writing reveals a three-dimensional man. In him we see ourselves, minus the slaying. His anecdotes have a cinematic immediacy, too. You can hear the snow crunch during his tortuous journey back to Kabul from Herat in the freezing winter of 1506. On 23 December, he bade his effete royal cousins farewell and rode straight into a terrific snowstorm. His men sank up to their chests. The terrified horses, plunging down to their stirrups and girth straps, were shattered. Babur and his men got frostbite in their ears, hands and feet. ‘During those few days, much hardship and misery were endured, more than I had ever endured in my whole life.’ Women played a critical role in his life. He respected and was deeply influenced by them. He so revered his ‘very wise and farsighted’ grandmother that ‘most affairs of mine were carried through under her advice’. And what could be more modern than his love for both women and men? The honest, confessional tone is enormously endearing. He grieves for lost loved ones, is depressed and feels a failure. He writes of the tortured, should-I-or-shouldn’t-I temptations of drinking alcohol for the first time.

Although at that time I had not committed the sin of drinking to tipsiness, had not experienced drunkenness and did not know the delight and pleasure of being drunk as it should be known, not only was I inclined to have a drink of wine, but my heart was actually urging me to cross that valley.

He alternated between drinking and abstaining like a dutiful Muslim; the craving brought him ‘to the verge of tears’. Every once in a while he fell off the wagon with a bump. One evening he drank so much he could hardly stay on his horse. ‘Very drunk I must have been for, when they told me next day that we had galloped loose-rein into camp, carrying torches, I could not recall it in the very least. After reaching my quarters, I vomited a good deal.’ As far as mind-influencing substances went, Babur apparently preferred hashish and opium. He writes of how, one hallucinogenic night, he decided to take opium because the moon was shining. ‘While under its influence wonderful fields of flowers were enjoyed.’ He even finds space to pen a sixteenth-century Tatler guide on how to throw a good party and what to avoid:

A hashish party never goes well with a wine party; the drinkers began to make wild talk and chatter from all sides, mostly in allusion to hashish and hashish eaters. Baba Jan, even, when drunk, said many wild things . . . Try as we did to keep things straight, nothing went well; there was much disgusting uproar; the party became intolerable and was broken up.

We’ve all been there. Literary chat was highly prized, ‘vapid and empty talk’ was not. ‘His verse is flat and insipid,’ he writes of his contemporary, Sultan Mahmud Mirza, launching into an impromptu Who’s Who of poets and artists. ‘Not to compose is better than to compose verse such as his.’ Ouch. ‘His work was very dainty but he did not draw beardless faces well,’ he says of the peerless Persian artist Bihzad. Kabul, which he conquered in 1504, entranced him, though not before he had to stage a show of strength to suppress a fledgeling rebellion. ‘In the end I got to horse, had two or three persons shot, two or three cut in pieces, and so stamped the rising down.’ He came to adore his adopted hometown and became, as well as a warlord, the Alan Titchmarsh of his time. A green-fingered horticulturalist nicknamed the Gardener King, he had sour cherry cuttings brought to Kabul which grew nicely there. He laid out ten grand gardens in and around the city, of which Bagh-e Babu (Babur’s Gardens) was his favourite on an eleven-hectare sweep of ground tumbling down the western slopes of Mount Sher-i-Darwaza to the foaming Kabul River. Recently, after decades of neglect and destruction, it has been handsomely restored by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Here were roses, pistachios, walnuts, an avenue of plane trees interspersed with peaches and pomegranates, apricots, apples and cherries, and the Arghavans, or Judas trees, that he especially cherished. ‘If, the world over, there is a place to match this when the Arghavans are in full bloom, their yellow mingling with red, I do not know it.’ Babur was an enthusiastic naturalist, too, counting thirty-two varieties of wild tulips on Kabul’s mountainsides, admiring the abundance of ‘grape, pomegranate, apricot, apple, quince, pear, peach, plum, almond and walnut’, and writing of the many birds and their birdsong. There were nightingales, herons, mallards, blackbirds, thrushes, doves, magpies, egrets, waterhens and cranes – the birds of heaven – ‘in large flocks, and countless numbers’. In the rushing waters of the Kabul River, fishermen took to the banks and hauled in generous catches. In a lovely passage he raves about firewood in characteristically Baburid style: forthright, jaunty and instructive. Mastic was his favourite.

It burns with flame and a nice smell, makes plenty of hot ashes and does well even if sappy. Holm-oak is also first-rate firewood, blazing less than mastic but, like it, making a hot fire with plenty of hot ashes and a pleasant smell. It has the peculiarity in burning that when its leafy branches are set alight, they fire up with amazing sound, blazing and crackling from bottom to top. It is good fun to burn it.

In 1525, after decades of destitute wandering across Central Asia, when he was – in the words of Ferishta, the sixteenth-century Persian historian – ‘like a king on a chess-board, moved from place to place, and buffeted about like pebbles on a seashore’, Babur led his army south through the mountain-girdled Khyber Pass. On 21 April 1526, he did battle with the much larger force of Ibrahim Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, at Panipat, north of the city. By midday the battle was over and Lodi was dead. Alas, the kingdom he had at last won for himself after years of struggle did not live up to its promise. India just wasn’t to his taste:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

Perhaps his renunciation of alcohol after years of drinking accounted for the gloom. ‘Everybody regrets drinking and then takes an oath,’ he writes. ‘But I have taken the oath and now regret it.’ To improve his environment he threw himself into another bout of garden-planning, celebrating his triumph by laying out the Garden of the Eight Paradises in Agra. More followed, among them the Garden of Rest, the Lotus Garden, the Gold-Scattering Garden, each an echo of his ancestor Timur’s imperial parks and gardens in Samarkand. The fruits he grew so successfully in Agra alleviated his homesickness – ‘to have grapes and melons grown in this way in Hindustan filled my measure of content’. His most important bit of gardening, though he did not know it, was to plant the seeds of the Mughal Empire, a fabulously rich, mighty, civilizing and long-lasting power, the largest and most populous of the Islamic world. That alone assured him a place in history, even without his scintillating memoirs. Towards the end of his life, letters made their way north to Kabul, the capital of his old mountain kingdom. On 10 February 1529, he fired off a characteristically bright and breezy missive to his governor and old friend Khwaja Kalan. Here was Babur in a microcosm. There were asides on how much he missed Kabul and its grapes and melons, digressions on poetry, a heartfelt admission of how much he longed for a heavy drinking bout, directives on repairing and provisioning the fort and the caravanserai, on allocating funds to build a new mosque, even detailed instructions for the maintenance of a beloved garden. ‘The best of young trees must be planted there, lawns arranged, and borders set with sweet herbs and with flowers of beautiful colour and scent.’ He assured his old comrade that he would return ‘at once’ to his beloved Kabul, but it was not to be. After his son Humayun fell gravely ill, Babur consulted a Sufi saint whose advice convinced him to offer his life to God in exchange for that of his son. Humayun survived. Babur died on 26 December 1530, aged 47. One of my favourite lines from the Baburnama, a little gem that shows just how fresh and modern this vagabond-turned-emperor remains on the page half a millennium after his death, comes in a letter of 27 November 1528 to his son and heir. ‘In future write without elaboration. Use plain, clear words. It will be less trouble for you and the reader.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 82 © Justin Marozzi 2024