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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 22 (1990), 37-58.

Printed in the United States of America

Stephen Frederic Dale


STEPPE HUMANISM: T H E AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
WRITINGS O F ZAHIR A L - D I N M U H A M M A D B A B U R ,
1483-1530

In his essays on "Self-Expression" and "The Human Ideal" in the medieval


Islamic world, the late Gustave E. von Grunebaum argued that both expressions
and portrayals of individuality were a comparative rarity in the literature of
pre-modern Islamic civilization.' Von Grunebaum concluded from reviewing
both autobiographical and biographical works written by Muslims that the
social customs, religious values, and literary conventions of premodern Islamic
society combined to discourage evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic personalities in favor of representations of impersonal stereotypes. He found that
such bias characterized the autobiographies of scholars, biographies of saints,
and lives of poets to the extent that religious autobiographies, such as that of the
theologian, al-Ghazzali, represented little more than "confessional monologues,"
while the biographies of sufi saints routinely "obliterated peculiarities of character" and those of literary historians, such as the Iranian Dawlatshah, con
centrated on features that revealed their subjects to share the characteristics of a
literary stereotype, the poet.2
When viewed against the backdrop of this depersonalized literary landscape,
works of Muslim authors that either evoke or depict individuality compel attention because they offer humanistic insights into premodern Islamic civilization.
One rare example of such a work-and an important, unacknowledged exception
to von Grunebaum's characterization of the literature of Islamic societies-is the
autobiographical memoir of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, the founder, in
1526, of the Mughal Empire of 1ndia.j Babur, who was born in 1483 in the
Ferghana Valley, east of Samarqand, was a Turkic Muslim of impeccable
lineage, descended from both Timur and Chingiz Khan. He composed his
principal work, now known as the Baburnama, as well as a separate diwan of
Turkic poetry and a treatise on Turkic prosody, during his tumultuous 47-year
life in Transoxiana, Afghanistan, and northern ~ n d i aIn
. ~the Baburnama and in
his poetry, Babur distinguished himself as an exceptional figure in premodern (or
precolonial) Islamic literature, by vividly conveying a sense of himself as a
unique personality. Indeed, he wrote so directly, so openly, and so extensively of
himself that it is possible to say that he represents for Islamic civilization what

1990 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438190 $5.00

+ .OO

38

Stephen Frederic Dale

his Italian contemporary Benvenuto Cellini represents for European civilization:


the most completely revealed individual of the 16th century.'
While much of Babur's poetry remains untranslated and little known, the
Baburnama has long been recognized as a text that contains remarkably modern
autobiographical elements. The text, that is, resembles the individualistic selfstatements characteristic of European autobiographies of the Renaissance and
the 18th century rather than the stereotypical portraits that typify premodern
autobiographical writings of the Islamic world. Annette Susannah Beveridge,
who has translated into English Babur's original Turkic prose, introduces her
translation by observing that "what has kept interest in it [the Baburnama] alive
through some four centuries is the autobiographic presentment of an arresting
personality [which] its whole manner, style and diction produce."6 These qualities
also captivated E. M. Forster, who writes in "The Emperor Babur":
Fresh yet mature, the Memoirs leave an . . . exquisite impression behind. We are admitted
into the writer's inmost confidence, yet that confidence is not, as in most cases, an
enervating chamber; it is a mountain stream, arched by the skies of early manhood. And
since to his honesty, energy and sensitiveness, Rabur added a warm heart, since he desired
empire simply that he might advance his friends, the reader may discover a companion
uncommon among the dead and amongst kings. Alexander the Great resembles him a
little, but Alexander is mystical and grandiose, whereas there are neither chasms nor
fences in Babur, nothing that need hinder the modern man if he cares to come.'

More recently, Roy Pascal, the author of a seminal modern analysis of the
autobiographical genre, Design and Truth in Autobiography, comments that the
Baburnama "would occupy a significant place in the history of autobiography
had it belonged t o ~ u r o ~ e . "He
' implies that Babur's text possesses some of those
same qualities that characterize the works of the European autobiographical
tradition, extending from St. Augustine through Cellini and Cardano t o what
Pascal describes as the "classical" autobiographies of Rousseau and ~ o e t h e . ~
Despite Pascal's cultural condescension, he is the only scholar to recognize the
modern, or modern European, autobiographical qualities of the Baburnama who
has offered a conceptual framework for studying this aspect of the text. Forster's
approach is more typical, in that he fails t o act as a literary critic but writes
instead as a publicist, a kind of intellectual "boon companion" of the monarch.
He typifies the response that readers generally have to persuasive autobiographers;
they are, as Pascal remarks, "won o v e r . . . by being admitted t o his [the autobiographer's] intimacy."'0 Pascal enables readers t o move beyond this natural
but intellectually debilitating infatuation t o a more critical understanding of
autobiographers in general, and of Babur in particular. He does so just by
identifying those qualities that are common t o most modern European autobiographers. Studying the Baburnama with these commonalities in mind, it is
easier t o identify the elements of the text that shape Babur's self-portrayal,
elements that make it seem so remarkably contemporary to 20th-century Western
readers. Equally important, Pascal also alerts readers t o the necessity of resisting
Babur's considerable charm and, instead, attempting to analyze his text with an
awareness that autobiographical writings are self-interpretations: they are crafted

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

39

or designed self-revelations rather than objective analyses of personalities and


events. If such a sensibility has become commonplace since Pascal wrote in 1960,
it has not yet altered discussions of the Bahurnama, nor has it been a very
conspicuous feature of studies of Islamic autobiographical literature as a whole.
Pascal characterizes autobiography as the retrospective presentation of a life
in which the author is primarily concerned with the development of the self, that
is, with the evolution of his or her own intellect and personality. Writing from
the perspective of maturity or old age, the autobiographer does not just describe
his or her life but interprets it from a particular viewpoint, be it a social or
political position, literary or artistic accomplishment, or philosophical outlook.
"Autobiography means, therefore, discrimination and selection in face of the
endless complexity of life, selection of facts, distribution of emphases, choice of
expression."" The most compelling autobiographies are distinguished from the
generality of recorded lives by the author's ability to convey a sense that one's
own life has a coherence, that it represents a triumph of personality over
circumstance, that the personality is marked by a "driving force" which represents
its "master" form." Yet, while autobiographers select from and interpret the
experiences of their lives, if they do so too narrowly and logically, suggesting an
inevitability and predestination, their work will suffer by failing to convey the
indeterminacy of life. "The problem for the autobiographer is to establish some
sort of balance between various types of meaning, a balance that will vary
according to his character and intention. Something of the contemporary and
perhaps aberrant meaning of an experience must be given as well as something
of its ultimate retrospective significance. The autobiography is an artistic failure
i f . . . 'its end is assumed from the beginning'."'3
Autobiography emerged as an explicit, distinct literary genre only in the 18th
century, and Pascal's characterization of the form is derived largely from his
reading of works that were written then. While he believes that the texts of
Rousseau, Goethe, Franklin, and Wordsworth were presaged by earlier autobiographical writings-most notably those of the Italian Renaissance writers,
Petrarch, Cellini, and Cardano-he argues that these earlier writers were not, for
different reasons, fully autobiographical. Cellini, he says, "presents" but does not
analyze himself; Cardano, at the opposite end of the introspective spectrum,
rigorously examines his intellect and emotions but fails to convey, "directly and
imaginatively," his personality.'4 By implication, Pascal would place Babur in
the same category as Renaissance autobiographers; Babur can be regarded, that
is, as one who wrote autobiographically but did not produce a fully realized life
of the 18th-century type. As an autobiographer Babur does resemble Cellini
more than Rousseau, for he is not often introspective and much of the Bahur
nama is a memoir, containing detailed narratives of a seemingly endless series of
military skirmishes, interspersed with catalogues of arcane genealogies.I5 Nonetheless, Babur-like Cellini-conveys a vivid and plausible individuality. He
offers a coherent portrait of himself as an idiosyncratic personality whose life
was, indeed, shaped by a driving force in his own psychology. In the course of
his narrative he also maintains, whether he intended to do so or not, an artistic
balance between retrospective certainty and the indeterminacy of the moment.

40

Stephen Frederic Dale

THE TEXT

Unlike Cellini's Vita, Cardano's De propria vita, and other familiar autobiographical works of the Italian Renaissance, little is known about the genesis of
the Baburnama. Nowhere in the extant Turkic text does Babur state what
prompted him to write what he himself refers to, in traditional Islamic historiographical terms, as a tiirikh. Nor does he discuss his reasons for keeping the
diary, now lost, that apparently provided the basis for the finished sections of the
Baburnarna, which he wrote between 1526 and 1529." The uncertainty both as
to how the book came to be written and the audience for whom it was intended
probably is due t o the incompleteness of the extant Turkic manuscript. It lacks
both an introduction and a conclusion; it begins with Babur describing how, in
1494, at the age of 12, he had inherited his father's small state of Ferghana: "On
Tuesday, 5 Ramadan 899 [ I 0 June 14941 in Ferghana Province, at the age of
twelve, I became ad shah."" It ends, equally abruptly, on 7 September 1529, 15
months before his death in December 1530. There are also major gaps within the
text, most significantly, an 11-year lacuna between 1508 and 15 19 and 5 years of
unrecorded events between 1520 and 1525. Annette Beveridge concludes in her
meticulous study of the Baburnama that some gaps resulted from Babur's failure
to complete certain sections, and that other pages were lost or destroyed by such
accidents as the collapse of his tent during a monsoon rainstorm in May 1529.
As Babur describes that incident:
1 was in the audience-tent, about to write . . . before I could collect papers and sections,
tent came down with porch, right on my head. God preserved me! No harm befell me!
Sections and book were drenched under water and gathered together with much diffi~ulty.'~

Most of the book's missing pages probably disappeared, though, during the
wandering exile of Babur's son and heir Humayun. He was forced from India in
1540 by the Afghan Shir Shah and only regained his Indian throne in 1555.
Despite gaps in the Baburnama and the consequent ambiguity surrounding
Babur's original reasons for keeping a diary and then composing this work, the
surviving text is itself persuasive evidence that Babur was, first of all, chronicling
the life of a Timurid prince. More particularly, he was recording the life of the
last independent mirza of Timur's lineage. His writing is suffused with a profound, unselfconscious sense of political legitimacy deriving from his Timurid
descent-the
source of his self-described "ambition for rule and desire of
conquest."'9 F r o m the vantage point of Agra and his Indian conquests, he
interpreted his life as a continuing struggle t o establish a new Timurid state. It
began with two abortive occupations of Timur's capital of Samarqand in 1497
and 1500 and reached its climax with his victories in northern India, conquests
that he justified by citing the precedent of Timur's brief occupation of Delhi in
1398." Babur was also convinced that his military feats rivaled those of any
other Timurid offspring, as he made unmistakably clear when he favorably
compared his second capture of Samarqand, with 240 men, to the seizure of
Herat in 1470 by his Timurid kinsman Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqara. While he
concluded this passage by insisting that "In writing these things, there is no
desire to magnify myself. . . ,"*I he was doing just that. Husayn Bayqara was the

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

41

greatest Timurid ruler of the late 15th and early 16th century. He died in 1506,
just two years after Babur became an independent ruler in Kabul. Husayn
Bayqara created the cultural oasis in the Khurasanian city of Herat of which
Babur himself wrote, "The whole habitable world has not such a town as Heri
had become under S1. Husain Mirza, whose orders and efforts had increased its
splendour and beauty as ten to one, rather, as twenty to one."22 By demonstrating that his own military exploits surpassed those of his illustrious relative,
Babur was laying claim to recognition as the seal of the Timurid dynasty. He
presumably intended the Baburnama t o be read by members and supporters of
various Timurid factions as well as by individuals within his own immediate
family.
If the composition of the Baburnama may be attributed, in general terms, to
the driving force of Babur's personality-his Timurid identity-it is much more
difficult to identify specific literary or historical texts that Babur may have used
as models. His dynastic sensibilities must have been heightened, and his desire to
record his own life, stimulated, by awareness of such Timurid historical works as
the Zafarnama (the Book of Victory) of Sharaf al-Din "Sharaf" Yazdi, cultural
tutor and close personal friend of Babur's maternal grandfather, the Mughal
Yunus ~ h a n . 'However,
~
profound differences of style and content distinguish
the Baburnama from Yazdi's work and from other Timurid court histories, such
as Khvandamir's Habib al-siyar, whose author became one of Humayun's court
historian^.'^ Babur wrote in his native Turkic language, now known as Chagatay;
he expressed himself in a direct, unadorned prose that seems closer in style to the
freshness and informality of the diary or court memoir than to any standard
literary or historical format.25 Both Yazdi and Khvandamir wrote in Persian,
freely using the allusive and metaphorical language that marked most courtpatronized historical writing.
A sense of the difference between these contrasting styles can be gained by
comparing narratives of the same events in the Baburnama and the Habib alsiyar. The comparison is especially telling since Khvandamir used Babur's work
to revise the Habib al-siyar. When, for example, Babur describes how he reacted
to the desertion of his own supporters in 1498, following a series of disastrous
military reverses, he wrote: "It came very hard on me; I could not help crying a
good deal. . . ."26 Khvandamir, who presumably took his account of this episode
directly from the Baburnama, observed that "when this news [of the defections]
reached the presence of the highly esteemed Padshah he was saddened at the
discord of the perfidious times."27 That Babur deliberately chose his language
and style is suggested by the contrasting preferences shown by his young cousin
Mirza Muhammad Dughlat, when he wrote his own personally informed history
of his ancestors and relatives, the Mughals of Central Asia. Muhammad Haydar
not only chose to write the Tarikh-i Rashidi in Persian, the prestigious literary
language which he probably knew no better than Babur, who composed competent Persian poetry, but he also expressed his preference for the ornate literary
style of court historians. Thus, in the introduction he apologized for his "inability
to write an elegant and ornate preface" and stated that t o give his book "an
auspicious opening" he had actually "transcribed the Prolegomena to the Zafar
nama of Sharaf-ud-Din Ali ~ a z d i . " ~ ~

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Stephen Frederic Dale

In content, the Baburnama is a remarkably variegated text. Babur's assertion


of his Timurid identity certainly constitutes the leitmotif of the narrative. The
presence of certain didactic passages suggest that Babur composed the work not
merely to inform Timurids, and posterity, of his genealogy and accomplishments
but also t o serve his heirs as a political guide, a mirror for Timurid princes. The
latter purpose seems suggested when he reflects upon his decision, taken in 1499,
to allow his troops to strip a group of captured Mughals who had earlier rebelled
against him and plundered his men:
In truth this seemed to be reasonable; our men were ordered to take what they knew to be
theirs. Reasonable and just though the order was, [I now] understand that it was a little
hasty. . . . In conquest and government, though many things may have an outward
appearance of reason and justice, yet 100,000 reflections are right and necessary as to the
bearings of each one of them. From this single incautious order of ours, what troubles!
What rebellions arose.29

Yet, many sections of the Baburnama have little evident connection with the
dynastic history and genealogy of the Timurids. Some resemble treatises on
geography and natural history, and others seem to be modeled on the memoirs
of poets.30 Although Babur does not display strikingly original insight in his
discussions of flora and fauna of Kabul and northern India, in his ad hoc
experiments with flying squirrels, or in his often scathing criticisms of poets, his
inquisitiveness and catholicity of interests led him to compose a work that ranges
far beyond the usual subjects of the tarikh format. The seeming modernity of the
Bahurnama is partly due to the precision with which Babur describes the natural
world. In this regard, the work resembles some of the more intelligent European
traveler's accounts, such as Alexander Burnes' classic, Travels into ~ o k h a r a . ~ '
Still, Babur seems atypically modern for a Muslim author of his time primarily
because he so persuasively conveys a sense of his own individuality.

T H E LINEAMENTS OF THE SELF

Following victories over Afghans and Rajputs in northern India in 1526 and
1527, Babur enjoyed short respites from campaigning and began to review his
life as he wrote parts of the Baburnama. The first or "Ferghana" section of the
work is the most polished and artistically the most satisfying as autobiography.
In it he narrates events up to his 21st year. By that time he had twice occupied
and then lost Samarqand; lost, regained, and then lost forever his Ferghana
patrimony; and had finally been forced to flee Transoxiana for Afghanistan
where, in 1504, he seized Kabul as the last possible base for a new Timurid
empire. In reflecting on his survival in the midst of these parlous circumstances,
he attributed his good fortune to "the Almighty God, who . . . has ever brought
my affairs to their right issue."32 By piously ascribing his success to divine
support Babur was, though, doing little more than exhibiting the reflexive
literary instinct of an orthodox Muslim-or that of an inheritor of Chingizid
and Timurid religious tradition^.^^ In the Ferghana section and throughout the
text, he usually attributed his success and failure to human decisions and, quite

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

43

often, to his own poor judgment. The most compelling aspect of this opening
chapter is, indeed, Babur's ability to convey a sense of his own humanity by
ingenuously relating youthful emotional crises and describing how inexperience
contributed to early military defeats and, on more than one occasion, nearly
resulted in his death.
Babur first pauses in the Baburnama to reflect on his personal life when he
remembers how he reacted to the military defeats of 1498, those that prompted
the majority of his troops to abandon him. Describing how he had just lost
Ferghana, having previously abandoned the premier prize of Samarqand, he says
of himself, "It was very hard and vexing to me.. . . Never since I had known
myself had I known such annoyance and such hardship."34 While the implications of Babur's use of the Turkic reflexive pronoun (ozum) is somewhat
ambiguous, his phrase, "Never since I had known myself. . . . (td ozumni bilib
idim) articulates a mature appreciation of his own individuality, implying that at
age 15 he already possessed a conscious apprehension of himself as a distinct
person. In modern Turkish, this phrase carries the connotation of a coming of
age, of a maturation that accompanies puberty. It probably has a similar connotation of adolescent self-awareness here. At least it is consistent with Babur's
recollection of the self-engrossed egotism that characterized his personality just
two years later, when he first married and then fell in love. Both of theseseparate-attachments, occurred in Andijan in 1500 when he was just 17 and
enjoying a brief respite from campaigning. As he describes it, the socially
conventional marriage to his first cousin 'A'isha-sultan Begum, was not successful. Writing with typically frank informality, Babur recalled, "Though I was not
ill-disposed to her, yet, this being my first marriage, out of modesty and bashfulness, I used to see her once in 10, I5 or 20 days."35 Later losing all interest in the
girl he visited her only when his mother insistently nagged him to d o so.
While Babur did not remember feeling either affection or passion for his bride,
he obviously had vivid recollections of a debilitating infatuation he developed for
a bazaar boy who was appropriately named Baburi. Recalling this attraction as a
flash of self-discovery, a sexual awakening that had not occurred at the time of
his marriage, Babur wrote:
In those leisurely days I discovered in myself a strange inclination, nay! as the verse says,
'I maddened and afflicted myself' for a boy in the camp-bazar, his very name, BZburi,
fitting in. Up till then I had had no inclination for any-one, indeed of love or desire, either
by hear-say or experience, I had not heard, I had not ta~ked.'~
After being smitten, Babur indulged in an emotional binge suffused with the
self-indulgent, adolescent angst associated with European romantic poets, a
resemblance heightened by his interspersal of the text with Persian and Turkic
couplets, such as his own Persian verse, "May none be as I, humbled, wretched
and love-sick; No beloved as thou art to me, cruel and ~areless."~'As he
describes his self-absorbed daze,
In that frothing up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to
wander bare-head, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard. I shewed
civility neither to friend nor stranger, took no care for myself or others.38

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Stephen Frederic Dale

Babur's compelling portrayal of his adolescent emotional turmoil communicates a sense of an autonomous personality to an extent that is rarely encountered
in premodern Islamic literature. By evocatively expressing emotions that, if they
are recorded at all, are usually filtered through the respectable medium of poetry,
he imbues the Ferghana portion of the text with the seemingly modern presence
that Forster and others have been quick to detect. Here, Babur not only resembles
certain autobiographical writers of the Italian Renaissance but seems similar in
outlook to Pascal's "classical" autobiographers of the late 18th and early 19th
century. These latter writers participated in the broader literary movement of
European romanticism, which vigorously asserted "the claims of the subjective
self";39 one of the reasons why Babur often seems so close in spirit to European
autobiographers is his emphasis on the significance of emotion. When he not
only candidly discusses his feelings but almost flaunts sensitivity in a Wertherlike fashion, he inevitably gives the Baburnama, at least in the minds of Western
readers, an air of romantic indulgence.
He reinforces this impression-so evocatively conveyed in his depiction of
love-sick, disconsolate, barefoot meanderings around Andijan-when
he describes his reaction to the unexpected death of a Mughal friend in 1502. This
man, Nuyan Kukaldash, evidently died when, returning drunk from a typical
Mughal party, he fell from his horse. "His death," Babur remembered, "made me
strangely sad; for few men have 1 felt such grief; I wept unceasingly for a week or
ten days."40
Babur's revelation of his subjective self is convincing partly because he shows
himself to be reacting with universally recognizable human emotions to the
particular crises of his youth-the depression that followed early military disasters, turbulent feelings engendered by adolescent love, a sense of loss following
the unexpected death of a close friend, and, in a passage near the end of the
Ferghana section, a powerfully evoked fear of death. The latter description is
included within his narrative of the defeat that he suffered in 1503, a devastating
setback that led him to abandon Transoxiana for a sanctuary in Kabul. After
fleeing alone into the hills near Aksi, in the Ferghana valley, Babur believed
himself to be threatened with capture and death. "My state of mind," he writes,
"was miserable indeed, for well is it understood that nothing in the world is
worse than fear for one's own life."41
Babur's candid portrayal of youthful emotions may be interpreted as merely
one manifestation of an oft-proclaimed concern for relating the truth about
himself and others, an assertion that is a typical conceit of European and
American a u t ~ b i o g r a ~ h e rIts .might
~ ~ also be seen as part of Babur's interest in
emphasizing the magnitude of his triumph over the dangers besetting his early
career. Whatever the interplay of motives, these passages have the effect of
adding a psychological dimension to the sense of contingency that Babur conveys
when he narrates political and military experiences.
The literary power of the Baburnama is partly due to Babur's ability to
recreate an impression of the uncertainty and ambiguity of the immediate situation, an effect that is heightened when he alludes to his psychological state
during particular moments of crisis. He has the ability to evoke that sense of

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

45

indeterminacy that Pascal believes to be characteristic of the best autobiographies.


It is a quality that is usually absent from the writings of most court historians,
whose stylistic imperatives naturally tend to emphasize the inevitable or preordained triumph of the patron. Babur never suggests that his creation of a new
Timurid empire in India was inevitable. On the contrary, by recording such
incidents as his 1503 defeat with his recollection of his "miserable state of mind,"
he stresses the fortuity of his career. He consistently implies that his life as an
aspiring Timurid emperor has been one of desperate improvisation, of ad hoc
decisions quickly taken in the midst of pressing circumstance. Nowhere does he
depict these realities more explicitly than in the Kabul section of the text, where
he describes his response to the news, in 1507, that the Uzbeks-who had
occupied most of the Timurid homelands in Transoxiana-had begun to besiege
Qandahar. Uzbek forces had conquered the last principal Timurid city of Herat
less than a year earlier, and Babur knew that if they took nearby Qandahar his
position in Kabul would become untenable.
When this news came, the begs were summoned for counsel. The matters for discussion
were these: Strangers and ancient foes, such as Shibaq Khan and the Auzbegs, are in
possession of all the countries once held by Timur Beg's descendants; even where the
Turks and Chaghatais survive in corners and border-lands, they have all joined the
Atizbeg, willingly or with aversion; one remains, I myself in Kabul, the foe mightily
strong, I very weak, with no means of making terms, no strength to oppose; that, in the
presence of such power and potency, we had to think of some place for ourselves and, at
this crisis and in the crack of time there was, to put a wider space between us and the
strong foeman; that choice lay between BadakshZn and Hindustiin and that decision must
now be made.43

Still, when Babur emphasizes the contingencies or uncertainties of his career,


he does not mean to imply that he was irresolute or plagued by self-doubt. Quite
the contrary, he pointedly characterizes himself as a self-reliant individual whose
tenacity allowed him to overcome formidable odds and to recover quickly from
defeat. Writing, for example, of his failure to retake Samarqand in 1498 he says,
"I did not sit at [sic] gaze when once or twice an affair had made no progress."44
He attributes his resolute personality to his dynastic ambitions, his Timurid
political sensibilities; in Pascal's terms, this was the "driving force" of his life,
which shaped his career and gave it meaning.
Babur's desire to portray himself as a successful Timurid mirza is a theme that
emerges even more clearly in the second, or Kabul, section of the Baburnama.
This is the fragmentary part of the work that covers aspects of his life between
1504 and 1526. Babur conveys this self-image with unmistakable clarity when he
recounts his reasons for marching from Kabul to Herat in 1506 to support
Sultan Husayn Bayqara's struggle with the Uzbeks. Noting that news of the
sultan's death had reached him before he left Kabul, he reports that he decided
to adhere to his original plan: "This news notwithstanding, we set forward for
Khurasan; though there were other grounds for doing this, what decided us was
anxious thought for the reputation of this [Timurid] dynasty."45 Then, in the
course of relating how disrespectfully his Timurid cousins treated him when he

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Stephen Frederic Dale

arrived in Herat, Babur observes that even though he was a young man he had
already by this time twice seated himself "on the throne of our forefathers in
Samarkand . . . and that to be laggard in shewing me respect was unreasonable,
since it was for this [Timarid] dynasty's sake I had thus fought and striven with
that alien foe."46
Nowhere else in the Baburnama does Babur reveal the Timurid design of this
particular autobiography as clearly as he does in these pages. He also remembers
himself at this period to have been motivated by natural as well as inherited
nobility when he insisted upon sharing the sufferings of his men during the
return journey from Herat to Kabul in the winter of 1506-1507. He and his small
group of men nearly perished in heavy mountain snows, and at one point they
took refuge in a cave. Not everyone could squeeze into this shelter so Babur
insisted upon remaining outside in the storm to endure snow and cold with his
followers.
I did not go into the cave though people kept saying, "Come inside," because this was in
my mind, "Some of my men in snow and storm, I in the comfort of a warm house! the
whole horde (afilzis) outside in misery and pain, 1 inside sleeping at ease! That would be
far from a man's act, quite another matter than comradeship."47

Still, however much Babur flattered himself by remembering this incident, his
invocation of comradeship (hamcehitlik) or common endeavor may well have
been informed by powerful memories of the new dangers that he faced in this his
24th year. His feelings were probably genuine, considering his youth and how
tenuous his royal status was. Other passages in the Kabul section show how little
he acted the austere padshah and how much he played Prince Hal, the royal
boon companion, with his men. He affectingly portrays the genuine pleasure he
took in their company in some of the poems written for his Indian diwan.
Unfortunately, the fragmentary state of the Kabul section of the Baburnama
does not allow the reader to gain much insight into Babur's perception of his
emotional and intellectual development during the more than 20 years he used
Kabul as a base. During this period he made a last, abortive attempt to reoccupy
the Timurid homelands in Transoxiana, in 1510, and initiated a series of raids
and probing actions into India before he triumphed there, in 1526. More than
two-thirds of the text that covers the years between 1504 and 1526 is missing.
Some of the surviving pages are still in unrevised diary form. Even in the pages
that he obviously wrote in India, Babur indulges in few of the introspective
recollections that enliven the Ferghana portion of his work. The birth of his son,
Humayun, in 1506, and a new marriage, in 1507, are merely noted. His lack of
comment on these events may itself reflect a certain maturity, distinguishing his
memory of these events from recollections of emotionally wrenching, adolescent
encounters in Ferghana. A sense of pride in his increasingly sophisticated military tactics does inform his memory of a victorious battle for Qandahar in 1507.
In a self-congratulatory passage he writes, "Though our men were few I had
them organized and posted on a first-rate plan and method; I had never arrayed
them before by such a good one."48 Otherwise the most notable sense of personal
change that can be detected in Babur's narration of events in these years is a

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

47

growing sense of self-confidence o r relaxation after the constant dangers and


largely unsuccessful military adventures of his youth.
Now he was willing t o taste wine, taking a n unrestrained delight in extended
drinking bouts with his companions. Having steadfastly observed Qur'anic
injunctions against drinking during his early life in Central Asia, Babur had been
persuaded t o sample wine by his dissolute Timurid relatives in Herat. Quickly he
became addicted to drinking and to the consumption of ma'jiin, that part
confection, part narcotic consumed at most parties. Babur himself initiated one
revel on 14 November 15 19, that continued as a kind of movable feast in the hills
above Kabul for nearly a week afterwards. His obvious delight in such festivities
might be taken merely as a sign that he had succumbed t o the influence of
MughalITurkic alcoholism that had indirectly caused the death of his friend
Nuyan Kukaldash, but it can also be seen as a n important indicator of his
unstructured social milieu.
On Saturday the 18th, 1 rode out of the Char-bagh at midnight, sent night-watch and
groom back, crossed Mull2 Baba's bridge, got out by the Diiirin narrows, round by the
bazars and the kdrez of the Qiishnadur (var.), along the back of the Bear-house
(khirskhdna), and near sunrise reached Tardi-beg Khdk-sdr's karez. He ran out quickly
on hearing of me. His shortness (qdldshlighi) was known; I had taken 100 shdhrukhis
[& 51 with me; 1 gave him these and told him to get wine and other things ready as 1 had a
fancy for a private and unrestrained party. He went for wine towards Bih-zadi; I sent my
horse by his slave to the valley-bottom and sat down on the slope behind the kdrez. At
the first watch [9 a.m.] Tardi Beg brought a pitcher of wine which we drank by turns.
After him came Muhammad-i-qasim Barlds [sic] and Shah-zada who had got to know of
his fetching the wine, and had followed him, their minds quite empty of any thought
about me. We invited them to the party. Said Tardi Beg, "Hul-hul Aniga wishes to drink
wine with you." "For my part, I never saw a woman drink wine; invite her." We also
invited Shahi, a qalandar, and one of the kdrez-men who played the rebeck. There was
drinking till the Evening Prayer on the rising ground behind the kdrez; we then went into
Tardi-Beg's house and drank by lamp-light almost till the Bed-time Prayer. The party
was quite free and unpretending. I lay down, the others went to another house and drank
there till beat of drum [midnight]. Hul-hul Aniga came in and made me much disturbance;
I got rid of her at last by flinging myself down as if drunk.49
By including this description, Babur was also, in the autobiographical mold of
St. Augustine and other authors of spiritual quests, constructing a dramatic
contrast between a n undisciplined youth and a pious maturity. Less than a
decade after this party Babur had come t o regard such episodes as signs of
spiritual immaturity. "I lived unconcernedly," he wrote about such incidents, "I
lived at the whim of personal pleasure."50 Concern for his soul's fate rather than
the transitory pleasure of social gatherings pervades the text of the Indian section
of the Baburnama, which covers the years from 1526 t o 1530. In these pages,
while Babur describes military campaigns that he conducted t o consolidate his
new Timurid state, he becomes increasingly introspective and reflective; the
perfunctory orthodoxy that he displayed in the first two sections gives way t o
earnest piety, and youthful exuberance is replaced by simple nostalgia. Similar
themes emerge in the poems of the diwan that Babur wrote during this period.

48

Stephen Frederic Dale

With considerable poignancy he evokes a sense of himself as an aging, tired and


somewhat disappointed old man. Especially in the poems of the 1528 Indian
diwan he recalls neglected religious vows and reflects o n the ephemeral nature of
life. He composed most of these verses while he was ill and at a time when he
was experiencing continued military and political difficulties in his imperfectly
subjugated empire. One poem particularly reflects his problematic health and
concern for spiritual union with God.
I am unwell, but the path is far.
Life is short, but the road is distant.
The pointer of the road is lost to me.
What should bring me to the goal?"

Babur's increasing concern for his health is also manifested in the pages of the
Baburnama that narrate events for the fall of 1528, the time when he was
composing verses for the diwan. In one passage he expresses belief that an
invocation t o his family's deceased Naqshbandi pir Khvaja Ahrar might relieve
his symptoms. Therefore, he decided t o versify one of Khvaja Ahrar's texts as a
pious offering.
I laid it to heart that if I, going to the soul of his Reverence for protection, were freed
from this disease, it would be a sign that my poem was accepted. . . . To this end I began
to versify the tract, using the metre of Maulana 'Abdu'r rahim Jgmi's, Subhatu'l-abriir
(Rosary of the ~ i g h t e o u s ) . ~ ~

Babur was cured within six days, but recurring illness now led him t o be
increasingly concerned with his spiritual state. According to his testimony, he
now vigorously condemned activities that so enlivened pages of the Kabul
section of the Baburnama. His poem, which begins, "you are a captive to
debauchery and pleasure," dramatically signals this change. He continues:
Bliss from ma'jiin and wine.

Friendship with young girls.

Intoxicated with boon companions. . . .


All this is transitory and fleeting.53

Babur had publicly renounced wine drinking two years before he composed
verses for the diwan, although as he wrote on February 10, 1529, to Khvaja
Kalan, his governor of Kabul, " . . . in truth the longing and craving for a wineparty has been infinite and endless for two years past, so much so that sometimes
the craving for wine brought me to the verge of tears."54
Another group of poems in the 1528 diwan brings the reader back full circle to
the initial pages of the Ferghana section. In these powerfully evocative verses
Babur describes his homesickness for the clear, dry air, the fruit and gardens of
Afghanistan and Central Asia. Neither he nor most of his followers cared much
for their newly captured territories; Babur himself pointedly criticizes Hindustan's
lack of gardens, melons and social intercourse. Illnesses which he suffered in
India's oppressive heat and humidity intensified his feeling of being a refugee, a
stranger in a strange land. He desired to return once more to the mountain
gardens near Kabul or to the Ferghana valley of his youth. Writing with his

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

49

usual directness in a poem that utilizes sufi imagery for the effect of the final line,
he expresses his contradictory feelings:
I have derived much wealth from India.
I d o not know why this land oppresses me so.
Being in this far off land do not perish Babur
Excuse me 0 loved one for this my insufficiency.55

In a companion verse he restates his feeling of being stranded, far from his
homeland.
For a long time I have had neither beloved nor lands.

I have no rest, although [I] should for one moment.

Although I wished to come here I am not able to return.56

These last lines echo sentiments he prosaically expresses in his letter to Khvaja
Kalan, in which he plaintively asks, "How should a person forget the pleasant
things of these countries, especially one who has repented and vowed to sin no
more? How should he banish from his mind the permitted flavours of melons
and grapes?"57
STEPPE H U M A N I S M

Babur's wistful longing for his Afghan territories or his Central Asian homeland
appropriately concludes an autobiographical memoir that contains what is
probably the most fully realized self-portrait in the literature of the premodern
Islamic world. Writing both poetry and prose in styles that convincingly convey
his own individuality, Babur successfully imparts a sense of aging; the uninhibited
emotions of his youth in Ferghana give way to the reflective melancholy of his
last days in India. His achievement can be understood most easily when his
self-portrait is compared to the treatment of his personality by court historians.
They strip him of his individuality with metaphor and ornamentation and depict
him as a type: the charismatic conqueror, the pious, ascetic Muslim, and the
great king. Abu al-Fazl, the court historian of Babur's grandson Akbar, mythologizes Babur in this way:
His pearl-like nature was a station for the marks of greatness and sublimity; freedom and
detachment together with lofty restraint and majestic power flashed forth in his nature; in
asceticism and absorption (faqr Li fund) a Junid [sic] and Biiyazid; while the magnificence
and genius of an Alexander and of a Faridfin shone from his

Abu al-Fazl's prose, while an exaggerated example of hyperbolic court style,


reflects prevailing literary norms that shaped the composition of dynastic histories
in premodern Indo-Persian culture.
The Baburnama's place in the intellectual history of the Islamic world appears
to be analogous to that of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima, an anomalous exception
to established literary norms and social interests of society.59Just as modern
readers find the autobiographical content of Babur's writing remarkably contemporary, so European and American scholars have generally regarded the
Muqaddima as a modern work, albeit for the distinct reason that it posits

50

Stephen Frederic Dale

civilizational laws from social relationships. In their own times, though, neither
Ibn Khaldun nor Babur stimulated the development of new historical o r literary
genres. Babur, at least, did inspire imitators, most notably his great-grandson
Jahangir, who also narrates his life in the first person; the book, the Tiizuk-i
Jahangiri, possesses little of the ingenuous charm and vitality that distinguishes
the ~ a b u r n a m a . ~ ~
The failure of the Baburnama t o trigger a n epidemic of literary egotism is
probably directly due t o the influence of those cultural values that von Grunebaum identified as responsible for discouraging portrayals of individuality in
premodern Islamic culture. Apart from the implicit but persuasive testimony of
extant literature, an unusually explicit indication that these values persisted into
the 19th century is Alexander Burnes's anecdote about a n encounter he had
while traveling from Kabul t o Bukhara in 1832. Burnes, who seems t o have had
a good command of colloquial Persian, met a
Khwaja . . . both a priest and a merchant. . . . I gave him the perusal of a small Persian
work, the "Memoirs of King Shooja of Cabool." The book was written by the King
himself; and gives a detail of his life and adventures free from the extracts of the Koran,
metaphors and other extravagancies of oriental authors. . . . The work was, in fact, what
would be called an interesting detail of events. The Khwaja returned it to me a few days
after, saying that it was a dry production, not enlivened by the fear of God or a
remembrance of the Prophet, but entirely occupied with matters of a personal nature."
While the opinion of a Central Asian alim and trader should not necessarily be
taken to represent the attitudes of all Muslims, the khvaja's negative reaction to
the Afghan monarch's memoirs makes it easier to understand the cultural
significance of works such as the Baburnama. They were valued as sources of
information o r dynastic pride for a ruler's descendants o r as mines of information f o r professional historians such as Khwandamir rather than as literary
models for a type of self-expression that departed from prevailing social and
religious norms.
If the Baburnama is properly regarded as a n anomaly in Islamic literary
culture then the question of its genesis remains unanswered. It may not be
possible t o trace the stylistic and autobiographical characteristics of the work t o
specific genres o r particular texts, but it still may be hypothesized that certain
aspects of Babur's political and social environment fostered its composition.
Babur was, of course, compelled to become self-reliant at a very young age. It
would have been surprising if his life had not forced him into a greater degree of
self-awareness than he might have evolved if he had matured within the protective confines of his father's court. His decision t o keep a diary may have been
influenced by just such self-awareness-or perhaps he wrote it because he believed
that in the prevailing turmoil of his early life it would be u p to him t o record his
own dynastic history. In his early years at least, his camps-the roughly constituted courts of a n aspiring emperor-usually lacked the scribes, portrayed in
Mughal miniature paintings, who recorded every public utterance of his descendants ruling from Agra and Delhi. Babur's clear, concise style may well have
been derived directly from the diary format, but it also seems possible that it was

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

51

influenced by his situation as a man of affairs operating in confused and unstable


circumstances that would have placed a premium on direct, succinct expression.
He forcefully expressed his preference for clear, spare prose in personal communications when he reprimanded his son Humayun for writing him an
ambiguously worded letter: "Although thy letter can be read if every sort of
pains be taken, yet it cannot be quite understood because of that obscure
wording of thine. . . . In future write without elaboration; use clear, plain words.
So will thy trouble and thy reader's be less."62
Babur's preference for lucid private correspondence, however, does not explain
why he should retain a similar style in the polished sections of his text. Literate
Muslims easily distinguished between styles that were appropriate for distinct
genres or situations. Babur's distinctive autobiographical style and content may
have been facilitated by his seminomadic life, which freed him from the influences
and dictates of court literary etiquette. He spent nearly all of his life on campaign,
as he recalled in 1527 when he wrote, "Since my 11th year I had not kept the
Ramzan feast for two successive years in the same place."63 In consequence his
Turkic prose manifested the vigor and particularity of a vernacular language,
remaining largely unaffected by courtly adab culture of Muslim states that, in
von Grunebaum's view, combined with social norms and religious values to
militate against portrayals of individuality.64The literature of this refined, aristocratic court culture had gradually evolved into a belles-lettres tradition. Regard
for specificity, simplicity, and precision, which is said to have shaped premodern
Islamic Iranian adab composition, had given way to a preference for elaborate,
stylized expression and indirection of speech.65Babur, who strove throughout his
life to refine his own verse style in both Chagatay and Persian, was to a certain
extent a part of this largely secular court culture. However, he represented the
tradition at its most vigorous; his compositions showed little evidence of its
increasingly stultifying restrictions.
The influence of camp life may by itself have been partly responsible for the
openness with which Babur discusses both his own feelings and the individual
characteristics of others-including, significantly, the personalities of women.
His willingness to depict women-not simply as individuals, but as persons with
negative as well as positive traits-offers an important clue to the source of his
atypical social candor, for women are rarely treated at length in premodern
Islamic literature, except as stereotypical objects of romantic love. Rarely are
they accorded genuine personalities, as is Khadija Begum, one of Husayn
Baiqara's wives. This woman, Babur writes, "took herself for a sensible woman
but was a silly chatterer [and] may also have been a heretic [a ~ h i ' a ] . " It
~ ~seems
likely that Babur's frankness derived in some measure from his experience in the
Turco-Mongol ordii, the relatively fluid, unstructured camp society in which he
usually lived. While both Turkistan and Afghanistan had cities whose society
was clearly stratified, religiously conservative, and strongly influenced by Persian
literary norms, the Central Asian and Afghan countryside and Babur's immediate
entourage were still dominated by Turkic, Mughal, and Afghan tribes and tribal
fragments. Kabul and Ghazni, Babur wrote, "were full of a turbulent and illconducted medley of people and hordes, Turks and Mughiils, clans and nomads

52

Stephen Frederic Dale

(aimaq u ahsham), Afghans and Hazara. . . ."67 Social relations within this
milieu were strikingly casual, unpretentious, and egalitarian. Babur's description
of his return march from Qandahar in 1506-1507 and the revel near Kabul in
1519 reveal how open and informal were the relations of his immediate social
environment. The cameraderie of common endeavor was still fundamentally
important, and even an obscure Turkic woman, the troublesome Hul-hul Aniga,
could drink openly and raucously with a padshah, the title Babur had assumed
after taking Kabul in 1504.
During most of his life in Ferghana and Afghanistan Babur lived in a frontier
society, but the frontier was not defined primarily in terms of its location-"at
the extreme north of the fashionable world," as Forster wittily characterized the
geography of Babur's homeland-but
it was a boundary that distinguished
societies of the Central Asian and Afghan countryside-including the small
towns of Andijan, Kabul, and Ghazni-from the more hierarchical, socially, and
religiously conservative urban populations of Samarqand, Bukhara, and Herat.
Viewed from a slightly different perspective, the Baburnama may be partly
explained or regarded as the work of a man who represented an intermediate
stage in Ibn Khaldun's scheme of evolution from "Bedouin" savagery and dynamism to urban, cultured decadence. Social groups that represented all of Ibn
Khaldun's generations or stages could be found coexisting in Central Asia and
Afghanistan of the late 15th century. Shaybani Khan's ferocious, untutored
Uzbeks were one group personifying the first stage; Babur's Timurid cousins in
Herat embodied characteristics of the decadent, concluding evolutionary phase.
The Herat Timurids had lost their savagery and group feeling; they could
socialize but their taste, training, and organization for battle had atrophied.
When Uzbek armies threatened Herat in 1506,
Three months it took the Mirzas to get out of Heri, agree amongst themselves, collect
troops and reach Murgh-5b. The Mirzas were good enough as company and in social
matters, in conversation and in parties, but they were strangers to war, strategy, equipment, bold fight and e n ~ o u n t e r . ~ '

Babur himself might be perceived as a member of the Timurid lineage who


represented an atypical reversal of Ibn Khaldun's cycle of inevitable dynastic
decline. His intellect had been stimulated and his personality had been polished
by the refined Persian culture of the Central Asian steppe-or by that which had
been brought to the area directly from Iran by his Mughal grandfather Yunus
~ h a n . By
~ ' composing Persian love lyrics he showed his partial assimilation to
that civilization. At the same time Babur had been compelled by force of
circumstance to retain a degree of "Bedouin" savagery, the "natural" vigor
possessed by tribes of the desert and steppe. His Turkic and Mughal companions
remained largely untouched by the social constraints and debilitating influences
that had contributed to the fall of Timurid Herat. Mughals among them still
exhibited the casual rapacity of the truly savage "Bedouin." Babur's untutored
military boldness, his unaffected social openness, and the direct simplicity of his
prose might all be regarded in some measure as attributes of his arrested state of
social and cultural evolution. Yet, if Ibn Khaldun's thesis offers clues to his
success as an autobiographer, it also suggests a general explanation for his

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

53

failure to reestablish a Timurid empire in Turkistan or western Afghanistan.


However personally brave and capable, Babur never possessed a coherent tribal
following that had social cohesion-Ibn Khaldun's "group feeling," that would
have enabled him to defeat the genuinely nomadic Uzbeks. In these circumstances an urban-based, agrarian empire in Hindustan represented the last, best
hope for the restoration of Timurid fortunes.

CONCLUSION

It is ultimately unlikely that it will be possible to offer more than an hypothesis


to explain the Baburnama and the intensely personal verse of Babur's Indian
diwan, any more than it has been feasible to assign precisely satisfactory reasons
for Ibn Khaldun's composition of the Muqaddima. The exact sources or
influences of Babur's inspiration may remain hypothetical, but that ambiguity
should not detract from the significance of his writings as works that help to
humanize Islamic civilization. The Baburnama populates 15th- and 16th-century
Islamic society with genuine personalities, not just that of Babur himself, but
also the dozens of others whose individuality he conveys as precisely as he
describes the natural world. When, for example, Babur observes of Husayn
Bayqara that he "could not perform the prayers on account of a trouble in the
joints," he immediately transforms the abstracted, mythic figure of the Timurid
pantheon into a memorable, idiosyncratic individual. In fact, Babur resembles
certain Italian Renaissance literary figures not merely because he composed an
autobiography but because of his "appreciation of the concrete, the specific and
the unique"70 in people and nature, a cultural attitude and literary taste usually
associated with the "social and intellectual climate of Renaissance ~ l o r e n c e . " ~ '
Babur's work represents an important literary legacy for students of pre
modern Islamic civilization. His writings offer an antidote to counteract the
Orientalists' depersonalized vision of Muslim societies. This vision treats Muslims
as categories rather than as individuals, although the stereotypes are not always
Western preconceptions, but sometimes reflect conventional representations
found in Islamic literature. The example of Babur's work is more likely to be
effective in nullifying such misleading generalizations than is Edward Said's
powerful but unrelenting polemic.72 Standing within an Islamic society, Babur
reveals individual Muslims to be emotional and intellectual, pious, ambitious,
depraved, eccentric, manic chess players, verbose poets, loyal friends, untrustworthy followers, sensitive naturalists, aggressive women, inept military tacticians, recovered alcoholics, and nostalgic conquerors. He humanizes the steppe,
Afghanistan and the north Indian plain as effectively as Chaucer animates 14thcentury England or Cellini invigorates Renaissance Italy. His writings ought to
be regarded as fundamentally significant texts of Islamic civilization, even if the
events he describes occur in an area that many may think of as an obscure and
insignificant frontier region of the Islamic world.
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

OHIO STATE U N I V E R S I T Y

54

Stephen Frederic Dale

NOTES

Author's note: Part of this research was carried out under a grant from the Social Science
Research Council. The article was first presented at the Ohio State University Humanities Symposium, April, 1988. I am grateful to my colleagues, June and Paul Fullmer, and to former editor
Peter van Sivers for valuable suggestions that have been incorporated into the final draft.
' ~ u s t a v eE . van Grunebaum, "Self-Expression: Literature and History," and "The Human Ideal,"
in idem, Medieval Islam, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1953), pp. 221 -93. See also Fedwa Malti-Douglas,
Blindness and Autobiography (Princeton. N . J . , 1988). In her discussion of the many examples of
premodern Arabic autobiographical literature, Malti-Douglas echoes von Grunebaum when she says,
"Autobiography was a literary form well known to the medieval Arabs. . . . But there is a basic
difference between classical and modern Arabic conceptions of literature. ( . . . ) [In modern Arabic
literature] there can be seen a totally transformed relationship between the individual and the work
of art. The literary text ceases to be an expression of collective norms and becomes a personal work,
expressing and centering on the individual" (pp. 9-10). The standard study of Arabic autobiography
is Franz Rosenthal's, "Die arabische Autobiographie," Studia Arahica, I [Analecia Orientalia, 14
(1937)], 1-40. See also Sergei E. Shuishkii, "Some Observations on Modern Arabic Autobiography,"
Journal of Arabic Literaturu, 13 (1982). 1 I 1 23. Maria Subtelny discusses autobiographical and
biographical literature of the Timurid period in "Scenes from the Literary Life of Timurid Herat," in
Roger Savory and Dionisius A. Agius, eds., Logos Islamikos: Studia Islamica in Honorem Georgii
Miyhaelis Wickens (Toronto, 1984), pp. 137-45.
-Van Grunebaum, "Self-Expression: Literature and History," and "The Human Ideal," in van
Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, pp. 275, 223-24.
'AS is generally known, the use of the term "Mughal" as a label for Babur's Indian dynasty is a
misnomer, for although Babur's mother was of Mongol lineage, Babur spoke and largely wrote
Chagatay and thought of himself as a Turk and, more particularly, as a Timurid. His "claim" to
India was based upon Timur's invasion of India and sack of Delhi in 1398. See Annette Susannah
Beveridge, trans. and ed., The BShur-nama in English, 2nd ed. (London, 1969), pp. 382-85.
"he Chagatay text has been edited by A. S. Beveridge, The BSbar-nSma (repr. London, 1971).
Beveridge meticulously edited her translation of the text cited in n. 3. J. L. Baquk-Grammont
recently published a new French translation, Le livre de Babur (Paris, 1980). Sabakat Azimdzhanova
describes Russian and Uzbek editions of the text in her partial biography, Gosudarstvo Babura v
Kabule i v Indii (Moscow, 1977). R e ~ i tRahmeti Arat did a modern Turkish translation in 1943.
Vekayi Babur'un hatiratr (Ankara, 1943). For Babur's verse, see S. Azimdzhanova, Indiiskii divan
Babura (Tashkent, 1966); E . Denison Ross, "A Collection of Poems by the Emperor Babur," Journal
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, N.S., 6 (1910), 1 42; Saibek Hasanov, trans., Babur, 2 vols.
(Tashkent, 1982); and Annemarie Schimmel, "Babur Padishah, the Poet, with an Account of the
Poetical Talent in His Family," Islamic Culture, 24 (April 1960), 125-38. Babur's treatise on Turkic
prosody has been edited with an introduction by A. V. Steblevoi, Traktat oh aruze (Moscow, 1972).
A Russian translation of the work is contained in the first volume of Hasanov's Bahur. pp. 91-107.
' ~ o h nPope-Hennessy, CeNini (New York, 1985), p. 16.
6~everidge,The BSbur-nSma in English, p. Iviii.
7 ~ M.
. Forster, "The Emperor Babur," in Abinger Harvest (New York, 1964), p. 303. 1 am
indebted to Guy Welbon of the University of Pennsylvania for introducing me to this delightful essay
which stimulated my interest in studying Babur's life.
' ~ o yPascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London, 1960). p. 22. In his monumental
study of autobiography Georg Misch recognized the Bahurnama as autobiographical literature in his
work Geschichte der Autohiographie, 4 vols. (Frankfurt, 1962), 111, 2: 960-61. It is more common for
scholars of autobiography to proceed from the assumption that the genre is "a phenomenon peculiar
to Western culture," as John Paul Eakin remarks in his eloquent work, Fictions in Autobiography
(Princeton, N.J., 1985). p. 224.
' ~ a s c a l ,De~ignand Truth in Autobiography, chap. 3, "The Classical Age of Autobiography."
10
Ibid., p. I.
"lbid., p. 10. Eakin repeatedly restates this point even more strongly, describing "autobiography . . .
as a ceaseless process of identity formation in which new versions of the past evolve to meet the
constantly changing requirements of the self in each successive event" (Fictions in Autobiography,

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

55

p. 36). See also the invaluable bibliographic essay by William G. Spengemann, "The Study of Autobiography," in idem, The Forms of Autobiography (New Haven, Conn., 1980), pp. 170245.
12pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 19. Eakin, in the course of making this same
point, quotes Eric Erikson's discussion of identity formation in Young Man Luther. Erikson wrote:
"By accepting some definition as to who he is, usually on the basis of a function in an economy, a
place in the sequence of generations, and a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to
selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, o r
better, he seems to have planned it" (Fictions In Autobiography, p. 109, n. 32). For an extended
discussion of personal identity formation, see Jonathan Glover, I: The Philosophy and Psychology of
Personal Identity (London, 1988); Adam Morton's review of Glover's book, "Creators of Ourselves,"
Times Literary Supplement, January 27-February 2, 1989, p. 77.
and Truth in Autobiography, p. 17.
1 3 ~ a s c aDesign
l,
I41bid., p. 31.
'A number of scholars distinguish between autobiography and memoir. Karl Joachim Weintraub
considers the difference to be that of introspection, which is characteristic of autobiography. "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness," Critical Enquiry, 1,4 (June 1975), 821-48. Roy Pascal
believes the distinction reflects a contrast in emphasis and focus. He writes: "The line between
autobiography and memoir or reminiscence is much harder t o draw-or rather, no clean line can be
drawn. . . . In the autobiography proper, attention is focused on the self, in the memoir or reminiscence, on others" (Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 5).
I6~everidge,The Biibur-ntfma in English, p. 445, n. I; p. 678, n. 4 & 6.
I7Beveridge, The Babar-ncima, fol. 2.
"Beveridge, The Babur-niima in English, p. 678.
I91bid., p. 92.
bid., p. 382.
"lbid., p. 135.
"lbid., p. 300.
21
For Yazdi's works see C. A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Biobibliographical Survey, 2 vols.,
(London, 1970), 1: 283-87.
24
Ibid., pp. 101-9, 536. Khvandamir, a native of Herat, spent most of his life in that city. In 1527,
he left for Qandahar and in 1528 arrived in India, where he was welcomed by Babur, accompanying
the latter on his campaigns into Bengal. Khvandamir continued revising the Habib a/-siyar during
this period, making use of at least the recently completed Ferghana section of the Babur nama. N. D.
Mikhluko-Maklai analyzes the relationship between the two texts in his article, "Khondamir i
'zapiski' BBbura," Tiurkologicheskie lssledovaniia (Moscow/ Leningrad, 1963), 237-49. After Babur's
death in 1530, Khvandamir became a member of Humayun's court circle.
25
George Makdisi discusses the composition and stylistic peculiarities of diaries in early Islamic
culture. "The Diary in Islamic Historiography," History and Theory, 25,2 (1986), 173-85. In commenting on an earlier draft of this article, Cornell Fleischer of Washington University suggested to
me that, based upon his knowledge of the Ottoman archives, the stylistic peculiarities were, in general
terms, similar to aide-memoire o r other internal documents that had a limited circulation within the
court.
26
Beveridge, The Biibur-niima in English, p. 91.
27
GhiyBs al-Din b. Humam Muhammad KhvBndamir, Tarikh-i habib a/-siyar, ed. J. H u m I J i
(Tehran, 13331 1954). IV: 261.
28
N. Elias and E. Denison Ross, ed. and trans., A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia Being
the Tarikh-i Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlat, 2nd ed. (repr. London, 1972), p. 2.
29
Beveridge, The Bcibur-niima in English, pp. 104-5. It seems characteristic that if Babur felt his
experiences could serve as guides for political tactics, he did not transpose his reflections into the
generalized, depersonalized style that characterized the "mirrors for princes" literature with which he
may have been familiar, such as the Qiibus and Siyasat namas. Both works were written in Iran in
the 1 Ith century. See E. G. Browne's account of the texts, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (repr.
Cambridge, 1964), 11: 212-17, 276-87.
30
Babur's sections on geography and the flora and fauna of Hindustan bear a general resemblance
to Muslim geographical works such as that of Ibn Hawkal, Configuration de la terre (Kit& pirat
al-ard), ed. and trans. J. N. Kramers and G. Wiet (Paris, 1964). A poetic memoir written by one of

56

Stephen Frederic Dale

Babur's virtual contemporaries is the Badayi' al-vaqciyic by Zayn al-Din Vgsifi. Maria Subtelny of
Toronto University describes it in "Scenes from the Literary Life of Timtirid Herat." Vasifi's work,
completed in Tashkent in 1538-1539, is, like the Babur nama, an unofficial composition. It is also
strongly autobiographical, frank and direct. 1 am indebted to Professor Subtelny for sending me a
copy of this article and for introducing me to much of the scholarly literature on the Timurid period.
" ~ l e x a n d e r Burnes, Travels into Bokhara. . . in the years 1831, 1832 and 1833, 2nd ed., 3 vols.
(London, 1835).
32
Beveridge, The Biibur-nama in English, p. 3 1.
33
Beatrice F. Manz describes Timur's invocation of divine sanction for his conquests in "Tamerlane
and the Symbolism of Sovereignty," Iranian Studies, 21, 1-2 (1988), 117. Babur invokes Timur to
legitimize his own conquests but only rarely does he cite Chingizid or other steppe traditions as a way
to explain or justify his own conduct.
34
Beveridge, The Biibar-ncima, fol. 54b. Re$ Arat translates this crucial sentence into 20th-century
Turkish as follows: "Kendimi bileliden beri bu kadar iztirap ve m e ~ a k k a tqekmemi~tim"(Vekayi
Babur'un hatirati, p. 57).
35
Beveridge, The Biibur-niima in English, p. 120.
36
Ibid., p. 120. The sense of adolescence that Beveridge conveys in her translation accurately
reflects the Chagatay text. "Meyn onka garib meyl peyda klldlm, belkim onka ozini zar ve sheyda
k~ldlm"(Beveridge, The Bcibar-niima, fol. 75b). Professor Arat translates these lines as follows:
"Bende ona k a r ~ igarib bir meyil peyda oldu; hattP ona kendimi zBr ve ~ e y d ak~ldlm"(Vekayi
Babur'un hatirati, p. 79).
37
Beveridge, The BrThur-nama in English, p. 120. The verses are as follows: "Hich kas chiin kharab
va'ashiq va rusva mubad,// Hich mahjiibi chii to bi rahm va bi pirva mubad." (Beveridge, The
Biibar-niima, fol. 75b).
38
Beveridge, The Bcibur-niima in English, p. 121. Ehsan Yarshater points out that poets commonly
addressed Persian love lyrics to males ("The Development of Iranian Literatures," in Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Persian Literature [Albany, N.Y., 19881, 25). The verse forms and vocabulary of such
lyrics were, of course, highly stylized. Annemarie Schimmel suggested that this passage might be an
adaptation of Sufi descriptions of spiritual wanderings. If Professor Schimmel is correct, this is good
indication of how Babur, like Cellini, could adapt existing genres or imagery to his autobiographical
purpose. Pope-Hennessy discusses Cellini's Vita as a variant of a well-known Florentine genre, the
memoriali (Cellini, p. 12).
39
Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p. 5 1.
4U
Beveridge, The BGbur-niima in English, p. 152.
41
Ibid., p. 182.
42
Writing about the disloyalty of supporters in Kabul in 1507 Babur says, "I do not write this in
order to make complaint: I have written the plain truth. I d o not set these matters down in order to
make known my own deserts; I have set down exactly what has happened. In this History 1 have held
firmly to it that the truth should be reached in every matter. . ." (Beveridge, The Babur-nama in
English, p. 318). Pascal and Eakin both dwell on the claims of Rousseau, the first "classical"
autobiographer, that he was completely truthful. Eakin takes Pascal's observation that each autobiographer designs his own life as the theme of his work, arguing that it is impossible to know
whether autobiographers actually present themselves accurately or truthfully. "Whether the self, that
'certain intricate watermark,' is literally dis-covered, made 'visible' in autobiography, or is only
invented by it as a kind of signature, a kind of writing, is beyond our knowing" (Eakin, Fictions in
Autobiography, p. 278). This epistemological question is an issue that is distinct from the present
discussion of Babur's perception and literary presentation of his individuality.
43
Beveridge, The Biibur-nama in English, p. 340. For a discussion of the Uzbek state, see Martin B.
Dickson, "Shah Tahmasp and the Ozbeks (The Duel for Khurasan with 'Ubayd Khan: 9 3 0 ~
9461 1524-1540)," Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1958, chap. 2, "The Political Situation
Among the Uzbeks."
14
Beveridge, The Bcibur-ncima in English, p. 92.
1s
Ibid., p. 295.
16
Ibid., p. 299.
47
Ibid., p. 310 and Beveridge, The Bcibar-niima, fol. 194b.
18
The Biibur-ncima in English, p. 334.

Autobiographical Writings of Babur

57

49
Ibid., p. 417. The "qalandar" whom Babur invited to his party represented a socially and
religiously marginal group discussed by Simon Digby in his fascinating article, "Elements of Social
Deviance in the Religious Life of the Delhi Sultanate of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," in
Yohanan Friedmann, ed., Islam in Asia (Boulder, Colo., 1984), 60-108.
*OS. Azimdzhanova, Indiiskii divan Babura (Tashkent: Fan, 1966), pp. 48-49. I have largely
followed Azimdzhanova's translations here.
5'lbid., p. 45.
52
Beveridge, The BGbur-ntfma in English, p. 620. The connection between Timurids and Khvaja
Ahrar is summarized by 0. D. Chekovitch in his edition of Naqshbandi waqfdocuments, Samar
kandskie dokumenty (Moscow, 1974), pp. 14-28. I am indebted to Thomas Allsen of Trenton State
University for introducing me to this work and generously sharing with me his exceptional knowledge
of sources for Central Asian history.
Indiiskiidivan Bahura, pp. 47-48.

S3~zimdzhanova,
54
Beveridge, The Btfbur-ntfmain English, p. 648.

Indiiskii divan Babura, pp. 49-50.


SS~zimdzhanova,

56
Ibid., p. 50.
57
Beveridge, The Bahur-ntfma in English, p. 645.
58
Henry Beveridge, trans. and ed., The Akbar Nama of Ahu-1-Fazl, 3 vols. (Delhi, 1987), I: 22324. For a discussion of court historiography in general and of that of Timur in particular, see E. A.
Polyakova, "Timur as Described by 15th-Century Court Historians," in Iranian Studies, 21, 1-2
(1988), 31-44.
59
'Abd al-Rahmgn Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, N.J.,
1969). N. Talbi writes of Ibn Khaldun's impact, "thus the atypical figure of Ibn Khaldun in AraboMuslim culture has been unanimously considered, since his discovery in Europe, as that of an
authentic genius. . . . Certainly a 'solitary genius,' he does not belong to any definite current of
Arabo-Muslim thought. . . . His thinking represents a radical change, which unfortunately remained
as unproductive as his political midadventures." Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1971), 111:
830-31.
60
Alexander Rogers and Henry Beveridge, trans. and ed., The Ttizuk-i-Jahangiri, 2nd ed. (New
Delhi, 1968). Jahangir's less interesting memoirs might be interpreted as the product of one who
represented a later, "decadent," phase of Mughal dynastic history in Ibn Khaldun's schema of the rise
and fall of dynasties.
6 ' ~ u r n e sT
, ravels into Bokhara, 11: 219.
62
Beveridge, The BrThur-nama in English, pp. 626-27. Over a century and a half later Sir John
Chardin reported a dramatic anecdote from the Safavid court that illustrated a high official's
preference for clear, concise prose. Chardin was told of an instance in which a "molla" was severely
beaten for having presented a petition written in the ornate, elliptical style of the eulogy "where the
Sense was so confus'd and perplex'd with Compliments, and old Canting stuff, that it was a difficult
Matter to penetrate into the Meaning thereof, with ever so great an Attention. After this miserable
Wretch had receiv'd so severe a Punishment, the First minister caus'd him to be brought before
him. . . . 'A Great Vizier' said he to him, 'has other Business to do than to read thy sorry Compliments, and to unravel and disentangle the Chaos of the Petitions thou writest: Use a more simple and
clear Style, or else d o not write for the Publick; for otherwise 1'11 cause thy Hands to be cut off"'
(Travels in Persia, 1673-77 [New York, 19881, p. 97).
63
Beveridge, The BrThur-nama in English, p. 584. Maria Subtelny has pointed out that Babur was
not unique in his consciousness of having lived a chaotic wandering life and that the term qazaqli'q,
translated by Beveridge as "guerilla days," which he uses to describe his early career in Ferghana, was
a well-developed concept among Turkic pastoralists. See her article, "Babur's Rival Relations: A
Study in Kinship and Conflict in 15th-16th Century Central Asia," Der Islam, 66, 1 (1989), 10218.
64
von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam, pp. 250-57. The phrase "courtly adab culture" is used advisedly
here since adab refers to a wide variety of contexts in a way that is somewhat analogous to the use of
dharma in South Asian Sanskritic culture. For a collection of articles on noncourtly adab see
Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley, 1984).
65
An opinion expressed by Charles Pellat in his lengthy article, "Adab," in Ehsan Yarshater, ed.,
Encyclopaedia Iranica (London, 1985), 1: 433, 436. Pellat writes: "As regards the art of composition
and rhetoric, the Iranians ideally gave weight to meaning and were wary of verbal ornamentation

58

Stephen Frederic Dale

which might distract the reader or hearer from the subject. . . . In the light of the foregoing, the
desiderata of prose and verse style in Pahlavi and in Persian of the 4th/ 10th and 5th/ l lth centuries
may be summarized as "brevity. . . simplicity and imaginativeness."
66
Beveridge, The BrThur-nama in English. p. 268. A. K. S. Lambton offers valuable insight into the
influential role of women in Turco-Mongol society. See "The Constitution of Society (2) Women of
the Ruling House," in A. K. S. Lambton, ed., Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia (London,
1988).
67
The BrThur-nama in English, p. 300.
68
Ibid., pp. 299 -300.
69
Yunas Khan, who spent a long period of exile in Iran, combined Mughal steppe and Iranian
urban culture in a manner that excited Babur's cousin Haydar Mirza's admiration. He wrote that
Yunus Khan excelled in "penmanship, painting and other accomplishments conformable with a
healthy nature, and was well trained in singing and instrumental music. . . . He was graced with good
qualities and perfect manners, was unequaled in bravery and heroism and excelled especially in
archery" (Elias and Ross, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, p. 155).
70
Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1983), p. 222. Brucker is summarizing
the opinion of Paul Oskar Kristeller. See his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and
Humanist Strains (repr. New York, 1961), p. 120.
71
Brucker, Renaissance Florence, p. 222.
72~dwarS
d aid, Orientalism (New York, 1979). The failure of Western writers to accord individuality to the Muslims they discuss is an underlying theme of Said's work. The same failure is one
of Ronald Inden's observations about IndologicaliOrientalist discourse in his essay, "Orientalist
Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies, 20.3 (1986). 401-46. Neither author discusses the
broader assumptions of Western scholars that individuality was a uniquely Western trait that had its
origins in that unique event, the Italian Renaissance.

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