A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B.Tauris Short Histories)

by Fisher, H, Michael

  …I endured such hardship and misery. I had no realm—and no hope of any realm…. I had had all I could take of homelessness and alienation. ‘With such difficulties,’ I said to myself, ‘it would be better to go off on my own so long as I am alive, and with such deprivation and wretchedness [wander] wherever my feet will carry me, even to the ends of the earth.’ I decided to go to Cathay [Khitai, meaning Mongolia] on my own. From my childhood I had had a desire to go to Cathay, but because of having to rule and other obstacles, it had never been possible. Now there was nothing for me to rule…. Impediments to my travel had disappeared, as had my former ambitions.11

  Two frustrating years later, however, he moved with his household—including his mother and brothers—over the Hindu Kush mountains in the depths of winter toward Kabul, a place he had never visited or much considered, on the very southern edge of the Central Asian world that he knew and valued throughout his lifetime.

  BABUR’S KABUL YEARS AND FAMILY

  Babur’s paternal uncle had ruled Kabul until his death in 1501. Then a rival Timurid prince seized the city and married the late ruler’s daughter. In 1504, Babur persuaded two hundred Turks and Mongols to follow him and succeeded in snatching from his cousin-in-law Kabul and its surrounding region plus the smaller town of Ghazni. Initially, Babur dismissively called his new domain ‘a petty little province’ and Ghazni ‘a truly miserable place.’12 However, late in life, Babur nostalgically wrote: ‘There were such conquests and victories while we were in Kabul that I consider Kabul my lucky piece’ and he willed his burial there.13

  For two decades, Babur used Kabul to conduct predatory raids, and to expand his domain, although this base proved precarious and had insufficient resources to support his unbounded ambitions. Babur’s occasional victories were interspersed with nearly fatal defeats. Once, he barely escaped a frozen death when unwisely taking a short-cut through mountains in winter. Kabul itself periodically prospered from the intersecting trade routes among the richer lands of India, Iran and the Silk Route to Central Asia and China. But throughout these decades, Babur had to struggle to retain control even over Kabul.

  Further, the various Pashtun and other Afghan ethnic groups in the region had always resisted Kabul’s authority and revenue demands. Hence, Babur annually led punitive and predatory raids to seize livestock and grain from defiant villagers in the surrounding mountains and valleys. Babur used these spoils to reward his personal followers—mostly Turkish or Mongol relatives, retainers and mercenaries. These warriors had few resources other than their martial skills so they relied for their livelihood on Babur, or any other leader who achieved victories. Babur, to support them with sufficient cash, gifts and honors to keep them loyal, made constant efforts to expand his territories. He tenuously conquered Badakhshan, his frontier region with the still-expanding Uzbeks, and also captured from them the often contested town of Balkh. But Uzbeks repulsed his repeated incursions back into Mawarannahr. In 1522, Babur seized the commercially and strategically significant border city of Qandahar, which the Safavids from the west also claimed.

  After four years ruling Kabul and as the senior remaining Timurid ruler, Babur formally claimed clan leadership and the imperial title Padshah, which also implied innately superior status (in the Safavid model, semi-divinity). Babur in his autobiography anachronistically used this title for himself from his original accession in Fergana, although he actually spent most of his youth as a kingdomless refugee with only the lesser honorific of Mirza indicating his status as a Timurid prince. Further, Babur never relinquished his determination to recover Mawarannahr.

  In 1513, in exchange for Irani military support to retake Samarkand, Babur donned the qizilbash turban as a disciple of Safavid Shah Ismail and his Shi‘i Sufi order. Once installed in Timur’s capital for the third (and last) time, Babur pragmatically acknowledged Safavid sovereignty by having Samarkand’s mosques recite the khutba (Friday sermon calling down blessings on the sovereign) for Shah Ismail and by minting coins in his name. Babur’s opportunistic acceptance of Shi‘ism contrasted with his frequent denigration of Shi‘as and their theology. (Babur’s imperial descendants remained embarrassed by his public acknowledgement of Safavid sovereignty.) Further, the strongly Sunni population of Samarkand rejected Safavid and Shi‘i authority and accepted a Sunni Uzbek ruler instead, forcing Babur to flee to Kabul again.

  As a patrimonial ruler following Central Asian custom, Babur used his close male relatives as his deputies. Babur appointed his two half-brothers, Jahangir Mirza and Nasir Mirza, to govern appanages under his authority. However, both had their own ambitions and, at various times, fought for autonomy or to displace Babur as Kabul’s ruler; on several occasions when Babur was absent, one of his half-brothers seized that city and he had to recapture it. However, Babur needed the support of even those who betrayed him. Thus, acting as a gracious font of imperial forgiveness (and emulating God), he repeatedly pardoned his defeated half-brothers and other opponents who submitted in person before him and vowed fealty, even when they had broken such vows previously. After Jahangir died of alcoholism in 1507, followed eight years later by Nasir, Babur was no longer threatened by male siblings. But he was also unable to use them as subordinate governors. Further, unlike contemporary Ottoman and Delhi Sultans, Timurids did not deploy slave-governors. Hence, to rule and ensure his dynasty’s security, Babur needed legal wives to bear legitimate sons.

  While in Kabul, Babur had about 20 children, including four surviving sons, with his legal wives. His official marriages reflected the first three stages of his life and his household’s multiple cultures. His earliest wives, whom Babur only briefly mentioned in his autobiography, were close relatives and native speakers of Turki, highlighting his early life as a Central Asian Timurid. His first two weddings were political marriages with his double first cousins (daughters of his father’s brothers and their wives who were his mother’s sisters).

  Like Babur’s initial career, these intra-Timurid marriages proved unsuccessful. Babur and Ayisha Sultan Begum were engaged at age five to solidify clan solidarity; they married 12 years later. But even in political marriages, personalities can matter. Babur candidly wrote that they never got on well and, after the death of their newborn daughter, she left him ‘at her elder sister’s instigation.’14 Babur also noted that his second political marriage, with Zaynab Sultan Begum, ‘was not congenial,’ although not to the point of divorce. She died of smallpox after a few years in Kabul.

  Babur’s next marriage was also with a closely related Timurid, the engagement approved and advanced by their female clan elders. Babur recorded that this wedding resulted initially from the personal attraction between him and Masuma Sultan Begum (the youngest half-sister of his divorced first wife, Ayisha). Babur recorded how they met at a female relative’s home while Babur was visiting his cousins in Herat. She responded first (according to him): ‘Upon first laying eyes on me she felt a great inclination toward me.’ Reciprocating, Babur ‘saw her, liked her, and asked for her hand.’ Her mother and Babur’s aunt discussed the matter and ‘decided’ to bring her to Kabul where Babur married her.15 But this marriage also failed to produce a son. Masuma died in her first childbirth, although their daughter, named for her, survived. Babur’s next Timurid wife was Saliha Sultan Begum, who also bore him only a daughter, Salima Sultan Begum. Thus, Babur still needed male heirs to sustain his dynasty.

  During his next life stage, as ruler of Kabul, Babur had not given up his own aspirations for recovery of Mawarannahr, but Timurids no longer had political power there. So Babur now turned elsewhere for his next three marriages (although the senior women of both households probably had major roles in negotiating them). Significantly, Babur recorded the births of his sons with his next three wives but did not mention any of them in his autobiography. They were evidently not Timurid princesses. Since they bore Persian names, they were probably from respectable families in the Kabul region who spoke Persian (or its Afghan dialect, Dari). Of
these three, Babur’s main wife, Maham Begum (d. 1533), was probably Shi‘a. She claimed descent from a four-centuries-earlier Sufi pir, Shaikh Ahmad, known for his ferocity as Zinda-fil (literarily ‘Awesome Elephant’). Maham, who married Babur in Herat, secured her prime position in his household by bearing in 1508 his first surviving son, Mirza Humayun. Around age 12, Humayun went as Babur’s deputy in the strategic region of Badakhshan; he spent about a decade there learning how to govern while repulsing Uzbek invasions. Although Maham’s four other children died, she fostered several of Babur’s children by his junior wives.

  Babur’s next wedding was to Gulrukh (‘Rosy-Faced’) Begum, who bore Babur four sons and a daughter. Although only two sons survived—Mirza Kamran (1509–57) and Mirza Askari (1516–58)—both would hold prominent positions in Babur’s household and receive appanages. Babur’s next wife, Dildar (‘Heart-Holding’) Begum, bore two sons and three daughters. Of these, Mirza Hindal (1519–51) also served as a commander and administrator under Babur. One daughter, Gulbadan Begum, remained a leading figure in the courts of Humayun and his heir, Akbar.

  As Kabul’s ruler, Babur spent much energy trying to subdue the surrounding tribes and villages. Babur perennially used brute force and intimidation. But Babur also made personal alliances with local headmen who would then more obediently submit tribute and accept his authority. Thus, Babur’s last wedding was a political marriage in 1519 with Bibi Mubaraka, called ‘Afghan Begum’ by the other women in his household.16 She embodied the fealty of one of Babur’s subordinate allies: her father, Malik Shah Mansur, was a chief of the independent-minded Yusufzai Pashtuns. She spoke Pashto and probably also Dari, plus she learned Turki from her new family. However, she and the much older Babur had no surviving children.

  These wives formed a substantial female community, whatever their personal feelings toward Babur and their factional support for their rival sons and half-sons. Gulbadan listed 96 notable women of Babur’s household (leaving aside uncounted servants and slaves).17 Babur entered their world with formality and ritual, as well as occasional intimacy. Only years after he had established himself in north India did he direct the women of his household to join him there from Kabul. As they arrived, he ceremoniously greeted them according to their status and place in his personal regard. During his four years in India, the last stage of his life, Babur made no further marriages. But he did expend much effort in balancing his reliance on each of his four contending sons and in securing his political and cultural legacies for them.

  Between the ages of 21 when Babur first entered Kabul and 43 when he left, never to return alive, he cultivated many pleasures and arts. He started frequently savoring convivial parties, often alfresco in gardens or on river-rafts, drinking wine for the first time in his late twenties. With a rare exception, these escalating drink- or drug-fueled revelries, filled with music and poetry, were all-male gatherings. Indeed, Babur, at age 36, recorded his surprise when a woman joined them in drinking for the first (and only recorded) time; repulsed by her inebriated loquacity, he ‘got rid of her by pretending to be drunk.’18 On special occasions, Babur’s womenfolk and young children joined him in more decorous picnics in pleasure gardens that he constructed around Kabul.

  During his two decades in Kabul, Babur made himself an increasingly experienced and educated ruler. He analysed the nature of authority, both divine and mundane. He presented his state as more than just predatory on the communities around him, expressing a sense of responsibility to impose his own just rule on them. He studied Islamic law which formed the basis of judicial decisions. Three sections of Rasila-i Mubin, the Turki-language verse treatise he wrote around 1521, are theological. Nowhere, however, does Babur claim religious authority (as would some of his imperial descendants). The poem’s fourth section considers the principles and forms of taxation on land and merchants, indicating his engagement with the pragmatic functions of administration.

  Babur also practiced, perfected and praised his own martial skills in leading hunts and raids. Further, Babur enhanced his forces with the latest military science. The Ottomans to the west had developed gunpowder artillery and matchlock muskets fired by foot soldiers for their janissary (‘new model’) infantry.19 These defeated the Safavids at the battle of Chaldiran in 1514. The Safavids quickly adopted these technologies to supplement their light qizilbash cavalry armed with bows and arrows, lances and swords. Similarly, Babur began recruiting a series of Ottoman ustads (masters) to hand-craft matchlock muskets, to cast and fire expensive artillery pieces, and to deploy techniques for protecting them by binding carts into a barrier in the ‘Anatolian manner.’20 In 1519, Babur noted how his musket-bearing snipers had killing power from a distance and also awed enemy troops in Central Asia and India unfamiliar with them. The cumbersome cannon had limited use in mountainous Afghanistan, but would prove effective for Babur on the Indian plains.

  While ruling Kabul, Babur found his most lucrative raids were through mountain passes and across Indus River tributaries into the rich agricultural lands and wealthy cities of the Punjab. When Babur personally first raided India’s northwest in 1505, he recorded his amazement: ‘I had never seen a hot climate or any of Hindustan before … a new world came into view—different plants, different trees, different animals and birds, different tribes and people, different manners and customs. It was astonishing, truly astonishing.’21 Thereafter, Babur occasionally forced several cities in the Punjab and Sind to pay tribute and submit to his authority or be plundered and contribute to the Timurid-style towers of skulls that marked his victories. Over his last 20 years, Babur made increasingly deeper incursions into the subcontinent.

  As we have seen, in 1519, Babur vainly called on Sultan Ibrahim to relinquish the territories, including Delhi, briefly conquered by Timur in 1398. In 1523–4, Babur defeated part of Ibrahim’s forces, forced the subordination of the Afghan governor of Lahore, but withdrew from his march on Delhi due to an Uzbek threat against Balkh (which he still valued more highly than Delhi). For his fifth Indian incursion in 1526, Babur entrusted nominal governance of Kabul, Qandahar, and his household to his young son, Mirza Kamran. Babur summoned his more experienced son, Mirza Humayun, and his forces from Badakhshan. Babur mobilized his Pashtun allies from Afghanistan and those long settled in the Punjab. He thus assembled 12,000 men (counting ‘liege men, merchants, servants, and all those with the army’) and successfully invaded this different new world of South Asia.22

  BABUR’S INITIAL CONQUEST OF 1526

  When Babur made his final and finally successful invasion of Hindustan in 1526, he faced a daunting enemy, but remained undaunted: ‘… we placed our feet in the stirrup of resolve, grabbed the reigns of trust in God, and directed ourselves against Sultan Ibrahim…. He was said to have a standing army of one hundred thousand, and he and his begs [noblemen] had nearly a thousand elephants …’23 In addition to Indo-Afghans, this force also contained Hindu allies, most prominently Raja Vikramajit from Gwalior.

  Further, Ibrahim had inherited vast treasuries. Babur judged he should have hired an insurmountable number of Indian soldiers, but foolishly did not due to miserliness:

  If Sultan Ibrahim had had a mind to, he could have hired one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand troops. Thank God he was able neither to satisfy his warriors nor to part with his treasury …. He himself was an inexperienced young man who craved beyond all things the acquisition of money … and neither his march nor his fighting was energetic.24

  Thus, despite the mass of Ibrahim’s army, it and his regime proved fragile.

  In contrast, Babur effectively deployed his more limited resources. Babur received wary support from Afghans settled in India who turned against their fellow Afghan, Sultan Ibrahim. However, most of Babur’s motley followers were martial adventurers from various lands he had repeatedly ruled and lost in Central Asia, including Turks and Mongols, plus Arab and Baluch mercenaries. They were attracted to Babur by the prospect of plunder. Babur knew the names o
f his most prominent commanders but individual and groups of soldiers arrived (and departed) at their own volition and received no salaries. Hence, he had no accurate information about their number, which he initially thought was 12,000 but, when he actually deployed them on the battlefield, he realized ‘We had fewer men than we had estimated.’25

  The reliable core of Babur’s force was his personal followers. Most prominent was his eldest son Humayun, who had been fighting for five years to control Badakhshan. Babur, having impatiently summoned Humayun, tested him with a detached command, and approved his conduct: ‘This was the first time that Humayun saw action, and it was taken as a good portent.’26

  Babur also innovated in military technology by personally employing specialists in gunpowder weaponry. This was a major financial drain since their salaries and equipment were notably expensive and they could not as easily live by foraging and plundering from the surrounding countryside as did his largely unsalaried cavalry and infantry. When Babur entered north India for this last time, he tested his new military science, which was not yet widespread there. Evidently as an experiment, Babur had a hundred captured enemy soldiers executed by muskets, not as usual with swords or arrows. These were ideal conditions for the musketeers since they had ample time to prop up their awkward weapon, there was no rain to dampen the gunpowder or extinguish the firing match, no pressure of time or distracting threat against them, no need to wait impatiently while the musket cooled before it could be reloaded, and a mass of unmoving bound targets at a fixed and known range.