The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  The entire country is Ramjanmabhumi, the birth land of Rama. The Ramjanmasthan, the birthplace, lies, however, in the hearts and minds of all those who have, over the centuries, loved, respected and worshipped Shri Rama as Maryada Purshottram: an ideal of rectitude, integrity, decency and sheer humanity. Nothing is denied to him when his historicity is denied.

  All cultures of course have fixed on the idea of a great past, a golden age But golden ages are imagined pasts. Real history is more complex, never static, always moving. And creating it in a realistic way for each generation is not just the preserve of politicians and thinkers, or the job of historians, but (and this is even more true in the age of the internet) of all of us. For identity is not a fixed thing, and it never was. It is always in the making, and never made. And that is above all true in India. In a civilisation as rich as India, there are many histories, and Indians for centuries have lived comfortably with multiple identities – with the sense of being Tamil, Bengali or Rajasthani, Hindu, Buddhist, Parsee Jain or Sikh – and yet still loyal to India’s ‘Great Tradition’. Whether this could be same for India’s Muslims will become the great debate in the next part of the story, in one of most dramatic and brilliant epochs of Indian culture: the Moghuls.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE RULE OF REASON: THE GREAT MUGHALS

  AT THE GREAT fort Bala Hissar the trees are shaken by the north wind that blows through spring and summer across the Kabul plain. Zigzagging over bare brown hills, the city walls of Kabul were first built to withstand the attacks of the Huns during the fifth century. Kabul has seen many attackers since then – Genghis Khan, Tamburlaine, Mughals, Persians, British – and they are still at war today, as the fighting spreads in Helmand province. But here in the early sixteenth century a new invasion of India was planned, which would have a profound effect on the history of the subcontinent.

  When I was here in the mid-1990s, during the first war with the Taliban, the city had been devastated: there was no electricity, no street lighting; at night the occasional car’s headlights swept through the jagged pinnacles and murky shadows of a broken city. Since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, international commerce has returned and new buildings are going up everywhere, despite the rumble of war in the south. But the incessant fighting over the last quarter century has also brought a vast expansion of the population, spreading shanties up the hillsides, draping dingy suburbs over what was in the late 1960s, as all old Afghan hands will tell you, a heavenly land: as the poet Peter Levi put it, ‘the light garden of the angel king’.

  BABUR, THE FIRST MUGHAL

  The tomb of Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty that ruled northern India from 1526 to 1857, lies in a once-lovely valley a short walk from the city centre – a walk that opens up views of the diversity of Afghan history. It is easy today to think of Afghanistan as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, but traces of another, richer history are all around us. This place is a witness to the waves of history on the subcontinent, for Afghanistan, as we have already seen, has always been part of that story. In the Late Bronze Age and after, the Kabul valley was one of the lands of the Rig-Veda. It was a great centre of Buddhist culture in the early centuries AD, and was ruled by Hindu shahs between 600 and the tenth century AD. Indeed, until the civil war of the 1980s and the Russian invasion it still had a big Hindu population, nearly a quarter of a million strong, mainly traders, craftsmen, practitioners of traditional ‘Yunani’ (Graeco-Roman) medicine. Now there are only a few hundred families left, but the valley bears evidence of its multi-faith past, when Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims came here to worship. There are the remains of a Kushan stupa at the southern end of the valley; an old Muslim cemetery commemorates the first Islamic missionaries to Kabul in the seventh century AD; and there was a Hindu temple still in this area until the Russian invasion. Sadly, the old picnics in the groves of mulberries are a thing of the past – at least for now.

  But the most evocative spot of all is the garden of Babur, burial place of the legendary Mughal leader. His was an amazing tale. Born in Fergana, proclaimed king in the Tajik city of Khodzent, he was a direct descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine. He conquered Kabul in 1504, and it was from here that he launched his final attack on India in 1525, which at that time was, paradoxically, ruled by the Lodi sultans who had originally come from Afghanistan. Babur’s bold and risky adventure succeeded. He founded the Mughal dynasty, whose leaders would become among the greatest and most glamorous rulers in the world. But he never forgot Kabul. In his memoirs he complains about the hot, dusty climate of India (‘a place with few attractions … and no good melons’). Kabul was the place he really loved, ‘with its excellent climate, overlooking the great lake, and three meadows that look very beautiful when the plains are green’. He liked the valley in particular, his home for twenty years, its altitude giving it the perfect summer climate, a place where vines, olive trees and fruit orchards could thrive. The garden here was laid out between 1504 and 1528, and has been popular with the people of the city ever since. The inscription on the tomb is his: ‘If there is a paradise on Earth, this is it, this is it, this is it!’

  Babur tells us that he felt most at home in these rugged landscapes with their emerald green valleys and fruit orchards; their brown whalebacks of mountains streaked with snow; in the serais and bazaars of Bukhara Merv and Samarkand. He never mastered an Indian language, but spoke the Chaghtai dialect of Turkic from Mughalistan, the lands north of the Syr Darya river stretching towards Lake Balkash. And to the end, in the sweltering plains of India, he still hankered after the wide skies of central Asia, the purple deserts of Samarkand dotted with flowers after the spring rains.

  Forty years ago, in the days of the ‘Hippy Trail’, this was still a delightful spot, with magnificent chinar trees and the scent of wild rose and jasmine in the air. Since then the catastrophe for Afghanistan has also swept up even the greatest Muslim monuments. Decades of neglect, twenty-five years of war, and several years of drought have dried up watercourses and killed all the trees and plants, leaving it derelict and engulfed by the urban sprawl of shanties. Now it is being restored: the gardens are to be replanted with trees and flowers, so it may once again be the haven it was in Mughal times. Like so much of the tragedy of Afghanistan over the last three decades, from the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas to the wrecking of the Kabul Museum, the battle is also against the loss of the past.

  But the garden is not just a setting for this part of the story of India; it is also a symbol of a civilization that we have come to view as quintessentially Indian. It was the first of the Mughal gardens of the subcontinent, while the garden at Dholpur, south of Agra, was almost Babur’s first act of state in India. Others laid out by his successors include the magnificent group of gardens at Srinagar, overlooking the Dal Lake in Kashmir and now languishing unvisited under the shadow of the jihadists; and the recently rediscovered Moonlit Garden over the Jumna from the Taj Mahal. The Kabul garden was the first model. Babur laid out the site in a series of square gardens on low terraces, with octagonal and circular fountains, shaded by chinar trees beloved of the Mughals. The sides are gone now, but there is still the lovely view across the plain to the mountains of central Afghanistan, whose long ridges are seamed with snow even during the summer. Walk up the hill path once lined with stately cypress trees and you come to a beautiful marble mosque built by Shah Jahan in 1646 to celebrate his capture of the ancient city of Balkh, the ‘mother of cities’, on the Oxus plain beyond the Hindu Kush. Babur’s tomb lies on the terrace above the mosque. Although he died in Agra, he loved this garden so much that he asked to be brought here for burial. War and civil unrest delayed this until, nine years later, his loyal Afghan wife Bibi Mubarika Yusufzai finally brought him back.

  Babur stipulated that nothing should cover his grave: he wanted rain and sun to beat upon it, for snow to blanket it, and maybe wild flowers to grow. This request was honoured: the small headstone was built by his great-grandson Jahangir i
n the seventeenth century. Only in the 1930s was the present marble stone placed on top, under a small pavilion, but the current restoration project will remove it and expose Babur’s tomb once more to the elements.

  The northern Indian empire he created would, in the end, be an extraordinary Indo-Islamic synthesis that, albeit briefly, comprehended all religions. It was ruled by Muslim emperors who spoke to Buddhists rather than bombing their statues, had pictures of the Virgin Mary in their bedrooms, and translated Hindu sacred texts rather than dismissing them as the abominations of idolators. The Mughal age today is a defining image of North India, and its achievements remain a source of fascination, but this is not its only own interest. Within this tale are pointers to what the Islamic world could have been, and perhaps can still be.

  THE BATTLE OF PANIPAT

  In the spring of 1526, harnesses jangling, the Mughal army came down from Kabul, crossed the Indus at Attock, and marched down the Grand Trunk Road. Crossing the Punjab, it turned south along the river Jumna on the ancient road into the plains. The army’s guns, pulled by trains of horses, were the first artillery to be used in battle in India. This was to be the last of Babur’s five attempts to gain the riches of the subcontinent. Forty-three now, a grizzled veteran inured to war since childhood, he was descended on his mother’s side from Genghis Khan and on his father’s side from Tamburlaine:

  Hindustan is a vast and populous kingdom and a productive realm, but it is a strange country. Compared to ours it is another world. Its mountains, rivers, forests and wildernesses, its villages and provinces, animals and plants, peoples and languages, even its rain and winds are altogether different. Once you cross the Indus, the land, water, trees, stones, peoples, tribes, manners and customs are all of the Hindustani fashion. There is no limit to the people … and most of the people of Hindustan are infidels …

  However, his enemy was not Hindu, but Muslim – Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi. The decisive battle was fought on Friday, 20 April 1526, when the heat was building in the northern Indian plain, and temperatures can go up to 45°C (115°F) or even more. He was up against the numerically superior forces of Sultan Ibrahim, who, it was rumoured, could muster around 100,000 men, almost ten times that of his own forces.

  The scene of the battle was Panipat, an old town on the Grand Trunk Road, 55 miles north of Delhi. Lying in the narrow tract of country where many great battles of Indian history have been fought, it was a place of legend too, feuded over by the Pandavas and the Kurus in the Mahabharata. Babur chose a position with his right wing anchored on the walled town and its suburbs, his left wing on an old, dried-up course of the Jumna, strengthened with fallen trees and brushwood. Seven hundred carts were commandeered from his own baggage and from the local people, and roped together with cables, leaving gaps where his matchlock gunmen could shoot and reload behind mantlets (movable screens). Several larger openings, 50–100 yards wide, were left for the cavalry to mount forays, especially on the wings where Babur was looking to make a decisive turning movement.

  The battle was won by Babur’s toughness, his nerve and his artillery. The Afghan dead were set by Babur at up to 16,000, and the sultan himself fell on the battlefield among a great heap of the slain. When the Mughals found his body, they cut off his head and took it to Babur. ‘Honour to your bravery,’ he said grimly, lifting up the blood-matted head. Local tradition places the luckless Sultan Ibrahim’s tomb in a little shrine behind the bus stand in the bustling heart of today’s town.

  Babur now marched on Delhi, but before he left Panipat he decreed the construction of a mosque on the battle site as a thanksgiving. It’s still there – the earliest Mughal monument in India. Now engulfed by Panipat’s modern industrial expansion, it stands on a low rise that once looked out over the battlefield. Not easy to find, you must ask the locals, and eventually someone will point you the way to the Kabuli Bagh Masjid (Mosque of the Kabul Garden). It’s a pretty little building of warm brown brick and red sandstone veneer, set in what the Mughals called a char bagh, a four-quartered garden with an ornamental pool. With this, he introduced the concept of the central Asian garden into India, and you can perhaps sense his personality here more than in any other place. Additions by his son Humayun and a lovely gateway by his grandson Akbar testify to the family attachment to this place. The Tuesday after the battle Babur reached Delhi: ‘we came to Nizamuddin, which I circumambulated, and then we camped beside the Jumna directly opposite the city’. Nizamuddin is still the favourite Sufi shrine of all Delhiites, approached through narrow lanes of butchers’ shops, chai stalls and a covered tunnel of pilgrim stalls, opening into a marble courtyard full of people from dawn till dusk. In terms of communal tolerance, it is one of loveliest spots in Delhi. ‘Afterwards,’ says Babur, ‘I went back to camp, got on a boat and drank some spirits.’

  It was a moment for reflection, both on his own life and on wider history. ‘From the year 910 [AD 1504–5] when I captured Kabul,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I had coveted Hindustan.’ That this was a turning point he was well aware. After four failed expeditions, he had finally done it:

  From the time of the Prophet only three great Muslim shahs gained dominion over and ruled the realm of Hindustan [by which he means the north and Delhi: he was aware of great southern kings outside the orbit of the Islamic world]. I was the third great shah to conquer Hindustan: first was Mahmud of Ghazni; second was Sultan Shiabuddin Ghuri, who with his slaves and followers ruled this kingdom for many years. I am the third. My accomplishment, however, is beyond comparison with theirs. When that first time we went to Bhera [on the Indus] we were 1500 strong, 2000 at most. The fifth time, when we defeated Sultan Ibrahim and conquered the realm of Hindustan, I had the biggest army I ever had –and that was only 12,000 on the muster roll.

  Those words come from Babur’s memoirs, one of history’s great autobiographies from the pen of one of its great movers. Frank, intimate and (one senses) unbiased, it is one of the first and, until recently, the only true autobiography in Islamic literature. Full of conversations, letters, poems, decrees and historical and geographical detail, it is marked by a profound curiosity about the natural world, full of rich observations on flora and fauna. For a man who lived such a tough life in the saddle, sleeping in camp, he appreciated the small things in life, especially fruit: Bukhara plums were ‘without rival’, Kabul rhubarb ‘excellent’, and its grapes ‘superb’. As for Nasukh melons, ‘yellow skin soft as glove leather, they are amazingly delicious, there is nothing like them’. Babur records his own foibles, his illnesses, boils and abcesses, his excessive drinking; he is a human personality. As a leader and man of action, he was also peremptory in his cruelty. A typical passage reads: ‘I ordered the cook to be flayed alive, the taster cut to pieces, one of the women trampled by elephants, the other shot.’

  Babur describes a gripping scene at Delhi after the great victory. There were signs of disaffection in the army, reminiscent of Alexander the Great at the river Beas. Deaths through sickness and heat were increasing, and so was hatred of India and nostalgia for the Kabuli gardens. ‘Many began to sicken and die, as if under a pestilential wind. That’s why most of the great warriors and chiefs began to lose heart.’ Unwilling to stay in Hindustan they began to leave. This was a key moment.

  … if aged and experienced leaders say such things, it is no fault, for such men have enough sense and intelligence to distinguish between prudence and imprudence and to discern good from evil after a decision has been made. Such a person considers everything for himself and he knows that when something has been decided there is no sense in endlessly repeating words that have already been spoken. But these were men that I expected if I went through fire or water, they would go in with me and emerge with me and be at my side wherever I went, not speak out against me.

  So Babur speaks to the council just as his Spanish contemporary Francisco Pizarro did to his men in South America, both being conscious that a continent lay before them that would be won by those who we
re prepared to gamble all. His message to his commanders standing in the mid-May heat of the northern Indian plain was direct:

  I said rule and conquest do not come without tools and conquest. Kingship and princehood are not possible without liegemen and domains. For some years we have gone through hardships, traversed long distances, cast ourselves and our soldiers into the dangers of war and battle. Through God’s grace we have defeated such numerous enemies and taken such vast realms. Why throw it all away now, after gaining it at such cost? Shall we go back to Kabul and stay poor?

  They went on, most of them, though Babur never lost his longing for his old homeland. His descendants for a long time would nurse imperial dreams of their central Asian homeland: they even, unwisely, fought battles there. But eventually their ancestral lands around Fergana would become a distant memory; the orchards of Samarkand, the legendary Timurid capital, once so ardently desired, would become a forsaken passion. Babur’s descendants became Indian.

  THE LEGACY OF BABUR

  Babur, like Tamburlaine and the Tuqluqs, was an invader, and his career was driven by violence. In the sacred writings of the Sikhs, Guru Nanak says he was a messenger of death, who ‘terrified Hindustan’, and accuses his armies of the rape of Hindu women. Mughal sources, on the other hand, say he went out of his way to protect the civilian population in war, even compensating farmers if their crops were ruined. But he was a man of his time, and his was a time when striking fear was part of being a king. There is much argument about his legacy now, especially by Hindu nationalists, who see the Mughal as an enemy of India. And it is true that he could on occasion talk the language of jihad, though only perhaps when his army seemed to be losing its nerve.

  Also, as the Koran enjoins, he could be merciless towards unbelievers when they resisted him. But did he destroy Hindu temples, as others had done in the past and would in the future? Whether the mosque in Ayodhia was built on top of a destroyed Hindu temple has never been shown, but conquerors did this sort of thing, and whether Babur was different we cannot say. His bloodthirsty description of the killing of infidels at the siege of Chanderi in 1528, with the mass suicide of hundreds more (who ‘went to hell’) is a case in point. He was hardly squeamish about killing unbelievers, just as Akbar the Great could kill ‘idolaters’ and leave pillars made of their skulls. Such things, I daresay, were typical of wars of the time; if a city resisted, punishment was often merciless. But Babur was an intelligent man and saw that conciliation of enemies was the path to the future. That is something central to the history of India. Sikh texts also mention that before his death Babur was blessed by Guru Nanak. Had something in him changed? Had he understood something important about India in the three and a half years between Panipat and his death?