BABURNAMA

An autobiography, it was written in a culture and time where the genre was unknown. Written in Chagatai
Turkish, the spoken language of the Timurids, it is "one of the longest examples of sustained prose in the
language." And the author, the great Babur, is one of the leading figures of his time.
The text is not complete, but great parts of it remain. Best known in its Persian version it has been translated into
English before. Wheeler M. Thackston Jr.'s is a new translation, more scholarly in approach as well as with a
considerably updated style.
Babur describes the small state and how he came to be king, the first steps in an illustrious career that would
take him far from this place. He is meticulous in recording the details of his life: here and throughout his
autobiography Babur is careful to give a full picture of geography, history, nature, and the many people involved.
The chronicle provides a wealth of information about many aspects of the life and history of those turbulent
times. Babur explains the conflicts and battles between nations and peoples, but he also gives detailed
descriptions of the new lands and customs he comes across, a useful and vivid panorama of much of Central and
South East Asia.
He acknowledges weaknesses and uncertainty as to certain actions. There are attempts at poetry interspersed
in the text. Alcohol and battle are soberly and humanly addressed.
Babur's great, lasting success was the conquest of Hindustan and the establishment of the Mughal dynasty
there. Although he recognizes it as a triumph, it is also clear that he misses his Central Asian roots.
The text is not complete, but it gives a full picture of Babur's fascinating life. Many of the scenes (and Babur
himself) come alive in the often gripping history.

1. CONTENT

According to historian Stephen Frederic Dale, Babur's Chagatai prose is highly Persianized in its sentence
structure, morphology, and vocabulary,[7] and also contains many phrases and smaller poems in Persian.
The Bāburnāma begins abruptly with these plain words:

In the month of Ramadan of the year 899 [1494] and in the twelfth year of my age, I became ruler in the country
of Farghana.

Bābur describes his fluctuating fortunes as a minor ruler in Central Asia – he took and lost Samarkand twice – and
his move to Kabul in 1504. There is a break in all known manuscripts between 1508 and 1519. Annette Beveridge
and other scholars believe that the missing part in the middle, and perhaps an account of Babur's earlier
childhood, a preface and perhaps an epilogue, were written but the manuscript of those parts lost by the time of
Akbar.[9] There are various points in his highly active career, and that of his son Humayun, where parts of the
original manuscript might plausibly have been lost.

By 1519 Bābur is established in Kabul and from there launches an invasion into north-western India. The final
section of the Bāburnāma covers the years 1525 to 1529 and the establishment of the Mughal empire over what
was by his death still a relatively small part of north-western India, which Bābur's descendants would expand and
rule for three centuries.

The account of the decisive First Battle of Panipat in 1526 is followed by long descriptions of India, its people,
fauna and flora. Various exciting incidents are recounted and illustrated: Babur jumps off his horse just in time to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/orientalia/babur.htm
Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483-1530; Stephen F Dale Page 1
 avoid following it into a river, and when his army has formed its boats into a circle a fish jumps into a boat to
escape from a crocodile.

The original Chagatai language text does not seem to have existed in many copies, and those that survive are mostly
partial. The copy seen in the Mughal Library in the 1620s, and presumably used to base the Persian translation on,
seems to have been lost.

2. TEXT AND POETIC CONTEXT

Babur died in 1530, leaving behind an incompletely subjugated kingdom, an unfinished autobiographical memoir,
a diwân or volume of Turki poetry, and versified works on sufism and Islamic law. The Babur-nama was
immediately recognized as an unusual text when British-Indian officials first translated it in the early nineteenth
century. Babur’s original title and his purpose in writing have to be surmised because of the loss of a large portion
of the text, including the critical opening chapters in which he narrates the first eleven years of his life; but the
contents and style of his prose narrative are distinct from other premodern Muslim memoirs. He conveys a sense
of his humanity in a manner that is scarcely encountered in Islamic or Indian literature— and only rarely in that of
Europe or China in the early modern period.
In his spare Turki prose Babur describes moments of indecision, regret, fear of death, and a host of other emotions
that premodern Muslim writers rarely ascribe to themselves or describe in others. He conveys a sense of
psychological uncertainty and ambiguity of the moment that Roy Pascal, one of the founders of modern
autobiographical studies, believes to be an identifying characteristic of the best autobiographies.
Apart from offering occasional insights into his own emotional state, Babur presents a portrait of himself as a
supremely confident Timurid prince who shared the values of the Turco-Mongol aristocracy. He must be
addressing such men when he claims to have surpassed the military achievements of Sultan Hasayn Baiqara of
Harat (r.1470—1506), the last great Timurid ruler of the Iranian-Central Asian region,
Being a professed Sunni Muslim would include such incidents in his memoirs, it is worth remembering that
Babur was a Turco-Mongol aristocrat with a social ethos that in certain respects resembled that of the tribal poets
of pre- Islamic Arabia.
Apart from its obvious autobiographical elements, Babur’s text is famous for two stylistic qualities that help to
convey a sense of social reality or narrative truth: its direct, simple language and precise, remarkably detailed
social and geographical descriptions. Babur wrote in a direct, unadorned prose, a marked contrast to prevailing
literary norms of Timurid and Iranian historical writing in Persian or Turki that valued elaborate rhetorical
embellishment. His choice of style may reflect one or several influences: his own attenuated education, the lack of
a voluminous Turki historical literature written in the complex, elaborate Persian tradition, or the preference of a
man of affairs for clarity. As for Babur’s descriptions, they are not only detailed but are known to be
exceptionally precise where their accuracy can be measured, as in his many careful accounts of natural
phenomena. . Neither in style nor content, however, does the Babur-nama resemble the traditional, formal ta’rikh
of the professional historians, usually a dry narrative of military and political events, frequently couched in
allusive baroque prose. Once again it is worth recalling that Babur was neither a religious scholar, nor a
professional historian nor a court poet, any of whom are likely to have written easily recognizable traditional
genres with elaborate literary artifice. Yet, like contemporary historians, he uses poetry to provide apposite
sayings, decorating and legitimizing prosaic ideas with aphorisms of classical poets. More often though he quotes
his own verse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/orientalia/babur.htm
Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483-1530; Stephen F Dale Page 2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/orientalia/babur.htm
Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483-1530; Stephen F Dale Page 3