Short biography of the Great Mughal King – Babar

V.A. Smith in The Oxford History of India begins the chapter on Babar describing him as “…the most brilliant Asiatic prince of his age, and worthy of a high place among the sovereigns of any age or country. As a boy he inherited a fragment of that Timurid empire which briefly had stretched into India.

The fragment was Ferghana, the upper valley of the Syr Darya, whose revenue supported to more than a few thousand cavalry. With this force of helmeted, mail-clad warriors, attached to him only by personal loyalty or temporary interest, Babar began his carrier of conquest. He joined in the family struggles for power, thrice winning and thrice losing Samarkhand, alternately master of a kingdom or a wanderer through the hills.”

Born on February 14, 1483 at Andizhan, Babar was the eldest of the three sons of Umar Sheikh Mirza.

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babar was descended in the male line from Timur and in the female line from Chengiz Khan. His family belonged to the Chaghtai section of the Turkish race, but he was commonly known as ‘Mughal’. He became the ruler of Farghana in Trans-Oxania at the age of eleven years.

Becoming the king of Kabul in 1504, Babar was tempted by the wealth of India and carried out more than one raid. However, his heart was still in Central Asia, in Samarkhand, which he won in 1511 with help from the Persians and found that his subjects hated the Persian Shia. Still, he continued there hopefully for two years and then gave up to turn his gaze towards India, goaded on by the need to provide employment to the many exiled princes at his court.

He conducted preparatory raids on India in 1517 and 1519. In 1523, came the invitation from Daulat Khan Lodi, the governor of Punjab, and Alam Khan, an uncle of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi to invade India. However, the Uzbeg attack on the Balkh province of Afghanistan forced Babar to go back, and it was not until November 1525 that his final invasion on India began.

The two armies faced each other in the plain of Panipat on April 21, 1526. Babar possessed a large part of artillery, a new kind of weapon coming into use in Europe and Turkey but unknown at that time in northern India. But Babar’s total force, including the Badakhshan troops under Humayun and the camp followers did not exceed 12,000 men, say some historians.

As a kind of barriers to the enemy, 700 bullock carts were tied up by chains, leaving gaps sufficient for the cavalry to charge through. On the opposing side, Ibrahim Lodi’s men vastly outnum­bered his adversary’s forces. He also had 100 elephants. But he was “a young and inexperienced man, careless in his movements, who marched without order, halted or retired without method, and engaged without foresight.” Clearly, he was no match for Babar, a born general of many wars.

The battle was fought from half past nine in the morning until the evening, at the end of which Ibrahim lay dead surrounded by 15,000 of his dead soldiers. In the Babarnama, Babar wrote, “By the grace of God… this difficult affair was made easy for me and within the space of half a day a mighty army was laid to dust.”

Occupying Delhi and Agra promptly, the im­mense treasures were distributed generously among all the ranks. But the heat was oppressive, food and fodder scarce, and his army wanted to go back. Babar won their hearts by a rousing speech and persuaded them to stay back when they were discouraged again by the threat posed by Rana Sanga. Rana Sangram Singh, the doyen of the Rajput kings, expected Babar to defeat Ibrahim Lodi for him and then to go back as Timur had done earlier.

When Babar decided to stay to rule, the Rana felt the need to confront him. To lift the sagging spirits of his despairing force, Babar publicly renounced his drinking of wine and made another rousing speech. He declared jihad against the kafirs, that is, holy war against the Hindus so that the safety and honour of Islam was secured, and abolished tamgha (stamp duty) from all Muslims.

His force, much smaller than the Rana’s 80,000 cavalry and 500 war elephants, employed the same tactics as at Panipat with the same result. The battle was fought at Khanua on March 16, 1527, the Rana’s defeat was complete, but he escaped to live up to 1529. Babar thereafter attacked the fort of Chanderi held for the Rana by Medini Rao on January 29, 1529, annihilating the garrison. Next to be attacked were the Afghan chiefs of Bihar and Bengal who were defeated on the banks of the River Ghagra near Patna.

Babar decided not to enter Nusrat Shah’s territory, i.e., Bengal, provided no Afghan fugitive was sheltered there nor any help was given to the Afghan rebels from Bengal and to sign a treaty with him in this regard. Nusrat Shah supported the treaty with the condition that each side would respect the other’s borders. Babar kept a part of Bihar to himself distributing the remainder to Afghans who agreed to become his feudatories.

Appointing his son, Humayun, as his successor, Babar died on December 26, 1530. He was buried initially at Arambagh in Agra, but his remains were later removed to Kabul for burial at a place chosen by him earlier as his final resting place.

Babar left behind an empire stretching from Badakhshan to Bihar in which were included Af­ghanistan, Punjab and Delhi and extending south­wards to a perimeter bounded by the forts of Bayana,Ranthambhor, Gwalior and Chanderi.

Babar performed his duties of a ruler, to the best of his abilities and, rejecting the Afghan mo­narchical concept of first among equals, declared himself as the Padshah or supreme authority. Any­way, the considerable devaluation the monarchy had undergone in India since the death of Firuz Shah Tughlaq (barring the years of Sikandar Lodi) was stopped and the emperor was again looked up to with awe, admiration and respect.

Considering that it was his duty to bring peace and order to the people of the country, Babar made the roads safe from robbers and thieves, ordered all his governors and officers to save the people from tyranny and tried to bring justice to the people and redress their grievances. He constructed many buildings at Agra, Bayana, Dholpur, Fatehpur-Sikri and such other places while providing public welfare facilities like parks, gardens, and orchards.

With regard to administration, however, Babar’s record is not impressive; he did not bring in any new administrative measure in India nor in Afghani­stan. There was no reform, he continued with the old methods in both the countries. In India, he divided the empire into jagirs and iqtas which he assigned among the nobles and chiefs for adminis­tration.

As the head of the empire, Babar naturally was the unifying force; but he left the affairs of the provinces and regions entirely in the hands of the local administrators. In effect, they were almost independent in their regions and there were no guidelines from Babar for improvements in judiciary or revenue or taxation. Furthermore, Babar was not quite careful about financial matters.

Upon occupy­ing Delhi and Agra, he distributed the treasures generously among his followers without taking into account the effects of a depleted treasury in the years to come. Consequently, both he and Humayun felt acutely the shortage of finances, a shortfall Babar tried to meet by imposing additional taxes on the people and levying on his nobles a tax of 30 per cent of their income as the price of their appoint­ments.

Even so, a shortfall remained, which severely affected Humayun’s administration. In fact, this shortage of finance continued to bother Humayun making Babar’s legacy to him, in the words of Dr R.C. Majumdar, “quite precarious”. Rushbrooke Williams went further still by commenting, “He bequeathed to his son a monarchy which could be held together only by the continuance of war conditions, which in times of peace was weak, structureless and invertebrate.”

Babar succeeded in establishing the Mughal Rule in India, because of his victory in the battles of Panipat, Khanua and Ghagra. At Panipat, appar­ently, the beginning was made; at Khanua, it was consolidated by removing the Rajput threat and at Ghagra, it was mopping up the remaining opposition of Muhammad Lodi. Dr S. Roy has said that the “empire… (founded by Babar) excelled, in glory and greatness, the ephemeral structure of Chengiz as well as the ill-cemented empire of Timur whom he emulated. It is, however, in the military sense that Babar can be regarded as the founder of the Mughal empire in India.

The monarchy of Babar’s ideal was a divine inheritance, the sacrosanct monarchy of Timur; the monarchy that he established in reality was a human compromise. He had neither the time to organize, nor the genius for reconstruction; he failed in the task of the recreation of a new theory of kingship and the foundation of a stable, central­ized polity for his far-flung empire. As in Kabul, so in India, the government that he set up was saifi (by the sword) and not qalami (by the pen)” (The Mughal Empire).