Babur loved the pleasures of the table too; fruits especially were a

passion with him. He does not however seem to have been keen on the
fourth component of Omar Khayyarn's paradise, women. He was a
good provider and a caring householder, affectionate and deferential
towards his women, especially towards his elder relatives, but he was
not, unlike his roly-poly father, a ladies' man. Babur preferred the
macho bonhomie of his friends to the pleasures of the harem.
Babur's first wife was Aisha, a cousin, to whom he was betrothed
at the age of five. Eleven years later, she joined him in Fergana. She
found him a bashful lover. As Babur tells it, "Though I was not illdisposed towards her, yet, this being my first marriage, out of modesty
and bashfulness, I used to see her once in ten, fifteen, twenty days.
Later on, when even my first inclination did not last, my bashfulness
increased. Then my mother Khanum used to send me, once a month or
every forty days, with driving and driving, dunnings and worrying."
Babur had his first child, a daughter, by Aisha three years after she
joined him, but the baby died in infancy, and Aisha herself deserted
him during his days of homeless wandering. By and by Babur acquired
other wives and several concubines, as behoved a prince, and he
fathered a number of children, as duty required of him, to ensure the
continuity of his line. But there was no ardour in him for women.
There was only one romantic infatuation in Babur's life, his
unabashed love for a bazaar boy in Andizhan. Babur was sixteen then,
and Aisha had just joined him. "In those leisurely days," he confesses,
"I discovered in myself a strange inclination . . . for a boy in the campbazaar, his very name, Baburi, fitting in. Up till then I had had no
inclination for anyone, indeed of love and desire, either by hearsay or
experience, I had not heard, I had not talked . . . From time to time
Baburi used to come to my presence, but out of modesty and bashfulness
I could never look straight at him; how then could I make conversation
and recital? ... 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 showed civility neither
to friend nor stranger, took no care for myself or others . . ."
Babur does not tell how the affair ended. But he got over it soon
enough. Baburi was just an adolescent fancy, not unusual in an
environment in which, among Central Asian aristocrats, bisexuality was
common, and pederasty high fashion. In Babur's case, however, the
affair appears to have been virginally romantic and without carnal
expression. Later, in Kabul, when he once again had time to enjoy
himself, he preferred the gentler seductions of literature, art, music and
gardening to carnal pleasures.
12

Babur gave all of himself to every one of his many cultural

pursuits, and his achievements in some of them were substantial. Still,
they were only avocations for him, and not for one moment would he
let himself forget that he was a king by profession, and that his
ultimate ecstasy would be in the perilous thrill of the battlefield.

IN KABUL, THOUGH he did not yet know what fate had in store for
him, Babur began to organize himself for the battles ahead, whipping
his men into a superb fighting force. "I had been at great pains to train
and exercise them to the utmost point," he writes. "Never, perhaps,
were my troops in such perfect discipline." He also took care to
modernize his army, introducing muskets and cannons (till then used
mostly in siege operations) into field battle, a tactic he adopted from
the Ottoman Turks. That innovation would give him a crucial advantage in
India.
Meanwhile, the political jigsaw in India had rearranged itself, to
open a passage for Babur. And Babur needed that exit, to get away
from the ever menacing Uzbegs. "The foe mightily strong, I very weak,
with no means of making terms, no strength to oppose," he laments.
"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,
put a wider space between us and the strong foeman. That choice lay
between Badakshan and Hindustan and that decision must now be
made."
The choice fell on India.
Babur states that from 1519 on he led five expeditions into India,
but long before that, in fact from the time he took Kabul, he had been
active along India's north-western marches. Those early campaigns
were however only pillaging raids, and he probably did not cross the
Indus till 1519, when he advanced as far as the Jhelum. Even then, till
1524 he had no ambition beyond Punjab, which he claimed as his
Timurid legacy, by virtue of it having been a part of Timor's empire a
century earlier. Then, fortuitously, a greater opportunity came knocking.
The messengers of destiny were Dilawar Klan (son of Daulat Khan, the
rebel Afghan governor of Punjab) and Alarm Khan (an uncle of Ibrahim
Lodi, the Sultan of -Delhi), who arrived in Kabul to solicit Babur's help
in ousting Ibra_him. Babur then took an omen, found it favourable, and
agreed to their proposal, intending not so much to help them as to help
himself.
The campaign of 1524 was abortive. The allies, after occupying
Punjab, fell out over the division of the province. Daulat Khan wanted
13

all of Punjab for himself, while Babur had other ideas. Babur therefore
prudently withdrew to Kabul, leaving a garrison in Lahore. It would
have been dangerous for him to advance further into India, with a
truculent Daulat Khan behind him in Punjab threatening his line of
retreat.
Babur set out from Kabul on his final invasion of India in midNovember 1525, before the snows closed the mountain passes. He
moved leisurely, holding frequent wine parties along the way. By midDecember he crossed the Indus, never to recross it. His immediate
adversary was Daulat Khan, who had entered the field against him
with two swords girded to his waist to display his victory-or-death
resolve. That, it turned out, was just bluster, for as soon as Babur
approached, the Khan's army scattered and the old man himself tamely
surrendered. He was brought before Babur with his two swords hanging
from his neck. Babur upbraided him: "I called thee Father. I showed
thee more honour and respect than thou couldst have asked . . . What
ill sayest thou I have done thee, that thus thou shouldst hang a sword
on thy either side, lead an army out, fall on lands of ours, and stir strife
and trouble?" The Khan had no answer.
But Daulat Khan was irrelevant. The real challenge lay ahead, at
Panipat, where Ibrahim Lodi waited with his army. "I put my foot in
the stirrup of resolution," writes Babur, "set my hand on the rein of
trust in God, and moved forward against Sultan Ibrahim."

14

"If Fame Be Mine . .

/I

BABUR DID NOT tarry in Punjab. Even then it took him a while to
settle his affairs there, so that by the time he crossed the Satluj and
advanced to the Yamuna, it was April, and the dreaded Indian summer
was upon him. On reaching the Yamuna, at a point east of Kurukshetra,
the epic battleground of the Mahabharata, Babur encamped.
Meanwhile Ibrahim Lodi, haughtily disregarding the dire warnings
of his astrologers, had advanced with his troops to Panipat, eighty
kilometres north of Delhi, to challenge the intruder. The opposing
forces thus lay two marches away from each other, the Afghans
immediately to the south of Panipat and the Mughals some way to the
north of it.
The going had been easy for Babur in India till then, as he had met
only desultory resistance from the Afghan provincial forces in Punjab.
Now he had to face the imperial Afghan army. His own army was
small by Indian standards. Four months earlier, when he was crossing
the Indus, his army, Babur reports, numbered 12,000 men, "great and
small, good and bad, retainer and non-retainer." He was later joined by
the contingents he had left behind in India during his previous campaign,
as well as by a few renegade Afghan officers and soldiers. With these
accretions, by the time Babur reached Panipat his army had probably
swelled to about 20,000 men.
The actual strength of the Afghan army is not known. Babur
estimated it to be roughly 100,000 strong, with some 1000 elephants.
Whatever the true count, the Afghan army was certainly much larger
than the Mughal army. This Afghan advantage was somewhat offset by
Babur's superior weaponry: a train of artillery (estimates vary from just
two to a few hundred pieces) and a contingent of musketeers (again of
unknown number, but probably about 4000) which would be used in
India in a field battle for the first time at Panipat. Still, the balance of
power favoured Ibrahim. Babur could win only by clever tactics.
MOST OF BABUR'S battles till then had been close combats in the hill
country, in constricted battlefields where large forces could not be

deployed, and it was not the size of the army but its spirit, the tactical
use of the terrain and the element of surprise that decided the outcome
of battles. Babur was now in flat, open country. Here numbers would
matter. There was little scope for a surprise attack, no tactical advantage
in the terrain. And valour, rapidity of response and manoeuvrability,
though they all could make a difference, would not be decisive.
To defeat Ibrahim Lodi, Babur had to neutralize the awesome
Afghan superiority in numbers and enable his own strengths in cavalry
and gunnery to prevail. The critical requirement for him was to create.
a narrow battlefront, to prevent the Afghans from sweeping around the
flanks of his small army and encircling it. But that in itself was not
enough, for however narrow the front, Babur would not have enough
depth of array to withstand the Afghan onslaught which could, by its
sheer mass and velocity, smash through the Mughal ranks like a giant
tidal wave. Babur had to devise a means to steel his frontline, to hold
the Afghans in check long enough for his slow-firing guns to break the
Afghan formation. If he could do that, then the Mughal cavalry could
charge into their midst and scythe them down.
What had Babur to do to gain that tactical advantage? In his
quandary, he summoned his veterans to a war council. Together,
reaching back to the lore of their turbulent land and the memory of
Babur's own thirty-two years of incessant wars, they conceived a
revolutionary new strategy that dexterously modified the traditional
Mughal battle formation to accommodate the Ottoman wall-of-fire
gunnery tactics and the wheeling cavalry charge of the Uzbegsto halt
the Afghan juggernaut in its tracks and annihilate it.
Having decided on the strategy, Babur sent out scouts to survey
the prospective battlefield at Panipat. The stretch of open land on the
eastern flank of Haryana along the Yarnuna was the traditional passage
into the Gangetic Plain, a corridor between the mountains on the north
and the desert on the south, at the end of which lay Delhi. This was the
arena of India's destiny where other decisive battles had been fought in
the past, as they would be in the future. The ground at Panipat was
ideal for a conventional field battle. It suited Ibrahim Lodi.
But it did not suit Babur. There was nothing at all in the terrain
that he could take advantage ofit was just a vast, open, flat field, its
monotony relieved only by a few trees and thorn bushes. Babur had
somehow to modify the battleground to serve his particular strategic
needs.
In two rapid marches southward along the Yamuna, Babur reached
Panipat and deployed his army to the east of the town, between the
town and the river, which in the sixteenth century flowed close by. His
16

right wing abutted the buildings of the town, secure against being
outflanked; to protect his left wing, he dug ditches and laid an obstacle
of felled trees between the river and his position, thus effectively
narrowing the width of the field to ensure that the battle would be
fought precisely along the front on which he deployed his army. The
enemy would have no chance to sweep around him, either on the left
or on the right.
To protect his frontline and to impede the Afghan cavalry onset,
Babur set up along his entire front a barrier of gun-carriages and other
carts, some 700 of them, placed about four metres apart and with ropes
of rawhide stretched between them. In between the carts, Babur placed
his musketeers, six or seven in each gap, protected by breastworks.
And to give an offensive potential to this essentially defensive
deployment, he left several gaps, each about a bow-shot wide, between
groups of carts through which a couple of hundred horsemen could
charge abreast. By 12th April Babur was ready for the enemy, his
preparations complete.
His was a perfect defensive-offensive arrangement, which could
hold the enemy at bay until he was ready to attack. The only
disadvantage, and this was a crucial factor, was that its success depended
on the Afghans attacking his entrenched position; if they did not attack,
all his elaborate preparations would be worth nothing. Babur confidently
expected the Afghans to attack, for after all the Mughals had intruded
into the Lodi domain and it was for Ibrahim Lodi to expel them.
Ibrahim Lodi viewed the situation differently.
He was close by, straddling the route to Delhi in a good blocking
position. As Babur set about preparing his defences, the sultan made
no move to interfere. Clearly, he was not planning to attack. He had no
need to, as his objective was only to deny Babur passage to Delhi.
Defence, in this case, was the best form of offence. By staying fast in his
position, the sultan could force Babur to leave his entrenchments and
attack him. Time was on Ibrahim Lodi's side. He could afford to wait.
But Babur could not. As an aggressor in an alien land, and facing a
superior army, he needed qurck results to keep his men in the high heat
of martial zeal. For seven days, with increasing restlessness, he waited
for the Afghan attack. Meanwhile, the morale of his army began to
crumble. "Many of the troops," he notes, "were in great tremor and
alarm."
Babur tried to calm them by ridiculing Ibrahim Lodi as "an unproved
brave" from whom they had nothing to fear. At the same time he
sought to incite the Afghans into action by sending provocative sallies
into their camp, hurling insults and shooting arrows. These were
17

ignored by the Afghans. "Still he made no move; nor did his troops
sally out," grumbles Babur. The unproved brave was proving to have
a firm and sound strategy of his own.
In the end, it was Babur who was obliged to change his battle plan
and launch, on 19th April, a night attack on the Afghans, hoping to
take them by surprise. The main body of Babur's left wing, a contingent
of some four or five thousand men, nearly a fourth of his army, was
sent into the attack, while Babur himself stood at arms with the rest of
his men, ready to press the advantage should the attackers make
headway, or to cover their retreat should they fail.
The foray was a fiasco. Instead of surprising the Afghans, the
Mughals were in for a surprise themselvesthey found the Afghans
alert and ready for them, so that, in peril of being decimated, they
retreated abruptly, without engaging.
But such was Babur's luck that it was this apparent rout that got
him what he wantedan Afghan attack on his position.

APRIL 20TH, THE day after the failed night attack, was a quiet day in
the Mughal camp, as Babur waited for the Afghan countermove. He
waited in vain, though late that night the Mughal camp was thrown
into panic by a false alarm about a surprise Afghan attack"For
twenty minutes there was uproar and call to arms," says Babur. The
Mughals were edgy,
Then, as dawn broke over the plain on Saturday, 21st April,
Mughal pickets reported that the Afghans were on the move. Apparently,
the easy rout of the Mughal night-raiders had emboldened the Afghans.
They scented an easy victory, and moved in for the kill.
This was a fatal error. The Afghans were walking into the trap
cunningly laid by Babur.
Babur waited, his cavalry, his barricade of carts and breastworks,
his cannoneers and musketeers, all in position. Behind the gun line, the
Mughal army, with soldiers as well as horses clad in mail, was drawn
up in the classic Timurid formationthe advance guard up front at the
centre, with the main contingent directly behind it, flanked by the right
and left wings, and flying squadrons at the far right and the far left. At
the rear of it all, Babur kept a large reserve force ready for any
contingency.
The Afghans came on at a fast gallop, as if they meant simply to
overrun the Mughals.
But they were in trouble even before they engaged the Mughal
army. Squeezed between the walls of Panipat on their left and Babur's
18

ditches and hurdles on their right, the Afghans found themselves in

a bottleneck when they closed in on the Mughals. As they sidled
to squeeze though the constriction, their l e f t wing angled ahead of
the frontline, so it was in an odd, lopsided formation that the Afghans
slammed, like a brittle wedge, into the right wing of the Mughal
army.
Babur, who had positioned himself near the centre of the Mughal
deployment in an overseeing position, noticed the Afghans bearing
down on his right, and rushed a part of his reserve troops to reinforce
that wing. But there was no need for anxiety. When the Afghans came
up against the Mughal defences, and the Mughal guns opened up (an
unexpected terror) their forward divisions faltered, and as they tried to
rein in, the ranks behind, unable to break their momentum, slammed
into them, throwing the entire Afghan army, already under a lateral
squeeze because of the constriction in the wings, into disarray. It was
precisely as Babur had planned. An army no more but a dense,
seething horde, the Afghans were unable to fight effectively, or even to
retreat.
Babur seized the moment and swung his flying squadrons into
action, to wheel around the enemy and attack them from the rear.
Simultaneously, he ordered his left and right wings to advance. His
strategy was clear. He meant to roll up the Afghan wings and slam
them into the Afghan centre, turning the Afghan army into compacted
fodder for his cannons and muskets.
The Afghans fought on valiantly, repeatedly charging the Mughal
position, but their plight was hopeless. It was not a battle any more,
but carnage. "The sun had mounted a spear-high when the onset of
battle began, and the combat lasted till mid-day, when the enemy was
completely broken and routed, and my friends victorious and exulting,"
writes Babur. "By the grace and mercy of Almighty God, this arduous
undertaking was rendered easy for me, and this mighty army, in the
space of half a day, laid in the dust."
The slaughter was dreadful. The Afghan dead were set down by
Babur as 15,000 or 16,000 men, a likely figure. Ibrahim Lodi himself lay
dead amidst a pile of corpses, the only Muslim ruler of Delhi (Turk,
Afghan or Mughal) ever to fall in battle. When the Mughals found the
slain sultan's body, they, as was customary among them, severed his
head and took it as a memento to Babur. Babur treated the grisly
trophy with grave respect. "Honour to your bravery!" he exclaimed,
lifting up the head solemnly. Before the battle he had spoken scornfully
of Ibrahim Lodi, but now that the day was won, he would salute the
brave dead. He called for a bolt of brocade to shroud the body, and
19

commanded two of his top amirs, Dilawar Khan and Amir Khatifa, to
bathe Ibrahim Lodi and to bury him with full honours at the spot
where he had fallen.

AN EMPIRE HAD been won in a mere five-hour battle. "That very

day," writes Babur, "I directed Hurnayun Mirza . . . to set out without
baggage or encumbrances, and proceed with all possible expedition to
occupy Agra (the Lodi capital), and take possession of the treasuries."
Another contingent was rushed to occupy Delhi.
Babur himself rode on to seize the Afghan camp, then pitched his
tents on the banks of a nearby stream for the night. The next day, a
Sunday, he set out for Agra. On the way he stopped over in Delhi for
a few days, securing treasuries and visiting palaces, gardens and
shrines. He also arranged for the khutbah (a formal sermon,
incorporating a prayer for the reigning monarch) to be read in his name
at the main mosque in the city during the Friday noon congregational
prayers, to legalize his rule, He reached Agra on 4th May, haying
covered the 280 kilometres from Panipat in two weeks at the height of
summer. For a week he camped in an open field on the outskirts of the
city. On Thursday, 10th May, he ceremonially entered Agra, and rode
into the citadel of Ibrahim Lodi to take up residence there as the
Emperor of Hindustan.
Babur was now forty-three years old. Three decades earlier, as a
boy-king on the rickety throne of an obscure, war-torn principality, he
had dared to dream grand dreams, and now at last, after endless
struggles and many misfortunes, he had won a domain to match his
vision. Fergana, his ancestral kingdom Cost to the Uzbegs, was now a
distant memory; Samarkand, the legendary Timo rid capital which he
had once ardently coveted, a forsaken passion; and Kabul, his capital
for twenty-five years, just a provincial outpost. India was now home
for Babur.
Babur's decision to settle in India was an unpleasant surprise to his
men. They had expected him to return home to Kabul, laden with
booty, as he had done on previous occasions. When Babur first launched
his Indian campaigns, the annexation of Punjab as a province of his
Kabul kingdom was the limit of his ambition. That still had seemed to
be his goal as he set out on his last Indian invasion, for he had just
before that entered into an agreement with Alam Khan, the Lodi
pretender, by which, in return for help in ousting Ibrahim Lodi, Babur
was to get Lahore and all the Lodi lands west of it. Babur's officers had
therefore assumed that the expedition into the Endo-Gangetic Plain was
20

just another pillaging sweep. India was opulent, but inhospitable. A

good hunting ground, but no place to live in.
Such were the views of the Mughal amirs, and they resented
Babur's decision to remain in India. His very generosity compounded
his problems. "The treasures of five kings fell into his hands," writes
Gulbadan Begiim, his daughter; "he gave everything away." All his
mennobles and soldiers, even traders and scribesreceived generous
bounties from Babur, and so did his relations and friends back home,
as well as holy men in Samarkand and Khurasan. "Every soul in the
country of Kabul and the valley-side of Varsak, man and woman, bond
and free, of age and non-age," was given a silver coin, records Babur.
He kept nothing for himself.
His men were sated. Now all they wanted was to get back to the
cool mountains of Afghanistan and enjoy their good fortune. As Khwaja
ICalan, one of Babur's intimates, would write while leaving India for
Kabul,

If safe and sound F cross the Sind,

Blacken my face ere I wish for Hind.
Babur knew how his men felt. He himself found India a dreary, land.
"Hindustan is a country of few charms," he frets. "Its people have no
good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits, there is
none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and
work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no
good horses, no dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits,
no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in bazaars, no hotbaths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks."
More than anything else, the climate of India oppressed the Mughals.
The summer of 1526 was savage in Agra, one of the worst in living
memory. "Violent, pestilential winds struck people down in heaps
together," writes Babur. And this was not all. Powerful adversaries
Afghans in the east, Rajputs in the southwere marshalling their forces
and advancing against Babur. The Mughals, it was clear, would have to
fight and win many more battles before they could claim Hindustan as
their own.
There was no support for the Mughals anywhere in India. The
people of the land were sullenly hostile, harassing the Mughals at
every turn. "On our first coming to Agra, there was remarkable dislike
and hostility between its people and mine," writes Babur. "All the
inhabitants had run away in terror. Neither grain for ourselves nor corn
for our horses was to be had. The villagers, out of hostility and hatred
21

to us, had taken to thieving and highway robbery; roads became

impassable." Towns and villages fortified themselves and would not
submit without a fight. India, it seemed, would have to be conquered
inch by inch.

WAS THE CONQUEST of India worth such a formidable effort? Babur

thought so. India, he says, was "a large country , - - [that had] masses
of gold and silver," and "workmen of every profession and trade .
[were] innumerable, and without end." These were major attractions.
There was, in additionand perhaps, for Babur, ever so much more
seductive than any material rewardthe prospect of glory that would
be his, his place in history as the founder of a great empire. As one of
Babur's favourite sayings had it,

Give me but fame, and if I die I am contented.

If fame be mine, let Death claim my body.
In deciding to remain in India, Babur was looking at a time beyond his
own time. The ambitions of his men, however, were yoked to their
immediate appetites, and they clamoured to be sent back to Kabul. But
Babur remained adamant. "By the Labours of several years, by
encountering hardship, by long travel, by flinging myself and the army
into battle, and by deadly slaughter, we, through God's grace, beat
these masses of enemies in order that we might take their broad lands,"
he reminded his men. "Now what force compels us, what necessity has
arisen that we should, without cause, abandon countries taken at such
a risk of life? Was it for us to remain in Kabul, the sport of harsh
poverty? Henceforth, let no well-wisher of mine speak of such things!"
This exhortation chastened most, but not all. Some, including a
couple of his most trusted old comrades in arms, such as Khwaia
Kalan, pleaded with Babur to let them return to Kabul. Reluctantly, he
let them go. But he missed them.
He missed Kabul too. "Boundless and infinite is my desire to go to
those parts," he wrote in a letter to Khwaja Kalan in Kabul. Broiling in
the summer heat of India, he longed for the mountains. Once, when a
Kabul melon was brought to him and its aroma filled the air, he was
awash with nostalgia"I felt myself affected with a strong feeling of
loneliness, and a sense of my exile from my native country, and I could
not help shedding tears while eating it." He dreamed of returning to
Kabul some day.
But not yet. He had a mission to accomplish in India.
22

Panipat had given Babur his place in history, but it was only a
provisional place. If he abandoned India after Panipat, or if his successors
failed to preserve his conquest (as nearly happened), Babur would be
relegated to the nether regions of history crowded with petty potentates.
Babur could not afford to rest on his laurels. He had, as he enigmatically
noted m his memoirs, "seen his task whole".
There was, however, a lull in action after Panipat, as Babur's
adversaries, the Rajputs and the Afghans, waited to see what his moves
would be. Meanwhile, Babur's decision to make India his home brought
him several Indian allies, including a few Afghan nobles, who sought
to hitch their fortunes to the rising Mughal star. Also, the hostile public
mood in India, which had troubled Babur initially, now began to
dissipate, because, as Ahmad Yadgar puts it, "during the first two
months of His Majesty's reign, he behaved to every one with such
kindness and generosity that dread and terror were banished from the
hearts of all men." Babur's position further improved around this time
with the arrival of a number of Mughals from Central Asia to join him
on his invitation. "The Most High has given us sovereignty in
Hindustan," he had written to them; "let them come that we may see
prosperity together."
Babur needed all the strength he could marshal, for his position in
India was still perilous. By Central Asian reckoning, the domain that
Babur acquired by his victory over Ibrahim Lodi was immense, but it
was nevertheless only a strip of land staked out along the Lahore Delhi-Agra belt. The Mughals were by no means the dominant power
in India. The Afghans, defeated but not crushed, remained in power in
Bihar and Bengal. Immediately to the south of the Mughal lands lay a
powerful Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga of Mewar, who dreamed of
raising a Hindu empire from the ashes of the Delhi Sultanate.
Further south was the prosperous Afghan kingdom of Gujarat, a
rallying ground for ambitious Afghans. Still further south, beyond the
Vindhya Mountains, were other powerful kingdoms, the Deccan
sultanates and the Vijayanagar empire.
Babur's immediate concern was with the Afghan chieftains who
had regrouped in eastern India and had menacingly advanced to
Kanauj, some 200 kilometres east of Agra. But the Afghan challenge
turned out to be a weak bluff. As the Mughals advanced, they scattered.
The Rajputs were quite another matter. Babur however remained

curiously complacent about them, underestimating their power. "Rana

Sanga," he notes in his memoirs, "is thought not to be the equal of the
[Afghan] rebels." This was a serious miscalculation. Fortunately for
Babur, the Rajputs were still a long way off. And the monsoon, during

which no major military operation was possible in India, had broken

over the land. Babur would have a few months rest.
He used this interlude of peace to lay out gardens and palaces in
Agra, to make the city congenial to his lifestyle. Soon after arriving in
Agra he had scouted around on the left bank of the Yamuna, in the
crook of the river opposite the fort, for a place to build a garden
complex, but had, he says, found "those grounds . . . so bad and
unattractive that we traversed them with a hundred disgusts and
repulsions." Still, he ingeniously transformed that cheerless landscape
into a pleasant retreat, constructing tanks, water courses, bath-houses
and other buildings, and laying out gardens with "order and symmetry,
with suitable borders and flower-beds in every corner, and in every
border rose and narcissus in perfect arrangement," as he puts it. The
Mughal amirs followed Babur across the river, and soon the garden
complex grew into a flourishing and lovely suburb. The local people,
says Babur, "had never seen grounds planned so symmetrically and
thus laid out," and they in their prosaic simplicity called the settlement

Kabul.

THEN THE RAINS ceased, and it was time again for Babur to return
to the battlefield. Rana Sanga of Mewar, heading a formidable Rajput
confederacy, and joined by several Afghan chieftains, including Mahmud
Lodi, the brother of Ibrahim Lodi, was rapidly advancing on Agra.
Babur and the Rana had been in friendly contact with each other before
the battle of Panipat, but now they had bitter grievances against each
otherBabur accused the Rana of not keeping his word to make a
diversionary attack on Ibrahim Lodi on the eve of Panipat, and the
Rana resented Babur occupying lands to which he had a claim. These
recriminations were, however, mere pretexts. The real issue was who
should have sway over Hindustan.
Rana Sanga was a dangerous adversary. According to James Tod,
an early-nineteenth-century chronicler of Rajput history, the Rana was
so intrepid and ferocious a warrior that at the close of his life "he
exhibited . but the fragments of a warrior. One eye was lost in a broil
with his brother, an arm in an action with the Lodi king of Delhi, while
he was cripple owing to a limb having been broken by a cannon ball.
From the sword or lance he counted eighty wounds on various parts of
his body."
As the Rana approached, Babur, who had been earlier sanguine
about the Rajputs, recognized the gravity of the threat. "Rana Sanga the
pagan . . . Satan-like he threw back his head and collected an army of
24

accursed heretics," writes Babur. "Ten powerful chiefs, each the leader
of a pagan host, uprose in rebellion, as smoke rises, and linked
themselves, as though enchained, to that perverse one." Babur calculated
the potential strength of the Rajputs as 200,000, an army much larger
than that which Ibrahim Lodi had deployed at Panipat.
This alarmed the Mughals. The problem, however, was not just of
numbers. There was also the Rajput valour to be reckoned with. As the
advancing Rajputs decimated every probing contingent that Babur sent
against them, "the fierceness and valour of the pagan army" made the
Mughal troops "anxious and afraid," admits Babur. Some of Babur's
Indian allies, especially the Afghans who had joined him after Panipat,
now began to desert him. Even his own men were sullen, reluctant to
fight a dangerous and uncertain battle, risking all their gains in India,
their rich booty, merely to defend a land they hated and did not want
to hold. They again pleaded with Babur to return to Kabul. "No manly
word or brave counsel was heard from any one soever," laments Babur.
There were problems elsewhere too. "Trouble and disturbance rose
on every side . . . Every day some unpleasant news reached us from
one place or another," writes Babur. His stars, it seemed, were once
again turning malevolent. To make matters worse, Muhammad Sharif,
a reputed astrologer who had just then arrived from Kabul, predicted
that, because of the adverse aspect of Mars, Babur would be defeated
by .Rana Sanga. This prophecy shattered the fragile morale of the
Mughal army, though Babur himself, no stranger to adversity, was not
perturbed: nye gave no ear to his wild words, made no change in our
operations, but got ready in earnest for the fight."
On 11th February 1527, having marshalled his forces by calling in
his outlying garrisons, Babur marched out of Agra to confront the
Rajputs. He advanced with great caution, taking care at every halt to
protect his camp with ditches, wooden tripods on wheels (which
served as portable breastworks, a new innovation) and carts joined
together with chains and ropes of rawhide. These precautions helped to
ease the anxiety of his men. But this was not enough. Battles are not
won by troops cowering behind defences. To win, Babur would have to
ignite the blood of his warriors.
Mulling over the problem one day while out tiding, Babur came up
with a perfect solution. For over fourteen years he had been a heavy
drinker, a grave though common infraction among the Mughals. Now, in
his hour of crisis, he decided to "return to obedience"to win divine
favour, and, more importantly, to gain the moral authority to declare the
war against Rana Sanga (his first war against a Hindu monarch) as a jihad,
holy war, and thus to unleash the martial fury of his men.
25

What followed was high drama, as Babur turned the private

renunciatory vow into a stirring sacramental rite. As his men stood in
formation, glum and uncertain about what to expect, he faced them,
and raising his arms to invoke the blessings of Allah, ceremonially took
his pledge to renounce wine. Then, with splendid theatricality, he
called for his abundant stock of wine to be brought, poured all the
radiant ruby-red liquor on the ground in front of his aghast troops,
smashed his flagons, his gold and silver goblets, and gave away the
fragments to dervishes and the poor. A well was ordered to be dug
where the wine was poured, and an alms-house built beside it. For
good measure, Babur also swore not to trim his beard thereafter.
He then turned to address his men. "Noblemen and soldiers!
Whoever sits down to the feast of life must, before it is over, drink of
the cup of death . . . How much better, then, it is to die with honour,
than to live with infamy," he declaimed. "The most High God has been
propitious to us. He has now placed us in such a crisis that if we fall
in the field, we die the death of martyrs; if we survive, we rise
victorious, the avengers of his sacred cause. Let us, therefore, with one
accord swear on God's Holy Word that none of us will for a moment
think of turning his face from this warfare; or shrink from the battle
and slaughter that ensue, till his soul is separated from his body."
The impact of these words on his men was electric_ "All those
present, officer and retainer, great and small, took the Holy Book
joyfully into their hands and made vow and compact to this purport,"
Babur notes with gratification. "The plan was perfect. It worked
admirably." The mood of the Mughal army then swung dramatically
from dread to daredevilry. "From the effect of these soul-inflaming
words, a fire fell into each heart," says Mughal chronicler Nizamuddin
Ahmad.
AT DAWN ON 16th March, Babur reached Khanua, a small village
about forty kilometres west of Agra. There, as his army was pitching its
camp at a carefully chosen and prepared site near a low hill, he was
informed by scouts that the Rajputs were approaching.
It was, as at Panipat, a Saturday, and it would be as lucky for
Babur. The battle of Khanua was a virtual replay of the battle of
Panipat, except that it lasted nearly double the time and was far more
fiercely contested, resulting in heavy casualties on both sides. The
battle commenced at about nine in the morning and raged on till late
evening. The decisive factor at Khanua, as at Panipat, was the firepower
of the Mughals, aimed at the enemy compacted into "one mass" by
26

Babur turning the Rajput flanks. Mustafa, the Ottoman Turk in charge
of the Mughal artillery, "had the carts brought forward and broke the
ranks of pagans with matchlock and cannon," reports Babur. And the
Mughal soldiers, inflamed by Babur's oration, "fought with such delight
and pleasure that it was more like a time of mirth than one of war,"
notes Nizamuddin Ahmad.
In the end the Rajputs fled, leaving so many dead in the battlefield
that, according to Babur, the Mughal contingents chasing them "found
no foot-space without the prostrate foe." Rana Sanga himself fled, with
Babur in hot pursuit, But after a chase of about three kilometres beyond
the enemy camp, Babur peeled away, leaving it to others to follow on,
which enabled the Rana to escape. "There was a little slackness; I ought
to have gone myself," writes Babur. Apparently he did not want to
force his luck. Nor did he, as he would normally have done, follow up
the victory with an invasion of Mewar, because of "little water and
much heat on the road."
Returning to the battlefield, Babur ordered a pillar of severed
enemy heads to be erected on the hill beside which the battle was
fought. This was a Mughal military rite performed after almost every
battle, to, strike terror in potential adversaries and thus to cripple their
spirit and defeat them even before the battle was fought on the ground.
By nightfall Babur returned to his camp, and there assumed the
title of Ghazi, Holy Warrior. He then turned to Muhammad Sharif, the
astrologer who had predicted a Mughal rout, but was now waiting to
congratulate Babur on his victory. Babur tore into him: "I poured forth
upon him a torrent of abuse." But eventually his generosity prevailed.
"When I had relieved my heart by it, although he was a self-conceited
fellow . . and an intolerable evil-speaker, yet, as he was my old
servant, I gave him a lakh in a present, and dismissed him, commanding
him to depart from my dominions."

27

Black Fell the Day

THE BATTLE OF Khanua marked the end of the travails of Babur.
There were still battles to fightthere would always be battles to
fightbut Babur was now indisputably the Emperor of Hindustan. He
was content. The pace of his life now eased, and he gradually reverted
to the relaxed lifestyle of his balmy days in Kabul.
Everything interested Babur and most things delighted him. His
curiosity was boundless, and there was in him, even after all he had
had to endure in life, a charming, childlike faculty to find joy in the
most humdrum things of everyday life. It thrilled him, for instance, to
bum the leafy branches of holm-oak which crackled as they burned; "It
is good fun to burn it!" he writes. For him, the shining moon, the
flowering bush, the rushing stream, were all celebratory miracles.
"Tonight I elected to take opium," he writes, "because of . . . the
shining of the moon." Again: "On Thursday at sunrise ... confection
was eaten. While under its influence wonderful fields of flowers were
enjoyed . . . There were flowers on all sides of the mound, yellow here,
red there, as if arranged regularly to form a sextuple." It was with the
same joyous wonder that he had first seen India, in 1505: "In Ningnahar
another world came to view other grasses, other trees, other animals,
other birds, and other manners and customs of clan and horde. We
were amazed, and truly there was ground for amazement."
In India, after Khanua, there was only one thing that sullied
Babur's happinesshis vow to abstain from wine. "In truth the longing
and craving for wine-party 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," he wrote to Khwaja Kalan in Kabul, and lamented:

While others repent and make vow to abstain,

I have vowed to abstain, and repentant am I.
He would break his vow and revert to wine towards the end of his life.
but in the meantime he consoled himself with the pleasures of good
companionship. In the company of friends, death is a feast," he used
to say, quoting a Persian proverb. He enjoyed people and delighted in

convivial parties. "There was much joking and laughter," he says,

recalling with pleasure a party at the house of an amir. He revelled in
clever repartee, but despised "vapid and empty" small-talk.
ONE OF THE enduring passions of Babur, in good times and bad, was
his love of literature. He now had the leisure to luxuriate in it. I-Us
library was one of his most valued possessions, which he always
carried around with him, and books were one of the treasures he
hunted for in a conquered land. In his memoirs, when he listed the
sovereigns and high nobles of a land, he also listed poets, musicians
and intellectuals. They too mattered to him.
He was a fastidious connoisseur of literature, and he considered it
a terrible depravity to write bad poetry. "His verse is flat and insipid,"
says he about his paternal uncle Sultan Mahmud Mirza of Badakshan,
and adds: "Not to compose is better than to compose verse such as
his." It greatly distressed him that his son Humayun was a negligent
writer. "Though taking trouble . . . [your letter) can be read, it is very
puzzling, and whoever saw an enigma in prose?" he once upbraided
Humayun, and advised: "Thy remissness in writing seems to be due to
the thing which makes thee obscure, that is to say, to elaboration. In
future write unaffectedly, clearly, with plain words, which saves trouble
to both writer and reader."
Babur himself was an acclaimed writer. He wrote in Turki as well as
in Persian, but with greater felicity in Turki, in which he was a poet
"second only to Arnir All Shit.", according to Mirza Haidar. Babur had
several books to his credit, prose and poetry, even a treatise on
jurisprudence and another on Turki prosody. But his best known work
is his autobiography, a classic in its genre.
Babur wrote a good deal after Khanua. He found it a fair consolation
for the loss of the pleasures of wine. Further, he had a curious notion
that literature had healing powerswriting irreverent poetry, he
believed, caused illness, while writing ennobling poetry cured it! He
was, he says, once a careless versifier, stringing into verse whatever
came to his head, "good or bad, grave or jest . . . however empty and
harsh the verse might be," but became more discriminating while
writing Mubayyin, his poetic magnum opus. At that time, says Babur,
"this thought pierced through my dull wits and made way into my
troubled heart, 'A pity it will be if the tongue which has the treasure
of utterances so lofty as these, is wasted again on low words . ..' Since
that time I have refrained from satirical and jesting verse."
Not quite. Babur did still occasionally relapse into frivolous
29

limericksand suffered for it! A few days after one such trivial
composition, notes Babur, "I had fever and discharge, followed by
cough, and I began to spit blood each time I coughed. I knew whence
my reproof came; I knew what act of mine had brought this affliction
on me."
Unfortunately, very little of Babur's poetry has survived, so his
literary reputation today rests solely on his autobiography, and even
from this large--portions are missing. Babur used to carry his journal
with him all the time, even on military campaigns, working on it
whenever he had a little time. This habit of his once led to a near
disaster. He was at that time encamped at a riverside, sitting up late in
the night, writing. Suddenly, a great storm burst over the camp. "Such
a storm burst, in the inside of a moment, from the up-piled clouds of
the rainy season, and such a stiff gale rose, that few tents were left
standing," Babur records. "I was in the audience tent, about to write;
before I could collect papers and sections, the tent came down, with its
porch, right on my head . . . Sections and book were drenched under
water and were gathered together with much difficulty. We laid them in
folds of the woollen throne-carpet, put this on the throne and on it piled
blankets . We, without sleep, were busy till shoot of day drying folios
and sections." It was probably in some such mishap that the missing
sections of his memoirs were lost.
The great charm of Babur's memoirs is its directness and simplicity,
its total lack of affectation. Babur was a candid chronicler. "In this
history I have held firmly to it that the truth should be reached in
every matter, and that every act should be recorded precisely as it
occurred," he writes. "From this it follows of necessity that I have set
down of good and bad whatever is known, concerning father and elder
brother, kinsman and stranger; of them all I have set down carefully
the known virtues and defects."
This was his precept. His practice did not always quite match the
high ideal. Babur was writing about himself, with his eyes on posterity,
and he would not have been human if he did not intensify the drama
of his life. Babur's descriptions of events do sometimes vary in detail
from other contemporary sources, and it cannot be assumed that his
version was always right. The discrepancies are, however, minor, and
could be due to differences in perception or quirks of memory.
Apart from the books he wrote, Babur had to his credit several
other cultural accomplishments, such as musical compositions, and the
creation of a new and distinctive style of calligraphy, called Baburi. But
his greatest passion outside literature was gardening. He would even
pause in the midst of critical military campaigns to lay out gardens, as
30

he did on the river-bank near Sirhind in Punjab on the way to Panipat.

In Agra, one of his first projects was to build a garden complex. Later,
he laid out another garden at the lake in Daulpur, where he had a six
by six metre tank hewed out of a single mass of rock, saying, "When
it is finished, I will fill it with wine." At Sikri, on his way back from
Khanua, he ordered an octagonal platform to be built in the middle of
the lake there, for him to repose and enjoy opium; he also loved
boating in the lake, says Gulbadan.
Babur was a keen horticulturist. "I had plantains brought and
planted there (in Kabul); they did very well," he writes. "The year
before I had sugar-cane planted there; it also did well." In India, he
was ecstatic when the grapes and melons which he had introduced into
the Garden of Eight Paradises in Agra began to bear fruit. "To have
grapes and melons grown in this way in Hindustan filled my measure
of content," he writes.
THIS CAPACITY OF Babur to find joy in so many different things was
what sustained him during his years of adversity, for some facet or
other of the many facets of his personality always caught the light of
the sun, whichever way the wheel of fate turned. Babur was a blessed
dilettante, not a driven, obsessed genius. Whatever he did was a
vigorous and cheerful expression of his own vigorous and cheerful self,
open and spontaneous. Babur delighted in being Babur.
All things fresh and new gladdened him, and he travelled around
his Indian empire with the feisty enthusiasm of a tourist. "They are
wonderful buildings," he writes about the Gwalior fort complex, though
he found the rooms dark and airless, and the palace itself "heavy and
unsymmetrical". In the valley beneath the fort, he visited the Jain
shrines alongside the lake, where, he notes, "the idols are shewn quite
naked without covering the privities ... Not a bad place . the idols
are its defect. L for my part, ordered them destroyed." He also visited
the nearby Hindu temples, but says nothing about destroying the idols
thereit seems that it was his aesthetic sensibilities that were offended
by the Jain idols, not his religious sentiments.
The tours of Babur had a political purpose too: he was familiarizing
himself with his empire, its land, its people. Whatever else his interests
and activities, Babur always had one eye cocked vigilantly on state
security. On that he would never relax. "No bondage equals that of
sovereignty," he would write sternly to Humayun when that easygoing
prince wanted to "retire" from government. "Retirement matches not
with rule."
31

Curiously, despite all the attention he gave to matters of the state,

and despite his scholarship in jurisprudence, Babur did not set up even
a rudimentary administrative system in India. This failure cannot be
explained away by the fact that he ruled India only for less than five
years or that during that time he was continually engaged in wars, for
under virtually the same circumstances, Sher Shah (the Afghan chief
who later expelled Babur's successor from India) set up a complex,
efficient and enduring administrative system.
But then, Sher Shah was of the land; he knew its ways, and had
only to overhaul and energize the prevailing system. Babur was an
alien in India, and he did not have the time to familiarize himself with
local traditions. Besides, his administrative attitudes were conditioned
by his experience in turbulent Afghanistan, which could be ruled only
by saifi (sword), not galami (pen), as Babur puts it.
All that Babur did in India by way of administrative action was to
parcel out his domain among his amirs, for them to govern their fiefs
as they pleased. He did not even have a regular system of revenue
collection. Once, in October 1528, when he needed fundshe was short
of funds in India, as he had given away virtually all the plunder he had
gatheredhe even had to requisition contributions from his arnirs,
ordering "that each stipendiary should drop into the royal treasury
thirty in every hundred of his allowance, to be used for war materiel
and appliances, for equipment, for powder, and for the pay of gunners
and matchlockmen."
This was an unusual procedure, presumably adopted to meet some
emergency. The primary source of revenue for Babur in India was
pillage. As he candidly states in his memoirs, raids were often made
specifically to seize plunderfor instance, he notes that he once decided,
choosing from different alternatives, to march westward from Agra
because that was where there was "treasure helpful for the army". The
Mughals lived by war. Not to wage war was not to live, or at least not
to have the means of livelihood.
It certainly was a failure of Babur that he did not make the
transition from the ways of nomadic monarchy to those of a settled
empire. As Sher Shah observed, the Mughals "have no order or
discipline, and ... their kings ... do not personally superintend the
government, but leave all the affairs of the State to their nobles and
ministers . . . These grandees act on corrupt motive in every case."

BACK IN AGRA after the battle of Khanua, Babur rewarded his men
suitably, distributed fiefs among his nobles, and, as he had promised
32

he would, granted leave to those who wanted to return to Kabul.

Humayun was dispatched to govern Badakshan, which had fallen to

Babur in 1520. Then, as the monsoon was imminent, he sent the
remaining officers to their fiefs, to get some well-earned rest and to reequip their contingents. Babur himself remained in Agra, in the Garden
of Eight Paradises, till Ramadan, and then moved to Sikri, because, he
says, he did not want to break his custom of not holding the Ramadan
feast in the same place for two successive years.
When the monsoon ended Babur set out on his campaigns again,
this time against Medini Rai of Chanderi in north-eastern Malwa. Here
for the first time he came across the macabre Rajput rite of jauhar, in
which, faced with certain defeat, women and children immolated
themselves or were slaughtered by their men, who then slew each
other or rushed out naked to fight and dieto preserve their honour.
The Rajputs kept their honour; Babur took the fort.
Meanwhile the Afghans were on the move again east of Agra, and
though they initially scattered without fighting when Babur turned on
them menacingly, they regrouped again soon after, this time under the
command of Sultan Mahmud Loch, the brother of Ibrahim Lodi, who
had set himself up as the king of Bihar. Babur then launched a second
eastern campaign, and in a battle fought at the confluence of the Ganga
and the Ghaghara, near Patna. on 6th May 1529, he decisively routed
the Afghans.
The battle of Patna was Babur's last major military campaign. By
then, his attention had once again turned to developments beyond the
Hindu Kush; in fact, even while he was marching against the Afghans,
his eyes were on Central Asia, as he had received reports of Uzbeg Persian clashes in Khurasan. An old gleam now returned to Baburis
eyesmaybe the Timurid lands could yet be recovered, he thought,
and ordered Humayun in Badakshan to. join the fray. "Thank God! now
is your time to risk life and slash swords," he wrote. "Neglect not the
work chance has brought He grips the world who hastens." Babur
then made plans for himself to return to Kabul, to be close to the scene
of action. "Matters are coming to some settlement in Hindustan; there
is hope .. . that the work here will soon be arranged," he wrote to
Khwaja Kalan. "This work brought to order, God willing, my start will
be made at once."
Nothing came of those plans. In Central Asia, the tizbegs recovered
their initiative, the Persians retreated, and Humayun aborted his
campaign. Babur was not destined to see Kabul again. However,
towards the dose of 1529, he did proceed as far as Lahore, and spent
a couple of months there. Surprisingly, he did not make the short hop
33

from there to Kabul, which he so passionately yearned to visit again.

Instead, he returned to Agra. His memoirs do not tell whythey end
abruptly in mid-sentence on 7th September 1529. Even the entries for
the previous several months are sketchy. Something was amiss.

BABUR HAD NOT been in good health for quite some time. Despite
his phenomenal physical vitality, he had always been prone to illness,
and at least once, in 1498, when he was fifteen, was so critically ill that
his life was despaired of. His memoirs are dotted with accounts of his
numerous ailments. "It was a strange sort of illness," writes Babur
about a bout of fever, "for whenever with much trouble I had been
awakened, my eyes closed again in sleep. In four or five days I got
quite well." On his final Indian expedition, as soon he crossed the
mountains he fell ill. "That evening I had fever and discharge which
led on to cough, and every time I coughed, I spat blood," he notes. In
India, because of the oppressive climate and the rigours of incessant
wars, he was ill quite often, especially in the last couple of years of his life
he suffered from recurrent fever, boils, diarrhoea, sciatica,
discharges of the ears and spitting of blood.
Amazingly, despite his ill health, even late in his life Babur could
perform physical feats from which a much younger man would have
flinched. At forty-six we find him exuberantly swimming across the
Ganga. "I swam the Ganga river, counting every stroke," he writes, "I
crossed with thirty-three, then, without resting, swam back. I had
swum the other rivers, Ganga had remained to do." Still, age had
begun to tell on him. He suffered from ennui as much as from ill
health. For all his vigorous enjoyment of life, Babur had a renunciatory
streak in him, a predilection for mysticism. "I am a king but yet the
slave of dervishes," he used to say. He had led a full life, had seen
everything, done everything, and now he was tired. Sometimes he
went into a deep depression and talked of becoming a hermit. "My
heart is bowed down by ruling and reigning," he said. "I will make
over the kingdom to Humayun."
His iron will began to falter. He returned to wine. And, though he
had not till then shown any great fondness for the company of women,
he now became attached to two Caucasian slave girls, Gul-nar and Nar g ul, whom he had received as a gift from Shah Tahmasp of Persia a
couple of years earlier. The death of an infant son, Alwar, at this time
upset him greatly. He missed his children, and kept asking to see
Hindal, his youngest son, who was away in Kabul. There were signs of
senility. His mind often wandered. He took little interest in government.
34

"He passed his time in .. . company with Mughal companions and

friends, in pleasure and enjoyment and carousing, in the presence of
enchanting dancing girls with rosy cheeks, who sang tunes and displayed
their accomplishments," Yadgar reports, "Mir Khalifa . . possessing
the chief authority, managed the government, and his decrees were like
those of the Sultan himself."
In that perplexing situation, Humayun abruptly returned to India
from Badakshan without royal permission, a serious breach of propriety. It
is likely that he had come to know of his father's condition. It could also
be that he had heard the rumour that Mir Khalifa was plotting a
succession coupthough none of Humayun's contemporaries mentions
such a conspiracy, the writers of the next generation do; but if indeed
there was such a plot, it fizzled out on the arrival of Humayun in Agra.
Babur upbraided Humayun for leaving Badakshan without
permission, but soon forgave him. Humayun, though somewhat
eccentric, and not as ambitious or energetic as Babur would have liked
him to be, was nevertheless a lovable and highly cultivated prince,
whose company Babur enjoyed hugely. Says Abul Fazi, "The Emperor
many times declared that Humayun was an incomparable companion."
After spending a few days with his father in Agra, Humayun left
for Sambhal, his fief near Delhi, and Babur himself with his wives
moved to his gardens at Daulpur. There he presently received an
urgent message from Humayun's camp: "Humayun Mirza is ill and in
an extraordinary state. Her highness the Begum should come at once to
Delhi, for the Mirza is much prostrated." Babur, says Gulbadan, was
desolated by the news. When Humayun's mother, Maham Begum,
consoled him, saying, "Do not be troubled about my son. You are a
Icing: what griefs have you? You have other sons. I sorrow because I
have only this one," Babur said, "Maham, although I have ether sons,
I love none as I love your Humayun. I crave that this cherished child
may have his heart's desire and live long, and I desire the kingdom for
him and not for others, because he has not his equal in distinction."
Babur immediately returned to Agra and ordered Humayun to be
brought by boat from Delhi to Agra for treatment, but by the time the
prince reached Agra, he was delirious and critically ill,
Only god could save Humayun, it seemed. And god, an amir
suggested, could be induced to save the prince if one of Humayun's
valued possessions was offered as a propitiatory oblation. Babur seized
the thought, but rejected the suggestion to offer a great diamond
belonging to Humayun. Instead, he decided to offer his own life,
characteristically placing sentiment above treasure and contending that
it was the father's life that a son valued most. As Mughal chroniclers
35