Babur of Fergana

"Like us many have spoken over this spring, but they were gone in the twinkling of an eye. We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it with us to the grave." - Babur, from the Baburnama

In 1526, Zahir-ud-Din Babur, a young Timurid poet-prince from Fergana, in what is now Uzbekistan, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked followers; with him he brought some of the first modern muskets and cannon seen in India. With these he defeated the Delhi sultan, Ibrahim Lodhi, and established in Delhi and Agra the beginnings of what would soon become the Mughal Empire. Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India, and before he could consolidate his new conquests. He regarded himself as a failure for having lost his family lands in Fergana, and had no idea whether his new Indian conquests were secure. History may remember him as the first Mughal emperor, but in his own eyes he was always a refugee driven away from his father’s kingdom by the Uzbek Shaibani Khan. Percivial Spear writes in the History of India that Turks and Mongols had seen a lot of inter-mixing in the ebb and flow of Central Asian intertribal warfare and through some Mughals had decidedly Mongoloid features they were physically more Turkish than Mongols. Unlike his descendants, Babur never really fell in love with Hindustan and its people and ruled India from Kabul leaving his son Humayun and other governors in-charge. He mostly got to rule the Delhi-Agra tract and its inhabitants whom he described in Baburnama as, “Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no good fruits, no ice, or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candle stick.” While the Delhi-Agra tract is a small patch of land within the realm of Hindustan and not a reflection of the land as a whole, it is important to know that at the time of his ascension, the Hindu mass remained at subsistence level, punctuated by famines and floods. The upper classes were slightly better off but still relatively impoverished as in the last 100 years, North India had only seen wars and invasions resulting in a loss of trade and business. Delhi and around had been the worst affected. Babur died knowing the pain of exile and homelessness, neither in Hindustan nor Fergana. The present work is located at the British Museum, London, UK. While some provenance has described it as the work of Bishandas, an artist unrivalled in the art of portraiture in Jehangir’s court, I personally see little similarity in style between this and his other works. I may or may not stand corrected on this."

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