The Babur Nama: Introduction by William Dalrymple (Everyman's Library Classics Series) - Hardcover

Babur

 
9781101908235: The Babur Nama: Introduction by William Dalrymple (Everyman's Library Classics Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101908238 ISBN 13: 9781101908235
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

“If you only read one autobiography from a sensitive 16th-century warlord this year, make it this one.” —The New York Times

A hardcover edition of the colorful memoirs of Babur—founder and first emperor of the Mughal dynasty—that is "justly considered a masterpiece" (The Wall Street Journal).
Zahiru’d-din Muhamad Babur (1483–1530), a poet-prince from Central Asia, was the author of one of the most remarkable autobiographies in world literature. The Babur Nama reveals him as not only a military genius but also a ruler unusually magnanimous for his time, cultured, witty, and possessing a talent for poetry, an adventurous spirit, and an acute eye for natural beauty.

Babur ascended the throne of Fergana, in what is now Uzbekistan, when he was twelve years old. He eventually invaded India and founded the Mughal dynasty, which would dazzle the world for three centuries. Babur left behind a detailed and colorful record of his life, written in simple and unpretentious prose, that has fascinated readers for hundreds of years. But his self-portrait goes beyond the events of a dramatic life; on the page, his restless energy and ambition are balanced by modesty, regret for his failures, and frankness about his experiences with depression and grief in response to tragedy. The Babur Nama is both a lively chronicle of extraordinary historical events and a deeply personal memoir whose unusual honesty and sensitivity has given it enduring appeal.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BABUR (1483-1530), born Zahir ud-Din Muhammad, was the founder and first emperor of the Mughal dynasty. He was a direct descendant of Emperor Timur (Tamerlane) from what is now Uzbekistan.

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE is an award-winning British historian and writer based in Delhi, India, as well as a BAFTA-award-winning broadcaster and critic. His books have won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, and the Hemingway, the Kapuscinski, and the Wolfson Prizes. He has been four times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. In the spring of 2015 he was appointed the O. P  Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University.

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Introduction

At the end of 1525, Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur, a Timurid poet-prince from Farghana in Central Asia, descended the Khyber Pass with a small army of hand-picked followers; with him he brought some of the first modern muskets and cannons seen in India. With these he defeated the Delhi Sultan, Ibrahim Lodhi, and established his garden-capital at Agra.

This was not Babur’s first conquest. He had spent much of his youth throneless, living with his companions from day to day, rustling sheep and stealing food. Occasionally he would capture a town—he was 14 when he first took Samarkand and held it for four months. Aged 21, he finally managed to seize and secure Kabul, and it was this Afghan base that became the springboard for his later conquest of India.

But before this he had lived for years in a tent, displaced and dispossessed, a peripatetic existence that had little appeal to him. “It passed through my mind,” he wrote, “that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless . . . had nothing to recommend it.”

Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India, and before he could properly consolidate his new conquests. He regarded himself as a failure for having lost his family lands in Central Asia and was profoundly ashamed that his generation of Timurids, thanks to their squabbles and rivalries, had failed to defend their ancestral inheritance after holding Oxiana for more than a century. He could not have imagined that his new Indian conquests would grow to be the greatest and most populous of all Muslim-ruled empires with, by 1650, around 150 million subjects—five times the number ruled by their Ottoman rivals.

At this point, his family’s lands were producing about a quarter of all global manufacturing: the Mughal Empire had become the world’s industrial powerhouse and its greatest producer of manufactured textiles. In comparison, England then had just five percent of India’s population and was producing under three percent of the world’s manufactured goods.

A good proportion of the profits of these Indian manufactures found their way to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making Babur’s successors, with incomes of around £100 million, by far the richest monarchs in the world.

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great Mughal cities of Agra and Lahore are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God’s creation. This was no understatement: by the age of Milton, Lahore had grown larger even than Constantinople, and, with its two million inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris. From the ramparts of the Fort, Babur’s descendants ruled over most of India, all of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and great chunks of Afghanistan.

Their army was all but invincible; their palaces unparalleled; the domes of their many mosques quite literally glittered with gold. The Mughals were really rivaled only by their Ming counterparts in China. For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, Babur’s descendants, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power—a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word “mogul” ever since.

If the dynasty Babur founded represented Islamic rule at its most powerful and majestic, it also defined it at its most aesthetically pleasing: this was, after all, the Empire that gave the world Mughal miniatures, Mughal gardens and the spectacular architectural tradition that culminated in the Taj Mahal. The great Mughal Emperors were also, with one notable exception, tolerant, pluralistic and eclectic. Their Empire was effectively built in coalition with India’s Hindu majority, particularly the Rajputs of Rajasthan, and succeeded as much through conciliation as by war.

This was particularly true of Babur’s grandson, the Emperor Akbar (1542–1605), who issued an edict of universal religious toleration, forbade forcible conversion to Islam and married a succession of Hindu wives. At the same time that Jesuits were being hanged, drawn and quartered in London, and when much of Catholic Europe was subject to the Inquisition, in India Akbar was summoning Jesuits from Goa, as well as Sunnis and Shia Muslims, Hindus of both Shaivite and Vaishnavite persuasions, Jews from Cochin, Parsis from Gujarat and groups of Hindu atheists, to come to his palace and debate their understanding of the metaphysical, declaring that “no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.”

Babur not only established this extraordinary dynasty and set the tone for its future political, economic, aesthetic and humanistic triumphs; he also produced one of the most fascinating autobiographies ever written to record exactly how he did it. The Babur Nama does much more than merely keep the memory of his conquests alive. In its pages Babur opens his soul with a frankness and lack of inhibition comparable to Pepys.

Typical is his description of falling in love with an adolescent boy from the camp bazaar: “Up till then I had had no inclination for anyone, indeed of love and desire,” he wrote. “In that frothing-up of desire and passion, and under that stress of youthful folly, I used to wander bare-headed, bare-foot, through street and lane, orchard and vineyard. I shewed civility neither to friend nor stranger, took no care for myself or others.”

Throughout his memoir, we are admitted to Babur’s innermost confidence as he examines and questions the world around him. He compares the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of falling for men or marrying women, or weighing up the differing pleasures of opium, hashish and alcohol.

Profoundly honest and unusually articulate, at once emotionally compelling and profoundly revealing, the Babur Nama is in many ways an oddly modern text, almost Proustian in its self-awareness. It presents the uncensored fullness of the man, a human life perfectly pinned to the page in simple, direct and unpretentious prose.

The uniqueness of the Babur Nama was immediately recognized by all Babur’s contemporaries as it was by his Mughal successors, who quickly had it translated from Babur’s colloquial Turki to literary Persian; from Persian it was first translated into English in 1826 by William Erskine and John Leyden, and became a favorite text of the Orientalists of the British Raj who had replaced the Mughals in India, and who saw many echoes of their life and thoughts in his.

According to the Victorian administrator and Persian scholar Henry Beveridge, husband of the translator of this volume, Annette Beveridge (their son, William Beveridge, was instrumental in the formation of the British Welfare State) the Babur Nama “is one of those priceless records which are for all time, and is fit to rank with the confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau, and the memoirs of Gibbon and Newton. In Asia it stands almost alone.”

This last sentence is not quite accurate: there was in fact a wonderfully rich tradition of Islamic autobiography out of which the Babur Nama grew, and which includes such masterworks as the witty and urbane Memoirs of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh, a Syrian Arab landowner from the time of the Crusades, and the wise, measured and ironic Mirror for Princes of Kai Ka’us Qabus, an 11th-century Seljuk vassal of the Ziyarid dynasty, whose grandfather built the great Gunbad-i-Qabus tomb tower on the Caspian steppe, and had his corpse suspended halfway up in a rock crystal coffin.

What is true, however, is that the Babur Nama is the culmination and climax of that Islamic autobiographical...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101908238
ISBN 13 
9781101908235
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
1032
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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