In January 1505, Babur, twenty-two years old, raided India for the first time. Since he was just a minor prince struggling for his very existence, his raid was tiny compared to the invasion of his great-great-grandfather Tamerlane, who had sacked Delhi. Babur – Tiger – was an irrepressible, exuberant and playful extrovert with an awesome lineage – his mother was descended from Genghis Khan, his father from Tamerlane. But in the half-century since 1447 when Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh had died, the descendants of the conqueror had failed to control his former empire. Like any mirza,* Babur longed to sit on the conqueror’s throne in Samarkand. But many mirzas were no longer warriors; rather they were playboys, who were ‘fine as companions, in conversations and at parties, but strangers to war’.
Babur, contemporary of Manuel and Michelangelo, was twelve when his father, womanizer, poet, swashbuckling warrior and pigeon fancier, ‘fat, brave, eloquent’, was killed – he was visiting his doves and his dovecote fell down a ravine. ‘Umar Sheikh Mirza,’ wrote Babur, ‘flew with his pigeons and their house and became a falcon.’ Inheriting the Fergana Valley, the mirza depended on his grandmother, Ësan Dawlat Begum, ‘for tactics and strategy, an intelligent and good planner’. Babur was a Chagatai Turk, adept with the crossbow, sword, six-flanged mace and axe of the steppe horseman, and thanks to his flamboyant memoir
As a teenager, Babur married for the first time, to Aisha, but his first love was a boy: ‘I discovered in myself a strange inclination for a boy in the camp bazaar, his very name Baburi suited me well.’ Sometimes, ‘Baburi came to me but I was so bashful I couldn’t look him in the face,’ and when Babur bumped into him, ‘I went to pieces … I’m so embarrassed every time I see my beloved.’ Tortured by his infatuation, ‘that frothing up of desire and passion, and the stress of youthful folly, I used to wander bareheaded and barefoot through street, orchard and vineyard. I took no notice of myself or anyone else.’ Afterwards he married his beautiful, intelligent cousin Maham, whom he trusted implicitly, saying, ‘Treat Maham’s words like a law,’ especially after she gave birth his beloved son Humayoun.
In 1496, Babur seized Samarkand, but lost it after 100 days. ‘I cried involuntarily,’ he admitted. ‘Is there any pang, any grief, my wounded heart has missed?’ In 1500 when he was nineteen, ‘I took Samarkand’ again; ‘I had 240 men.’ A year later, humiliated in battle, he fled, so desperate that he and his posse ate their horses. ‘When one has pretensions to rule and a desire for conquest, one can’t sit back and just watch when events don’t go right once or twice.’ But he also knew that power is solitude: ‘Other than my own heart, I never found a confidant.’
Then, just as he planned to flee to China, his fortune turned: he seized Kabul, famed for its gardens and its poverty, with 200 ruffians whom he had to discipline: ‘I had four or five shot, one or two dismembered.’ Starting with this shambolic warband, he would go on to conquer the richest land on earth. ‘My desire for Hindustan [India] was constant,’ wrote Babur, raiding through the Khyber Pass, where he saw the wealth of India: ‘Every year, twenty thousand animals bring slaves, textiles, sugar, spices.’ Even better, the Delhi sultanate, ruled for fifty years by the Lodi dynasty of Afghan descent, was weak.
In between raids into India, Babur enjoyed booze and drugs. ‘There was much disgusting uproar,’ he reminisced. Once, ‘We rode off, we got on a boat and drank spirits, left the boat roaring drunk and mounting our horses let the horse gallop free-reined. I must have been really drunk.’ He was the only psychedelic conqueror: ‘How strange the fields of flowers appeared under its influence,’ he raved about narcotics. ‘Nothing but purple flowers, sometimes yellow and purple together with gold flecks.’
In November 1525, he led 20,000 men including 4,000 arquebusiers and artillery sent by the Ottoman sultan into the Punjab (Pakistan), then swooped on Delhi. At Panipat, on 21 April 1526, just north of Delhi, Sultan Ibrahim’s 100,000 men and 100 elephants challenged Babur’s small force. The invaders’ musketeers and cannon probably won the day. Ibrahim’s head was taken to Babur. At the age of forty-three, he had conquered northern India. ‘I ordered [my eldest son] Humayoun Mirza to occupy the capital, Agra. But after he had given away his spoils, his troops wanted to return to Kabul; he wanted to stay.
