Babur’s Timurid Sultanate

Har kîm bû Vaqâyi‘ ni okur bîlgey kim

Ni ranj ü ni mihnet ü ni gamlar kördüm

Everyone who reads these Events will know

What grief and what sorrow and what difficulties I have seen

Babur in his Rampur Diwan

Agra, 28 December 1528

Until recently, most historians of the state commonly, if erroneously, known as the Mughal or Mongol Empire of South Asia have paid scant attention to its founder, the Timurid, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530). Their neglect is not surprising, considering that when Babur died in 1530, he bequeathed only a fragile North Indian paramountcy to his son and heir Humayun. Then after the Afghans chased Humayun from India in 1540, the following interregnum meant that when Humayun died only a year after resuscitating his father’s dynasty in 1555, it seemed reasonable to consider his formidable son Akbar (1556-1605) as the founder of the Empire qua empire. Scholars could feel comfortable ignoring Babur’s poorly understood Central Asian, Turco-Mongol heritage and the ineffectual reign of his son. In 1992, however, members or associates of the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) violently provoked interest in Babur’s Indian conquest by destroying a mosque in Ayodhya known as the Babri Masjid. They asserted that Babur deliberately built this mosque on the foundation of a temple that commemorated the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram, and that he did so because he had invaded India as a ghazi, a militant Muslim religious crusader who was bent on Islamising Hindustan. Many Indians also believed Babur’s malevolent intent was corroborated by a passage in his autobiography where he portrays his pivotal 1527 Battle of Kanua against the Rajput Rana Sanga as a jihad, a war for the faith. On its face, the idea that Babur invaded North India on a religious crusade seems absurd. The region of North India he knew as Hindustan was already widely settled by Muslims,  and was ruled by an Afghan Muslim dynasty. More than a religious crusade, Babur’s attack on the Ludi Sultanate was an instance of dynastic imperialism, driven by his desire to resurrect a Timurid empire in the wealthy North Indian heartland. Yet, it is questionable if reasoned argument can dispel nationalist rhetoric that affirms and spreads the notion of Babur’s evangelical mentality. In consequence, scholarly analysis of this issue has acquired compelling, immediate significance in twenty-first-century India. This characterisation of Babur’s campaign in 1526 is but one aspect of the BJP’s implicit rejection of Jawaharlal Nehru’s tolerant, secular, social democratic ideology in favour of a policy of Hindu dominance that encourages or tolerates persecution of Indian Muslims and other religious minorities.

Fortunately, Babur’s remarkable autobiography, which when taken together with his verse and other writings, offers readers the opportunity to analyse his motives, policies and actions with a degree of certainty unrivalled in studies of other pre-modern conquerors. The scant sources, sometimes just a single text, available for historical studies of so many pre-modern conquerors and rulers often foster misleadingly simplistic interpretations of complex historical events. Babur´s lavishly documented life, while as rhetorical or self-serving as other autobiographies, nonetheless represents an exceptionally realistic portrait of his Turco-Mongol society, highly Persianised culture and Timurid political career. In the case of Babur’s invasion of India, it enables the reader to understand how his sense of himself as both a Timurid and a Muslim shaped his decisions.

Introduction: Emperor as Sultan

To better understand the interplay between Babur’s dynastic inheritance as a Timurid and his Muslim identity, it is helpful to preface a survey of his career with an introduction to the concept of the sultanate, the dominant form of the state in post-Mongol Islamic history. In 1508, while ruling from Kabul, which he had seized four years earlier after fleeing the Uzbeks as a political refugee from Mawarannahr, Babur demanded to be recognised as a padshah. This was an imperial Iranian title that reflected the expansive ambitions—or fantasies—of Timurids, who all inherited assumptions of imperial legitimacy. Yet, while Timurids’ grandiose dreams have caused the Mughal Indian state to be commonly and reasonably characterised as an empire, Babur’s autobiography and verse reveals him to have been an individual who exemplified nearly all traits of the Muslim sultan as defined by the North African philosophical historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). 

In his Arabic work, the Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun developed a political model of sultanates. He contrasted the vital, internalised piety of Muhammad and the Rightly Guided Caliphs with later Muslim rulers. He asserted that the former possessed spiritual authority, legitimised by their evangelical mission and religious responsibility as rulers. However, the later rulers, known as sultans, neither possessed nor claimed religious authority but ruled solely through “superiority and force”. They practised, he wrote, siyasah ‘aqliyah, “rational politics”, outwardly respecting the shari’ah, Muslim religious law, while governing according to expedient administrative norms, qawanin. Ibn Khaldun asserted that the religiosity of early Muslims had gradually atrophied during the Umayyad and ‘Abbasid Caliphates, largely disappearing in the later ‘Abbasid era (750-1258). These rulers, Ibn Khaldun believed, had metathesised into proto-imperial Iranian-like monarchs, men who patronised Islam but ruled according to the imperial traditions of Sasanian emperors. 

By the later years of the ‘Abbasid era, Ibn Khaldun pointedly remarked, ‘ulama, the clerical class of Muslim religious scholars and officials, had become politically marginalised. Alluding to ‘ulama complaints that they, the rightful “heirs of the prophets”, had been wrongfully excluded from royal councils, Ibn Khaldun wrote an acerbic commentary on the class. He argued that sultans’ disregard for clerics’ opinions was entirely justified, reasoning that sultans’ authority was not derived from divine law. Instead, he said, it was issued from the “nature of society and human existence”. The nature of society, he added, did not require that jurists [muftis] and scholars [‘ulama] exercised authority. If, he continued, sultans invited Muslim religious scholars and functionaries into their counsels, they did so only as a courtesy and sign of their regard for Islam. Then adding social insult to political injury, he added that “common people” as well as sultans “had no compelling need for the things religious officials had to offer. They were needed only by special people who took a particular interest in their religion.” 

Otherwise, Babur rarely pauses in his account of this chaotic and desperate period in life to discuss anything but military campaigns. The only exception is how he recorded his early efforts to develop a literary reputation, a preoccupation that he retained throughout his life. Apart from campaigns, Babur allots more space to verse than any other subject in the Vaqayi‘. He notes in passing that during this decade, he included a copy of one of his verses in a letter he wrote in 1500 to the great Turki poet Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i in Herat. Two years later, in the midst of  desperate political troubles, he found time to improve his literary skills by considering technical aspects of vocabulary and the prosody of the Turki verse he wrote when he visited his Mongol uncle Mahmud Khan in Tashkent. Eventually he produced two diwans of verse, nearly all in Turki except for a few juvenile love poems in Persian/Farsi. From India, he proudly sent copies of his diwans to family and close friends. The Turki verses did not resonate in the Persianate literary world, but nonetheless added to Babur’s reputation as a major Turki writer.

With his flight from Mawarannahr and occupation of Kabul in October 1504, Babur escaped his immediate Uzbek pursuers, and he held the city for the next two decades. Initially threatened with renewed Uzbek attacks, he subsequently struggled throughout these two decades with the Sisyphean task of subjugating Afghan tribes and clans. Nonetheless, Babur achieved a degree of security during this period and his carefully detailed narrative illuminates his biases and priorities. His description of events in 1506, 1511 and 1519 are particularly important for appreciating his Timurid identity and mulkgirliq ambition. The first of these involved his march from Kabul to Herat in late 1506. He initially decided to visit Herat, because its ruler, the Timurid Sultan Husain Baiqara, asked him to join an alliance against the Uzbeks. Babur decided to go to Herat because the Sultan was a doubly descended Timurid who had created a cultural oasis in his capital in the late fifteenth century. Despite learning of Husain Baiqara’s death before reaching the city, he still decided to visit, and met two of the Sultan’s sons. He relates two revealing incidents that occurred there. First, he complained that these two Timurids did not show him proper respect as one who had twice occupied Samarqand, Timur’s capital, and then asserted his dynastic right to lead the Timurid khanivadeh, Timur’s family or dynasty, as a result of these victories. Yet while stressing his right to Timurid political supremacy, Babur culturally elevated Islam above the Chingizid Turco-Mongol ethos. At a dinner with his Timurid cousins, he remarked that unlike them, he respected but did not recognise the authority of the torah, the Chingizid code, as it did not have Quranic sanction, nass qati‘.

Two years after returning from Herat, Babur demanded to be recognised as padshah, an Iranian imperial title. By doing so, he asserted a broad sovereignty over both Turks and Mongols, and the title publicised his expansive, but as yet unrealised, imperial ambition. This he tried once again to achieve when he occupied Samarqand for the third time with Safavid military aid in 1511. Yet, unable to consolidate his victory and defeated once again by Uzbeks, he fell back to northern Afghanistan, where he remained for nearly two years, probably hoping to make another attempt on Timur’s capital. By 1514, he evidently abandoned hope of another assault on the city and returned to Kabul, where he gradually came to the understanding that India represented the only reasonable basis for a new Timurid state. In his Vaqayi‘ narrative, Babur never adequately explains when he finally decided to look to India as a suitable kingdom, although Safavid power to the west and Uzbek control of Mawarannahr in the north had long precluded expansion in either direction. By 1519, however, he explicitly demonstrated his intent to seize the North Indian territories known to him as Hindustan. It is crucial when debating Babur’s sense of himself and reason for ultimately invading India in 1526 to understand that the invasion was the culmination of years of frustrated attempts to establish a new Timurid state in Mawarannahr. Religion played no discernable influence in those failed campaigns or in his later invasion of India. 

The preface to that invasion occurred in 1519, when Babur led a yurush, an armed expedition, into the Indian borderlands in a search for supplies for his habitually impoverished forces. After crossing the Indus for the first time, he arrived before the town of Bhirah on the Jhelum river. Then, what had reportedly begun as a raid inexplicably became a sovereign act, for he reports that instead of simply plundering the town, he forbade his men to engage in “talan u taraj, “sacking and plundering”. Instead, he met the town’s leaders and levied a kind of Timurid indemnity on its inhabitants, known as mal-i aman. Whatever the exact nature of Babur’s musing, dreaming or thinking about new Timurid states had been up to then, it was at this precise moment, he indicated, that he planned to seize India, or more accurately, defeat the Ludi Sultanate of Hindustan. “It had always been in my heart,” he writes, “to take or possess [almaq] Hindustan.” In saying this, Babur alluded to the tenuous authority that Timur’s son, Shah Rukh of Herat (r.1405- 1427), claimed and fitfully exercised following Timur’s invasion of India and sack of Delhi in 1398. He climaxed his narrative of this critical episode by reporting that he dispatched a messenger to the Ludi governor of the Punjab, claiming all of Hindustan as Timur’s heir.

At the conclusion of his Bhirah narrative, Babur meaningfully reports that afterwards he named his newly born third son Hind-al, that is Hind-al[maq], the taking or seizing of India. Adopting the Turki verb almaq for his son’s name nicely punctuates this Timurid episode, in which Babur refers to the Timurids as Turks, a usage he adopts elsewhere in the Vaqayi‘. If he had thought of himself as a ghazi it is highly likely he would have chosen an Arabic, Islamic name for his son. His obvious choice would have been Mahmud, as it would have framed his campaign as a revival of the oft-cited crusading spirit attributed to Mahmud of Ghazni, (d. 1030). Babur was certainly familiar with Mahmud, who many Indian Muslims revere as the founder of Islam in India. This particular descendent of Turkic ghulams, though, was principally interested in plundering wealthy Indian territories to finance his Iranian conquests rather than actually ruling the land. The evidence of his Bhirah narrative refutes the current political rhetoric that asserts Babur thought of himself, and invaded India, as a ghazi. This makes it clear the invasion was, quite simply and unmistakably, an act of Timurid dynastic imperialism.

If the Kabul section of the Vaqayi‘ offers compelling evidence of Babur’s Timurid dynastic ideology, its detailed narrative also enables readers to understand the limited degree to which Babur acted from religious motives in any context during these two decades. It is not a question of his unmistakable Muslim identity, which he demonstrates by his everyday allusions to his observance of common Muslim practices, as in using the Islamic calendar, celebrating the ‘Id festival and marking times in relation to the five daily prayers. He also records an isolated instance in January 1519, in which he justifies a massacre of more than 3,000 Afghans at the village of Bajaur, located east-northeast of Kabul, by denouncing its inhabitants as heretics who had adopted the “customs of unbelievers”. By this, he evidently meant that they had become disciples of a qalandar, an itinerant Sufi, whose tomb he later destroyed. Babur attacked Bajaur as part of his effort to subjugate Afghans, and the massacre reflected how ruthless he could be, and how willingly he invoked Muslim doctrine when it came to subjugating Afghan tribes whom he, like later occupiers of Afghan borderlands, found impossible to control despite repeated chapquns or raids. He evidently meant the massacre to intimidate nearby Dilahzak Afghan tribesmen, and his massacre foreshadows his invocation of common Muslim doctrine to sanctify his battle with Rajputs eight years later.

In the Kabul narrative, Babur also displays a Sunni Muslim’s hostility toward Shi‘as or heretics on several occasions, as when he labels one of Sultan Husain Baiqara’s wives as not only “a talkative, stupid woman” but also  a rafizi, a heretic. Otherwise, he displays his ritualistic formally observant Islam when he mentions studying or writing about Islamic law. Thus, during the same year as the Bajaur massacre and the Bhirah episode, Babur not only began studying fiqh, Islamic law, with one Mullah Muhammad in Kabul, but more substantively he wrote an extensive verse treatise on Islamic law. Known variously as the Mubin or Mubaiyin,  it devoted four chapters to everyday Muslim religious duties and another chapter titled Kitab al-zakat to Muslim regulation of taxation and commerce. The entire work was almost certainly inspired by and extensively copied from the Hanafi Sunni text that Babur earlier cited, the Hidayat, written by the Ferghanah native Burhan ‘Ali Qilich al-Marghinani, the ancestor of his advisor Khwajah Maulana Qazi. The Kitab al-zakat discussed agricultural taxes and various types of land revenue as well as outlining the differential rates of commercial taxes to be paid by Muslims and non-Muslims. The chapter also included other mundane aspects of administration such as the building of caravansarai to stimulate commerce. Babur’s composition of this text reinforces his image as a potential Ibn Khaldun-like sultan, who respected and practised Islam while being primarily concerned with governance rather than ideological purity.  

Apart from his dominating Timurid mulkgirliq preoccupation as Padshah and his apparent intention to establish a Hanafi Sunni administrative state, Babur’s reign in Kabul was notable for two, well three, activities: constructing gardens, composing verse—and drinking. As a ruler, while also a Muslim, he might have been presumed to have constructed mosques to proclaim and publicly celebrate his faith, but he does not report building a single masjid during the more than two decades he spent in and around Kabul. In the first two sections of the Vaqâyi‘ Babur does mention mosques he saw at Ferghanah and Samarqand, while in the third or Indian section he criticises the style of a pre-Timurid mosque in Agra, and mentions building one in Dhulpur.  From Agra he later ordered another, constructed in Kabul in 1528. He never mentions the now famous or infamous Ayodhya mosque, so it is impossible to know why he or a supporter chose to construct it there. Instead of building mosques in his Kabul domains, Babur built gardens, many of them. He proudly mentions building modest garden structures while in Ferghanah. During his Kabul years, he constructed what he identifies as chahar (char)-baghs—precisely measured quadrilateral or four-part gardens which he favourably compared to the few garden examples he saw in Hindustan. The Bagh-i Vafâ or the Garden of Fidelity that he constructed in 1508-09 in the east of Kabul is a classic example. 

’It is impossible to overestimate the importance of chahar-baghs as the central institution throughout Babur’s life in Kabul and later in India, where he built the Garden of the Eight Paradises and the Gold-scattering Garden in or near Agra. He valued gardens, as Iranians had done for millennia, but not just for their  geometrically precise visions of paradise or as agricultural experimental stations but as foci of his social and cultural life, including literary recitals. He revelled in the congenial garden gatherings, which he termed suhbat, a word redolent with meaning for social camaraderie of congenial comrades. There too, poets often displayed their literary wares, and just as Babur favoured gardens over mosques, so also he devoted himself to poetry rather than theology. 

If Babur had seen himself as a ghazi before invading India, traces of this ideology would most likely appear in his verse. Yet, he never alludes to religious controversy or Muslim political ideology of any kind in his Kabul poems. He repeatedly and proudly discusses his poems and even the technicalities of prosody, and in these decades he produced an impressive quantity of ghazals and ruba‘iyat. Apart from the Mubîn, though, he did not write a single verse of any kind that expresses or even mentions religion, neither Sufism nor militant Islam. Indeed in his entire oeuvre, including Indian verse, he expresses religious ideology in only two poems, one ruba‘i ’in Turki, the second a chronogram in Persian/Farsi.  Both of these latter verses he wrote during his confrontation with Rajputs in 1527 and 1528.  

The momentous year of 1519 began an era, unfortunately not covered in the surviving pages of the Vaqâyi‘ in which Babur probed deeper into the Punjab in a series of five expeditions. These were climaxed by the actual invasion, described as a safar or “journey” and the victorious  Battle of Panipat in April 1526, in which he defeated the forces of the Afghan Muslim sultan Ibrahim Ludi. This was an unmistakable dynastic Timurid victory over a Muslim tribal ruler who had attempted to become, with limited degrees of success, a Perso-Islamic sultan. It was, indeed, a victory over an Afghan, of whom Babur repeatedly speaks with contempt, an emotion very likely fuelled by two decades of largely ineffective chapquns to subdue Afghan tribes in Afghanistan. Neither in the Vaqâyi‘ nor in his verse does Babur suggest this invasion was anything more than a Timurid act. When narrating the battle and its immediate aftermath, he does not mention either Indian Muslims or Hindus in his brief survey of the country’s flora and fauna that opens the third or Indian section of the work. His concern is solely with political control and the economics of empire.  Babur concedes that he knew little about the country but planned to expand his survey when he had learned more. 

Typically frank, he reports in a very sultan-like way that what attracted him about India was that the “Hindustan mamalik… is a vast, populous and productive vilayat…  adding, “It is a large vilayat with a huge [amount] of gold and silver… and “innumerable labourers of every kind”. He disliked nearly every aspect of the Indian environment and society, apart from enjoying the air during monsoon rains and winter months, as he wrote in December 1528: “This winter in India is very amiable.” He does not, though, fill his text with visceral attacks on Hindus as a religious community. Pointing out that the most Indians were kafirs, who were called Hindus/Hindular, he briefly mentions that they believed in the transmigration of souls, and adds that all artisans, workers and officials were Hindus. Babur does not denounce them as a religious community as he would if they were Shi’as. However, he expresses a Central Asian, Perso-Islamic individual’s distaste for Indian society, especially for its absence of the suhbat — the congregational garden society he prized—an evident implicit allusion to caste restrictions. 

His disdain seems fuelled by racism, homesickness and an apparently nearly complete ignorance of India’s cultural and intellectual life or sustained contact with Hindus or any class other than labourers. He expresses his  feelings in a famous passage that begins with the statement: “Hindustan is a place of little elegance/latafat…Its people/ilî are not comely/hasan yoq, of convivial society or social intercourse there is none/ikhtilat u amizesh wa amad u raft yoq, of creativity and genius there is none/tab‘ wa idrak yoq, of culture there is none/adab yoq, of nobility and chivalry there is none/karam wa morevvat yoq, in the arts and crafts there is no regularity, proportionality, straightness or rectangularity/ hunarlarida wa ishlarida, siyaq wa andâm wa rajah wa gunia yoq, no good horses, yakhsi at yoq, no good dogs/yakhsi it yoq, there are no grapes, muskmelons, and good fruits/uzum, qavun wa yakhsiî meivahlar yoq….” Babur was not, evidently, also offended by the reality of a predominantly Hindu or non-Muslim population in Hindustan, as he does not even mention Hindu belief or practice.

Yet in one section of the Vaqayi‘, Babur portrays himself—or allows himself to be portrayed—as a ghazi. This occurs in the passages in the Vaqayi‘ devoted to his conflict with the Rajput Rana Sanga, which  have a dramatically different quality from the rest of his autobiography. Very shortly after narrating his victory over Ibrahim Ludi in April 1526, Babur turns to his account of an impending conflict with the powerful Rajput. By November and December of 1526, following his Panipat victory, he knew that Rana Sanga was on the march. By early January 1527, it was obvious that the Rajput was advancing toward Agra. Babur does not express surprise at this threat, for he had conducted some kind of negotiation with the Rana Sanga while still in Kabul. He proposed, Babur reports, that there was an agreement he should take Delhi while Rana Sanga would occupy Agra. Reporting this, Babur does not say he agreed to a division of territorial spoils, but merely notes that he had already taken both cities, while Rana Sanga had earlier not given any sign of moving toward Agra. Babur reports on 11 February that he led his army out of Agra on a safar or journey, which he labelled as a ghaza, a war against non-Muslims or heretics, to confront the Rajput. From this point in the narrative Babur, or his amanuensis, the Iranian Shaikh Zain Khawafi, use the Islamic vocabulary of conflict, ghaza, when fighting Rajputs, identified as kafirs, unbelievers, and describes Timurids who died fighting them as shahids or martyrs. 

After learning that Rana Sanga’s men had savaged a Timurid advanced force, Babur describes a collapse in morale as Timurids themselves praised the ferocity and courage of Rajput forces. Attempting to rally his disheartened men, Babur decided to sanctify the religious nature of the conflict by formally renouncing the use of wine in a farman, which he publicises in a combined Persian and Turki verse. He followed this by declaring that if victorious, he would release Muslims from the payment of the Mongol tax known as tamgha. Shaikh Zain wrote the farman dated 26 February, using the religious vocabulary and polished style of an Iranian literati, decorated with Quranic quotations. It concludes with an interesting passage stating that all who supported or recognised Babur’s authority, whether Turk, Tajik, ‘Arab, Hindi or Farsi, peasants or soldiers, all tribes or peoples of the sons of Adam ought to strengthen their religious commitment and obey the farman.

Following his description of issuing the text of Shaikh Zain’s farman, Babur records a deepening sense of dread enveloping his men. This prompted him to address his troops with, he reports, a fatalistic Persian and Turki verse, saying that they should reflect that all men must die. He then repeated a sentiment he had earlier used when once encouraging a Timurid to fight Uzbeks in the Ferghanah Valley — that a good name is more important than death. He then returned to Islamic vocabulary and told his men they ought to be privileged to die as martyrs in support of God—in this case invoking Tingri, the overarching sky of Mongol worship. Babur then concludes by reporting that his audience made vows of support on the Quran. This worked, he reports, while simultaneously lamenting that his nascent empire was falling apart around him even as he spoke, with desertions of Hindustanis and sieges of some forts by kafirs presumably but not certainly Rajputs. Then finally on 17 March the Battle of Kanua began, which Shaikh Zain, who fought on the left wing, describes in apocalyptic Islamic terms in a later Fath Namah or Letter of Victory. He portrays Rana Sanga as a Satan-like pagan fighting the Army of Islam, askar-i Islamı, who imitated the Ottoman ghazis of Rum. Following Shaikh Zain’s Persian text, Babur then returns to the narrative by announcing that he now added the term ghazi to his titles. He then concludes with a ruba‘i for his Turki audience, jokingly expressing his relief at surviving the battle.

Islam üçün âvâre-i yazı boldûm

Küffâr u Hûnûd harb-sâzı boldûm

Cezm iylep idim özni şehd olmakka

El-minnetü-li’llâh kî gâzî boldûm

I am become a desert wanderer for Islam

Having joined battle with infidels and Hindus

I readied myself to become a shahid

God be thanked, I am become a ghazi.

Babur used the language of jihad a second and final time in the Vaqâyi,‘ when he describes his assault on the Rajput fortress of Chanderi in January 1528. The fortress was within Rana Sanga’s dominions, and Babur’s successful seizure on 29 January represented part of his larger plan to conquer all of Rajasthan, including Chitur, where the wounded Rana Sanga had originally fled. Now increasingly threatened by resurgent Afghan forces to his east, he abandoned the Rajput campaign. From this date until his death in 1530, he spent most of his declining energy attacking Afghans in the Gangetic Valley. However, two subsequent passages concerning Babur’s relations with Rajputs are important for understanding his attitude towards them and other Hindu rulers. The first is the negotiation he conducted in late 1528 with Rana Sanga’s second son, Bikramjit, who then held Ranthambore fortress. In his narrative, Babur reports treating Bikramjit matter-of-factly, free of hostile religious rhetoric. He identifies Rajputs as Hindus but treats them no differently than he does Afghans, who submitted to his authority. He even indicates that he planned later to seat Bikramjt as ruler of Chitur. Then when Babur records names of the important rulers in Hindustan, he concludes by noting that Rana Sanga’s lands had become part of the “mansion of Islam”,  a political, not a theological statement. Almost as a footnote, he also reports that there were many other “rais and rajas” in Hindustan, some “obedient to Islam” and others “not subject to Musalman rule”. The phrase “subject to Musalman rule” makes it even more clear that “obedience” meant feudatory status, not religious conversion.

Babur’s account of the Rajput phase of his Indian conquest serves as the principal evidence which critics use to portray him as a ghazi, a Muslim, who invaded India on a religious crusade. His actions, vocabulary and verse, along with Shaikh Zain Khawâfî ‘s Letter of Victory,  express the vocabulary of jihad. Whether or not Shaikh Zain had persuaded Babur to see or portray the Rajput conflict in these terms, the Iranian had, at least momentarily, acquired unusual influence in the Timurid camp. His account of the Kanua battle is a notable example of Perso-Islamic battlefield rhetoric and Babur’s inclusion of the Shaikh’s Fath Namah suggests he admired the language—whose ornate vocabulary he probably could not have easily produced himself. In any event, the Rajput passages demonstrate Babur’s willingness to use the ideology of jihad against a non-Muslim enemy such as Rana Sanga. Given this experience, it seems quite likely he would have invoked it against other formidable Hindu opponents, had he lived longer. Including the Rajput conflict in the Vaqâyi‘ meant he was also pleased to celebrate the Kanua and Chanderi victories as Muslim triumphs with Turki readers, a small audience of his sons and confidants. Yet, not only are the ideas of ghaza and jihad entirely absent from earlier and later pages of the Vaqâyi‘ but Babur drops this vocabulary immediately after he narrates the Chanderi siege.  

In the overall context of the Vaqâyi‘ the Rajput passages show Babur using jihad vocabulary as a momentary tactic—in a particularly fraught conflict—rather than as an expression of a long-held evangelical Muslim ideology. In that way, it somewhat resembles his religious justification for massacring the Afghans of Bajaur in 1519. The fact that he was willing later to accept Bikramjit as a feudatory rather than persecuting him as a kafir substantiates other evidence that Babur viewed his new Timurid Empire  as a military feudatory system of indirect rule over indigenous rulers of all faiths. 

Near the end of his life, he wrote about how he wished to return to Kabul and govern his Afghan and Indian territories from his adopted homeland. In his survey of the Indian political landscape cited above, he alludes to the presence of both Hindu and Muslim rulers, which clarifies the impression that Babur sought military victories and political dominance in India but that neither in 1527 and 1528, nor at any time before or after this, did he consider forcibly imposing Islam on non-Muslim rulers or the broader Hindu population. He sought paramountcy and its financial benefit from his conquest, not ideological purity, as he demonstrates even more clearly when he reports that in December 1528 he invited unnamed Rajput representatives to attend his celebration of empire in a lavish celebration at Agra.   

At the December gathering Babur publicised an imperial, Timurid dynastic triumph. It was not, emphatically not, a religious event that celebrated the culmination of a successful jihad. Its Timurid, dynastic nature was reflected by the guest list that included, as he notes, Iranian, Uzbek and “Hindu” ambassadors/ Qizilbash wa Uzbek wa Hindularning ilchiları. This serves to illustrate the dynastic or political nature of the celebration. These Hindus must have included Rana Sanga’s son Bikramjit, as Rajputs were the only formidable, non-Afghan forces he had battled in India. The Rajputs’ presence as honoured guests alerts readers to the reality of Babur’s Kanua and Chanderi battles, that the religious vocabulary he and Shaikh Zain used to describe them was a tactical device rather than a reflection of a desire to convert Rajputs or Hindus generally to Islam. Despite his or Shaikh Zain’s rhetoric, Babur sought only political submission. Others who sat immediately beside Babur were Timurids, Mongols, Ahrari Naqshbandi Sufis from Mawarannahr and a Bengali ambassador. Included among the guests were villagers from Ferghanah who had aided him in 1502-03, after his loss to the Uzbeks. Babur does not record the presence of Shaikh Zain, or of any indigenous Indian ‘ulama. In fact, throughout the Indian section of the Vaqâyi‘, Babur never once mentions the indigenous Indian ‘ulama nor discusses the Indo-Muslim society. 

The last event, which offers Babur’s readers a grace note, a requiem of sorts, is the occasion, when ill, he oversaw the engagement of two of his daughters, that is two of Gulbadan Begim’s sisters, the “Rose-Colored” and “Rosy-Faced” begims. He thought it appropriate that they should be married to two Chaghatai Mongol brothers—the ninth and tenth sons of his Mongol uncle Kichik Khan, the Chaghatai Khan who had ridden to Ferghanah from Xinjiang in 1502 to aid Babur’s desperate struggle with the Uzbeks. Brought before Babur, the two brothers were formally made to kneel before him, ceremonially elevating them to the rank of sons-in-law. Here was a poignantly appropriate reunification of Babur’s Turkic and Mongol lineages, and why ultimately his dynasty and empire might better be termed not merely Timurid or Turkic but Turco-Mongol. It concludes a dynastic conquest which began with Babur’s two occupations of Samarqand and climaxed with the battles of Panipat and Kanua. Like early Ottoman sultans, Babur fought both Muslims and non-Muslims, but his imperial or mulkgirliq goal was a Timurid dynastic state.  It was a wealthy Ibn Khaldun-like sultanate, one observant of Islam but willing to rule a diverse population—and not a state dictated by the ideology of jihad or conversion.  

Babur’s Vaqayi‘ represents an unusually individualised example of Ibn Khaldun’s generalised model of a Muslim sultan, a ruler who personally internalised Islamic practice and saw in Muslim law the administrative code for society and government. At the same time, he was also a ruler who demonstrably ignored ‘ulama and never claimed to possess religious authority or demonstrated an evangelical mission. Babur’s Timurid-Mughal successors in India also illustrated Ibn Khaldun’s idea of a “rational” state. Unlike their theocratic Safavid contemporaries his descendants ruled, as Babur did, jealous of their Timurid paramountcy but seemingly unconcerned about ruling a predominantly non-Muslim empire. They primarily campaigned against Muslim states in the Deccan rather than coercing Hindus to convert to Islam. While their titles also included the phrase Padshah ghazi, its use meant  little more than their assumption of grandiose imperial titles such as Jahangir or Shah Jahan. Literature of Shah Jahan’s reign illustrates the continuing Ibn Khaldun-like nature of the Timurid-Mughal sultanate. Shah Jahan, who took Timur’s title Sahib-i Qiran had himself pictured seated opposite Timur in the illustrated Padshah Namah of Abdul Hamid Lahuri. The Brahman Persian-speaking official at Shah Jahan’s court, Chandra Bhan Barahman (d. 1662-63), depicted the Timurid-Mughal sultanate in his work Chahar Chaman. Referring to the “throne of the sultanate”, Chandra Bhan depicts a splendid multi-racial, multi-ethnic state whose court featured “high-ranking sayyids, great shaykhs, noble learned men, skilled physicians, and boon companions of various classes of Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Tajiks, Kurds, Tatars, Russians, Ethiopians, Circassians… various groups and castes of learned men from Hindustan, peoples of the sword and pen, true sayyids, warrior shaykhzadas [the offspring of a religious personage], Afghan tribes and classes of Rajputs – ranas, rajas, raos and rais… and the rest of the people of India and other tribes…. From all the protected imperial realms, class by class, and group by group, they are honored to kiss the threshold of Saturnian splendor….  The phrase “protected imperial realms” describes the essentially feudatory nature of the Empire, a state inclusive of different ethnic and religious groups who had been defeated and to various degrees integrated into the Empire. In his lavish account of Shah Jahan’s court, Chandra Bhan Barahman makes no mention of ghazis or jihads, but depicts an imperial system of diverse subject populations in words that resemble accounts of the Iranian Achaemenid Empire. Babur seemed to envisage and be planning such a state when he died.