Resplendent: ‘Babur receives a courtier’ (1589) by Farrukh Baig. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Babur was a sensitive memoirist with the rare ability to distance himself from his writing
Babur’s memoir did not have a name but is referred to as Baburnama or Tuzuk-e-Baburi. It is the first autobiography from the subcontinent and one of the first in the world. Babur came from two different cultures, of which one was literate and aspired to high culture. This was his father’s ancestral family, which was Timurid. His mother came from the nomadic Mongols, who weren’t literate. Babur describes his maternal uncles in his memoir.
The Timurids had a tradition of poetry, hawking, music, and, of course, war. Babur was from a family of minor nobles who had inherited the governorship of Ferghana. His autobiography begins with a description of the geography and tells us that his father, Umar Shaikh Mirza, died in an accident when he was 39 and Babur 12. The young Babur struggled to hold on to his inheritance, losing several battles, including one in Ferghana, which he had to give up to the victor.
Babur describes these decades of his life in an unemotional and direct way: he hardly valorises his own achievements. Like the great Caesar, whose books on his wars in Gaul and against Pompey may as well have been written by a non-partisan observer, Babur has the ability to distance himself from his life.
Keen naturalist
Babur’s life turns when he is found to be the only living heir to the throne of Kabul. He takes it and turns his eyes to India. For 20 years, he campaigns against India, being held back at the borders each time.
Then, as we know, he defeated the Lodi dynasty (introducing firearms to the subcontinent for the first time) and captured north India in 1526 after a decisive battle at Panipat. Babur died four years later, spending much of this time travelling across India and writing his memoir in the afternoons.
These paragraphs show how much of a keen naturalist he was. “The elephant, which the Hindustanis call hathi, is one of the wild animals peculiar to Hindustan. It inhabits the western borders of the Kalpi country… the elephant is an immense animal and very sagacious. If people speak to it, it understands. If they command anything from it, it does it. Its value is according to its size — the larger it is, the higher the price. On some islands an elephant is rumoured to be as tall as 20 or 30 feet, but here it is not more than 10 feet. It eats and drinks entirely with its trunk. If it loses the trunk, it cannot live. It has two great teeth (tusks) in its upper jaw, one on each side of the trunk. By setting these against trees and walls, it is able to bring them down; with these it fights and does whatever hard tasks fall to it. These teeth are called ivory and are highly valued by Hindustanis.’
‘Like a goat, the elephant has no skin hair. It is relied on to accompany every troop of their armies. It crosses rivers with great ease, carrying a mass of baggage, and three or four can drag without trouble a special piece of artillery that takes four or five hundred men to haul. But its stomach is large. One elephant eats as much as a dozen camels.
Elegant and clean
Babur’s book was not freely available till a British amateur linguist named Annette Susannah Beveridge translated it. She taught herself the particular version of Turkish that Babur wrote in (later Mughals wrote in Farsi) and published it in four volumes from 1912 to 1922.
At the time of the first British census a century and a quarter ago, India was 4% literate. Most Indians even today don’t have four generations of literacy: in fact, the proportion of those of us who can claim to have had great-grandparents who could write is tiny. Babur came from a tradition that already had centuries of literacy.
His is elegant and clean writing of the sort that one would expect from a very literate and sensitive person. Babur’s daughter, Gulbadan Begum, sister of Humayun and aunt of Akbar, also wrote a lovely memoir in which she describes her father’s attention to detail which he passed on to his family.
These two works, along with Jahangir’s autobiography, are some of the best material available on the Mughals. It’s a shame that these books are not taught in India’s schools today.
Aakar Patel is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books – Leather Bound / by Aakar Patel / January 16th, 2020
Of History and Gastronomy: Ira Mukhoty at Jaypee Vasant Continental’s Paatra restaurant in New Delhi | Photo Credit: SHIV KUMAR PUSHPAKAR
From the resilience of Khanzada Begum to the food habits of Akbar, author Ira Mukhoty reveals many Mughal secrets over a lavish vegetarian meal
Those who suffer from colonial hangover or know their Mughals through movies have an exotic notion about the haramam or harem – a place where many women were housed to please the most important man in the empire. Author Ira Mukhoty, who scans history and mythology to find the status of women in India, counters the perception through a well-argued book, “Daughters Of The Sun” (Aleph). “This idea of ‘oriental harem’ came through the British historians because they had a long association with Islam right from the times of crusades. For them, the Mughals, the Sultans and the Tughlaqs were all the same – part of one Islamic marauding entity. The idea was completely false.”
The whole harem space, she says, evolved from the time of Babur, who wanted his women to be well-educated and was pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy. “Over a period of time, when Mughals absorbed some elements of Rajput culture, it became a little different but even then it was completely alien to the oriental idea of a sexual space. Most of these women were in no way sexually available to the Padshah. The harem had relatives, other noble men’s wives; there were servants and attendants…there was a huge collection of women but not to please the emperor,” says Ira, as we settle for an elaborate lunch at Jaypee Vasant Continental’s Paatra restaurant.
The catalyst came from Ira’s previous book, Heroines, where she wrote about powerful women in myth and history. “One of them was Jahanara Begum. I was interested in finding more women like her associated with the Mughal empire.” She found many. But the one story that is most compelling is that of Khanzada Begam, the sister of Babur, whom he left behind with Shaybani Khan as war conquest when he escaped from Samarkand. She remained with Khan for ten years but remained true to her brother’s cause. And when she eventually returned to Babur’s household, her sacrifice and resilience was celebrated. “In fact, she went on to be anointed Padshah Begum of Hindustan during Humayun’s reign,” says Ira.
Powerful women
Women are a neglected lot in our history. Ira says this is not specific to our country. “Around the world, women stories are neglected to a smaller space – it is not just about Mughals or India. You first talk about the kings and and rajas. Women were treated like wallpapers. It is not that I have found something special here. The resources have been there but they have seldom been used to join the dots. For instance, Gulbadan Begum’s biography of her father Babur and brother Humayun was translated from Persian into English in 1907.” She reminds how Jahanara Begum wrote about her Sufi masters in two books. “Her lines are very powerful and erotically charged for Sufis believe in erotic love as means for union with the divine. A 17th Century Muslim woman writing such a powerful language is extraordinary.” Ira has tried to find out first hand information about these women who engaged in diplomacy and patronised the arts. “ I have written about Mughal women who were highly educated, who advised emperors and traded with foreigners. Babur saw them as symbols of Timur legacy. He wanted them to engage in verbal repartees and write poetry.”
Ira says her study of royal firmans reveal that Jahanara Begum asked for permission to go for Haj but it was denied. “Years before her, Gulbadan Begum had made the famous journey that lasted seven years. But by the time of Jahanara, royal women were not encouraged to take this hazardous journey. But she did make a request. I looked at the date and it was one month after her sister Roshanara Begum had died. I wondered that did something come over her.” It is her ability to join these dots that makes Ira’s work much more engaging and accessible than academic works by the likes of Prof Ruby Lal, whom Ira has extensively quoted.
“I try to find a thread between these stories to make fully-rounded characters. With women’s stories you get that sense. However, I tell the reader where I am not sure and am talking about possibilities.” Ira, who studied Immunology in Cambridge University, says her science background has always helped her in research. “It gives me patience. History brings subtlety and nuances which interest me much more. Science is no good for that,” she chuckles. Having said that, she doesn’t believe in speculating. “You should tell the reader where you are not sure even if it breaks the rhythm of the story. If I say it could have happened, I expect the reader to make his own mind.”
A vegetarian these days, Ira undertook ‘walks’ to the Walled City to understand the fragrances and the language of the time gone by. “They might not help you with facts, but they definitely help in writing about a past whose remains are very much part of our ecosystem.” As she appreciates the lavish spread at Paatra, she remembers the meal she had at the Nizamuddin dargah.
Introduction to ghee
Ira hasn’t written much about the Mughal kitchen but she has mentioned some instances which give us an idea of what was cooking. For instance, she captures Humayun’s exile in Persia with Hamida Banu Begum after the embarrassing defeat to Sher Shah Suri. “At one point they were actually cooking horsemeat to survive. But when they went to Persia, they were greeted as kings. Suddenly, the meal changed from fibrous, overcooked horsemeat to the amazing food that the Shah would offer them. When they were leaving, Shah Tahmasp wanted a banquet in Hindustani fashion prepared by his guests. What he liked the most was something called dal khuske which was like matar ka pulao. He tasted ghee for the first time as Persians used to cook in fat.”
Over the years, Mughal food became more and more refined. “There came a time when hens were massaged so that the chicken would be soft and tender. Akbar was a frugal eater who used to have just one meal a day but the time for it was not fixed. At any given time around 100 dishes were kept almost ready for him so that they could be served to the emperor at a short notice.”
Ira, who is now working on a biography of Akbar, says the emperor turned vegetarian under the influence of his Rajput wives. “Luckily for us, we have the Akbar’s biography of Bada’uni. He was a conservative person and his account is not glowing with praise like that of Abu’l-Fazl’s. He could not do what Akbar expected of him. He wrote the biography in secret and it was published during Jahangir’s rule. It is fascinating because it tells truthful things about Akbar. He writes that Akbar is so influenced by his Rajput wives that he gave up meat and indulged in Hindu rituals.” Similarly, she says, Gulbadan Begum’s account is very honest in comparison to a male biographer because she is not looking for building an image for posterity. “She writes very candidly like she explains why Humayun was very angry one day. He believed in astrology and always made the journey when the stars were in right alignment. One day he told the women in harem that they would go on an expedition at such and such time. Unfortunately, his new wife fell off the horse. It took her some time to get back. He got furious. He said he would need some opium to calm down. A male biographer would not have put all this but Gulbadan mentions all these intimate details so that we would know the man not just as a king and a conqueror but also as a father, a husband and a son.”
Ira has emerged at a time when Akbar’s legacy is being questioned and anecdotal history is gaining currency in mainstream discourse. She says hers is not a political book. “I am not trying to push any agenda. However, in this atmosphere, it is not unimportant to hear these stories also to clear many of the prejudices that we may have had. When things remain in anecdotal form, it is easy to manipulate them.”
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Society> History & Culture / by Anuj Kumar / August 31st, 2018
Many Indian dishes can be traced back, indirectly, to a 16th-century, food-obsessed ruler named Babur.
Babur Being Entertained in Ghazni, from the Baburnama, the memoirs of Ẓahīr al-din Muhammad. PUBLIC DOMAIN
ZAHIR AL-DIN MUHAMMAD, THE 16TH century Central Asian prince better known as Babur, is renowned for his fierce pedigree and proclivities. Descended from both Timur and Genghis Khan, he used military genius to overcome strife and exile, conquer northern India, and found the Moghul dynasty, which endured for over 300 years. He was a warlord who built towers of his enemies’ skulls on at least four occasions. Yet he was also a cultured man who wrote tomes on law and Sufi philosophy, collections of poetry, and a shockingly honest memoir, the Baburnama, in which he appears to us as one of the most complex and human figures of the early modern era.
Through the Baburnama, we learn that Babur was versed in courtly Persian speech and custom, yet nonetheless a populist who built strong ties with nomads and championed the vernacular Chagatai Turkic tongue in the arts. He was a pious man, but was also given to libertine escapades, including massive, wine-fueled parties.
But the first—and arguably one of the most culturally consequential—personal details he reveals is that he was a food snob. Babur loved the foods of his homeland and hated those he found when he had to reestablish himself in India, which to him was mostly a way station on the bloody road back to the melon patches of his youth. He didn’t just whinge about missing foods from home, though. He imported and glorified them in his new kingdom, laying the groundwork for his descendants to warp Indian cuisine so profoundly that they redefined that culinary tradition, as many know it worldwide, to this day.
A depiction of Babur meeting Sultan ‘Ali Mirza near Samarqand, from the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
The Baburnama opens with a description of Ferghana, a region now split between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, where Babur grew up. Known then and now as the breadbasket of Central Asia, it follows that Babur would touch on agriculture. But in introducing his hometown of Andijan, Babur opens with a note on the quality of its grapes and melons before turning his attention to its layout and fortifications. He then ducks back to praise its game meats, especially its pheasants, which “are so fat, that the report goes that four persons may dine on the broth of one of them and not be able to finish it.” Only then does he tell us of the people who live there.
Almost anytime he describes a place back home, he starts with vittles. Margilan is known for its dried apricots, pitted and stuffed with almonds. Khojand’s pomegranates are proverbially good, but they pale next to Margilan’s. And Kandbadam is tiny and insignificant, but it grows the best almonds in the region, so it’s worth mentioning.
“Early sections of his Baburnama,” writes Fabrizio Foschini, in a report on Afghanistani melons authored in 2011, “really sound like a consumer guide to the fruit markets of Central Asia.”
A detail of date trees illustrated in the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Babur doesn’t forget food once he gets into the meaty war stories, either. He breaks one narrative to note that the area around a castle he just besieged grew a unique melon with puckered yellow skin, apple-like seeds, and pulp as thick as four fingers.
The Baburnama is not solely concerned with food. The bulk of it is a painstaking record of families and feuds, and Babur dwells on other seemingly random details that tickled him, such as a courtier’s talent at leapfrog. Since we don’t have a similarly honest accounting from his peers, it’s hard to say whether Babur’s epicureanism was atypical.
Given the chaos he grew up in, though, it’s incredible that Babur could spare any thought for food. Thrust to power at age 11 (by the Gregorian calendar), in 1494, he had to navigate bloody infighting amongst his relatives. Known as the Timurid princes after their conqueror-ancestor Timur, they jockeyed against each other for regional control. Babur became an active participant in this Central Asian game of thrones—he seemed particularly obsessed with taking the regional cultural capital of Samarkand. While he seized it in 1497, he lost the city almost immediately, as well as Ferghana, and (a very long story short) spent the rest of his teenage years reclaiming or losing bits of territory, fleeing into exile with remote nomadic tribes, and trying to court new followers and surge back. Although he never stopped trying to reclaim Samarkand and his homeland, by 1504, at age 21, he’d effectively been forced out of the region for the rest of his life.
A portrait of Babur. PUBLIC DOMAIN
That year, he pulled off a fantastic feat of warlord jiujitsu, flipping a rival’s forces into his service and marching on Kabul, which was vulnerable after undergoing its own contentious power shift. Babur took the city, and, naturally, set to cultivating its produce scene. In and around the city, he built at least 10 grand gardens that included a fair number of fruiting plants.
While Babur’s writings suggest a personal obsession with food, it’s hard to disentangle this obsession from homesickness. There were also political reasons for him to pay so much attention to cuisine: Food snobbery was a standard way for a Timurid prince such as Babur to make his mark and prove his elite bona fides in a new land. “The Timurids, while ethnically Turkic, based their legitimacy to a large extent on their being champions of Persianate ‘high’ culture,” says Central Asian historian Richard Foltz, “which included taste in food.”
Kabul proved ill endowed to support a successful campaign back to Ferghana, though. So Babur turned his attention to neighboring India. He got a lucky break when a new king—an inept man who clearly had dissenters and rebels in his ranks—came to power in the northern Sultanate of Delhi. Babur struck at this weakness, invading the region through the early 1520s. Despite being outmanned by a ratio of perhaps five-to-one in his final standoff with the sultan, he usurped the throne in 1526.
Babur entering Kabul. PUBLIC DOMAIN
According to Foltz, Central Asians mostly looked down on Indians, who were neither Muslims nor Persianate. Babur, his recent biographer Stephen Dale notes, was also still deeply homesick. These factors, and possibly personal tastes, led him to dismiss his new territory, and especially its food: “Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. … [There is] no good flesh, no grapes or muskmelons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food in their bazaars.”
Babur shouldn’t have had time for food in India either. He spent the last four years of his life fighting local insurgencies and consolidating his power. In 1530, he died at the age of 48, in Agra, the north Indian city where his great-great grandson Shah Jahan (lived 1592–1666) would later build the Taj Mahal. But he wrote letters in those years expressing his desire to return home, or at least taste its grapes and melons. He describes receiving a melon from Kabul and weeping as he ate it. He planted Central Asian grapes and melons in India, which brought him some joy. He even asked local chefs to make Persianate food for him, although one of them tried to poison him.
By establishing supply chains that brought his native agriculture and cuisine to the region, Babur left a lasting legacy. “He probably played a role in bringing Central Asian influences into the elite, courtly Indian life,” says Elizabeth Collingham, a food historian who explored Babur’s life and influence in her history of curries .
Babur, on the Way to Hindustan, Camping at Jam, from the Baburnama. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Granted, Babur was not the first Central Asian lord in what is now India. From 1206 to Babur’s day, five prior Central Asian dynasties ruled from Delhi. They too imported foods from home, cooked dishes they knew, and even did some fusion cooking. Trade and migration also meant there’d always been interplay between the regions, including culinary influence. Glimpses of this cultural mingling include the first mentions of samosas in the region’s written record—in accounts of those earlier medieval sultans’ feasts.
But according to Rukhsana Iftikhar, a historian of social life amongst the Mughals, the Persian word for “Mongols” by which Babur’s descendants came to be known, many of these dishes differed in style and flavor profile from the Persian-influenced Central Asian cuisine Babur preferred. They likely had not caught on with the general Indian population by the time Babur arrived, and few of them would sound familiar to fans of global Indian fare today.
Historians like Dale and Foltz chalk this up to the fact that previous dynasties—while they had some cultural influence—seemed to see India mostly as a piggy bank. They didn’t like to mix with local elites, and their culture was not grand or stable enough to invite mimicry and adaptation.
A banquet with roast goose. PUBLIC DOMAIN
Babur, by contrast, was more statesman than raider. His pedigree and strong connections to Iran also gave him and his descendants more cultural cachet, and those descendants mixed more readily with the local populace. And for over a century after his death, Mughal rulers continued to praise the same foods Babur praised and keep the caravans of his beloved Central Asian fruits and nuts flowing. Babur’s successor Humayun brought Persian cooks to Delhi, and Humayun’s son, Akbar, was notably cosmopolitan and curious in the kitchen. Later descendents were not as invested in Persianate culture and the foods of Ferghana as Babur. But either as a means of displaying their wealth or of brandishing the superiority of their heritage, they carried on the culinary trajectory Babur set up.
Babur’s descendants also spent lavishly on their kitchens, elevating food as a status symbol. But unlike Babur, they made it a point to round up chefs from around their Indian domains, a practice that invited fusion. The grandeur and duration of their courts, argues Collingham, led local elites to copy their Persianate and Central Asian motifs and augment their own kitchens, leading to parallel fusion work in places like Hyderabad, Kashmir, and Lucknow. Over the centuries, these innovations coalesced into Mughlai food, a stable cuisine common across, although not ubiquitous in, northern India by the early 20th century.
This cuisine was defined by, among other things, aromatic, creamy curries, often incorporating the nuts and dried fruits Babur adored. It includes many dishes familiar to Western diners today: Korma, a blend of Central Asian nuts and dairy with Persian and Indian spices. Rogan Josh, a slow-cooked, Persian-style meat spiced up in the kitchens of Kashmir. And tandoori grilling, facilitated by Mughal tweaks to said grills and to marinades and spicing styles.
These dishes became ubiquitous in the West, Collingham says, because haute Indian chefs have long viewed Mughlai cooking the same way Western cooks used to see Le Cordon Bleu. Indians who set up restaurants abroad made Mughlai food the template of Indian food in the U.S. and U.K.—to the chagrin of Indians who grew up eating many other cuisines that remain hard to find outside their homelands.
None of this was a conscious project for Babur. But by setting up shop in Agra and Delhi, he created a wave that shook the foundations of India, culinary and otherwise. His tastes indirectly fueled 300-plus years of kitchen innovation. It’s no Central Asian dynasty of skulls and melons. It’s something more widespread and enduring, if unexpected or unwanted.
Gastro Obscura covers the world’s most wondrous food and drink.
source: http://www.atlasobscura.com / Atlas Obscura / Home> Stories / by Mark Hay / November 15th, 2017
