On Babur... And The Weather... And Exodus

I have just read Amitav Ghosh’s review of the Baburnama, an essay included in a collection titled The Imam and The Indian. It is a brilliant review of this classic work, the diary of the Emperor Babur, founder of Mughal rule in India. I found Amitav Ghosh’s conclusion, in particular, hugely enlightening: the fact that these were “men of the steppes” who had never seen The Sea.

Ghosh finds it “baffling” how, down to Aurangzeb, who exhausted himself and his treasury trying to conquer a plateau, none of the Mughals looked at the sea as a source of wealth and power. “Their emissaries to Persia generally took the difficult and dangerous overland route rather than the much easier seagoing one,” Ghosh writes.

Ghosh concludes that the decisive battle of those years was not Babur’s with Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in 1526, but that between the Portuguese and the combined navies of the Sultans of Gujarat and Egypt, and that of the Hindu king of Calicut, off Diu in 1509. After that, all the real “action” was seen on the coasts, with the French, the English, the Dutch and even the Danes – following the Portuguese – setting up “factories.” All this while the Mughals, “men of the steppes,” looked for more “acres and revenues” – for more and more Land: indeed, the massive Deccan Plateau.

Says something about our rulers today sitting in New Delhi, like Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi, a sardar from west Punjab, and his anti-commerce minister, The Great Kamal Nutt, whose constituency lies in land-locked, poverty-stricken Madhya Pradesh.

Like the Mughals, the rulers of India today are all “landlubbers” who have never “seen” the sea, never thought that there was much more to rule than the Land. That the earth is 70 percent Ocean; that the source of wealth and power is The Sea.

Living in Goa in 2009, after traveling the Konkan and the Ghats for a few years now, I think that the Portuguese “cherry-picked” the best portion of coastal India while leaving The Land to the Mughals. Or to the Brits – like Curzon, who divided Bengal and shifted the capital to New Delhi.

Food for thought, what?

Having said that, let me now add a few additional points from the Baburnama, aspects of the book that Ghosh has neglected to mention. These throw light on the nature of rule under the Timurid princes like Babur, who thought it was their pesha to rule over a realm with The Sword.

When Babur conquered Bhira, he ordered his chief scribe to convey to the people the following: “The possession of this country by a Turk has come down from olden times. Do not give way to fear or anxiety. Our eye is on this land and its people, not on raid and pillage.”

A curious aspect of Babur’s character is revealed in his diary entry on the conquest of Kala Nour. After the battle is won, and his generals take over the fort of the defeated khan to search for all precious objects, Babur himself goes to Ghazi Khan’s library, and immerses himself in some “scholarly books” he finds therein.

There is an entire section in the Baburnama on the conquest of Delhi. Here he writes about the people, their clothing, the fruits like the mango and banana, the flora and fauna. He does not seem particularly impressed by the Land and the people he had conquered. He talks about how even candles were not in use in Hindostan! How cooked food was not sold in the bazaars.

Babur also talks about The Heat – and, now that Holi is over, everyone in Delhi is getting his air-conditioner serviced. Think of The Heat in Delhi and Agra of 1526, without ACs, without fans.

On this Heat, there is an entire section in the Baburnama titled “Disaffection Among My Generals,” in which he tells of many among his nobles who wanted to return to the cool mountains of the north, with all that they could loot from Hindostan. Babur shut them off with a spirited speech, recorded in full in his diary, in which he stood by the same “morality”: that as a Timurid prince who has conquered territory with The Sword, it was his Duty to Rule – not pillage and plunder. That was not his pesha, his vocation.

Babur was not a "roving bandit." He was a Stationary Bandit par excellence.

Khwaja Kalan, his great general, while leaving Delhi for cooler climes, inscribed on the wall of his Delhi house the following:

If safe and sound I cross the River Sind,
Blacken my face before I wish for Hind.

Babur felt insulted, and fired back:

Give a hundred thanks to Babur, the generous Pardoner
Has given you Sind and many a kingdom there;
If you have not the strength for their Heat,
If you say ‘Let me feel the cold,’ Ghazni is there.

Of course, Khwaja Kalan, also a “man of the steppes,” had never heard of Portuguese Goa, and so took the overland route to cooler climes – Kabul or Kandahar or wherever.

While in Poona some years ago, I attended a Son et Lumiere show at the Shanivarwada fort, where the story was told of one of Aurangzeb’s generals, sent there to battle Shivaji, who preferred not to fight, but to camp permanently at Chakan, 50 km away. After 6 months of this paid vacation, one of his lieutenants asked him what he was up to. The reply: “Let us just sit back and enjoy the weather here. If we win we will be sent to Kabul or Kandhahar – the Cold.”

Funny how the weather is great on the Konkan and the Ghats all year long. We never use the car AC in southern Goa. If the power fails, sea breezes keep us cool. There is no hard summer; there is no hard winter; it is shorts and t-shirts right through the year. And it rains a lot – but the monsoon is infinitely better than The Heat.

If you are one of those unfortunates living in Delhi, the landlocked Capital City of the “landlubbers” who rule The Land, buying his booze from a sarkaari theka, I hope this post has given you much to think about. About the important question called Physical Location: Where Do I Live?

Even Curzon, who founded New Delhi, had a palace in Mashobra, high above Simla, to beat The Heat.

No one ever set up Permanent Residence in Delhi. It is a city with a horrible summer, a bone-chilling winter, and no rains at all. And it has Land all around it. The city possesses no locational advantages, nor is it in any other way particularly blessed by Nature. It should not be a major centre of human habitation. Babur willed that he be buried in Kabul, in his favourite garden.

One thing Babur also noted about Hindostan: The ability of the people to vacate a city and set up a New City somewhere else in record time.

Think about that… the Sea… the Konkan… the Ghats… a New Amsterdam… a New Jerusalem… busy ports… bustling bazaars… hundreds of “hill stations”… catallactic energy in all markets… sound money and free trade… no recession from here to eternity… Life!

The Song: Why, Bob Marley, of course: Exodus.