Abstract
Projecting contemporary nationalist sentiments into the past almost invariably distorts the past. Respecting the Mughal empire, Indian nationalist historiography mostly draws a conceptual line at the Khyber Pass, thus marginalising the Central Asian component of the Mughals’ inherited identity. At the same time, many scholars of the Middle East and Central Asia marginalise the Mughals, imagining incorrectly that they lay on the periphery of the Muslim world. Lisa Balabanlilar’s finely crafted study corrects both distortions by highlighting the substantial Turko-Mongol component of Mughal imperial identity from the time of its founder, Babur, through that of ‘Alamgir (a.k.a. Aurangzeb).
The author first describes the hybridised imperial identity of the Central Asian warlord Timur (d. 1405), who, on the one hand, had publicised his Mongol inheritance by claiming descent from Alanqua, the mythological mother of the Mongols, and by adopting the title ‘son-in-law’ (guregen) by virtue of his marriage to a Chaghatai princess, on the other. Yet he also lavishly patronised all aspects of Perso-Islamic culture—the arts, literature, the Yasavi and Naqshbandi Sufi orders, and especially, spectacular monumental architecture. Within a century of Timur’s death, however, a powerful confederation of Uzbek Turks had rolled over Central Asia, driving Timur’s descendants from power. The first chapter of Balabanlilar’s book thus traces the sense of melancholy and loss that one of those descendants, Babur, felt when the Uzbeks forced him into exile. Many of Babur’s female relatives, unable to accompany the prince’s loyal band of followers as they migrated south to Kabul, were seized and forced to marry Uzbek men. This explains Babur’s bitter feelings of humiliation, displacement and grievance so candidly expressed in his own memoir, the remarkable Baburnama. For unlike the Ottomans and Safavids, who could claim only the weakest ties to Timur, Babur descended directly from the great warlord. Indeed, he was the only surviving Timurid monarch of his age.
For such reasons, Balabanlilar throughout her book refers to the dynasty Babur established in India as ‘Timurid-Mughal’. She even characterises his court at Agra as ‘neo-Timurid’, for Babur wrote his Baburnama not in the prestigious language of Persian, but in Chaghatai Turkish, suggesting that he was directing his work to a Central Asian constituency. He also sought to transplant Timurid aesthetic sensibilities directly to north India, where he established formal, Persian gardens nearly everywhere he went. In doing so, however, he was motivated not just by nostalgia. Having seen Timur’s own gardens when he briefly held Samarqand, Babur understood their political significance. Such symmetrically planned projects, argues Balabanlilar, represented a ‘brute assertion of power over land, labor, and nature itself: an affirmation of imperial legitimacy, cultural prowess, strength, and sensitivity’ (p. 75).
Balabanlilar’s study then explores the long shadow that the Timurid legacy continued to cast over India. When Babur’s son Humayun returned from years of exile in Iran, he initially turned towards Samarqand, Timur’s former capital. Only after being routed by the Uzbeks did he return to India, reluctantly, to recover his lost empire there. In 1587 Akbar briefly considered invading Khurasan. Shah Jahan actually did send an army of some 60,000 to conquer former Timurid territory in Balkh and Badakhshan, although his troops, unable to hold the territory, returned to India. For his part, Jahangir sent ₹10,000 to Samarqand for the upkeep of Timur’s tomb-shrine. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chaghatai Turkish was still taught to royal children, though Persian remained the language of prestige at the Mughal court.
Such actions surely signal the Mughals’ collective memory of their Central Asian and Timurid roots. But, Balabanlilar argues, it is not just in the occasional gesture that one finds a continued Timurid presence in India. Rather, that presence was thoroughly institutionalised in imperial titulature and practice. For two and a half centuries, Mughal rulers referred to their dynasty as that of the ‘son-in-law’ (guregen), referring to Timur’s own title. Shah Jahan’s artists produced an imperial painting of Timur allegorically (and anachronistically) passing a crown to Babur in the presence of Humayun. Even the Mughals’ peripatetic court faintly echoed the pastoral nomadic tradition of their Turko-Mongol forbears. Whereas the Ottoman imperial enterprise remained rigidly fixed on Istanbul, a city long steeped in imperial traditions, the Mughals had no single capital city. The capital was simply wherever the emperor happened to be. So, a tradition that began with the peripatetic movements of Babur, who at one point possessed little more than a single tent (in which he housed his mother), by the time of ‘Alamgir had swollen into a vast assemblage of hundreds of thousands of men, women and animals, plodding in stately grandeur across the Indian terrain. In the reigns of aggressive rulers such as Akbar or Shah Jahan, these movements doubled as military campaigns; for Jahangir, by contrast, they typically resembled leisurely promenades from garden to garden, or from hunt to hunt. Yet all the Mughals, like their Timurid ancestors, stayed on the move.
The Mughals’ most politically charged Turko-Mongol legacy was the tradition that all princes had an equal right to claim sovereignty—a principle that Balabanlilar calls ‘tanistry’, a term derived from ancient Celtic practice. Following the tradition of Genghis Khan, Timur had allowed his sons to lead armies, govern provinces and inherit proportional divisions of his kingdom. Accordingly, Babur expected that his son Humayun would share his kingdom with his younger brother Kamran. But on Babur’s death Kamran treated his appanage of Kabul as an independent kingdom, not even allowing his older brother to pass through it when he was forced to flee India for Iran. Aware of the dangers of allowing princes too much independence in their youth, Akbar kept his own sons close at hand and dependent. From this point on, royal princes would be given provincial responsibilities only when they reached adulthood, and their assignments would be regularly rotated. Yet even such measures failed to guarantee smooth successions, as was witnessed in the violently destructive War of Succession in 1657–58 that attended ‘Alamgir’s accession. Although the Ottomans, Safavids and Uzbeks avoided such wars by either executing their princes or confining them at court, the Mughals never evolved a system less traumatic than full-scale, fratricidal succession wars. Though highly destructive, this aspect of their Turko-Mongol legacy nonetheless had the virtue of placing the continuity of the Mughal house above the fortunes of individual members.
To conclude, it is well known that Babur’s nostalgia for Central Asia was matched by his dislike for India, where he found little to admire apart from its large size and its abundant treasures. He refused to be buried in India, and he never ceased complaining of its hot, dusty climate, or its lack of flowing water or good melons (although he did concede that ‘when the mangoes are good, they’re really good’). For such reasons, Indian nationalists will probably not like hearing of the Mughals’ commitment to their Central Asian roots, which is this book’s central thesis, any more than Hindutva protagonists would like hearing that Indo-Aryans had migrated to South Asia from the Iranian plateau. But this judgement is perhaps unfair, since the Mughals’ Timurid heritage also included a profound commitment to hybridised rule, a tradition that had been informed by political thinkers like Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274). Written and adapted to suit the Mongols’ need to govern a large, multi-cultural empire, Tusi’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri argued against applying a narrow, legalistic adherence to Islamic Law in a culturally mixed society. In India, where it enjoyed wide circulation in the Mughal court, the Akhlaq-i Nasiri befit the Mughals’ need to govern a culturally plural society. In practice, this meant assimilating indigenous political rituals into their imperial identity. Thus, just as Timur himself had blended Perso-Islamic political culture with Central Asia’s Mongol heritage, so too the Mughals performed Indian political rituals, such as, the daily public viewing (darshan) of a ruler from a raised enclosure, or jharokha. Whereas such a ritual was thoroughly Indian, the inclination to assimilate it, so Balabanlilar argues, was thoroughly Turko-Mongol.
Only several small errors came to this reviewer’s attention. Whereas the author argues that Babur dropped the title of ghazi (holy warrior) after his defeat of Rana Sanga at Kanauj, and that subsequent emperors generally ignored the designation, in fact every Mughal ruler ascended the throne with badshah ghazi in his official title, and most of them—including Babur, Akbar, Shah Jahan, ‘Alamgir, Muhammad Shah and Shah ‘Alam II—routinely stamped it on their coins, as well. These apart, Professor Balabanlilar has offered a thoroughly researched study on an important topic, one that convincingly reminds us of how thoroughly cosmopolitan—and Timurid—the Mughals really were.