The Garden and the Sword

Part Two on Humayun — the exile and the return.

In October 1542, in a borrowed fort in the Sindh desert, a fifteen-year-old gave birth to a son. Her husband was the former Emperor of Hindustan, two years into wandering, with a few hundred men left. He had nothing to mark the birth with, so he broke open a pod of musk and divided it, and said he hoped the child's fame would spread as the scent was spreading through the tent.

The child was Akbar.

This episode is what happened to a man after he lost everything. The desert years and the doors that closed one by one. Hamida Banu Begum refusing him for forty days, recorded by his own sister Gulbadan, who did not tidy it up. The infant Akbar left behind on the road to Persia, raised by the uncles trying to destroy his father, and placed on the walls of Kabul at four years old so his father's guns would have to stop.

Then Persia, which is the hinge of the whole story and was not free: Shah Tahmasp's extraordinary hospitality, the pressure to adopt Shi'ism, Humayun's agreement, Kandahar promised, twelve thousand troops granted. And then ten years not fighting for India at all, but besieging his own brothers for the same two cities, ending with Kamran blinded because the nobles demanded it and Humayun weeping over him afterwards.

He got the throne back in July 1555, fifteen years after he rode away from it. He had six months before he fell down his library stairs.

The argument here is that the usual verdict misses what he actually achieved. He lost an empire through indecision, then spent fifteen years acquiring, at ruinous cost to his own family, the one asset his father never secured. Akbar inherited a throne, a general, and no uncles.

It ends with Hamida Banu Begum commissioning her husband's tomb at Delhi, the first monumental garden tomb in India, and the building the Taj Mahal copies eighty years later. The architectural signature of the dynasty begins as a widow's memorial to the emperor who lost the empire.

Sources are the contemporary chronicles and memoirs, including Gulbadan Begum's, and the surrounding scholarship. Paintings referenced come from museum archives.

The Garden and the Sword, a history podcast on the Mughal empire, from Aurah Living.

Part One of a new series, on Humayun — the second Mughal emperor, the one who lost the empire and then got it back.

This episode is the losing.

In June 1539 the Emperor of Hindustan crossed the Ganges on an inflated animal skin handed to him by a water-carrier, because he could not swim and his army no longer existed. Eleven months later he lost the second battle too, and rode away from a throne he would not see again for fifteen years.

The usual verdict is that Humayun was weak. The details are not wrong; the shape is. Babur did not leave an empire. He left a four-year-old military occupation with no revenue system of its own, no loyal administrative class, and an intact Afghan nobility in the east that was simply waiting. Humayun inherited a conquest, not a country, and he inherited it under the Timurid rule that a patrimony is divided among the sons.

So before he had fought anyone, Kabul and the Punjab, his recruiting ground and his line of retreat, belonged to a brother who would later decline to fight for him.

Against that: Sher Khan, an Afghan of modest birth from Bihar who had been passed over and left alone, and who spent those years surveying land, fixing assessments and paying an inspected army. He built a state, then used the state to fight the war.

The sting is in the aftermath. Sher Shah Suri was a better ruler than any Mughal before Akbar: the Grand Trunk Road, the silver rupiya, a revenue system Akbar's own was largely adapted from. The Mughals lost India to the man who then showed them how to run it.

Sources are the contemporary chronicles and memoirs, including Gulbadan Begum's, and the surrounding scholarship. Paintings referenced come from museum archives.

The Garden and the Sword, a history podcast on the Mughal empire, from Aurah Living.

Part Six of six on the Baburnama.

Eleven months after Panipat, Babur broke all his wine cups in front of his army, abolished a tax, and asked every man present to swear on the Quran that he would not retreat. Then he marched to Khanwa to fight the one opponent left in northern India who could beat him.

This episode covers the fourteen months after the victory, when the Lodi state had dissolved rather than transferred, his army was asking to go home, and his own commanders had started believing an astrologer who said they would lose. Then Khanwa, Chanderi, the Ghaghra, and his death at Agra in 1530 after four and a half years of rule.

And then the book. Why it was written in Chaghatai Turkish rather than Persian, why it reads unlike anything else from its century, the fifteen-year gap in the manuscript that nobody can account for, and how it survived: carried through exile by Humayun, used by his daughter Gulbadan, translated into Persian under Akbar in 1589. The famous illustrations are Akbar's court reading his grandfather sixty years after the fact, not evidence from Babur's own life.

What he left was a claim, a bloodline, and a book. The book is the part he would have been least confident about, and the part that has lasted best.

Sources are Babur's own memoir and the surrounding scholarship. Paintings referenced come from museum archives.

The Garden and the Sword, a history podcast on the Mughal empire, from Aurah Living.

On the morning of 21 April 1526, on a dusty plain north of Delhi, a man who had spent thirty years losing things stood behind a line of carts and waited to be attacked.

Part Five of six on the Baburnama. The battle took four hours. The road to it took seven years: five expeditions through the passes, a Lodi sultan who had alienated his own nobles, and two of those nobles writing to Kabul with an invitation they had not thought through.

Babur counted everyone with him, twelve thousand, and wrote the number down. Against him came Ibrahim Lodi with, by Babur's count, a hundred thousand men and a thousand elephants. What Babur had instead: matchlocks and a few guns, seven hundred carts lashed together in the Ottoman manner, and a flanking sweep he had learned by having it done to him.

Then the aftermath: the khutba read in his name in Delhi, the Agra treasury given away so freely that his men called him Qalandar, and a great diamond handed to his son in a single line.

Sources: Annette Beveridge's translation of the Baburnama.

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Around 1529, in Agra, the most powerful man in northern India was handed a melon, and cut it, and burst into tears.

Part Four of six on the Baburnama. Not the battles — those are next time. This is the country itself, through the eyes of the man who took it and never once pretended to like it.

"Hindustan is a country of few charms," he wrote, and then listed what it lacked: no good horses, no grapes, no melons, no ice, no hot baths, no candles. It is the most famous passage in the book and the most misread — because every item on it is something he had in Kabul.

And then the same eye turns the other way, and he writes the longest natural history in the manuscript. The rhinoceros, which he decides is a kind of horse, and argues the case anatomically. The peacock, and the question of why a bird that can barely fly chooses to live where the jackals are. The parrot that said "Uncover my face, I am stifling" — followed immediately by "let credit rest with the narrator." The banana, which he works out is something between a grass and a tree. And the public clocks of northern India, whose workings he studied, whose flaw he found, and which he then fixed by imperial decree.

He ends by building a Timurid garden on ground he crossed "with a hundred disgusts and repulsions" — and the people of Agra, who had never seen anything laid out that way, gave that stretch of the river a name of their own.

Sources: Annette Beveridge's translation of the Baburnama.

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In October 1504 a twenty-two-year-old who had spent ten years failing to hold a city walked into one and was handed the keys. "Without a fight, without an effort," he wrote. He held Kabul for the rest of his life.

Part Three of six on the Baburnama. This is the decade in which Babur stops being a claimant and becomes a ruler — and the decade in which he writes the strangest and most beautiful thing in his book: a systematic survey of a province nobody asked him to describe. Its climate, its trade, its seven roads over the Hindu Kush, its meadows ranked by mosquitoes, and thirty-four species of tulip that he had counted.

Also in this episode: the winter crossing that cost him the hearing in one ear, and the night he sat out a blizzard in a hole he dug himself rather than sleep warm while his men froze; the moment he stopped calling himself Mirza and ordered that he be called Padshah; the birth of Humayun and the feast that followed; and the price he paid a Shia shah for eight months in Samarkand.

Then the book goes silent for eleven years, and every surviving manuscript loses them.

Sources: Annette Beveridge's translation of the Baburnama; Mirza Haidar's Tarikh-i-Rashidi; Khwandamir.

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Part Two of six on the Baburnama.

He took Samarkand at fifteen, after a seven-month siege, and held it for exactly one hundred days — he counts them himself. Within a week of riding out he had lost that city and his own kingdom too, both of them to a rumour that he was dying.

This episode is the decade Babur called the fatrat: the throneless time. Two capitals taken and two lost. A second capture of Samarkand at seventeen with two hundred and forty men. Five months of blockade, a surrender, and a sister handed to the enemy. Three years of wandering with nothing.

Also in this episode: why a fifteen-year-old conqueror stopped to write notes on the history of astronomy; what Shaibani Khan understood that the Timurid princes did not; and the moment the manuscript breaks off in the middle of a line of poetry, taking sixteen months of his life with it.

Part One of six on the Baburnama — the first true autobiography in Islamic literature, and the strangest book any king of the sixteenth century left behind.

On 8 June 1494 a man fell into a ravine at Akhsi with his pigeons. His eleven-year-old son inherited a small valley in Fergana, wrote the sentence that recorded his father's death, and thirty years later founded the Mughal empire almost by accident.

This episode is about what Babur thought he was before any of that happened: the junior branch of Timur's line, a claimed descent from Chinggis Khan he was faintly embarrassed by, the city he spent his life trying to take, and the minister in Herat who convinced him it was possible to write serious literature in the language you actually spoke.

Also in this episode: why Timurid succession guaranteed that a prince's worst enemy was his cousin; Ulugh Beg's observatory and what his son did to him; and Aisan Daulat Begum, the grandmother Babur openly credits with keeping him alive.

Made by Aurah Living — Mughal art, history and the stories behind the paintings. aurahliving.com

The full life of the first Mughal emperor — the long version.

Babur inherited a small kingdom at eleven and one of the most frightening names in Asia. What he wanted his entire life was a single city: Samarkand, his ancestor Timur's capital. He took it three times. He lost it three times. He spent two years with nothing at all, and wrote afterwards that he endured "much poverty and humiliation."

He settled for Kabul, stayed twenty-two years, and built gardens. Then at forty-three, having permanently failed at the only thing he ever really wanted, he came down through the passes with twelve thousand men and took northern India in a single morning at Panipat — and then had to argue his own army out of going home.

This episode: the dovecote his father died in, the siege where his sister was handed over as the price of surrender, the two years in the wilderness that taught him how to win, what northern India actually was in 1526, the chained wagons and guns that broke two Indian armies eleven months apart, the public destruction of his wine cups before Khanwa, the melon that made him cry, and the fourfold garden he planted out of homesickness that ended up holding the Taj Mahal.

Running through all of it: the Baburnama, the memoir he wrote in Chaghatai Turkic, in which a king records his own failures, his shyness, his drinking and his regrets — one of the earliest true autobiographies in Islamic literature.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Three times around a bed

03:31 Two bloodlines and a very small kingdom

07:43 What Samarkand meant

10:46 Samarkand again, and the price of losing it

14:37 The wilderness

18:21 The book he wrote about himself

24:06 Kabul, and twenty-two years of peace

28:32 The third loss, and looking south

32:27 The country he was walking into

36:30 Panipat, 21 April 1526

41:45 And he hated it

44:26 Khanwa, 16 March 1527

50:52 The last campaigns

54:13 The garden at Agra

56:59 The circumambulation

59:53 Close

Where the sources disagree, this episode says so out loud: the size of Ibrahim Lodi's army at Panipat, the size of Rana Sanga's confederacy at Khanwa, the sincerity of Babur's renunciation of wine, and the historicity of the deathbed story.

The Garden and the Sword is made by Aurah Living. aurahliving.com

Babur founded the Mughal empire almost by accident. What he actually wanted, his entire life, was a single city — Samarkand, his ancestor Timur's capital. He took it three times. He lost it three times. India was the consolation prize, and he complained about it in writing until the day he died.

A throne at eleven. A kingdom lost before he was twenty. Two years of wandering with nothing. And one morning at Panipat in 1526 when twelve thousand men beat an army several times their size. Plus the most surprising thing about the man who started it all — that he wrote it all down himself, failures included.

CHAPTERS

00:00 A melon in Agra

01:30 A throne at eleven

04:20 Samarkand, won and lost

07:40 Poverty and humiliation

10:10 Kabul, the consolation prize

12:40 Panipat, 21 April 1526

15:30 Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures

17:40 The fourfold garden

19:20 Close

Sources include the Baburnama — Babur's own memoir, written in Chagatai Turkic. Where the sources disagree on a number, the episode says so.

The Garden and the Sword is made by Aurah Living. aurahliving.com