READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM
"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY"
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READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY" |
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BABARCHAPTER IINTRODUCTION
Babar is the link between Central Asia and India,
between predatory hordes and imperial government, between Tamerlane and Akbar.
The blood of the two great Scourges of Asia, Chingiz and Timur, mixed in his
veins, and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad Tatar he joined the
culture and urbanity of the Persian. He brought the energy of the Mongol, the
courage and capacity of the Turk, to the listless Hindu; and, himself a soldier
of fortune and no architect of empire, he yet laid the first stone of the
splendid fabric which his grandson Akbar achieved.
His connection with India began only in the last
twelve years of his life. His youth was spent in ineffectual struggles to
preserve his sovereignty in his native land. His early manhood, passed in his
new kingdom of Kabul, was full of an unsatisfied yearning for the recovery of
his mother country. It was not till the age of thirty-six that he abandoned his
hope of a restored empire on the Oxus and Iaxartes, and turned his eyes
resolutely towards the cities and spoils of Hindustan. Five times he invaded
the northern plains, and the fifth invasion was a conquest. Five years he dwelt
in the India he had now made his own, and in his forty-eighth year he died.
His permanent place in history rests upon his Indian
conquests, which opened the way for an imperial line; but his place in
biography and in literature is determined rather by his daring adventures and
persevering efforts in his earlier days, and by the delightful Memoirs in which he related them.
Soldier of fortune as he was, Babar was not the less a man of fine literary
taste and fastidious critical perception. In Persian, the language of culture,
the Latin of Central Asia, as it is of India, he was an accomplished poet, and
in his native Turki he was master of a pure and unaffected style alike in prose
and verse. The Turkish princes of his time prided themselves upon their literary
polish, and to turn an elegant ghazal, or even to write a beautiful manuscript, was their
peculiar ambition, no less worthy or stimulating than to be master of sword or
mace. In some of the boldly sketched portraits of his contemporaries which enliven
the Memoirs, Babar often passes abruptly from warlike or administrative
qualities to literary gifts; he will tell how many battles a king fought, and
then, as if to clinch the tale of his merits, he will add that he was a
competent judge of poetry and was fond of reading the Sháh Náma, yet had such a fist that “he
never struck a man but he felled him”. Of another dignitary he notes
regretfully that “he never read, and though a townsman he was illiterate and
unrefined”; on the other hand a “brave man” is commended the more because he
“wrote the nastalik hand”, though, truly, “after a fashion”. Wit and learning, the art of turning a
quatrain on the spot, quoting the Persian classics, writing a good hand, or
singing a good song, were highly appreciated in Babar’s world, as much perhaps
as valor, and infinitely more than virtue. Babar himself will break off in the
middle of a tragic story to quote a verse, and he found leisure in the thick of
his difficulties and dangers to compose an ode on his misfortunes. His battles
as well as his orgies were humanized by a breath of poetry.
Hence his Memoirs are no rough soldier’s chronicle of
marches and countermarches, “saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery”; they
contain the personal impressions and acute reflections of a cultivated man of
the world, well read in eastern literature, a close and curious observer, quick
in perception, a discerning judge of persons, and a devoted lover of nature;
one, moreover, who was well able to express his thoughts and observations in
clear and vigorous language. “His autobiography”, says a sound authority, “is
one of those priceless records which are for all time, and is fit to rank with
the confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau, and the memoirs of Gibbon and
Newton. In Asia it stands almost alone”. There is no doubt a vast deal of
dreary chronicle in the Memoirs, much
desultory trifling, some repetition, and needlessly minute descriptions of
secondary characters and incidents; the first part is infinitely better than
the end; but with all this, the shrewd comments and lively impressions which
break in upon the narrative give Babar’s reminiscences a unique and penetrating
flavor. The man’s own character is so fresh and buoyant, so free from
convention and cant, so rich in hope, courage, resolve, and at the same time so
warm and friendly, so very human, that it conquers one’s admiring sympathy. The
utter frankness of self-revelation, the unconscious portraiture of all his
virtues and follies, his obvious truthfulness and fine sense of honor, give the
Memoirs an authority which is equal to their charm. If ever there were a case
when the testimony of a single historical document, unsupported by other
evidence, should be accepted as sufficient proof, it is the case with Babar’s
Memoirs. No reader of this prince of autobiographers can doubt his honesty or
his competence as witness and chronicler.
Very little is known about the mode in which they were
composed. That they were written at different dates, begun at one time and
taken up again after long intervals, as leisure or inclination suggested, is to
be inferred from the sudden way in which they break off, generally at a
peculiarly critical moment, to be resumed without a word of explanation at a
point several years later. The style, moreover, of the later portions is
markedly different from that of the earlier, whilst the earlier portions bear
internal evidence of revision at a later date. The natural (though conjectural)
inference is that the Memoirs were written at various dates; that the earlier
part was revised and enlarged after Babar’s invasion of India, though memory
failed or time was wanting to fill the gaps; and that the later part remains in
its original form of a rough diary because its author died before he had
leisure or energy to revise it. The Memoirs were written in Turki, Babar’s
native tongue. A copy of the work was in his cousin Haidar’s hands, who
probably obtained it during his visit to India within ten years of its author’s
death. Another copy, which appears to be the original of all the existing
manuscripts, was transcribed from an original in Babar’s own handwriting by his
eldest son, the Emperor Humayun, in 1553, as is stated in an interpolation by
Humayun in the body of the work. That the son was a faithful copyist is
evident, for he has not suppressed several passages in which his own conduct is
censured by his father.
The Memoirs were more than once translated from Turki
into Persian; notably, with scrupulous accuracy, by the illustrious Mirzá
Abdu-r-Rahim, son of Bairam Khan, in 1590, by the
desire of the Emperor Akbar. The close agreement, even in trifling details, of
the various Turki and Persian manuscripts preserved in several collections,
shows that the original text has been faithfully respected, and such variations
as exist do not affect the essential accuracy of the document. Even the gaps in
the narrative unfortunately occur at the same places and for the same intervals
in all the manuscripts, Turki and Persian, with the exception of two or three
short but interesting passages which one Turki text alone presents. This text
was printed at Kazan by M. Ilminski in 1857, and was
translated into French by M. Pavet de Courteille in 1871. Long before this, a translation into
vigorous English, by John Leyden and William Erskine, based upon a collation of
Persian and Turki manuscripts, and enriched with a valuable introduction and
copious notes, appeared in 1826, and has ever since held its place as the
standard version. It represents the Persian more than the Turki text, but how
little the two differ, and how trifling are the emendations (save in Turki
words and names) to be gained from the Turki version, may be seen by a
comparison of the French and English translations.
This comparison of two versions founded upon several
manuscripts written in two languages brings us to the remarkable conclusion
that Babar’s Memoirs have come through the ordeals of translation and
transcription practically unchanged. We possess, in effect, the ipsissima verba of an autobiography written early in the
sixteenth century by one of the most interesting and famous men of all Asia. It
is a literary fact of no little importance. The line of Emperors who proceeded
from Babar’s loins is no more. The very name of Mongol has lost its influence
on the banks of Iaxartes; the Turk is the servant of the Russian he once
despised. The last Indian sovereign of Timur’s race ended his inglorious career
an exile at Rangoon; a few years later, the degenerate descendants of Chingiz Khan
submitted to the officers of the Tsar. The power of Babar’s dynasty is gone;
the record of his life, the littera scripta that mocks at time remains unaltered and
imperishable.
CHAPTER IIFARGHANA. 1494 A.D.
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