READING HALL DOORS OF WISDOM

"THIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY"

BABAR

CHAPTER XI

THE INVASION OF INDIA

1519-1524 A.D.

“From the time when I conquered the land of Kabul in 910 [1504-5] till now” wrote Babar in 1526, “I had always been bent on subduing Hindustan. Sometimes, however, from the misconduct of my Amirs and their dislike of the plan, sometimes from the cabals and opposition of my brothers, I was prevented... At length these obstacles were removed; there was no one left, high or low, gentle or simple, who could dare to urge a word against the enterprise. In 925 [1519] I gathered an army, and taking the fort of Bajaur by storm in about an hour, put all the garrison to the sword. Then I advanced into Bhíra, where I prevented all marauding and plunder, imposed a tax upon the inhabitants, and dividing the proceeds among my troops, returned to Kabul. From that time till 932 [1526], I especially devoted myself to the affairs of Hindustan, and in the space of these seven or eight years I entered five times at the head of an army. The fifth time God Most-high, of His mercy and grace, cast down and defeated so powerful an enemy as Sultan Ibrahim and made me master and conqueror of the mighty empire of Hindustan”

So wrote the first Emperor of India after the memorable victory at Pánipat, on the field where the fate of Hindustan has thrice been decided. He was apt to take the impression of the moment for a permanent conviction, and it may do questioned whether he had really set the conquest of India before his eyes ever since his arrival in Kabul. The evidence points to a much stronger attraction towards Samarkand. When that fervent ambition lay dead, killed by repeated failure and the indomitable ascendancy of the Uzbegs, then, and not before, did Babar’s dreams of an Indian empire take distinct form. After that it was five years before he made the first move, and more than twenty years had passed since his conquest of Kabul, before he marched into Delhi. Men of his impetuous and daring nature do not stifle a burning ambition for twenty years, and it was only when a still more ardent hope was quenched theft the alternative began to become urgent, and even then the plan took five years maturing.

Those five years must have been spent in organizing his little kingdom, which had been allowed to degenerate under the loose control of his youngest brother. Nasir Mirza went out to meet Babar with all honor, on his return from the ill-fated campaigns beyond the Oxus, and at once resigned the government, retiring to his former command at Ghazni, where drink, the prevailing vice of the Mongols, soon made an end of the weak voluptuary, as it had before of his brother Jahangir. A rebellion of his Mongol Begs followed upon his death, but Babar was by this time hardened to these periodical outbreaks, defeated the traitors in a pitched battle, and quickly suppressed the revolt. He had more troublesome work to reduce the hill tribes to order, and his success was only partial; but he secured the loyalty of the great clan of the Yusufzáis by marrying a daughter of one of their chiefs, and he received the submission of the rulers of Swat and Bajaur. At this point (1519) the Memoirs, of which we have been deprived for a dozen important years, recommence (though only in a fragment covering twelve months), and the description of the siege of Bajaur—the prologue to the first act of the invasion of India—presents a vivid picture of the fighting of those days, and is peculiarly interesting for its account of the use of European (Feringi) artillery:—

“On Thursday, 4 Muharram [Jan. 6, 1519], I ordered the troops to put on their armor, to prepare their weapons, and to mount ready for action. The left wing I ordered to proceed higher up than the fort of Bajaur, to cross the river at the ford, and to take their ground to the north of the fort; I ordered the center not to cross the river, but to station themselves in the broken and high grounds to the north-west; the right wing was directed to halt to the west of the lower gate. When Dost Beg and the officers of the left wing halted after crossing the river, a hundred or a hundred and fifty foot sallied from the fort and assailed them with flights of arrows; but they, for their part, received the attack, returned the volley, chased the enemy back to the fort and drove them under the ramparts. Maula Abd-al-Malik of Khost madly pressed on his horse and galloped up to the foot of the wall; and if scaling ladders and siege-shields had been ready we should have been inside the castle that moment ... The people of Bajaur had never seen matchlocks, and at first were not in the least afraid of them, but, hearing the reports of the shots, stood opposite the guns, mocking and playing unseemly antics. But that day Ustád Ali Kúli [the chief gunner] brought down five men with his matchlock, and Wali Khazin killed two, and the other musketeers shot well and bravely, quitting their shields, mail, and “cowheads” [or penthouses], and aiming so truly that before night seven to ten Bajauris were laid low; whereupon the defenders of the fort became so frightened that not a man ventured to show his head for fear of the matchlocks. As it was now evening, orders were given that the troops should be drawn off for the present, but should prepare implements and engines for assaulting the fortress in the morning twilight.

“On Friday, at the first dawn of light, orders were given to sound the kettle-drum for action. The troops all moved forward in the stations assigned to them, and invested the place. The left wing and center having brought at once an entire túra [penthouse] from their trenches, applied the scaling ladders, and began to mount... Dost Beg’s men reached the foot of a tower on the north-east of the fort, and began undermining and destroying the walls. Ustád Ali Kuli was also there, and that day too he managed his matchlock to good purpose; the Feringi piece was twice discharged. Wali Khazin also brought down a man with his matchlock. On the left of the center, Malik Kutb Ali, having climbed the wall by a scaling-ladder, was for some time engaged hand to hand with the enemy; at the lines of the main body, Muhammad Ali Jangjang and his younger brother Nauróz, scaling a ladder, fought bravely with sword and spear; Baba Yasáwal, going up another ladder, set about demolishing the parapet with his axe. Many of our men climbed boldly up, and plied the enemy with their arrows so that never a head was shown above the works; others, despite all the enemy’s exertions and harassments, despising their bows and arrows, busied themselves in breaking through the walls and demolishing the defenses. It was breakfast time when the tower on the north-east, which Dost Beg’s men were undermining, was breached; whereat the enemy were forthwith driven in, and the tower was taken. At this moment the men of the main body, scaling the walls, also entered the fort. By God’s favor and grace we took this strong castle in a couple of hours”

It is a piteous story: the unhappy Bajauris with their bows and arrows could make no stand against the mysterious matchlocks, primitive as they were; and their smoking muzzles and sharp reports, and the heavy boom of the strange “Feringi” cannon, must have produced a consternation like black magic. The end was still worse: “As the men of Bajaur were rebels, rebels to the followers of Islam, and as, besides their rebellion and hostility, they followed the customs and usages of the infidels, while even the name of Islam was extirpated among them, they were all put to the sword, and their wives and families made prisoners. Perhaps upwards of 3,000 were killed”. Babar records the brutal massacre with righteous satisfaction; despite his generosity and nobility of character, the savage Mongol nature peeps out sometimes. He cut off the heads of the chiefs, and sent them to Kabul as trophies of victory; a pyramid of skulls was built near the ill-fated fortress. Bringing in heads was an honorable feat among Babar’s fellows, and we read of the distress of a scout who successfully cut off an Afghan’s head, but had the misfortune to mislay it on his way back. Later, in India, when an attempt was made to poison him, the Emperor took a bloody revenge: the taster was cut in pieces, the cook flayed alive, a woman trampled under the elephants, and another woman shot. Cultured in the humanities, Babar sometimes forgot to be humane.

From Bajaur the Emperor marched east through Bunír, and fording the Indus, on Feb. 17, 1519, above Attok, followed by his infantry on rafts, he pushed on into the Punjab, intending to occupy Bhíra, which then lay on the west of the Jhílam. “We were always full of the idea of invading Hindustan” he says; “and as Bhíra was upon the borders and near at hand, I conceived that if I were now to push on without baggage, the soldiers might light upon some booty”. He arrived there without opposition; levied a contribution of over £16,000 on the inhabitants, and sternly suppressed all excesses on the part of his soldiers. He claimed the Punjab as his inheritance in right of Timur’s conquest and occupation more than a century before—he had been reading the Zafar Náma to refresh his memory of his great ancestor’s campaigns—and “as I reckoned the countries that had belonged to the Turks as my own territories, I permitted no plundering or pillage”. Conscious of his right, such as it was, he even sent an ambassador to explain the situation to the King of Delhi, the actual sovereign of the Punjab, but the envoy was detained at Lahore, and sent back with his mission unfulfilled.

Having secured the submission of Bhíra, Khusháb, “the country of Chenab”—probably between the rivers Jhílam and Chenab—Babar appointed governors from among his Begs, and set out for Kabul. He had, so to speak, “pegged out a claim” in the north of the Punjab, but he must have been well aware that it was liable to be jumped—as indeed it was, the moment his back was turned. His army of at most 2,000 men was not equal to larger efforts, his horses were done up, and his chief object had been plunder, of which he had no cause to complain. On his way back he passed north of the Salt Range, and after a sharp skirmish with the Gakars, took their capital, Perhála, and received the submission of several tribes. He doubtless reached Kabul by the Kuram Pass...The expedition had not been fruitless., though it left no very permanent traces.

A very singular fact appears prominently throughout Babar’s diary of this campaign. In spite of arduous and responsible duties, he confesses, with his unique frankness, that he was frequently intoxicated, and had become indeed a regular, systematic, deliberate drunkard. As we have seen, before his visit to his cousins at Herat he had never tasted wine, and though he was sorely tempted to begin among such jovial boon fellows the influence of his prime minister seems to have checked him. We hear nothing of his drinking until January of this year, 1519, when we read of his enjoying the wine of Káfiristán at the castle of Bajaur. A few days later he is eating the “pleasant, but highly inebriating kimál—apparently a powerful species of tipsy-cake—which affected him so “strangely” that he could not attend his council. Soon afterwards we find him taking a bolus (majún), or in other words eating hemp or hashish, called in India bhang. Late in life he took opium, which made him very sick; but as a rule arack, wine, and bhang served his purpose—anything but beer, which he could not stomach.

There is no telling when he began these habits, but by 1519 he was a steady toper. The least thing serves him as an excuse. He sees a lovely view—and has a drinking party; or the crops were uncommonly fine—another bout; “I had an early cup by Kábil’s tomb; at noon-day prayers a drinking party; after evening prayers—a drinking party; a tribute offering arrives—he takes his bhang lozenge; he cuts his hair—a bout ensues; the Bágh-i-Wafá was such a beautiful spot that we drank a quantity of wine, and took our regular morning cup: when I had no drinking parties I had parties for bhang”. Sailing on a raft, he “drank all the way”. His friends would gather round him under the Tál trees, among the orange groves, or beside a canal; the musicians played, and they drank till they were merry. It was a rule that every man who sang a Persian song—one of Babar’s own composition, sometimes—should have his glass, and everyone who sang a Turki song, another; but on rare occasions it was enacted that if a man became drunk, he must be removed, and another take his place.

As everyone knows, when Orientals drink at all, they generally do it, not for the bouquet, or for gentle exhilaration, but for the express purpose of getting drunk. This was Babar’s case. In the course of the return march from the Punjab we read: “About the time of noon-day prayers, I mounted to take a ride, and afterwards going on board a boat, we had a drinking bout... We continued dunking spirits in the boat till bed-time prayers, when, being utterly drunk, we mounted, and, taking torches in our hands, came at full gallop back to the camp from the river-side, falling sometimes on one side of the horse, and sometimes on the other. I was miserably drunk, and next morning, when they told me of our having galloped into camp with lighted torches in our hands, I had not the slightest recollection of it”. The Memoirs are full of the oddest bacchanalian scenes; for example:

“Towards the bow of the vessel a space was roofed in. It had a level platform above, and I and some others sat on the top of it. A few others sat below the scaffolding. Towards the stern of the ship, too, there was a place for sitting: Muhammadi, with Gedai and Naman, sat there. We continued drinking spirits till after noon-prayers. Disliking the spirits, we then took to bhang. Those who were at the other end of the vessel did not know that we were taking bhang, and continued to drink spirits. About night prayers we left the vessel, and mounting our horses returned late to camp. Muhammadi and Gedai, thinking that I had been taking nothing but spirits, and imagining that they were doing an acceptable service, brought me a pitcher of liquor, carrying it by turns on their horses. They were extremely drunk and jovial when they brought it in. “Here it is” they said; “dark as the night is, we have brought a pitcher. We carried it by turns”. They were informed that we had been using a different thing. The bhang-takers and spirit-drinkers, as they have different tastes, are very apt to take offence with each other. I said, “Don’t spoil the cordiality of the party; whoever wishes to drink spirits, let him drink spirits; and let him that prefers bhang take bhang; and let not the one party give any idle or provoking language to the other”. Some sat down to spirits, some to bhang. The party went on for some time tolerably well. Baba Jan, the player on the kabúz, had not been in the boat; we had sent for him when we reached the royal tents. He chose to drink spirits. As the spirit-drinkers and bhang-takers never can agree in one party, the spirit-bibbers began to indulge in foolish and idle talk, and to make provoking remarks on bhang and bhang-takers. Baba Jan, too, getting drunk, talked very absurdly. The tipplers filling up glass after glass for Tardi Muhammad, made him drink them off, so that in a very short time he was mad drunk. Whatever exertions I could make to preserve peace were all unavailing; there was much uproar and wrangling. The party became quite burdensome and unpleasant, and soon broke up”.

It was worse on November 1-2, when they began drinking in the Emperor’s tent in the morning, kept at it till night, and the following morning took the customary cup, and “getting intoxicated, went to sleep”

“About noon-day prayers we left Istalif, and I took a bolus (of bhang) on the road ... While I was riding round the harvest fields, such of my companions as were fond of wine began to contrive another drinking bout. Although I had taken bhang, yet as the crops were uncommonly fine, we sat down under some trees that had yielded a plentiful load of fruit, and began to drink. We kept it up there till bed­time prayers”

Ten days later we find an extraordinary picture of the Emperors pleasures. They had left the Chárbágh Palace about noon, and dismissing their servants, arrived, late, “about the time of the first sleep”, at their friend Tardi Beg’s underground conduit, whence that choice spirit—who, by the way, began life as a dervish, and ended as a distinguished general—hastened forth to greet them.

“I well knew” writes Babar, “Tardi Beg’s thoughtless, profuse turn, and that he did not dislike his glass. I had brought about four guineas with me, and gave them to him to get wine and everything ready for an entertainment, as I wished to make merry with some jolly companions. He set out for Behzádi to fetch wine, and I sent my horse by one of his servants to graze in the valley while I sat near the water-course on a rising ground. It was past nine when Tardi Beg came back with a pitcher of wine, and we set about drinking it. While he was fetching it Muhammad Kásim Barlás and Sháhzáda, who had guessed what he was after but did not suspect that I was in the affair, dogged him on foot : so we invited them to join the party. Tardi Beg said that Húlhúlanka wished to drink with us, and I said, “I have never seen a woman drink wine: call her in”. He also sent for a kalandar [dervish], called Sháhi, and a man belonging to the water-works, who played the rebeck. We sat drinking wine on the hill behind, the water-run till evening prayers; then we went to Tardi Beg’s house, and drank by candlelight till after bed-time prayers. It was a wonderfully amusing and guileless party”

Yet Babar was up and mounted at the roll of the kettle-drum and reached his first halt before sunrise. He must have possessed an amazing constitution to survive this treatment. After two more nights of revelry we find him standing in rapt contemplation before an apple-tree, admiring the exquisite colors of the autumn leaves, “which no painter, however skillful, could depict”. He is always curiously observant of the beauties of nature; he delights in the discovery of spikenard, which he had not found before; and he is never weary of expatiating on the loveliness of the flowers in his favorite gardens. Dissipation never dulled his appreciation of such delights, or his pleasure in poetry and music :—

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness!

Oh! Wilderness were Paradise snow!

Nor did he lose his nerve, for in the midst of this debauchery he joins vigorously in hunting “the arm’d rhinoceros and the Hyrcanian tiger”. He does not seem in the least ashamed of his excesses—on the contrary he often winds up a tale of unconscionable revelry with the words, “It was a rare party”, or, as above, “a wonderfully amusing and guileless party”. Evidently he agreed that

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;

The best of life is but intoxication.

When he had fever, indeed, he was forced to abstain, but even then nothing would satisfy him but his friends must come and drink in his room, so that he might study the effects of wine upon different temperaments from the critical point of view of strict sobriety.

He was, however, fastidious in deportment, even in drinking, and required that his friends, however drunk they might be, should “carry their liquor like gentlemen, when they grew uproarious with the turbulent mirth of wine” or foul-mouthed, or idiotic, he was disgusted. Reprobate as he was in this respect, he had his code of morals. He never pressed a man to drink who did not wish it, and he refused to hold a bout in a private house when his host, a kázi, protested that such a thing as wine had never been seen there. Clearly he was a man of scruples—on occasion. Moreover he appears to have been always able to resist temptation when work was to the fore. We never hear of his being in the slightest degree overcome or incapable when his army needed his command, or the enemy were at hand; and we may be sure that if it had happened he would have told us with the utmost candor. He could never have waged his later wars in India unless he had held himself in hand, and accordingly we hear little of drinking parties when once he was on the campaign.

He seems, indeed, to have entered upon his course of regular intemperance with a deliberate intention of carrying it on for a definite period. “As I intended”, he says in 1519 “to abstain from wine at the age of forty, and as I now wanted somewhat less than a year of that age, I drank wine most copiously”. Undoubtedly he made the most of the interval, but unhappily he did not stick to his word. There is another gap in the Memoirs from 1520 to 1525, but as we find him hard at the wine-jar at the latter date, there can be little doubt that he had never really left off. In December, 1525, however, he had a serious warning; he took fever and dysentery, and began to spit blood. In his alarm he made many virtuous resolutions. “I knew” he writes, “whence this illness proceeded, and what conduct had brought on this chastisement”; and he quotes verses in Arabic and Turki to prove the sure penalty of breaking a vow. “I now once more composed myself to penitence and self-control; I resolved to abstain from such idle thoughts and unseemly pleasures”, and even to renounce poetry and break his pen, in contrition for the quantity of frivolous verse he had thoughtlessly scribbled. But two or three days later he was better, and was so charmed with the view of the camp-fires flickering in the valley beneath his tent one night, that he felt that a libation was distinctly due to the scenery.

Babar’s revels would be merely gross and revolting but for this touch of romance and sentiment. His enjoyment of wine was but a part of his delight in everything that was beautiful, everything that heightened the quickness of the senses and touched the emotions. On the side of a hill near Kabul he built a little cistern of red granite, which was filed from time to time with red wine. Here he would sit and drink, while the fairest maidens sang and danced around. On the sides of the cistern were chiseled these lines :—

Sweet is the New Year’s coming,

Sweet the smiling Spring,

Sweet is the juice of the mellow grape,

Sweeter far the voice of Love.

O Babar, seize life’s pleasures,

Which, once departed, can never, alas! return.

It was not till February 35, 1527, that he carried his good resolution into effect, and, once made, the reform was final. He was near Síkri, preparing for the decisive battle with Ráná Sanga, when, perhaps as a prophylactic or propitiation to the God of Victories, who could scarcely favor a Muslim who indulged in forbidden vice, he suddenly determined to carry out his long-deferred repentance. He sent for all his gold and silver drinking cups, and smashed them in pieces, and gave the fragments to the poor. “I renounced the use of wine” he said, “purifying my mind”. Three hundred of his followers did the like, and the store of wine in the camp was poured out upon the earth, and an almshouse was built upon the spot. An eloquent imperial rescript was indited by Shaikh Zain-ad-dín, calling upon the people, in florid rhetoric, to follow this example, so that “in all the regions protected by our sway, God keeping watch to guard them from all evil and enmity, there may not be a creature who shall indulge in intoxicating liquor, or employ himself in procuring or making spirits or in selling them, or who shall purchase them, keep them, or carry them out or bring them in”. To signalize this great reform Babar remitted the tamgha, or stamp-tax, from all Muslims throughout his dominions. He never took wine again.

Some notice of Babar’s intemperance is essential in any sketch of his life. For many years it was a prominent part of his daily routine, and fills the largest place in his diary. Without attempting to moralize, we may remark that drunkenness was the hereditary vice of his race and his family, that he did not succumb to it till he was near thirty, and that he made the grand renunciation, which to many men seems to be impossible, at the age of forty-four. It will have been noticed too that he always tippled in company, in a jolly group of “noble and illustrious drinkers” after a healthy Rabelaisian fashion, and evidently regarded the wine as an accessory, though a most necessary and delightful accessory, to a merry meeting. His intemperance was really a part of his gay, genial, sunny nature. He was bon camarade to his many friends, and among them it was a mark of good comradeship to pledge one another in the bowl.

If he often degraded himself in times of idleness, he knew how to stop when there was work afoot, and he was able to conquer his vice in a supreme and final act of penitence.

The events of 1520-1525 may be passed over rapidly. We have not the brilliant illumination of the Memoirs for these years, and the records of other historians are meager. Two changes materially strengthened Babar’s position: on the death of his cousin Khan Mirza in 1520 the Emperor’s eldest son, Humayun, was appointed to the government of Badakhshan, and Babar himself visited this province, accompanied by the young prince’s mother; and in September, 1522, Kandahar, which he had long sought to annex, and had lately besieged twice, was surrendered to him by the Arghún chief, Shah Beg, who had found the Emperor a dangerous neighbor, and so had sought a new province to rule in Sind. Babar’s territory now extended from the Upper Oxus to the Garmsír or “hot region” on the Persian frontier; he was in no risk of attack upon his flanks, and could advance upon India with security. He had indeed twice made incursions into the Punjab since his first annexation of Bhíra; but of the second raid we know nothing very certainly; and the third, in 1520, when he again marched through the Gakars’ country, punished the rebels who had revolted in and about Bhíra, and pushed on to Siálkót, was abruptly checked by news of an attack on his territory by the Arghúns of Kandahar, which caused his immediate return, and led to the subjugation of that city. It was not till 1524 that he entered resolutely upon the campaigns which ended in the conquest of Hindustan,

CHAPTER XII

PANIPAT