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Did Babar love India?
Vinod
Kumar
Part I
There is an extremely disturbing and alarming trend amongst the Indian
intelligentsia to glean from history what suits their bias. Rather than accept
the historical fact that the Muslim invasion of India has, by almost all
accounts (including the historical writings of the invaders themselves), been
the bloodiest in the history of the World, these "scholars" try to project a
more "respectable" account of the Islamic invasion of India. Anyone who rejects
this rosy picture of history is immediately dismissed as being a Hindutva freak.
Thus, when even a respected journalist like Naipaul, dares to speak the truth,
he is accused of succumbing to the Hindutva propaganda. Amulya Ganguli in one of
articles in The Hindustan Times claims that Naipaul has a "warped vision of
(Indian) history" and yet it is actually Ganguli who distorts Indian
history by trying to present Babur as someone who loved India.
Ganguli claims that
"There is nothing in Babur-nama to indicate that Babur "despised" India. Citing
Babur's description of India flora and fauna, Ganguli tries to prove Babur loved
India. That, if anything is a tremendous stretch. Five years of Babur's memoirs
prior to his fifth and final expedition to India are missing -- so we shall
never know what his exact motives were, but one thing that is clearly evident
from the portions of the Babur-nama that have survived is that what Babur liked
most about India, were its "masses of gold and silver" and the large revenue
(52 krurs -- estimated by Erskine to be 4,212,000 British Pounds).
The following couplet,
taken from the Babur-nama, might give some clue as to why Babur came to India:
"For Islam's sake, I
wandered the wilds,
Prepared for war with pagans and Hindus,
Resolved myself to meet the martyr's death,
Thanks be to God ! a ghazi I became."
Unable to bear the heat
and other travails of the country, soon after coming to India, a large
section Babur's army wanted to return to Kabul. This naturally concerned him. He
summoned all his generals, took counsel, and and made a stirring speech: "By the
labours of several years, by encountering hardship, by long travel, by flinging
myself and the army into battle, and by deadly slaughter, we, through God's
grace beat these masses of enemies in order that we might take their broad
lands. Why after all this should we abandon countries taken at such a risk? Was
it for us to remain in Kabul, the sport of harsh poverty?"
Loathing Hindustan,
Khwaja Kalan, one of his generals left India with the following couplet
inscribed on the wall of his residence in Dihli:
"If safe and sound I
cross the Sind,
Blacken my face ere I wish to for Hind"
Babur longed for Kabul and what he thought of Hindustan is evident from the
following verse written to Mulla Ali Khan who had gone there:
"As for you have gone
from this country of Hind,
Aware for yourself of its woes and its pain,
With longing desire for Kabul's fine air,
You went hot-foot forth out of Hind.
The pleasure you looked for you will have found there
With sociable ease and charm and delight;
As for us, God be thanked ! we are still alive,
In spite of much pain and unending distress;
Pleasure of sense and bodily toil
Have been passed-by by you, passed-by too by us"
Babur contemplated leaving India several times -- he was here only for
four years -- but he was not going to leave his empire which he had built
with so "much hardship" and "great slaughter" and where he had found
immense wealth on a mere whim without securing it properly. What he could not do
-- leave Hindustan -- while alive, he did after his death by leaving
instructions that his body be conveyed and buried in Kabul. India, for him was a
place to be conquered for Islam. And he wrote: "by the help of our victorious
soldiers the standards of Islam have been raised to the highest pinnacles."
Babur's heart was always in Kabul and Tramontana as he expressed in his letter
to Khwaja Kalan who, as stated above, had left for Kabul earlier:
"Boundless and infinite
is my desire to go to those parts. Matters are coming to some sort of settlement
in Hindustan. This work brought to order, God willing! My start will be
made at once. How should a person forget the pleasant things of those
countries?"
Ganguli describes Babur's visit to temples on September 29, 1528, in Gualiar
which is described on page 613 of his memoirs translated by Beveridge and
comments "There is little to suggest from these passages that Babur was full of
animus against the Hindus." But Ganguli in his zest to "glean from history what
suits his bias" conveniently forgets to tell the readers what Babur did a day
earlier on September 28, at Urwa described on the preceding page. In
Babur's own words "Three sides of Urwa are solid rocks, not the rocks of Biana
but one paler in colour. On these sides people have cut out idol-statues, large
and small, one large statue on the south side being perhaps 20 qari (yds) high.
Urwa is not bad place; it is shut in; the idols are its defect; I for my
part, ordered them destroyed."
He also conveniently forgets to talk about the transformation of a temple into a
mosque at Sambhal and in Ayodhya on Babur's orders.
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