But you cannot blame the agents. It was our systems which were at fault. For a while after Mangal took over, things seemed to go from bad to worse. Had I made a mistake in choosing him? It’s one thing to take care of the Maharaj Kumar, pick up whatever gossip and rumour you can and protect His Highness, and quite another to take over the reins of a demoralized intelligence service, enthuse its members while always keeping alive the threat of disciplinary action and most important of all, deliver valuable and trustworthy information. Maybe Mangal was out of his depth. Two months into the post, almost all reports from his agents had ceased. Then every once in a while he started sending me pages written in Turki, some of them in a childish script, some in exquisite calligraphy along with an execrable and indecipherable scrawl which was meant to be a translation of the Turki. I had little desire and even less patience to unravel the meaning from bits and pieces of what was clearly someone else’s diary. They were rarely connected and I did not get a feel for the diarist or the way his mind worked. Besides, I also had the strange feeling that if I continued reading, I would become a voyeur. A diary by definition is a chronicle of past events. Detailed descriptive passages about flowers and fruits; nocturnal raids which were nothing but dacoities in plain language; the one-time bane of my life, poetry, though I must confess that in the last couple of years, constant exposure has worn me down to the point that I am not only receptive to it but even look forward to it occasionally. But poetry in Turki where assonance and wordplay run riot and the translator is not always capable of handling the multiple layers of meaning? No, thank you. Constant troubles with uncles, cousins and half-brothers, as if I don’t have enough of my own. Drinking parties followed by remorse at having imbibed.
What interest would Father have in an indigent man who was a maruader, with literate and cultured tastes, in some distant land? I stopped going through the scraps. I had now at least seven or ten of them, some of them two lines long, others a paragraph while a couple went on for a page. I put them away in a desk and decided to call Mangal and ask him why he was wasting my time with a Turki diary, and how did he expect me to brief His Majesty and the War Council three weeks from now when all other reports from our agents in Delhi, Malwa, Gujarat and elsewhere had dried up.
My irritation with Mangal kept rising but for some reason I was loath to summon him. (The scraps of Turki with their translation have now gone up to twenty-one.) There was only one thing for me to do. When I get mad with a written report, I sit down with a pen, go over the text line by line and then tear apart the writer’s facts and assessment, his lack of interest, his woolly language and ask him to redo the report within a day or two. I sat down with paper and quill and the excerpts and got ready to blast Mangal. If he thought he could take me for granted just because we had grown up together since childhood and because I was dependent on him, he was making a mistake.
If anybody was mistaken, it was not Mangal but I. I wrote furiously and scathingly. By the seventh note a pattern had begun to emerge; by the eleventh excerpt I was hooked. I couldn’t have enough.
‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
‘In the month of Ramzan of the year 1494 and in the twelfth year of my age, I became a ruler in the country of Farghana.
‘Farghana is situated in the fifth climate and at the limit of settled habitation. On the east it has Kashghar; on the west, Samarkand; on the south, the mountains of the Badakhshan border; on the north, though in former times there must have been towns such as Almaligh, Almatu and Yangi which in books they write Taraz, at the present all is desolate, no settled population whatever remaining, because of the Moghuls and the Auzbegs.’
‘Farghana has seven separate townships, five on the south and two on the north of the Saihun river.
‘Of those on the south, one is Andijan. It has a central position and is the capital of the Farghana country. It produces much grain, fruits in abundance, excellent grapes and melons. In the melon season it is not customary to sell them out at the beds. Better than the Andijan nashpati, there is none. After Samarkand and Kesh, the fort of Andijan is the largest in Transoxiana. It has three gates. Its citadel is on its south side. Into it water goes by nine channels; out of it, it is strange that none comes at even a single place. Round the outer edge of the ditch runs a gravelled highway; the width of this highway divides the fort from the suburbs surrounding it.
‘Andijan has good hunting and fowling; its pheasants grow so surprisingly fat that rumour has it four people could not finish one they were eating with its stew.’
‘It passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, had nothing to recommend it.’
‘I do not write this in order to make complaint; I have written the plain truth. I do not set these matters down in order to make known my own deserts; I have set down exactly what has happened. In this History I have held firmly to it that the truth should be reached in every matter, and that every act should be recorded precisely as it occurred. From this it follows that I have set down of good and bad whatever is known, concerning father and older brother, kinsman and stranger; of them all I have set down carefully the known virtues and defects. Let the reader accept my excuse; let the reader pass on from the place of severity!’
‘Umar Sheikh Mirza, my father, was a short, stout, round-bearded and fleshy-faced person. He used to wear his tunic so very tight that to fasten the strings he had to draw his belly in and, if he let himself out after tying them, they often tore away. He was not choice in dress or food.
‘He was very generous; in truth, his character rose altogether to the height of generosity. He was affable, eloquent and sweet-spoken, daring and bold.’
‘A middling archer, he was strong in the fist; not a man but fell to his blow. Through his ambition, peace was exchanged often for war, friendliness for hostility.’
‘It has been mentioned that the fort of Akhsi is situated above a deep ravine; along this ravine stand the palace buildings, and from it, on Monday, Ramzan four, Umar Sheikh Mirza flew with his pigeons and their house, and became a falcon.’
‘Without a glance at the fewness of our men, we had the nagarets sounded, and putting our trust in God moved with face set for our opponent Muquim.
For few or many God is full strength,
No man has might in His court.
‘How often, God willing it, a small force has vanquished a large one! Learning from the nagarets that we were approaching, Muquim forgot his fixed plan and took the road to flight. God brought it right.’
‘As the Bajauris were rebels and at enmity with the people of Islam, and as, by reason of the heathenish and hostile customs prevailing in their midst, the very name of Islam was rooted out from their tribe, they were put to general massacre and their wives and children were made captive. At a guess, more than three thousand men went to their death; as the fight did not reach to the eastern side of the fort, a few got away there.
‘The fort taken, we entered and inspected it. On the walls, in houses, streets and alleys, the dead lay in what numbers! Comers and goers to and fro were passing over the bodies.’
‘After taking Bajaur by storm in two to three gari, and making a general massacre of its people, we went on into Bhira. Bhira we neither overran nor plundered; we imposed a ransom on its people, taking from them in money and goods to the value of four lakhs of shahrukhis and having shared this out to the army and auxiliaries, returned to Kabul.’
There was more, all of it jagged and piecemeal. There were various references to defeats, ignominious flights from whichever place served as a temporary home, repeated mention of the enormous pleasure the diarist took in swimming in any kind of climate. He was constantly on the move, from Samarkand to Kabul to Kandahar to Samarkand and other places. There were times when the band of men following him was less than two hundred.
I suspect that there were two reasons why Mangal wanted me to look at the transcripts. The first was that the diarist never g
ave up. Defeat rejuvenated him. There was something in his character which drew people to him despite repeated defeats, failures and dethronings. The second feature could have a direct bearing on Mewar itself. The man had crossed the River Indus. Granted that it was more in the nature of a swift desperado raid on Bajaur for what appeared to be religious reasons and the collection of a substantial ransom from the people of Bhira. Having tested the waters of Hindustan and found them inviting, he had made a second incursion from his base in Kabul.
Perhaps Father knew of his visits. He is news to me since I was dead to the world in Kumbhalgarh. Innumerable Muslim chieftains, kings and padshahs have come through the Khyber Pass, pillaged the land around the Indus and sometimes as far down as Delhi, defaced temples and massacred people in the hundreds of thousands but most of them have gone back for the simple reason that they were transient marauders and their only purpose was plunder and booty. Only a few stayed behind. Delhi has been under Afghan rule for generations. Hardly anyone remembers that their ancestors crossed the high passes in the Hindukush without any clear-cut idea of settling down in India. This man (why is Mangal keeping his name in the dark?) will bear watching closely.
There is however one other reason, call it intangible, whimsical or absurd, why I’m drawn to the diarist. I see myself in him. I too take notes and since Kumbhalgarh, have begun to turn them into an autobiography of sorts. You will find the passage where he speaks about writing the truth without regard to how one comes across, on the flyleaf of my own memoirs. Of course the language and specifics may differ but the sentiment is exactly the same. I read about the pleasure the man takes in swimming across rivers and I see myself. He is fond of his father but does not care if the pen portrait is not always complimentary to the subject. There’s something else, something dour and dark and disturbing. He leaves his conscience and sentiments out of the picture and the diary, when he commits mass murder. I feel a closeness to the man that makes me feel that I’m familiar with his mind. As we all know, or at least ought to know, the one simple way a commander can ensure defeat and disaster is for him to go by his intuition alone.
Having said that, let me not underplay the sharp and unbridgeable differences between us. There is a truly scary sentence which occurs again and again in his writing. ‘God brought it right.’ I am a believer in our gods. I may no longer have any serious dialogue or transaction with the Flautist, but I cannot imagine starting a day or ending it without saying a prayer to Lord Eklingji. And yet my relationship with God is distant, formal and more a matter of protocol and habit. The diarist on the other hand has an extraordinary faith, the kind of compelling faith that can almost bend and coerce God to rise to his expectations. Don’t take me literally; the wandering diarist would find this blasphemous in the extreme. But there is something about his tone and his absolute and unshakable trust in God which must surely give pause to even the Almighty.
There is a side effect of this belief which can have the gravest consequences for us. If he ever comes to Hindustan with long-term plans of settling down, he’ll want to be a ghazi, a holy warrior of God who fights against infidels and heathens like us in Mewar. Will he keep off the Muslim kingdoms like Malwa and Gujarat or will his territorial ambitions run them over? This is speculation but there’s more to it than foolish imaginings. Since my return, I have been pondering the Hindu-Muslim divide. If Mewar is to grow and expand, one of our major tasks will have to do with making Muslims feel secure in a Hindu kingdom. They must have as much of a stake in Mewar’s future as the Jains or Hindus. How, I keep wondering, do we ensure a dichotomy whereby God and faith remain at home and the state takes first priority in public life?
That evening Mangal sent his ‘confidential and top secret’ file home to me.
Your Highness,
Now that you’ve been through the notes that I have been sending you over a period of months and studied them carefully (the man has me followed round the clock; I can’t pee without one of his men noting down the time and place and colour of the fluid), I feel free to present my report. I’m aware that I have tested your patience and put you in a predicament by not having yet submitted my very first report for the coming cabinet meeting. It is true that I have also been avoiding you but that was because I did not wish to have converse with you till you had independently made up your mind about those excerpts.
A word before I come to the report. I know you’ve been wondering why I have not submitted most of the reports sent by our agents. Their veracity was, frankly, doubtful and I wished to spend time with each agent and get a feel for the man, his quirks, his level of insecurity and his need to justify his patriotism. I wanted to encourage them in their endeavours and discourage them from what can perhaps be termed as parallel truths. I gained their confidence by putting them at ease over a series of meetings. Then I went over their previous reports. I gave them my assessment of the ratios of truth and fabrication they contained and told them that they were free to contradict my assessment so long as they produced corroboration for their stories.
Ten days from now, I believe, intelligence reports will once again appear on your table. Each will come marked with its priority rating and also a rating for veracity. Over and above these two parameters, every once in a while you’ll come across a comment like ‘Facts and data unreliable but agent’s feel for the situation is insightful and should not be discounted.’ It is in the nature of a spy’s job that nothing can be guaranteed, not even his lies; for every once in a while you’ll discover that his fabrications have been substantiated by the turn of events.
Now to the report.
Name of subject : Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur
Designation : King of Kabul
Sources : Dictation or copying exercises given by Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur to his nine-year-old cousin, Haidar. Also scraps of paper on which Babur’s amanuensis tested his quill, ink and handwriting before making a copy of the diary under Babur’s supervision or sheets thrown into the waste paper basket because of spelling and other errors committed during the course of copying.
Ancestry : On his father’s side Babur is the great-great-grandson of Timur the Lame. On his mother’s, Babur is descended from Chaghatai Khan, second son of the Mongol conqueror, Jenghiz Khan.
Rajputs and even the Lodis of Delhi may regard Timur and Jenghiz Khan as barbarians but that is the outsider’s point of view. For Babur it is a matter of the highest pride that the blood of these two conquerors flows in his veins.
Most of his life Babur has been on the run. In 1497, at the age of fourteen he captured his ancestral home, Samarkand. The expedition proved prohibitively expensive since within a hundred days, he lost both his own kingdom Farghana, and Samarkand as well.
In 1499, Babur recovered Farghana but the year after he had to share it with his brother Jehangir.
In the year 1500, Babur recaptured Samarkand. Within a few months, he had once again lost it. Homeless for three years, in 1504 Babur took possession of Kabul which he made his capital. In 1511 Babur again mounted the throne of Samarkand only to vacate it in May 1512.
In 1519, Babur first crossed the Indus and took Bajaur fort. In 1520, he invaded India for the third time, attacked the Gakkai tribe, quashed a rebellion at Bhira and reached Sialkot.
There is clearly a pattern here. In his diary, Babur keeps referring to Samarkand, the place that Timur used as his home base, and to Delhi which Timur invaded in 1398.
Timur always had Samarkand to return to. Babur captured Samarkand thrice and thrice he has had to relinquish it. Even Kabul he may lose one of these days. India is infinitely bigger, infinitely richer, and has the added attraction of being peopled by infidels. If he decides to take Delhi, he serves both Allah’s purposes and his own.
Conclusion : Adversity does not faze Babur. Wherever he goes, whether it is Samarkand, Kandahar or Kabul, he quickly establishes a court and gathers poets and artisans around him. Since he is a man of his word, he arouses strong loyalty in his men. He i
s swift both to attack and retreat. Some of his most impressive victories have been won by a mere thousand to twelve hundred men. It is not inconceivable that he will go into battle with just two hundred men and yet come out triumphant. He has a keen interest in weapons technology and is constantly trying to acquire and incorporate it in his military strategy. He has, it is said, acquired a new kind of weapon called cannons and a Turkish artilleryman called Ustad Ali who casts them. We await more information on these firearms.
Recommended action :
1. Babur, to follow your own precepts, will bear watching.
2. Go all out to obtain samples of the new weaponry.
3. Demonstrate how this new weaponry operates to His Majesty.
4. Get a big budget sanctioned to place large orders for guns and cannons.
5. Build our offensive and defensive strategies around these weapons.
6. Train our army personnel in the use of these firearms.
7. Ensure that our investment in technology is not a one-shot exercise but a continuous one so that at every point it is our enemy who is at a disadvantage against us and not the other way round.
8. Accessing ordnance know-how from foreign sources as an initial measure is fine but in the long run, we’ll have to steep ourselves in the new knowledge and learn to stand on our own feet, the idea being that future advances in the field come from us.
* * *
Is there any room for doubt that Mangal and I fed at the same breast after you’ve read his report? He may be more terse than I but that’s because the format of a briefing demands brevity, clarity, a conclusion and a line of action. I doubt if I will ever have to rework a Mangal-report before presenting it to Father. Will Mangal’s recommendations have the desired effect on Father? After all, I have been saying the same things to His Majesty for the last seven or eight years. There is no denying, however, that Mangal’s action-scenario is now anchored to an actual set of circumstances while what I’ve been talking about was really a matter of policy. I hope the War Council meetings are not going to get stuck in a discussion about how Mangal’s suggestions devolve upon a series of assumptions: one, the ruler of Kabul plans to come into India again; two, at some point in time he’ll give battle to the Sultan of Delhi; and three, our own borders and kingdom will then be threatened by him.
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