by John Keay
What became of this feminist republic is not known. But in the early sixteenth century the Muslim – rajput balance on which the foundations of the Malwa state rested was overthrown. To offset the preponderance achieved by the rajputs, the incumbent sultan called in the forces of Gujarat, while the rajputs looked to their co-religionists in Mewar. In 1518 and then again in 1531 the Gujarati army would indeed take Mandu by storm, and its fall would presage that of the sultanate itself.
But if Malwa proved to be something of a failure in state-formation, Gujarat continued from strength to strength. In Mahmud Shah it enjoyed the services of an exceptionally able and long-reigning sultan (1459–1511) who completed the consolidation of the kingdom. Mercifully, given the innumerable other Mahmuds and Muhammads, he is usually remembered as Mahmud ‘Begarha’, a nickname which is variously explained. It may refer to his whiskers: according to European accounts his beard reached to below his waist, while his moustaches, long and grey like the horns of a buffalo (begara), were swept back to cross in a tie on the crown of his head. Alternatively it may refer to his capture of two vital fortresses (garh). One was Champaner near Baroda in eastern Gujarat, which became a subsidiary capital; the other was Girnar in Saurashtra, the great massif where Ashoka had left that famous rock inscription and where Rudradaman the satrap had once championed both irrigation and Sanskrit. ‘Mahmud Two-Forts’ in effect united mainland Gujarat with the Saurashtra peninsula to create a powerful maritime state enjoying a monopoly of those west coast ports which served upper India. It would prosper well into the seventeenth century and be finally overwhelmed only by a combination of Mughal might on land and Portuguese firepower at sea.
In the absence of obvious frontiers, fortifications were also the key to territorial aggrandisement in Rajasthan. The great plateau of Chitor, Mewar’s equivalent of the heights of Mandu, had been refortified by the Sesodia rajputs following its partial destruction by Ala-ud-din Khalji. Under Rana, or Maharana (variants of Raja and Maharaja) Kumbha, who reigned from 1433 to 1468, another towering stronghold was ringed with battlemented walls at Kumbhalgarh. From these twin eyries the Sesodias extended their sway over the lesser rajput houses of Rajasthan and adventured deep into Gujarat and Malwa. ‘Mewar was now in the middle path of her glory, and enjoying the legitimate triumph of seeing the foes of her religion captives on the rock of her power,’ pronounces Colonel Tod.
At the other extremity of Rajasthan, Raja Jodha (reigned 1438–89), a rajput of the Rathor clan who had been instrumental in securing Rana Kumbha’s throne, established his own hilltop stronghold at what became Jodhpur. ‘Never capable of uniting, even for their own preservation,’ as Colonel Tod put it, the rajputs scarcely constituted a state. They were, though, again about to give a good account of themselves. Famously if fortuitously it would be the boast of the Sesodias of Mewar that they alone never succumbed to the might of the Mughals.
In Orissa, Bengal and Awadh the same process of territorial definition and political consolidation might be traced. In Awadh (Oudh) the sultans of Jaunpur built Tughluq-esque mosques and fought with the Delhi sultans; in Orissa the Suryavamsha rajas built temples and warred with the rajas of Andhra and Vijayanagar. The success and liberality of the ruler, and the culture and language of the locality, created bonds which often transcended those of religion. In Bengal in 1418 a Hindu actually became sultan. This was too much for the Bengali ulema, who sought assistance from Jaunpur. Sultan Raja Ganesh was duly toppled, but only in favour of his son who, adopting Islam, changed his name from Jadusen to Jalal-ud-din and ruled under his father’s direction until 1431. A successor, Ala-ud-din Husain Shah (reigned 1493–1519), is revered as an outstanding patron of Bengali scholarship and, though a Muslim, indeed an Arab, is said to have honoured Chaitanya, the leader of the Vaishnavite bhakti movement in Bengal. In return the Hindus ‘went so far as to honour [the sultan] as an incarnation of Lord Krishna’.21
Husain’s tolerance had its limitations. Like the sultans of Gujarat and Malwa he stands accused of destroying temples in time of war, most notably during an attack on Orissa. But temples were seldom exclusively places of worship. They were also depositories of treasure, political statements which embodied the ambitions of their royal patrons and, on occasion, even military strongholds. Desecration was not necessarily prompted by bigotry.
In Kashmir, where Muslim immigration and conversion had resulted in the installation of a Muslim dynasty in 1339, the normally cordial pattern of Hindu – Muslim relations was interrupted in the early fifteenth century. The great Sun temple of Martand was destroyed and heavy penalties imposed on the mainly brahman Hindus. But the persecution proved short-lived. In a fifty-year reign (1420–70) Sultan Zayn-ul-Abidin reversed such discriminatory policies and, fostering both scholarship and a variety of new crafts, transformed his Himalayan kingdom into a stable and thriving state. Canals and irrigation works were also undertaken and, with a reassertion of its authority over Ladakh and Baltistan, Kashmir aspired to the sovereign status which its distinct history had long promised and which the finest natural frontiers in India seemingly guaranteed.
It was a different story in the neighbouring Panjab. Here evidence of nation-state-building is notably lacking. Timur’s Mongol descendants continued to nurse claims to the lands which he had traversed and conquered en route to Delhi in 1398. Meanwhile Afghan adventurers continued to migrate to and through the Panjab in large numbers. By the late fifteenth century the Afghan Lodis exercised desultory control from Delhi. But so heavily engaged was the Lodi sultan with rivals elsewhere that his governor in the Panjab enjoyed near independence. No obdurate dynasty like the Shahis stood between the undefended north-west frontier and the temptations of India. No champion like the later Ranjit Singh rose to rally Panjabi loyalty. The gates of Hind were swinging in the wind.
13
The Making of the Mughal Empire
1500–1605
BABUR GOES TO INDIA
ON 5 JULY IN THE YEAR 1505 a violent earthquake hit the city of Agra. According to Ferishta, ‘so severe an earthquake was never experienced in India either before or since … Lofty buildings were levelled with the ground [and] several thousand inhabitants were buried under the ruins.’1 To the survivors it seemed like an omen. Sikander, the second and greatest of the three Lodi sultans of Delhi, had in the preceding year celebrated his recovery of some of the sultanate’s erstwhile territories by designating Agra as his alternative capital. A small town of no previous importance, its elevation also signified Lodi ambitions to subdue rivals to the south of Jamuna. The town had been replanned round a grand fort and ‘the foundations of the modern Agra were laid.’2
Their almost immediate destruction by the earthquake made no impression on Sikander Lodi. Heedless, he resumed the creation of his new capital and continued to hammer away at his nearest rajput rival. This was Raja Man Singh of Gwalior whose subsidiary fortress of Narwar was indeed taken. But before the beetling cliffs of the superbly fortified palace-citadel at Gwalior itself, the Lodi forces, lacking artillery, proved powerless. At enormous cost the siege dragged on for several years. Worse still, word of the Lodi’s discomfiture reached the ear of a young and ambitious new Mongol ruler in Kabul.
Zahir-ud-din Muhammad, otherwise known as Babur or ‘the Tiger’, was already showing an unhealthy interest in the disturbed affairs of the Panjab, which province bordered his Afghan kingdom and was nominally under Lodi rule. In 1505, the year of the earthquake, he made his first foray across the north-west frontier. It was another omen which the Lodi sultan chose to ignore. Babur drew his own conclusion. As the Lodis’ biographer puts it, ‘Sikander Lodi, while fighting against the Tomars [i.e. the rajputs of Gwalior], was criminally neglecting the north-west frontier and the Panjab.’3
This state of affairs, if anything, worsened as the strife-torn Lodis squabbled amongst themselves. Twenty years and five exploratory incursions later, Babur would invade in earnest, topple Sikander’s successor and, taking both Delhi and Agra, w
ould inaugurate in India a Mongol, or Mughal, empire. Conventionally known in English as that of the Great Mughals, it would wax supreme for two centuries and engross most of the subcontinent. Through the agency of Babur, first of the Great Mughals, the multilateral history of the Indian subcontinent begins to jell into the monolithic history of India.
In his Babur-nama, a personal memoir-cum-diary of such disarming frankness that it was once reckoned ‘amongst the most enthralling and romantic works in the literature of all time’,4 Babur leaps from the page with the zestful energy of a sowar (trooper) bounding into the saddle. Restless to the point of nomadism, he was a born adventurer to whom success was an ultimate certainty and failure but a temporary inconvenience. Publicly he never hesitated. Deliberation inspired decision; decision guaranteed action. Convivial and charismatic, he rejoiced in the adulation of his comrades much as did his adored English contemporary, the young Prince Hal. Yet while ambition and obesity would stifle all scruple in Henry VIII, Babur continued to nurse both a sensitive spirit and the rawest of consciences. In a career that speaks volumes for his courage and genius, it is this emotional frailty which is so remarkable. A succinct piece of versification seemingly gave him as much satisfaction as a well-worked cavalry manoeuvre. Ill health he often reckoned a penalty for past vanities and, though a mighty toper, long and often did he groan over the sinfulness of intoxicants. For his greatest battle he would prepare by finally forswearing alcohol and promoting prohibition. No less typically would the aroma of a musk melon, dewily redolent of his central Asian home, reduce him to a moist-eyed reverie of nostalgic abandon.
To such an adventurer direction was dictated as much by fate as by forebears. On his mother’s side Babur was a distant descendant of Ghenghiz Khan, and on his father’s he was a fifth-generation descendant of Timur, he who in 1398 had sacked the Tughluqs’ Delhi. This latter conquest would furnish Babur with a cherished but highly dubious claim to legitimate sovereignty in northern India. But India was not his first choice. Nor was Kabul. His inheritance lay much further north beyond the Oxus in Ferghana, a minor kingdom to the east of the modern city of Tashkent. He had been born there in 1484 and, though of Mongol blood, it was in the Turkic and Islamic milieu of this subordinate kingdom of Timur’s erstwhile empire that he was educated. Turki would remain his first language; he even wrote of himself and his followers as Turks. His Islam was a robust, workaday faith tempered more by the winds of circumstance and the exigencies of campaigning than by the niceties of theology. And it was to Samarkand, Timur’s capital and the cultural focus of central Asia, that he aspired. Briefly, aged fifteen, he actually occupied it, but was quickly dispossessed by an Uzbeg rival. Twice more he would take the city and twice more he would lose it. Kabul, on the other hand, was just a distraction. Yet for a virtual fugitive it offered consolation. From Afghanistan Timur himself had launched his bid for Samarkand and had then gone on to conquer much of Asia. Babur could do worse. In 1504 he crossed the Oxus, then the Hindu Kush, and seized Kabul.
Apart from that one ominous raid across the Indian frontier in 1505, Babur spent the next fourteen years securing his position in Afghanistan and chasing the dream of sovereignty in Samarkand. In his memoir, which was written towards the end of his reign, he insists that ‘my desire for Hindustan remained constant’. Yet it was not until 1519 that he resumed the quest and not until 1525 that he launched his successful bid. He did so with a highly mobile force which had shared his exploits in central Asia and which, as it was ferried across the Indus north of Attock, was carefully counted. ‘Great and small, good and bad, retainer and non-retainer, [it] was written down as twelve thousand.’ For the task in hand so modest a force must have seemed pitifully inadequate. But in the interim two factors had greatly emboldened him.
One was the acquisition and potential of firearms. In the new gunpowder technology, as in much else, Babur’s Lodi adversaries lagged behind the kingdoms and sultanates of the Deccan and the south; there is no evidence to suggest that their forces were acquainted with either cannon or matchlocks. He, on the other hand, had both. Though personally more proficient at archery, he had studied the use of artillery in central Asia, had recruited Turkish gunners, and now took a close interest in the casting of siege-cannon and the transport of field guns. On a previous raid into the Panjab the sharp-shooting potential of matchlocks had also impressed him. For what his forces lacked in numbers they compensated with a capacity, terrifying alike to man, horse and elephant, for deafening and increasingly lethal bombardments.
The other consideration which worked in his favour was the now terminal rivalry amongst his enemies. Sikander Lodi had been succeeded by two sons who, on the insistence of the Lodis’ fractious power-brokers, had divided the sultanate between them. Ibrahim, inheriting Delhi, had since overcome his brother in Jaunpur but had thereby alienated the most senior nobility and alarmed Indian rivals like the rajput chief, Rana Sangha of Mewar. The latter now encouraged Babur with offers of collaboration against the Lodis, while in 1523 it had been the Lodis’ own governor in the Panjab who had invited Babur to capture Lahore and challenge for the sultanate. This man, Daulat Khan, had since changed his mind and now threatened to oppose the invasion, although other Lodis, including his own son, continued to back Babur.
In the event the twelve thousand Mughals advanced across the Panjab’s rivers unopposed. Near the city of Lahore Daulat Khan, old though he was, donned a couple of swords and bragged about halting the invader. ‘Was such a rustic blockhead possible!’ scoffed Babur. ‘With things as they were, he still made pretensions!’5 When the old man then sheepishly surrendered, Babur ordered him to submit on bended knee with his ridiculous swords dangling round his neck. Milking the moment for mirth rather than vengeance, Babur then pressed on to Rupar, Ambala and Delhi.
I put my foot in the stirrup of resolution, set my hand on the rein of trust in God, and moved forward against Sultan Ibrahim … in the possession of whose throne at that time were Delhi, the capital, and the dominions of Hindustan, whose standing army was rated at a lakh (100,000) and whose elephants and whose begs’ [nobles’] elephants were about 1000.6
The same figures are given for the host with which Ibrahim now moved out from Delhi to oppose him. Although Babur says that his own forces had, if anything, shrunk during their progress across the Panjab, they had also been supplemented by Lodi deserters. When in April 1526 the two armies met at Panipat, eighty kilometres due north of Delhi, Ibrahim is thought to have still enjoyed a numerical advantage of about ten to one.
Babur was not discouraged. For the Lodi he had nothing but contempt. Ibrahim was a novice who knew little of battle-craft, ‘neither when to stand, nor move, nor fight’. After a week-long stand-off he had to be prodded into action by Mughal raiders; he then moved forward without guile or stratagem. Babur awaited him in a carefully chosen formation with the close-packed walls of Panipat on one flank and an ambuscade of brush on the other. Seven hundred carts, commandeered in the neighbourhood, were lashed together across his front with matchlock-men sheltering between them and gaps every hundred metres for the cavalry to charge from. Additional flying columns were held in reserve. As soon as battle was joined they swung round the enemy’s flanks and pressed hard from the rear. Ibrahim had no room to manoeuvre. Despite repeated charges, he failed to break through the cordon of carts. His forces became ever more compacted, the wings falling back on the centre, unable either to advance or withdraw. That very numerical supremacy which should have overwhelmed the Mughals now overwhelmed the Lodis. ‘By God’s mercy and kindness this difficult affair was made easy for us,’ recalled Babur. ‘In one half-day that armed mass was laid upon the earth.’ The most conservative estimate put the slain at fifteen thousand; amongst them was Ibrahim himself.
Hot in pursuit of survivors, Babur headed for Delhi while Humayun, his son, was ‘to ride light and fast for Agra’, there to secure the Lodi capital and treasury. Amongst those sheltering in Agra Humayun found Ibrahim’s mother and
also the family of raja Vikramaditya of Gwalior. Gwalior had finally submitted to the Lodis in 1519; Vikramaditya, Man Singh’s successor, had thus become a Lodi feudatory and, fighting under Ibrahim at Panipat, had been duly ‘sent to hell’. It was supposedly to curry favour with the conqueror that his family now made a ‘voluntary offering [to Humayun] of a mass of jewels and valuables amongst which’, notes Babur, ‘was the famous diamond which Ala-ud-din must have brought’. The weight of this stone he gives as eight misqals, perhaps 186 carats, and its value as equivalent to ‘two and a half days’ food for the whole world’. If the Ala-ud-din in question was the Khalji sultan, the diamond had presumably been obtained during that ‘Aladdin’s’ Deccan campaigns, since the main diamond fields were in Golconda (Hyderabad). How it came into the possession of the Gwalior rajas is not known; but many experts think that this notice in the Babur-nama constitutes the first reference to the famous Koh-i-Nur, ‘the mountain of light’, a gem credited with conferring on its owner either rulership of the world or imminent extinction, depending on how its erratic history is read. It is also sometimes called ‘Babur’s diamond’, although the first Mughal never actually claimed it. Humayun did offer it to him but, perhaps wisely, Babur declined: ‘I just gave it back to him.’7
For far from being any kind of world-ruler, Babur, although now possessed of the Panjab, Delhi and Agra, was in a critical situation. It was one thing to defeat the unloved Ibrahim, quite another to secure the submission of the unruly Afghan nobles who had poured into India at the invitation of the Lodi sultans and amongst whom the Lodi territories were now parcelled out. The populace of even Agra was openly hostile and, ‘Delhi and Agra excepted, not a fortified town … was in obedience.’ The entire Doab was in enemy hands; so were Aligarh, Bayana and Dholpur, all within easy striking distance of Agra.