India

by John Keay

  Babur’s situation was further worsened by growing dissatisfaction within the ranks of his own forces. India had few charms for a God-fearing Mughal beg. In a long inventory wherein he reveals as much enthusiasm for India’s birds as for its revenues, Babur candidly lists the country’s defects: ‘no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, no torches, and no candlesticks.’ Perhaps his men could have managed without candlesticks, but amongst what Babur dubbed an unattractive, unsociable, uncouth and exceedingly numerous race of infidels they could never live at ease. In short, like Alexander’s Macedonians, Babur’s Mughals had had enough. It was May, one of the hottest and dustiest months of the north Indian year. Honours had been won, booty had been secured and vast amounts of treasure distributed. A more successful raid could scarcely have been hoped for. Now all they wanted was to return to their homes and families, to drink the cooler air of Kabul and in due course resume the struggle for Samarkand.

  Babur, like Alexander, remonstrated with them. Sovereignty, he said, depended on the possession of resources, revenues and retainers. After long years of struggle and at appalling risk they had at last obtained such things: broad lands, infinite wealth and innumerable subjects were awaiting their command; who would seriously abandon such plenty for ‘the harsh poverty of Kabul’? A close friend, who was also one of his most senior commanders, would do just that. Babur let him go, and took less exception to his departure than to the parting couplet he had daubed on his house: ‘If safe and sound I cross the Sind,/Blacken my face ere I wish for Hind.’ Most, however, stayed. Babur says they were swayed by his just and reasonable words. More probably they were shamed by his resolution. A few weeks later the monsoon brought relief from the heat. Then, in the campaigning season that followed, Humayun lead a force east to Awadh and Jaunpur, scattering the Lodis’ recalcitrant feudatories and at last securing those broad lands and that infinite wealth. Greed could be gratified with spoils and ransoms, loyalty rewarded with offices, contracts, revenue assignments and landed fiefs.

  There remained, though, one more obstacle to Mughal supremacy in the north. Listing the native powers of India in order of territory and forces, Babur placed first ‘the Raja of Bijanagar’. This was Krishna-deva-raya, the greatest of the Vijayanagar kings; since his kingdom was more than a thousand kilometres from Agra he posed no threat. But the second, wrote Babur, ‘is Rana Sangha [of Mewar] who in these days has grown great by his own valour and sword’. Though contemptuous of the rajput’s idolatry, Babur seems to have had a sneaking regard for Rana Sangha. It was not because Rana Sangha had originally encouraged him to invade. No treaty had ever been signed, and it was obvious that the rajput had simply hoped for a Lodi defeat and then a Mughal withdrawal which would leave the coast clear for his own ambitions. As it was, Rana Sangha had taken the opportunity to strengthen his hold over Rajasthan, and now, in early 1527, he swiftly advanced at the head of a largely rajput army to see off the invader who had so obligingly disposed of the Lodis.

  By February the rajputs were at Bayana, seventy kilometres south-west of Agra and lately occupied by the Mughals. Babur moved out to give battle amidst news that his Bayana garrison had been heavily defeated and a reconnaissance party, a thousand strong, routed by ‘the fierceness and valour of the pagan army’. It was an ominous beginning and brought gloom amongst the Mughal ranks. A soothsayer predicted disaster; subsidiary forts defected, Indian recruits deserted; ‘every day bad news came from every side.’ Once again Babur dug deep to rally his men, this time by appealing to their Islamic convictions. Since the rajputs were infidels, the war was designated a jihad. Cowardice thus became apostasy while death assumed the welcome guise of martyrdom. Better still, an acquisitive venture of doubtful legitimacy became the noblest possible of causes while any ambiguity in the minds of former Lodi retainers who were now under his command was dispelled. ‘The plan was perfect,’ confides Babur, ‘it worked admirably …’ All took an oath on the Quran to fight till they fell. Babur himself made what for him was the ultimate sacrifice by ostentatiously abjuring alcohol. Decanters and goblets were dashed to pieces, wine-skins emptied, and a quantity of the latest vintage from Ghazni salted for vinegar. At one, now, with both his men and his troublesome conscience, the born-again Babur prepared for battle.

  Unfortunately the details of the great encounter at Khanua (just west of the later Fatehpur Sikri) are not altogether clear. For the forces available to Rana Sangha and his confederates a figure of 200,000 was calculated, but he probably never commanded half that number in battle. Babur, on the other hand, had far more troops than at Panipat; he had just received reinforcements from Kabul, and had now been joined by numerous ex-Lodi retainers including Ibrahim’s son. Presumably there was nothing like the disparity of Panipat and, since the battle raged for a whole day, it seems to have been more evenly and much more fiercely contested. Babur again relied on a semi-fortified arrangement of ditches and fascines flanking the same chain of carts which were again interspersed with artillery and matchlock-men; and again he deployed his cavalry so that they early encircled the enemy. But the rajputs fought with the courage, if also with the lack of co-ordination, that was their wont. In the end, according to their annals as seen by Colonel Tod, defeat resulted not from tactical naivety but from treachery. ‘The Tomar traitor who led the [rajput] van went over to Babur, and [Rana] Sangha was obliged to retreat.’8 But if such a defection did indeed take place, it clearly came when the issue was already decided.

  Khanua left the Mughals supreme in the heartland of northern India. Here mopping-up operations became something of a formality as Babur looked further afield. After the 1527 monsoon another expedition was sent east to Jaunpur. Meanwhile Babur himself struck south into Malwa territory and took the fortified town of Chanderi, whose rajput garrison re-enacted the suicidal ritual of jauhar. He planned to continue south, but rapidly changed his mind when news arrived that the eastern expedition had been defeated by Lodi sympathisers and other assorted Afghans.

  Campaigns against these and other dissidents in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar kept him busy in 1528–9. It is clear from his memoir, however, that such challenges were not unwelcome; indeed the belligerence was often Babur’s. ‘The army must move … in whatever direction favours fortune,’ he told his senior advisers; and again, ‘To go to Bengal would be improper; but if the move be not on Bengal, where else on that side has treasure helpful for the army?’9 Although ‘boundless and infinite’ was his declared desire to return to central Asia, it was not that easy to disengage from India; the appetite for broad lands and abundant revenues which he himself had aroused was proving insatiable. His now considerable forces and feudatories could best be held together only by the prospect of further conquests, plus the further treasure they would bring and the further emoluments they would afford. Babur, in effect, was confronting the challenge which would dog his successors: how to sustain an empire of conquest other than by making more conquests. When he died near Agra in 1530, the question remained unanswered.

  INTERLUDE OR INSPIRATION

  Of Babur’s three sons, Humayun, the eldest and his favourite, had been designated his heir. After winning his spurs at Panipat and Khanua, Humayun had been sent back to Afghanistan to make another bid for Samarkand. This had failed through no fault of his own, and in 1529 he had reappeared in India, perhaps alerted by news of his father’s failing health. In the event it was Humayun who suddenly sickened and looked as if he were about to die. Distraught, his father supposedly prayed by his sickbed that his own life be forfeit for Humayun’s recovery. To a man who had traded abstinence for victory at Khanua, such dealings with the divine were second nature, and once again his piety was rewarded: the father faded as the son convalesced. Humayun was twenty-two when Babur was laid to rest in a parterred garden in Agra, one of many which the nature-loving Babur had himself planned and landscaped. (Later, i
n accordance with his final wishes, it was to another such retreat amidst the melons and vines of Kabul that his body was removed.)

  Hankering for central Asia, Babur had won an empire in India; scorning central Asia, Humayun now lost the empire in India. Thus, though he reigned for twenty-six years, he ruled for barely ten. ‘As remarkable for his wit as for his urbanity’, says Ferishta, Humayun was ‘for the most part disposed to spend his time in social intercourse and pleasure’.10 Like his father he could be a formidable campaigner but, more wayward, more indulgent and much more indolent, he knew neither how to counter failure nor how to capitalise on success. Nor, unlike Babur, did he personally write any record which might explain his actions – or the lack of them. The long interludes of passivity which punctuated his campaigns are therefore ascribed to his addiction to opium, a drug which in various ‘confections’ Babur too had used and on which Humayun seemingly depended.

  But his first mistake was to trust his three brothers; later Mughals would learn not to repeat it. Instead of eliminating them, he appointed each to the command of a part of the empire. Prince Kamran, who got Kabul, promptly added to it the Panjab, thus in effect severing Babur’s legacy. Humayun simply accepted this situation and, in so doing, emboldened his two other brothers, Askari and Hindal. Both would support him only when it suited them; and when it did not, each would make a bid for the throne.

  More pressing in Humayun’s estimation was the situation in the east. Lodi warlords had again seized Jaunpur; Kalinjar, the great hill-fort of the Chandelas of Khajuraho which had defied Mahmud of Ghazni and almost every Delhi sultan, awaited its first Mughal assault; and in the neighbourhood of Varanasi one Sher Khan, an Afghan of the Sur clan who had followed the Lodis into India, was carving out a kingdom for himself based on the fortress of Chunar. Humayun abandoned his siege of Kalinjar to tackle the situation in Jaunpur; but he had scarcely focused on Sher Khan when news came of a threat to Agra from Ahmed Shah, the sultan of Gujarat. Operations in the east were therefore suspended, much to Sher Khan’s advantage, as Humayun faced about. Pausing only to commission a palace which was meant to be the nucleus of another new Delhi, he led his forces south and west.

  During the two-year (1534–6) campaign which followed, Humayun achieved in Rajasthan, Malwa and Gujarat conquests of which his father would have been proud and which his son (Akbar) would more famously emulate. The Gujarati sultan, though possessed of a formidable artillery, was roundly defeated, and the near-impregnable heights of both Mandu and Champaner were successfully stormed. At Champaner Humayun himself led the raiders and, with hammer and pitons, scaled the sheer rock-face in a wildly audacious assault which, says Ferishta, was ‘equal in the opinion of military men to anything of the kind recorded in history’.11 Ahmadabad was then occupied and so was Cambay, respectively the richest city and port in western India. It was a dazzling triumph which, carefully consolidated, could have provided the economic foundation of Humayun’s empire as well as doubling its size. But he rejected the traditional solution of reinstating the defeated Ahmad Shah as a feudatory and, instead, installed the worthless Prince Askari. He then retired to Mandu whence, after several dazed months in the company of his favourites and his opium pipe, he headed home to Agra. As he did so, his conquests were simply rolled up behind him. Askari, seeing Gujarat primarily as a base whence to launch a bid for the throne, allowed Ahmad Shah to reoccupy his kingdom while he himself also hastened to Agra.

  There Humayun forestalled him but, nothing if not conciliatory, again forgave the fraternal transgression. Then he returned to the familiar solace of pipe and playmates. ‘Public business was neglected,’ says Ferishta, ‘and the governors of the surrounding districts, taking advantage of this state of affairs, … enlisted under the standard of Sher Khan Sur.’ In July 1537 Humayun at last bestirred himself and marched east against the Afghan usurper. Chunar fell after a long siege but Sher Khan was not there; nor was he at Jaunpur or anywhere else in Awadh. For while Humayun had been conquering Gujarat, Sher Khan had been about the same business in Bihar and now Bengal. And unlike Humayun, he was taking great care to secure his newly-acquired conquests. Instead of another Afghan upstart, Humayun suddenly found himself faced by a well-prepared contender for sovereignty. The tussle between Mughal and Afghan was far from over.

  In 1539, after much to-ing and fro-ing in Bengal, the rival armies finally met at Chausa between Varanasi and Patna. Humayun fell for an Afghan ruse and was defeated. He barely escaped with his life, his troops were decimated, and the myth of Mughal invincibility was badly dented.

  A year later it was utterly exploded. Near Kanauj, the imperial city on the upper Ganga from which the Gurjara-Pratiharas had once obscurely reigned, the fate of the short-lived Mughal empire looked to have been decided. In a surprising reversal of Panipat, Humayun’s army, forty thousand strong and well supplied with firepower, was overwhelmed by Sher Khan’s fifteen thousand mainly Afghan cavalry. Humayun again escaped with his life – and with his monstrous diamond. But failing to win help or even sanctuary from his ungrateful brothers, he became a fugitive in the deserts of Sind and Rajasthan and then an exile at the court of Shah Tamasp, the Safavid ruler of Iran. Luckily Shah Tamasp liked diamonds. Humayun’s fortunes would yet revive. Meanwhile Sher Khan Sur was supreme.

  The Afghan Surs, dynastically sandwiched amongst the great and magnificently documented Mughals, easily elude the credit that is their due. Their fifteen-year supremacy is sometimes portrayed as a reactionary interlude or an impertinent interruption to the glorious Mughal succession. Yet the interlude was rich in inspiration. Sher Khan, who following victory at Chausa had assumed the royal title of Sher Shah, was as able as any Mughal. If, fortuitously, the adventures of Babur the Mughal have a fictitious ring, no such complaint is heard of the stern and often devious doings of Sher Shah Sur. Where Babur’s genius lay in the glamour of battle-craft, Sher Shah’s lay in the minutiae of statecraft. To the sombre text of his short reign the empire which would soon embrace all India owes just as much as to the animated excitement of Babur’s more colourful adventures.

  Although embroidered by Afghan admirers, it is clear that Sher Shah’s rise from an insignificant Lodi retainer with a couple of small fiefs near Varanasi was in itself remarkable. It took some time, and when he finally gained the throne he was already into his fifties. But to have overcome the rivalries of his fractious Afghan compeers was more than most Lodis had managed, while the conquest of Bengal, and his subsequent settlement of it, reduced that troublesome and previously independent kingdom to a subordinate status unknown since the Tughluq interventions of the fourteenth century.

  Further Sur campaigns in the Panjab, Sind and Malwa followed the defeat of Humayun and duly secured those provinces. An expedition into the Deccan like that of Ala-ud-din Khalji, the sultan whom Sher Shah most admired, was also proposed. But, a devout if not fanatical Muslim, Sher Shah argued that the eradication of infidel authority within his existing domains was a higher priority. On the pretext that Muslim mothers and maidens were being abused in rajput households, he preferred first to reduce bastions of Hindu resistance like Jodhpur, Chitor and, fatefully, Kalinjar. There, too, he triumphed where so many others had failed, but at the cost of his life. A rocket aimed at the fort rebounded off its walls and, exploding, ignited the pile of rockets which were intended to follow it. Sher Shah, who was directing operations, was horribly burnt. He died a few hours later, just as news of the fort’s surrender arrived.

  In so short a reign (1540–5) a complete overhaul of the machinery of government had scarcely been possible. Yet ‘during that brief period his energetic administration forecast many of the centralising measures in revenue assessment and military organisation that would be carried to completion by the Mughals.’12 These were particularly evident in his settlement of Bengal. Instead of appointing another all-powerful governor, who would assuredly cast off his allegiance at the first opportunity, he divided the province into districts, each directly responsi
ble to himself, and then divided the exercise of authority amongst civil, military and religious officials who were themselves subject to rotation. There and elsewhere efforts were also made to rationalise the assessment and collection of revenue and to afford the cultivator a modicum of security; village headmen were made responsible for any unpunished crimes; corrupt officials were dismissed.

  Corruption within the military was also tackled. The practice was revived of branding all cavalry horses so that on active service they could not be replaced by lesser mounts; and for similar reasons attempts were made to compile service rolls which identified and described each trooper. Military posts were established throughout the provinces; roads and caravanserais were built; illegal imposts and duties were removed to facilitate trade. Memorably Sher Shah also occupies an important place in the history of Indian coinage, in that he coined the first silver rupees which, together with his other coins of gold and copper, would form the basis of the Mughal currency.13

  Something similar might be said of his architectural creations. Babur’s only noteworthy additions to India’s monuments had been three mosques of little stylistic distinction. One, at Panipat, celebrated his victory over the Lodi, although another, that at Ayodhya, has since upstaged it. Historians have of late been sorely taxed over this Ayodhya Babur-i (or Babri) masjid. Did it replace a Hindu temple which marked the spot where Lord Rama (of the Ramayana) was born? And what, if any, was Babur’s role in its construction? Ever since Hindu fanatics laid into the mosque with pickaxes in 1992, thus provoking a more serious cave-in of modern India’s secular credentials, more words have been written about this unimpressive site than about any other in India. Adding to them would be only to invite contradiction.