Loading summary
Transcript119 lines
- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:30]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with Anita.
- [00:32]
William Dalrymple
Arnand and me, William Derimple, who's sounding.
- [00:36]
Anita Anand
So spry considering he's on the other side of the world in Australia, having just come off stage, having just wowed thousands of people. And it's now almost midnight where you are, isn't it?
- [00:46]
William Dalrymple
It is, but I've had quite a few espressos, so. Quite wide awake and perky, actually.
- [00:51]
Anita Anand
I know. Slightly worries me, actually, you're Yin and Yang, because you sort of started. We were doing our tech check and you had a gin and tonic and then you said, oh, just a moment, and you got yourself an espresso. So this cocktail is going to play havoc with your stomach.
- [01:02]
William Dalrymple
I find that it's a very good cockt.
- [01:05]
Anita Anand
Are you going to be able to sleep after this? I mean, what are you going to do?
- [01:08]
William Dalrymple
It's more of a worry than how articulate I'm going to be after the gin and tonic.
- [01:11]
Anita Anand
But let's see, you're going to be fabulously articulate and there's no one better to talk about this because this is right in your wheelhouse, because we are talking about Barbour. Now, this is all sort of, you know, entwined with. There's a fantastic exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, if you get a chance to go. The great moguls, Art, architecture and opulence. And arguably one of the greatest names, and certainly the first name is Babur, and someone you know so well because you wrote an introduction to something called the Baba Nama. Now, first of all, tell everybody what is the Baba Nama?
- [01:46]
William Dalrymple
So the Baba Nama, Babur is the name of the guy and Nama is the story of. It just means the history of. And we are talking about the man who founded the Mughal Empire, but who, bizarrely, in his own eyes, was a refugee and a failure. And that's the strange irony about this man. He's always sort of held up there. The later Mughals look back to him as the founder of their line. There are a million images of him bestriding the world, but in his own eyes, he never forgave himself for having lost his family estates, which were the other side of the world from India, where he ended up, which were in Central Asia, in what's now Uzbekistan. And he Lost them to the Uzbeks.
- [02:29]
Anita Anand
To the Uzbeks, exactly. So, I mean, this is an origin story and is also very divisive in Asia because you've got, you know, those who say, absolutely extraordinary founding of an extraordinary empire that lasted for centuries and left behind such things as the Taj Mahal and the monuments around Delhi, the.
- [02:50]
William Dalrymple
Glitteriest glitter ever, including, of course, our old friend the Koh I Noor, which is probably passes through Barbara's hand, or may pass through Barbara.
- [02:58]
Anita Anand
But then you've got the other side, and particularly in India these days, that kind of want to repudiate that Mughal past and say, you know, invaders, invaders, they didn't change anything. And the best thing was when they were sort of kicked out. So, I mean, really interesting and divisive and controversial.
- [03:15]
William Dalrymple
I've got a theory about that. I mean, I think, in a sense, they got the wrong guy.
- [03:19]
Anita Anand
They got the wrong guy.
- [03:20]
William Dalrymple
Baba clearly was an invader.
- [03:22]
Anita Anand
Free the Baba one. Is that what you're saying?
- [03:24]
William Dalrymple
Baba did obviously invade India and did take it. And in that sense, yes, he was an invader, but he's come to represent for a whole series of reasons which are not to do with him. He's come to represent, along with his great great, great, great, great, great, great grandson Aurangzeb, everything that Hindu nationalists don't like about Muslims and Muslim rule in Indian history. And because his name was associated with something called the Barbari Masjid, which is this controversial mosque at a place called Ayodhya, which is the site supposedly of the original Ayodhya, which is the capital of Lord Ram, one of the greatest of all the Hindu gods, he has come to represent, subsequently to many people, all that is worst about Muslim rule. He's meant to be an iconoclast, a jihadi. And yet, if you actually read his autobiography, which is the fullest, most revealing, most well penned pre modern biography, probably anywhere before Pepys, and it's that good and that extraordinary, he is none of these things. He is an aesthete. He loves images, he loves nature. He waxes lyrical about fields of flowers or the smell of trees or the smell of leaves burning on a fire. He is incredibly frank about his own very complicated sexuality. The fact that he's quite keen on boys, but has to marry girls to produce heirs and to make diplomatic marriages. And in a sense, he couldn't be more different from the jihadi image that he has for Hindu nationalists. I mean, there are many Muslim rulers who were in India who did terrible acts of iconoclasm. And destroyed temples. And Aurangzeb, his great, great, great, great grandson, was one of those. But Babur is kind of not for a start. He loves alcohol. He drinks too much. He loves parties. In almost all his writings in Turkic, he calls God Tengri, which is the old animist name for God rather than Allah.
- [05:40]
Anita Anand
That's fascinating.
- [05:41]
William Dalrymple
And there's this one moment when his back is really against the wall, when he thinks he's going to be defeated right at the end of his career, when he makes a vow to give up alcohol if he wins a battle. And he wins the battle. And he's stuck with this vow. He writes his memoirs, particularly about how miserable life is without being able to have a drink.
- [06:01]
Anita Anand
I'm healthier, but I hate it. Can I also say, I mean, you know, I wholeheartedly believe and trust what you say, but it was also reinforced to me because when I was doing research on this, I came across my great friend, your great friend, Margaret MacMillan, who has declared Barber as the greatest primary source in history and absolutely loves the Barba Nama and his own sort of, you know, writings about himself and the frankness of them and the humanity of them. And so I thought that was very exciting. That Margaret MacMillan, for those of you who don't know, is a very esteemed historian. The Peacemakers was one of her sort of massive successes.
- [06:38]
William Dalrymple
Won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, I think.
- [06:40]
Anita Anand
So look, what we're going to do is we're going to split this story up. We're going to start with the origin story. You know how I love my Marvel origin stories. And take you right back to the beginning. We'll have another episode on development. But I should also say, you know, if you are a regular listener to Empire, you can hear these things as they drop. But if you can't wait for this great unfolding story, you need to sign up to our club, empirepoduk.com and then when we do these miniseries, you get them in one thwacking. So, you know, you could walk your dog till the little thing's legs fall off, and you'll still be with us and we'll still be talking to you. So there we are. There's an incentive. So shall we start with even before talking about Barbara's birth, this idea that he was a mogul, because he would not have liked to be described as a mogul, would he? Because Mughal is the bastardization of the term Mongol. So the Mongols of Genghis Khan and around Mongolia, and he would have really rather that part of his history was slightly dampened down.
- [07:36]
William Dalrymple
Well, that's not quite true, but it wasn't the bit he was most proud of. So bubble. It was his fate to be descended from, well, depending on who you're talking to, the two greatest conquerors in Asian history or the two most massive mass murderers in the same breath. His mother was descended from Genghis Khan, who was the man who turned the original mongols in the 12th century and 13th century into this extraordinary world changing army that just sort of swept all the way from Mongolia through China through, well, right through to Poland and Hungary. His father was descended from someone we've dealt with in the POD before, Timur. And he is, whatever it is, the great, great, great grandson of Timur. And that was something he was far more proud of because by the time that Babur was born, the Timurids, far from being this sort of raggedy taggity, genocidal mobile Mongol army, were associated certainly in his mind and in the eyes of many historians with high urban Central Asian culture. Some of the great monuments of Samarkand and the area around there. We've dealt with all this in earlier pods. Extraordina feats of astronomy, wonderful paintings and this incredibly urbane society. And it's Babo's fate to be descended from both of these and to lose this patrimony. He captures some of it when he's 14. He takes some account.
- [09:14]
Anita Anand
Wait, can I get all very excitable about something because he's the age of my teenager, 14 years old. Can I say if I can get him to take a used mug downstairs? It is a huge achievement. But there is a series, a really lavish Indian production called the Empires, which goes through the Mughal dynasty. And it begins with the voice of this young boy saying, I was 14 years old and I had defeated death already many times. What else was there to do?
- [09:41]
William Dalrymple
That's rather good.
- [09:42]
Anita Anand
This is just the trailer. I mean, it's really exciting. And one of the great sort of grand dames of Indian cinema, Shabban Azmi, appears in it as well, very regal. And at the end of it you just have this one shot of him on his feet charging towards a war elephant. So it's all very, very exciting. That was one exciting thing because I was sort of struck when you said Genghis Khan because people will know that as Genghis Khan, the Mongol terror, Genghis Khan of the steppes. And on the other hand, Timur, which is a name that will not resonate with you unless you've read your Shakespeare and you Think of Tamburlaine.
- [10:16]
William Dalrymple
Or listen to Empire Pod.
- [10:17]
Anita Anand
Or listen to us. I mean, of course, if you listen to us. But those are the way in which those names are transmitt. Both as terrors, both as sort of slightly horrifying. One you can thank Shakespeare, and the other you can thank numerous historians who thought that Genghis Khan was a barbarian. So there we are. So two barbarian lines. I stopped getting excited now.
- [10:35]
William Dalrymple
I loved your quote and it sounds a wonderful way to open the series, I defeated Death. But the wonderful thing about reading Barbur's own memoirs, and he writes this beautiful prose, this. He loves gardens, he loves sunsets, he loves colors. He loves. I mean, he's just such an attractive character. And in his memoirs, he's not this great conqueror who's defeated death.
- [11:00]
Anita Anand
No, he's self filled with self doubt. He's human.
- [11:03]
William Dalrymple
I'll read you this little quote, one of my favorite little quotes. Aged, I think, 21, he'd lost everything. He lost everything his family had built up. He inherits these two great lineages and he loses the whole bloody lot by 21.
- [11:16]
Anita Anand
You're doing spoilers, mate. But read your bit. Read your touching bit. Go on.
- [11:20]
William Dalrymple
And for, I think, two or three years, he's living in a tent, just as a brigand, because he has to, you know, feed himself and feed his family.
- [11:28]
Anita Anand
Yes.
- [11:28]
William Dalrymple
And there's this lovely little paragraph at the end of this section about how they got stuck in a snow drift and everything has gone horribly wrong.
- [11:35]
Anita Anand
I mean, I was literally under strict instructions, do not let William jump ahead in the story, which is what you're doing. So I'm just saying.
- [11:42]
William Dalrymple
But.
- [11:42]
Anita Anand
But, but what?
- [11:43]
William Dalrymple
But this little sentence, and it says, it passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and helpless has little to recommend. It isn't that lovely.
- [11:58]
Anita Anand
But there are lots of very humanizing lines in this. So as I say, you know, the trailer makes him sort of almost God like. But in reality, a very human account, a very human memoir. We should actually just anchor this in years, shall we? Because this is a man who was born on 14th February, Valentine's Day, as it turns out, 1483, in a place called Fergana, which is in, as William says, modern day Uzbekistan. I mean, it's a place of plenty. When we hear him talking about it, you know, sort of grains, fruits, trees laden with the sweetest of offerings, and pheasants so fat they can barely walk, let alone, you know, sort of jump up off the ground.
- [12:39]
William Dalrymple
I remember that was the first sentence that first attracted me to this book and it just this image of this fat pheasant just sitting there. A pheasant so fat. What does he say? He could feed four people.
- [12:51]
Anita Anand
Four people. One pheasant for four people. Exactly right.
- [12:54]
William Dalrymple
And this is all, of course, with the hindsight of someone that's lost it. This is him describing this place which I've been to, Fergana, in his footsteps. I'm so obsessed with him that I actually went and did a trip to Uzbekistan specifically to see his childhood, the place of his birth, the place where he had his education, the place where he lived and then where he lost it all. And the extraordinary thing about Fegana was that it was this place of bounty and beauty. And then when I was growing up and first discovered Babel, everyone told me that it had become this hideous Soviet hellhole, that they had mass farmed cotton as a monoculture. They destroyed the soil. The soil was dead. And there were just dead industrial remains of former cotton cultivation. But I never got there at that period of my life. And I only got there, what, seven or eight years ago when my sister in law, as chance would have it, was the UN rep in Tashkent.
- [13:54]
Anita Anand
Wow.
- [13:54]
William Dalrymple
And so was very well situated for borrowing her car and going off and driving around all the places where he was based. And it was brilliant timing because in the sort of 20 years since the fall of the Soviet world, everything that is associated with the Soviets had gone. The crumbly old factories had been taken down.
- [14:17]
Anita Anand
What, blown up and removed. Like actually the masonry removed from the sky.
- [14:21]
William Dalrymple
Everything removed. And it had reverted just by default back into this Kashmir, like paradise. So it's now again a gorgeous place to visit.
- [14:30]
Anita Anand
It's reclaimed. How interesting.
- [14:32]
William Dalrymple
Exactly. And you go there and it's between the two great rivers of Central Asia that the Greeks called the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And it's very green, it's very gorgeous. The fortress where he spent his childhood, where his father fell from a fall from his pigeon house, which is another lovely detail, is now a place surrounded by marshes where you can't hear each other if you're walking around with a friend because there are so many frogs singing to each other.
- [15:02]
Anita Anand
How very lovely.
- [15:03]
William Dalrymple
And ducks sort of calling to roost. And now for the first time in probably 100 years can actually experienced the plenty and the beauty and the sense of sort of green heaven that Babur remembers from his childhood and in middle age, writing his memoirs, writes so nostalgically.
- [15:23]
Anita Anand
About now I have to say, because you know this inside, outside, sideways and diagonally, I cannot let you throw in little phrases like his dad who fell off a roof. There is a beautiful story attached to this. So Barbua, as I said, born in 1483, his father, Umar Sheikh was the ruler of Ferghana. And we've described how wonderful it was. And as a young prince in inheriting this is a great prospect, except he inherits it really early on in life. His father, who he describes a little bit like the pheasants, as short and stout, like fat, round, bearded, a fleshy faced person, he says, loved pigeons, like my friend here, William, and is a really enthusiastic. What do you call them? Kabutar Kabutabas Kbutar Bahas. That's it, a kaboutar baz. So one day in this place, in the rugged fort of Akshi, the fat king is tending his birds on the outer wall. And this is so sweet, as Barbara puts it, and it's sort of overlooking a precipice and the precipice starts to crumble and this is what Barbara says. And Umar Sheikh Mirza flew with the pigeons and their house and became a falcon, ladies and gentlemen. He fell off. He basically fell off and plummeted to his death.
- [16:34]
William Dalrymple
He's such a great writer.
- [16:36]
Anita Anand
Such a great writer. Took off like a. No, fell like a rock, poor man. Anyway, but that is how Barbara, you know, as a young boy is sort of promoted to be a ruler of a place like Ferghana when he's actually arguably just as still a little boy.
- [16:49]
William Dalrymple
And then he writes in middle age, these gorgeous descriptions. I'm just going to read you a little bit. He talks about spring mornings spent in hillsides dotted with wild violets, tulips and roses, cold running water passing through a shady, delightful clover meadow where every passing traveler takes a rest. Beautiful little gardens with almond trees and the orchards, pomegranates renowned for their excellence, good hunting and fowling. And here's our favorite sentence, pheasants, which grow so surprisingly fat that rumor has it that four people could not finish one which they were eating with its stew.
- [17:25]
Anita Anand
So he's nostalgic and these are the happiest days of his life, melded together with an unhappy thing. Let's talk a little bit more about what he thought of himself. So he would have spoken, and he did write in a language called Turki T U R K I which I mean it is obviously shows, you know, sort of the strength of lineage there because it is a Turkic language. But also that would have been and will prove to be very, very useful in the court. It becomes the official Mughal language. But it means you can have a great deal of secrecy when you're invading because not many people speak it in the places that he's going to go and invade.
- [17:59]
William Dalrymple
But that's not entirely true because Turkey is obviously, as its name implies, one of the Turkish languages and it's related to this whole body of languages all the way from Istanbul up to Kashgar today. And a lot of the basic words are understood across that. But yes, it's a very particular dialect that these guys speak.
- [18:21]
Anita Anand
I thought it was that you didn't even need a cipher because people didn't, you know, in the court. That's why it was the chosen thing. But all right, stan corrected. He's 11 years old when his dad takes off like a falcon.
- [18:31]
William Dalrymple
And there's one other nice little description of the dad. I know I go backwards, but I just love it so much. My father, he writes, wore his tunic so tight that to fasten the ties he had to draw in his belly. If he let himself go, it happened that the ties tore away. I know that feeling.
- [18:46]
Anita Anand
Sweet, oh, sweet.
- [18:48]
William Dalrymple
Later on he used to have a party once or twice a week. He was good company, talkative and a well spoken man. He was fun to be with in a gathering and good at reciting poetry to his companions. We should also say at this point that the very beautiful translation from which I'm reading is the work of somebody called Annette Beveridge, whose grandson went on to found the National Health.
- [19:13]
Anita Anand
Really? That beverage? Oh, that is interesting. So 11 year old Babu takes over Ferghana, but he finds himself in a patchwork of provinces that are governed by various relatives, uncles, cousins. I mean, describe the bank. It's not like a union.
- [19:30]
William Dalrymple
I think a nest of vipers is actually probably as good a description as any because he inherits all this and immediately every uncle who hasn't inherited wants his castle. So from the very beginning he is at war with everybody. Among the many people that love the bubble Nama, there's E.M. forster. Oh yes, who wrote a wonderful essay on Baba. And I think we should quote him here because it gives an impression of what happened when Bubbles inherited this. He says there were simply too many kings about often not enough kingdoms. Camerlane and Genghis Khan had produced between them so numerous a progeny that a frightful congestion of royalties had resulted in the upper waters of the Jaxartes and Oxus in Afghanistan. One could scarcely travel two miles without being held up by an emperor. And Baba himself puts the same thought more succinctly. 10 dervishes can sleep under a single blanket, he wrote, but two kings cannot find room under one climb.
- [20:28]
Anita Anand
Isn't that great? Isn't that terrific? So, you know, it is a tenuous hold that a little boy may have. How does he weather the storm? And I just wanted to know, actually, because is it a nomadic lifestyle or are they anchored to their various fortresses, the uncles and cousins and Barbara himself?
- [20:45]
William Dalrymple
It's somewhere in between the two. These are on both sides, peoples who have been traditionally nomadic and now are conquerors, holding territory through castles. So they spend a lot of the time in the saddle fighting each other. They do have fortresses, but in Babu's case, as we will hear, he loses it quite quickly, because as well as all these guys fighting each other, there soon appears on the horizon the man who will be the nemesis of Babo, the Timurids, and the man who wrecks this idyllic childhood. And this is this character, the Uzbek warlord, who's one of the most successful warlords. And you know who's basically the reason that Uzbekistan is called Uzbekistan today is because of this guy. And his full name is Muhammad Shaibani Khan. And he's the one who just one by one, takes out each of Baba's warring cousins and kinsmen. And none of them, because they're so busy fighting each other, seem to realize the seriousness and that they've got to get themselves together. And Babu writes, as the person who he says realized it, they went to pieces, he writes, and were unable to do anything. Neither could they gather their men or were they able to array their own forces. Instead, each set out on his own. I tried to raise the alarm. An enemy like Shaibani Khan had arrived on the scene and posed a threat to Turk and Mughal alike, he wrote. He should be dealt with now, I urged. And while he had not yet totally defeated the nation or grown too strong, as has been said, and then he writes little verse. Put out a fire when you can, for when it blazes high, it will burn the wood. Do not allow an enemy to string his bow while you can, pierce him with an arrow.
- [22:31]
Anita Anand
Isn't that great? Isn't that great? So look, Shivani Khan is now introduced unto you. Join us after the break when we find out just how everything gets taken away from what is still a young boy. Join us after the break. Welcome back. So we left you with the introduction of this nemesis character, Shabbani Khan, who is after all of the lands, not just of Baba, but all of his relis. Can I just point out that in the trailer, going back to this. But it is very beautiful in this televisual feast that has been created in India of this Barbara story, Shwani Khan is Hot. I mean, he's very good looking. That's a description from our producer Anushka, by the way.
- [23:16]
William Dalrymple
You can't get around it like that. You have a reputation as the boy crazy.
- [23:21]
Anita Anand
It's entirely fake news. I know you've made that reputation. But Anushka, true or not true, did you not describe Ms. Hot? She did. So tell me, I mean, what do we know of Shobani Khan? How old is he when he's sort of picking off barber relatives?
- [23:35]
William Dalrymple
So I think what you have is you have on one hand all these sort of old aristocrats who've got used to hunting and feasting and writing poetry and squabbling with each other. And on the other hand, you have a guy who's a real nomad, who's a real nomad prince, who actually is rather more like the Genghis Khans and Timur that had proceeded in previous generations. And these old fat aristocrats with their buttons bursting out from their seams like Babur's dad, busy with their pigeons and their poetry simply aren't a match for the ruthlessness of this guy's. And the final stand, I mean, he picks off every one of these warring uncles and cousins. So the climax comes for poor Babu, who is how old at this point, Anita?
- [24:21]
Anita Anand
13 years old. So he is still just a boy when he has to face Shirani Khan. But his first challenge, even before he faces this big bad figure who's taking all the lands of his family, happens in Samarkand. And we ought to say that Samarkand is the prize for many, if not all of the Timurid leaders because it is a place of beauty. It is full of bazaars, enchanted gardens, pavilions. The architecture is gorgeous. There are murals depicting Timur's victory, Chinese porcelain tiles. I mean, it is stunning.
- [24:57]
William Dalrymple
No, it really is. And what has happened is that that Timor, 50, 60 years before this, has sort of raided the whole world and destroyed the old order, the whole global order, around this whole region, and hauled back everything lovely to Samarkand. So Samarkand reaches its sort of apogee just a generation before Babur. And Timur literally hauls back to Samarkand the greatest craftsmen, the artists, intellectuals from every region he conquers and through their captive labor, turns the steppe land capital, which, which before this is quite a minor place, into literally one of the great cities of the world. And it's on his death that you get this extraordinary cultural renaissance again, just before Babur is born. And the early Timurids who follow Timur, such as Shah Rukh, after whom Shah.
- [25:50]
Anita Anand
Rukh Khan is named, who's a great Bollywood actor.
- [25:53]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. Are known by my great hero, Robert Barron, as the Oriental Medici. And they are these sort of refined literatures, connoisseurs of painting, poetry and calligraphy, scientists, mathematicians and astronomers. Remember we talked about the amazing observatory in Samarkand.
- [26:12]
Anita Anand
Yes, yes. And that all the intellectuals were attracted to Samarkand to learn and read from their books in their libraries and so on.
- [26:19]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, exactly that. So when Babur is growing up, he's growing up, it's like being, you know, growing up in early Renaissance Florence and Donatello and all these sort of early Renaissance artists are there, studying young Uccello, young Piero della Francesca. And in the case of Babur, it's the greatest of all painters, Bezad, who we talked about, and there's this lovely phrase that Shah Rukh's sons argued over the superior talents of Khusro or Nizami. Comparing poems line by line, wrote Babur.
- [26:51]
Anita Anand
It's lovely and it's romantic and it is ironically for as yet still 13 year old Babu, it is kind of the thought of, of romance or love or at least coupling up with a woman. That takes him to Samarkand. When he is 13, he marches on the city and remember, you know, this is not unusual for these relatives to march on each other's territories. So 13 year old Barbara, filled with the first flush of testosterone in 1496, marches on Samarkand.
- [27:18]
William Dalrymple
He's already seen off two uncles who tried to throw him out.
- [27:22]
Anita Anand
By this time he tried to kill him and murder him and take Fergana, right? So he marches to this walled city of Samarkand and there are two of his cousins who live there. And he wants to marry one of these cousins because cousin marriage is a thing, but they're both promised to other people. And so what he does, and just put this in your head, this 13 year old kid lays siege to Samarkand, the jewel in the Timurid crown, where with all of this and also the loyalty of your army, that they will, you know, do this for you. Seven months is a very, very long time. And he turns 14 and finally Samarkand falls to him. So it is an extraordinary success. And it sort of really shores up his reputation that, you know, the start of that trailer at 14, I had cheated deaths many times. He sort of marches into Samarkand. What else is left?
- [28:14]
William Dalrymple
But he's literally. He's your son's age.
- [28:16]
Anita Anand
Oh, my God. I mean, honestly, it's just baffling. They were made of different stuff back then, but all these, you know, the pavilions, the gardens, all of this is his. But it doesn't last long, does it, William?
- [28:28]
William Dalrymple
It absolutely doesn't.
- [28:29]
Anita Anand
It's about sort of three months. He gets to enjoy it. And then what happens?
- [28:32]
William Dalrymple
Then he's thrown out by another uncle, isn't he? It's an uncle. And then Shaibani Khan comes when the Timurids, as ever, are squabbling among each other. And it is just a line of skittles after that. One after another, each uncle refuses to join up with the others. There's no united response. Village after village, castle after castle goes down. The Uzbeks are growing, and. And he's 21 when he has this sort of terrible final stand. And it's in his birthplace of Akshi in June 1503. And his men are outnumbered. There's only about 400 of them. The Uzbeks are about 10 times that number. And by the evening, Babur has to blow the retreat, and he's leading his last companions through the east gate, fleeing for their lives. And he describes all this in great detail. He says that we were running through the orchards below as the Uzbeks pursued them on horse. There was no time to make a stand or delay. We went off quickly, the enemy unhorsing our men. And this is when one of the great disasters takes place. And Babur only realizes it as he's running away because the women have been left behind. And Babur's half sister, who's called Yadgar Sultan Begun, has been captured, and Shaibani Khan wants to marry her. These guys think the Uzbeks are kind of just pure barbarians. They're sitting there like some sort of literary conference, going through poems line by line. And the Uzbek hurd while they're doing all this and take advantage. And he writes, it was a miserable position for me. I remained behind. I was alone. And he hides. And then he's discovered. But somehow he manages to convince the Uzbeks that he will reward them handsome if he lets them escape. So he then spends another year wandering forlornly from cousin to cousin, looking for opportunities to make a comeback, but without success. He says, I endured Much poverty and humiliation. I had no country or the hope of one. Most of my retainers dispersed and those left were unable to move around because of destitution. It came very hard on me and I could not help crying.
- [30:42]
Anita Anand
Yes, I know. It came very hard on me at 14, you were saying, I cried my eyes out. But also, he doesn't just lose some account, he loses for garne, he calls it himself, which I'll say, I love the honesty of this. The throneless time. The throneless times when a man who was born to be king has nothing at all but fear and movement. So, I mean, the throneless times, he has nowhere to put his roots down. Does he have anywhere in mind as a haven where he can hide and regroup and maybe set down roots again?
- [31:16]
William Dalrymple
So for a while they just hide in their old territories, going from mountain to mountain, cave to cave, and trying to rally these hopeless uncles who, again, still sort of just fighting with each other. And he writes, for more than 140 years, these lands had belonged to our dynasty. Now we were all reduced to utterly destitution. And what he has to do is he has to go south, which from Uzbekistan means going into what is now northern Afghanistan. And he's got nothing. He's got no gold, he didn't manage to save anything. And he is now literally a brigand, a fugitive.
- [31:56]
Anita Anand
There are great accounts again in his memoirs about, you know, how they would rather not fight if they didn't have to. They would put ladders up against sort of the village walls, and if they could sneak in and take what provisions they needed to survive, they would that if they had to fight, they would fight and they fought well. And just tell me, during this time, does he have family? Does he have, you know, sort of. Does he have love in his life?
- [32:20]
William Dalrymple
So love, again, is a complicated thing at this point, and it's a very difficult notion for us to take on board because we have such clear ideas what love means. And for Babu, women are about marriage and duty, and it's boys which are for pleasure.
- [32:41]
Anita Anand
So we're talking. He's 16 years old when he first starts talking about his desire and writing about the fact that he has desires for boys, you know, boy love.
- [32:50]
William Dalrymple
He hasn't fallen in love yet, but he does talk about this first love, which is a bit later in Herat, which we'll come to in a bit. And that's a wonderful story. And he describes it so beautifully. It's not love that's got him in a. Well, it is just Having lost everything, he says, I was fugitive, homeless, and utterly bewildered, not knowing where to go or where to stay. Our heads were all in a whirl. And what they decide to do eventually is to give up and go and look for a new land to the south. And the boundary, which is the sort of, for him, the boundary between civilization and the unknown is the Oxus. And there's this moment when he takes the ferry over the Oxus, which is the kind of moment when he's saying to himself that it's all over and there's no chance ever of returning to his homeland. Because beyond that lies the snowy wastes of the Hindu Kush. And he has, he says, no plan or destination other than to put as much space as possible between ourselves and the Uzbeks. Those who, hoping in me, went with me into exile were small and great. Between 2 and 300, they were almost all on foot, had walking staves in their hands, rough boots of untanned leather on their feet, and long coats. So destitute were we that we had but two tents among us. My tent, which used to be pitched for my mother. But what happens is that, in a sense, the sheer scale of the disaster plays into his hands. And as they're heading slowly southwards on foot, they're joined by more and more of these hopeless uncles who, one by one, are losing their castles and their villages. And he says that in the months that followed, one man after another came in and joined our party. And then he says, I didn't allow myself to give way to despair. When one has pretensions to rule and a desire for conquest, one cannot sit back and watch if events do not go right once or twice. Isn't that a lovely sentence?
- [34:52]
Anita Anand
It is lovely.
- [34:53]
William Dalrymple
So what begins as a kind of sprawling refugee column, and this lovely image of these guys with staves and kind of messy, unworked boots slowly grows over the course of the next months and seasons into a new Timurid army, because he's the only one that's got out with his family intact and also with.
- [35:12]
Anita Anand
A reputation of winning battles. You know, he's defeated some of these already, so, you know, they are coalescing around him. His marriage is also arranged at this time by his mother. But as you say, you know, women are for procreation, not for love. And I mean, you know, something is up because he's 16 years old. He has, you know, had his marriage arranged. But you can tell that this conflict is going on because he doesn't really want to have sex with Her. And he only does so we are told, once every 40 days and only when his mother gets on his. I want a grandchild. Where is my grandchild? I want my grandchild. But he does in this time and again, it's this sort of searing honesty. Talks about his attraction to boys. And it is boys rather than men.
- [35:58]
William Dalrymple
Which is not unusual for this time in this society.
- [36:02]
Anita Anand
It is unusual because Barbara, in later life, disapproves of homosexuality among his courtiers. This is what's weird to me. So at the beginning, let's talk about Barbara the Younger. Barbara the Younger talks about this one time in a camp bazaar because as you say, they're on the run. You know, they're getting more and more people who are joining them. But in one of the camps that he is in, he's mooning about and, you know, he's sort of in the camp bazaar, he's thinking about life. He's thinking about, you know, his surroundings and nature, as you say, sort of, you know, waxing lyrical about the gardens and the grass and the flowers. The way he says it, the way he tells the story. He turns a corner on one of these narrow lanes in a bazaar and he comes face to face with a boy. And he describes himself as being so covered in confusion that he can't even look at it in the eye. And he sort of asks for him to be sent to him. And he's in a real quandary about this because on the one hand, he's so confused and overwhelmed by passion, he wants to see him. But on the other hand, he can't look at him. And he writes about this. He goes. In my joy and agitation, I could not thank him for coming. How is it possible for me to reproach him for going away? He just doesn't know what to do with all of his feelings. A proper, proper first question. And that really surprises me. We'll talk about Barbara the later. But to go through that transition of understanding boy love and not being extraordinary for having it at that time, to then repudiating it utterly in later life. What's that about, mate? What is that about?
- [37:32]
William Dalrymple
I hadn't taken in the later repudiation. These passages about his early crushes are very famous.
- [37:38]
Anita Anand
So anyway, so look, with this conflicted teenage hormonal thing going on. So he's now looking towards Afghanistan and what happens.
- [37:47]
William Dalrymple
The Oxus is the boundary today between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. So in modern terms, his refugee column, all these guys with their staves are marching into Afghanistan over the Hindu Kush and what's initially just two or 300 people because of the complete failure of all the Timurid cousins. Two years later, by now, Ruz, just as he's coming down from the heights of the Hindu Kush, Baba's column has actually swelled to a staggering 20,000 men. It's a proper army. And that same year, 1504, Babo finally has what is his first lucky break for many years. He is approaching Kabul, which was not, as we think of it today, kind of war torn, messed up much invaded mess. It was the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the whole of what's now Afghanistan, the center of a really rich caravan trade between India and Central Asia. And what was Babur's great stroke of luck was that there was at that moment a particularly unpopular ruler, widely considered to be himself a usurper. And the local Afghan chiefs, and he has the wind of this, are ready for a change. So to their own surprise, Babur now draws up this army, and he takes the city without a battle, just by staring them down. He lines up his army in ranks below the fort, still there to this day, called the Bala Hissar. And he writes in his diary, those inside the fort became much perturbed and made an offer of submission and surrender. And so once he's got this center, Balasar is the great fortress of Afghanistan. And once he's inside, Babbo is able to call more of his fractious Timurid cast cousins to build up his numbers. And they're joined by other refugees, tribes and clans who've been displaced by the Uzbeks. And he makes coalition with others of the Afghans. This is what's, again, so odd for us today, is that the same guy who's writing about Boy Love, about the smell of burning leaves, about the gorgeous sunsets that he's seeing while crossing the Hindu Kush, then writes with equal accuracy and without any attempt to cover up what he's doing about how he imposes his rule on the area around Kabul. And the answer is raids, burning villages, impaling rebels, and enslavement. And so, you know, is Babel a poet or is he a war criminal? The answer is, rather distressingly, both at the same time. The same guy who could be so sensitive and who records things so beautifully is also capable of impaling people. And that, to us, is an odd mixture of qualities, but it seems to be very much powerful. If you think of the Tudors or think of the Medicis, these are very brutal times.
- [40:42]
Anita Anand
So now you've got Babur, who Maybe thinks for the first time in his very young life, okay, I've been chased from my home. I've been chased. I've been let down by all my bloody useless relatives. But maybe here in Kabul, which he describes as kind of a land of milk and honey, really a little bit like he thinks about Ferghana, you know, these lush groves and trees that are heavy, the boughs heavy with fruit. He thinks he might be able to put down roots. It should be said though, somebody is watching his progress with a great deal of interest. You remember we talked about Shabani Khan, the man who has chased him out of Samarkand, who has taken Ferghana, who is mopping up all of these Timurid lands and taking them without really much bother at all. And he also watches young Babur, who's only 18 at this point, sort of almost getting a little too comfortable in Kabul and maybe thinking to himself, you think you're safe, mate, you got another thing coming. But what is, what is going on in Babu's head?
- [41:40]
William Dalrymple
Well, you're quite right. Shaibani Khan comes into this story again. This is not the last we've heard of Shaibani Khan because remember, he's now on top of everything else, he's Babbo's brother in law. He's taken the captive sister of Babur, which is a massive humiliation for Babu. But for the time being, Babu is okay. He's got a new base, he's got a new castle. The Bala his of Kabul is a bigger castle than the one he's lost in Akshi and in Ferghana. And we have now one of the most gorgeous sections of the Babu Nama because Babur is happy. Babu is now being recognized by many of his useless uncles as the leader of the Timurids. He's the guy that's captured Kabul. He's the guy with the reputation. And so although Shaibani Khan is licking.
- [42:30]
Anita Anand
His lips and watching the king is.
- [42:32]
William Dalrymple
Lips and wondering, and we will come back to him. For the next few years, Babu is free to enjoy his new conquest. So what happens? And this is very important for the future because it not only determines the way that Babu behaves, his descendants. Copy this and see this as the example of civilized courtly behavior which sets the pattern later for the Mughals in India. So what the first thing he does after he captures Kabul is he lays out a four part chabag Persian garden and he remodels it according to his taste.
- [43:09]
Anita Anand
Oh, well, you need to describe what a charbag you see, you use these phrases like everybody knows what is a charbag garden. It's a very specific Mughal gift to the world. I mean, what are we talking about here?
- [43:20]
William Dalrymple
Well, they don't invent it, actually. It's a Mughal gift to India. But it's something which the ancient Persians originally invented. And what it is is basically just taking a rectangular garden and dividing it in four with runnels of water. So you have running down the center and from either of the cross axes, runnels of water, which are often powered by something called a Persian screw, which is basically kind of a giant corkscrew pushed by bullocks. And the bullocks go round and round around with this thing and that moves the water around and all draws it up from a medal.
- [43:53]
Anita Anand
So you have this lovely. The sound of water, the coolness of the water. And charbagh, I mean, literally translated as four gardens. So those are the four quadrants that you're talking about.
- [44:01]
William Dalrymple
Those four quadrants, yeah. And he says very proudly, and this is one of the reasons that the British always love Baba, because he's a gardener. He's like sort of Vita Sackville west or something on top of everything else. And he talks proudly about introducing bananas and sugar into the area and setting up his new Timurid court in exile in the gardens and in the Balaisar. Again, we think of a garden as something outside, and then we have houses where we live inside. The semi nomadic, post Timor, post Mongolia, Mughals often see the gardens as the center of their life. It's where you lay out a carpet, you have your lunch, you organize your business, you do your justice. And he loves, as you say, this familiar landscape and the climate.
- [44:46]
Anita Anand
But it's not just that. There is something else that he loves. If you look at his writing, what else he loves about Kabul, because this is like basically a country hick boy who's only known one part of the world. Kabul is a cross race for trade. And as is nearby Kandahar is a.
- [45:02]
William Dalrymple
Crossroads for trade and even more, and we'll have this in the next episode, is Herat. Herat is the greatest and most cosmopolitan of all.
- [45:10]
Anita Anand
So he sees the caravans coming from India, Persia, Iraq and Turkey. And for the first time, this young man's eyes open wide. There is a world, perhaps a world for me to conquer.
- [45:25]
William Dalrymple
But at this point, he's just happy where he is. And he says, I hunted, I fished, I hawked, I held parties on the green hills around the city. I wrote poetry. And there's one other thing we know he did, which was develop his own form of calligraphy, weirdly enough, something called the Katty Barberu, which is a new script which he works on at this period. It's also at this period that he fathers his children, including in 1508, his son Humayun, who we're going to hear at lot more of later.
- [45:55]
Anita Anand
Oh, his mother will be delighted. I mean, he really was tracking his heels, wasn't he?
- [45:59]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, but it's also, and this is some of the passages that I love most about this book. And it's a time when Babu is able to have the time to experiment in life's different pleasures. And so he talks about investigating the differing effects of opium and hashish, and records quote that while under its influence, wonderful fields of flowers were enjoyed sheets of yellow and sheets of red. Not what we met imagine medieval rulers doing. We sat on a mound near the camp and just enjoyed the sight. And then another occasion, and this is one of my favorite passages, he takes a party of nobles on a boating tree, not realizing that one end of the boat his friends are eating hashish, or at the other end, they're drinking wine. And he writes, and this is a great bit of advice for anyone. A hashish party never goes well with a wine party. He wrote.
- [46:47]
Anita Anand
Such wise words.
- [46:48]
William Dalrymple
The drinkers begin to make wild talk and chatter from all sides, mostly an allusion to hashish and hashish eaters. Babajan, when drunk, said many wild things. The drinkers made Tadi Khan mad drunk by giving him one full bowl and then another. Try as we might to keep things straight, nothing went well. There was much disgusting uproar. The party became intolerable and was broken up, which is a brilliant description, he does say.
- [47:15]
Anita Anand
He describes this time that he has in Kabul, the island of Kabul. He refers to it, and he says, it was the most free from care or sorrow of any time that I have ever experienced. I never suffered even a headache unless from the effects of wine. I never felt distressed or sad, except on account of the ringlets of some beloved one. He was having rather a lovely time. That nice phrase.
- [47:40]
William Dalrymple
I think this is a good place to end it. A happy bubble.
- [47:43]
Anita Anand
Is it going to be happily ever after? No. Is this a happily ever after? For this story it is not. So join us next time for the next installment of the life of Barbara. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan, and goodbye.
- [47:57]
William Dalrymple
From me, William Durimpel.