Babur-Nama

Babur-Nama, Khurshid Ziyakhanov (Uzbekistan) – Exquisite Art

Babur (Persian: بابر‎, transit. Bābur, lit. ‘Tiger’‎;[2][3] 14 February 1483 – 26 December 1530), born Ẓahīr-up-Dīn Muḥammad (Persian: ظهیرالدین محمد‎, translit. Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad‎), was a conqueror from Central Asia who, following a series of setbacks, finally succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in the Indian subcontinent and became the first Mughal emperor. He was a direct descendant of Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur(Tamerlane) from the Barlas clan through his father and also a descendant of Genghis Khan through his mother. The Persian culture also influenced him and affected his actions and those of his successors, giving rise to a significant expansion of the Persianate ethos in the Indian subcontinent. Babur’s memoirs form the primary source for details of his life. They are known as the Baburnama and were written in Chaghatai Turkic, his mother-tongue, though, according to Dale, “his Turkic prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology or word formation and vocabulary.”Baburnama was translated into Persian during the rule of Babur’s grandson Akbar.

Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in the city of Andijan, Andijan Province, Fergana Valley, contemporary Uzbekistan. He was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza, ruler of the Fergana Valley, the son of Abū Saʿīd Mirza (and grandson of Miran Shah, who was himself the son of Timur) and his wife Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, daughter of Yunus Khan, the ruler of Moghulistan (and great-great-grandson of Tughlugh Timur, the son of Esen Buqa I, who was the great-great-great-grandson of Chaghatai Khan, the second-born son of Genghis Khan).

Babur hailed from the Barlas tribe of Mongol origin and embraced Turkic and Persian culture. They had also converted to Islam centuries earlier and resided in Turkestan and Khorasan. Aside from the Chaghatai language, Babur was equally fluent in Persian, the lingua franca of the Timurid elite. Hence, Babur, though nominally a Mongol (or Moghul in the Persian language), drew much of his support from the local Turkic and Iranian people of Central Asia, and his army was diverse in its ethnic makeup. It included Persians (known to Babur as “Sarts” and “Tajiks“), ethnic Afghans, Arabs, as well as Barlas and Chaghatayid Turko-Mongols from Central Asia.