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Indian Armour

Chapter 8 – The Coming of the Moghuls – The Emperor Babar – 1451–1530 A.D.

The Moslems of India had grown effete. The old hardy vigour which had enabled the hillmen to trample upon the rich and ancient civilization of the Hindus was extinct. A race of conquerors had become a squabbling crowd, jostling each other for the luxuries

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of thrones, but wanting the power to hold a sceptre. The respect which belonged to a caste of foreigners, who kept themselves apart and observed strict rules of religious and social law, had been degraded when those laws were lightly esteemed, when the harems of the Moslems were filled with native women, when Hindus who nominally professed Islam were promoted to high office, when the Mohammedan domination, in short, had become the rule of the half-caste. The empire of Delhi had disappeared. The greater provinces had their separate kings, the smaller districts and even single cities and forts belonged to chiefs, or to clans who owned no higher lord. The king’s writ was no more supreme; it was the day of the little princes, the Muluk-at-tawaif, or Faction Kings.

Something, it is true, had been done to restore the vanished power of Delhi during the century that followed the collapse of the Taghlak dynasty after the invasion of Timur. The Sayyids utterly failed, but their successors, the Lodi Afghans, showed at first both energy and wisdom. Buhlol, who supplanted the last of the feeble Sayyids in 1451, was a good soldier and a simple man, who was content to let the world know that he was king, without parading the pomp of monarchy. He took the minor principalities round Delhi in hand, and after a stubborn war of over a quarter of a century succeeded (as we have seen) in recovering Jaunpur and its territories, and in restoring the old frontier of his kingdom as far as Bihar. His son Sikandar, succeeding him in 1488, completed his task by

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subduing Bihar, where Husain, the last King of Jaunpur, had taken refuge, and by a treaty of affiance with the King of Bengal it was arranged that the dominion of Delhi should bound that of Bengal, as in former times. The Rajputs of Dholpur, Chanderi, and Gwalior submitted; and Sikandar’s kingdom, including the Panjab, the Doab, Jaunpur, Oudh, Bihar, Tirhut, and the country between the Sutlaj and Bandelkhand, began to recall the earlier supremacy of Delhi.

The resemblance was only on the surface, however, and, as Erskine has pointed out in his judicious history, “these extensive possessions, though under one king, had no very strong principle of cohesion. The monarchy was a congeries of nearly independent principalities, jagirs, and provinces, each ruled by a hereditary chief, or by a zamindar or delegate from Delhi; and the inhabitants looked more to their immediate governors, who had absolute power in the province and in whose hands consequently lay their happiness or misery, than to a distant and little known sovereign. It was the individual, not the law, that reigned. The Lodi princes, not merely to strengthen their on power, but from necessity, had in general committed the government of the provinces and the chief offices of trust to their own countrymen, the Afghans; so that men of the Lodi, Fermuli, and Lohani tribes held all the principal jagirs; which from the habitual modes of thinking of their race they considered as their own of right and purchased by their swords rather than as due to any bounty or liberality on the part of the sovereign.”

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A throne depending on the allegiance of “an aristocracy of rapacious and turbulent chiefs” demands politic concessions on the part of the monarch. Afghans above most men resent an undue assumption of superiority, and tolerate with difficulty the tedious etiquette and obsequious ceremony of a formal court. Their king must be their chief, a bon camarade and admitted leader in arms, but he must not give himself airs, or show a want of respect for the free and outspoken clansmen upon whose swords his dominion rests. Unfortunately, the new Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim, son of Sikandar, who succeeded his father in 1518, was a man of forms and a stickler for royal prerogative. He made the great Afghan chiefs stand motionless in his presence with folded hands and vexed them with petty rules of etiquette. Dreading their power – already displayed in the support given by an influential faction to his brother Jalal, who had been nominated to the government of Jaunpur and had made a rash and unsuccessful effort to share a divided crown – he sought, instead of attempting to disarm them by favour and concession, to reduce them to a sense of their inferiority by treating his lower Subjects with the same degree of consideration that he showed to the Afghan nobles. When discontent arose, and revolt after revolt sprang up, he endeavoured to quench the rising conflagration by the blood of some of the leading amirs.

The result was still wider disaffection. The eastern districts about Oudh, Jaunpur, and Bihar, where Afghan influence was especially strong, rose in arms and

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chose Darya Khan, of the Lohani tribe, as their chief. In the Panjab, Daulat Khan, a son of one of the half-dozen Afghan nobles who had set the Lodi dynasty on the throne of Delhi seventy years before, rebelled in alarm at the execution of some of the leading chiefs. The rule of Sultan Ibrahim had become intolerable, even to his own nation, and his uncle, Ala-ad-din, fled to Kabul to solicit the aid of its king, the descendant of Timur, in wresting the crown of Delhi from its ill-advised possessor.

Behar Type

The King of Kabul was not the man to shrink from an adventure of any kind; the wilder and the more daring it seemed, the better he liked it. Babar is one of the most captivating personalities in Oriental history, and the fact that he is able to impart this charm to his own Memoirs is not the least of his titles to fame. He is the link between Central Asia and India, between predatory hordes and imperial government, between

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Timur and Akbar. The blood of the two great scourges of Asia, Mongol and Turk, Chingiz and Timur, mingled in his veins, and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad Tartar he joined the culture and urbanity of the Persian. He brought the energy of the Mongol and the courage and capacity of the Turk to the subjection of the listless Hindu; and, himself a soldier of fortune and no architect of empire, he laid the first stone of the splendid fabric which his grandson Akbar completed.

His connection with India began only in the last twelve years of his life. His youth was spent in ineffectual struggles to preserve his sovereignty in his native land. His early manhood, passed in his new kingdom of Kabul, was full of an unsatisfied yearning for the recovery of his mother country. It was not till the age of thirty-six that he abandoned his hope of a restored empire on the Oxus and Jaxartes, and turned his eyes resolutely towards the cities and spoils of Hindustan. Five times he invaded the northern plains, and the fifth invasion was a conquest. Five years he dwelt in the India he had now made his own, and in his forty-eighth year he died.

His permanent place in history rests upon his Indian conquests, which opened the way for an imperial line; but his place in biography and in literature is determined rather by his daring adventures and persevering efforts in his earlier days, and by the delightful Memoirs in which he related them. Soldier of fortune as he was, Babar was none the less a man of fine literary taste

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and fastidious critical perception. In Persian, the language of culture, the Latin of Central Asia, as it is of India, he was an accomplished poet, and in his native Turkish he was master of a pure and unaffected style alike in prose and verse. The Turkish princes of his time prided themselves upon their literary polish, and to turn an elegant ghazal, or even to write a beautiful manuscript, was their peculiar ambition, no less worthy or stimulating than to be master of sword or mace. Wit and learning, the art of improvising a quatrain on the spot, quoting the Persian classics, writing a good hand, or singing a good song, were highly appreciated in Babar’s world, as much perhaps as valour, and infinitely more than virtue. Babar himself often breaks off in the midst of a tragic story to quote a verse, and he found leisure in the thick of his difficulties and dangers to compose an ode on his misfortunes. His battles as well as his orgies were humanized by a breath of poetry.

Hence his Memoirs are no rough soldier’s chronicle of marches and countermarches, “saps, mines, blinds, gabions, palisadoes, ravelins, half-moons, and such trumpery”; they contain the personal impressions and acute reflections of a cultivated man of the world, well read in Eastern literature, a close and curious observer, quick in perception, a discerning judge of persons, and a devoted lover of nature – one, moreover, who was well able to express his thoughts and observations in clear and vigorous language. The man’s own character is so fresh and buoyant, so free from convention and cant,

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so rich in hope, courage, and resolve, and at the same time so warm and friendly, so very human, that it conquers one’s admiring sympathy. The utter frankness and self-revelation, the unconscious portraiture of all his virtues and follies, his obvious truthfulness and fine sense of honour give the Memoirs of this prince of autobiographers an authority which is equal to their charm.

The line of emperors descended from Babar is no more. The very name of Mongol has lost its influence on the banks of Jaxartes; the Turk is the servant of the Russian he once despised. The last Indian sovereign of Timur’s race ended his inglorious career an exile at Rangoon almost within our own memory; a few years later the degenerate descendants of Chingiz Khan submitted to the officers of the Czar. The power and pomp of Babar’s dynasty are gone; the record of his life – the littera scripta that mocks at time – remains unaltered and imperishable.

Babar’s earlier career must be read elsewhere: it began far away from India, in the country beyond the Oxus, where .the descendants of Timur struggled for the remaining fragment of the vast empire which had broken up as soon as his iron hand was set in death. Timur’s conquests were too recent and too hasty to be organized into settled empire. They were like a vast conflagration driven before the wind, which destroys the herbage for awhile, but when the flame has passed the earth grows green again. Even in his original home, the Oxus land, a single century saw the downfall of Timur’s dynasty: the fire had only left some embers,

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which smouldered awhile, but, lacking the kindling and stirring of the great incendiary, finally died out.

The Emperor Babar

After that, the sole relic of Timur’s vast dominions was the little kingdom which an exiled prince of his own brave blood set up among the crags and passes of the Afghan hills – whence came the great Moghuls1 and the glories of Delhi and Agra.

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It was among these embers of the great fire that Babar, in 1494, at the age of eleven, found himself suddenly king of the province of Farghana beside the Jaxartes, by right of inheritance in the sixth generation from Timur. No boy had ever to face such perilous paths as those which led the young King of Farghana to the heights of his soaring ambition. He would reign where Timur reigned at Samarkand, and there hold sway over the empire of his ancestor: nothing less would content him. But the road to empire lay through jealous, kinsmen, treacherous chiefs, mutinous retainers, and the ever-growing power of the hostile Uzbeg tribes. Twice did Babar seat himself upon Timur’s throne, and twice was he expelled to wander a homeless exile among the hills, dwelling in the shepherds’ huts, or suffering the ungracious protection of his mother’s Mongol relations in the northern steppes. Ten years of ceaseless effort, brief triumph, sore defeat, and grinding misery, all borne with that courage and sanguine hope that were among his finest qualities, ended in his retreat to Kabul, where he took the little throne which had been held by Timur’s lineage ever since his raid into India. Here Babar made himself a kingdom, small compared with the dominion of the present amir of Afghanistan, but not easy to hold, with its turbulent and jealous tribes and rocky barriers.

But a mountain chiefship was no fit ambition for a king who had twice ruled Samarkand. Babar’s dreams still reverted to the land of his forefathers, and only the disastrous failure of his third attempt to

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recover Timur’s capital in 1512 convinced him that the true road to empire led down the passes into the rich plains of Hindustan. His thoughts had often turned toward the east whilst he was bringing into order the restless tribes of his mountain realm, and several times his expeditions led him very near the Indian frontier; but he had been twenty years at Kabul before he carried his thoughts into decisive action and began his campaign of conquest. An attack in 1519 on Bajaur, in the Indian borderland near Chitral, was merely a preliminary step, though followed by the occupation of Bhira on the Jihlam. Babar had thus set foot upon the Panjab, and claimed it in right of his ancestor Timur’s conquest a hundred and twenty years before; but it was no more than a claim, for the moment he turned back to Kabul the Indians recovered the territory, and Babar’s occupation, with a couple of thousand horse, was but a raid. It was not till 1524 that he entered resolutely upon the campaigns which ended in the conquest of Hindustan.

The appeal of Alam Khan Ala-ad-din, the uncle of Sultan Ibrahim, was but the spark that kindled a long-prepared train. The claimant to the throne of Delhi appeared at Kabul to urge a petition that was already granted in Babar’s own mind. No more propitious moment could be desired. India was seething with faction and discontent. Babar was strong and prepared, and at his side was a member of the Lodi family to sanction his plans and invite adhesion. The emperor was soon on the march, and following his previous route to Bhira was quickly in the neighbourhood of Lahore.

Street Scene in Lahore.

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The insurgent governor, Daulat Khan, had already been driven out by the Delhi army, but he was amply avenged by the Kabul troops, who routed the enemy with heavy slaughter and drove them through the streets of Lahore, plundering and burning the bazar. Babar rested only four days in the capital of the Panjab, and then pressed on at his best speed to Dipalpur, where he stormed and sacked the town, and massacred the garrison. He appointed some of his most trusty officers to defend the province, and having established “Sultan” Ala-ad-din at Dipalpur (with a veteran Mongol to watch him), the emperor returned to Kabul to beat up reinforcements.

Babar set out on his final invasion of India in November, 1525. His eldest son, Humayun, brought a contingent from Badakhshan, and Khwaja Kalan, trustiest of generals, led the troops of Ghazni. Daulat Khan, after deceiving the invaders with pretended support, was now in the field against them at the head of forty thousand men, and the old Afghan had girded on two swords in token of his resolve to win or die. Nevertheless, this valiant army broke and vanished at Babar’s approach with a far less numerous force, and the emperor continued his advance.

The decisive battle was fought on April 21, 1526, on the plain of Panipat – the historic site where the throne of India has thrice been won. For several days Babar was busy with his preparations. Following the Osmanli order of battle, as he himself says, he collected seven hundred gun-carts, and formed a laager by linking

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them together with twisted bull-hides, to break a cavalry charge, and by arranging hurdles or shields between each pair to protect the matchlock men. Then two marches more brought the army to Panipat. Here he had the town on his right, his left was defended by ditches and abatis of trees, while he placed his cannon and matchlocks in the centre. He was careful to leave gaps in his line a bowshot apart, through which one hundred or 150 men could charge abreast.

On the 20th of April a night surprise was attempted upon the Afghans’ position, and though it failed, owing to the confusion of the troops in the darkness, it had the effect of drawing the enemy out of his camp. Sultan Ibrahim, elated by the ease with which this attack had been driven back, brought his army out at dawn on the 21st in battle array. It was said to muster one hundred thousand men and one hundred elephants. The moment Babar detected the movement of the enemy, his men were ordered to put on their helmets and mail, and take their stations. His army was drawn up behind his laager in the usual order, right and left centre, right and left wing, advance-guard, and reserve; but in addition he had placed flanking parties of Mongols on the extreme right and left, with orders to execute their famous national manoeuvre, the tulughma – a rapid wheel charging the enemy’s rear – of which Babar well knew the tremendous effect.

The army of Delhi came straight on, at a quick march, without a halt from the start. They seemed to be aiming at Babar’s right, and he sent up the reserve

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to its support. As the enemy came up to the ditches, abatis, and hurdles, they hesitated, and the pressure of the troops behind threw them into some confusion. Taking advantage of this, Babar sent out his Mongol flankers through the gaps in the laager, and they galloped round the enemy and poured their arrows into the rear. Part of the emperor’s left wing, advancing incautiously, got into difficulties; but the general’s eye was on them, and they were promptly supported from the centre. Meanwhile the right was also hard pressed, and Babar sent forward his right centre to their assistance. The master-gunner, Ustad Ali, made pretty practice with his European pieces, in front of the line, and was admirably seconded by Mustafa, the cannoneer on the left centre. The enemy was now engaged on all sides, front, flanks, and rear; and their charges, which seemed but puny to men who had stood up to the Mongols’ swoop, were easily repulsed and driven back upon their centre, which was already too crowded to be able to use its strength. In this jammed confusion they lay at the mercy of the hardy Turks and Mongols, who fell upon the strangled ranks with deadly effect.

By noon the great army of the King of Delhi was broken and flying for dear life. Sultan Ibrahim himself lay stark on the field, amid some fifteen thousand of his dead. They brought his head to Babar, and prisoners, elephants, and spoil of all sorts began to come in from the pursuers. “The sun had mounted spear-high when the onset began, and the battle lasted

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till mid-day, when the enemy were completely broken and routed, and my people victorious and triumphant. By the grace and mercy of Almighty God this difficult affair was made easy to me, and that mighty army, in the space of half a day, was laid in the dust.” Two detachments were at once despatched to occupy Delhi and Agra, and on Friday, April 27th, the public prayer was said in the mosque of the capital dal*`in the name of the new emperor, the first of the “Great Moguls.” The spoil of the royal treasuries at Delhi and Agra was immense, and the first business was to divide the booty among the expectant troops.

Architectural Detail of the Mosque at Old Delhi.

To his eldest son Humayun, who had played his part like a man in the great battle, he gave seventy lacs (of dams, equivalent to about £20,000) and a treasure which no one had counted. His chief Begs were rewarded with six to ten lacs apiece (£1,700 to £2,800). Every man who had fought received his share, and even the traders and camp-followers were remembered in the general bounty. Every man and woman, slave and free, young and old, in Kabul, was sent a silver coin in celebration of the

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victory. When Humayun brought his father the glorious diamond, one of the famous historical jewels, valued at “half the daily expenses of the world,” which is perhaps, to be identified with the renowned Koh-i-nur, and which the family of the late Baja Vikramajit had given him in gratitude for his chivalrous protection, Babar returned it to the young prince. He had no love for wealth or precious stones, except to give away, and his prodigal generosity in distributing the immense spoil of the Delhi kings gained him the nickname of “the Kalandari” – the mendicant friar. He was content with fame.

Babar was now King of Delhi, but not yet sovereign of Hindustan, much less of India. Even of the dominions of Delhi, which then stretched from the Indus to Bihar, and from Gwalior almost to the Himalayas, he was only nominally master. The Lodi dynasty, indeed, was dethroned, and its king slain, but that king left a brother to claim the crown, and the land remained unsubdued east and south of Agra. The people were hostile to the strangers of uncouth tongue, and each town and petty ruler prepared for obstinate resistance. The strongholds of the Doab and Rajputana were all fortifying against attack, unanimous in rejecting the newcomers. In spite of the surfeit of treasure, Babar’s troops were likely to starve. “When I came to Agra,” he says, “it was the hot season. All the inhabitants fled from terror, so that we could find neither grain for ourselves nor fodder for our beasts. The villages, out of mere hatred and spite to us, had taken to anarchy,

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thieving, and marauding. The roads became impassable. I had not had time, after the division of the treasure, to send fit persons to occupy and protect the different district-subdivisions and stations. The heats this year chanced to be unusually oppressive, and many men dropped at about the same time, as though struck by the simoom, and died on the spot.”

The troops began to murmur. They longed for the cool air of Kabul, and even made ready to return. They looked upon India as a buccaneer looked on a galleon: the prize-money secured, they wished to make sail. They had to deal with an obstinate man, however, and Babar summoned the chief officers together and made them a speech. He recalled their past toil and labours together, the weary marches and grievous hardships, and reminded them that all these had been endured for the sake of the great reward which was now theirs. “A mighty enemy has been overcome, and a rich and powerful kingdom is at our feet. And now, having attained our goal and won our game, are we to turn back from all we have accomplished, and fly to Kabul like men who have lost and are discomfited? Let no man who calls himself my friend ever again moot such a thing. But if there be any one of you who cannot bring himself to stay, then let him go.” Thoroughly ashamed, the murmurers dared not say a word. There are few acts more splendidly heroic in Babar’s career than this bold resolve to stay where he was, in the middle of India, among hostile nations and a discontented soldiery, and the reward of his firmness soon

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appeared. Not only his own people, but many of his enemies were won over. First an Afghan officer came with a valuable contingent of two or three thousand retainers from the Doab. Then a powerful chief was won by the emperor’s clemency to his captured sons. Meanwhile Sambhal was taken by guile; and Humayun led an army against the insurgent Afghans in the east, who were advancing into the Doab, but immediately broke up on his approach and fled over the Ganges. The young prince pursued, took Jaunpur and Ghazipur, and leaving strong divisions to hold his conquests, marched back by way of Kalpi to support his father against a pressing danger.

For Babar was now coming to the grip with the only formidable rival left in Hindustan. The great Rana Sanga of Chitor, the revered head of all the Rajput princes, commanded a vast army. One hundred and twenty chieftains of rank, with eighty thousand horse and 500 war elephants, followed him to the field. The lords of Marwar and Amber, Gwalior, Ajmir, Chanderi, and many more, brought their retainers to his standards; and the battered old Rajput hero, who counted eighty wounds in his body, and had lost an arm and an eye in the wars, was not to be denied when his drums beat to battle. The famous Rana was now marching on Biana. The emperor sent on a light detachment toward the threatened fortress, with orders to hang on the enemy and harass him; and himself set out with his main body in battle array on February 11, 1527. All his campaigns hitherto had been against fellow

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Moslems; now, for the first time, he was marching against “heathens;” it was the Jihad, the Holy War. Moreover, these “heathens” were fighting men of the first class. Babar had some experience of the warlike capacities of various races. He knew the Mongol wheeling swoop, the Uzbeg charge, the Afghan skirmish, and the steady fighting of his own Turks; but he was now to meet warriors of a higher type than any he had encountered.

Rajput Soldiers

The Rajputs, energetic, chivalrous, fond of battle and bloodshed, and animated by a strong national spirit, were ready to meet face to face the boldest veterans of the camp, and were at all times prepared to lay down their life for their honour.

The emperor camped at Sikri – afterwards Akbar’s

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exquisite palace-city of Fathpur – where he was joined by the garrison from Biana. These men had already received a lesson from the Rajputs, of whose bravery and daring they spoke with deep respect. The enemy was evidently not one that could be trifled with. An outpost affair soon confirmed this impression: an incautious advance by one of the amirs was instantly detected by the Rajputs, who sent the Turks flying back to camp. Being now in touch with the enemy, the emperor put his army in battle array. As before at Panipat, he ranged the gun-carriages, and probably the baggage-wagons, so as to cover his front, and chained them together at a distance of five paces. Mustafa from Turkey ordered his artillery admirably in the Ottoman manner on the left wing, but Ustad Ali had a method of his own; where there were no guns or wagons, a ditch was dug, backed by portable wooden tripods on wheels, lashed together at a few paces apart. These preparations took twenty-five days, and were designed to restore the confidence of the troops, who were almost in a panic at the reports of the numbers and courage of the Rajputs and at the foolish predictions of a rascally astrologer.

It was at this crisis that Babar renounced wine, broke his drinking-cups, poured out the stores of liquor on the ground, and calling his dispirited officers together, addressed them: “Gentlemen and Soldiers:– Every man that comes into the world must pass away: God alone is immortal and unchangeable. Whoso sits down to the feast of life must end by drinking the cup

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of death. All visitors to the inn of mortality must one day leave this house of sorrow. Rather let us die with honour than live disgraced.

“ ‘With fame, though I die, I am content,

Let fame be mine, though life be spent.’

God most high has been gracious in giving us this destiny, that if we fall, we die martyrs; if we conquer, we triumph in His holy cause. Let us swear with one accord by the great name of God that we will never turn back from such a death, or shrink from the stress of battle, till our souls are parted from our bodies.”

The response was enthusiastic. Every man seized the Koran and took the oath, and the army began to pluck up heart. Babar resolved to advance upon the enemy. On New Year’s Day, March 12, he writes: “I advanced my wagons [and guns] and tripods with all the apparatus and machines that I had prepared, and marched forward with my army in order of battle – right wing, left wing, and centre in their places. In front were the wagons, gun-carriages, and tripods on wheels, and behind came Ustad Ali Kull with a body of his matchlockmen, to prevent the communication being cut off between the artillery and the infantry behind, and to enable them to advance and form into line. When the ranks were formed and every man in his place, I galloped along the line, encouraging the begs and men of the centre, right, and left, giving special directions to each division how to act, and to each

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man orders how to proceed and engage. Then, when all was arranged, I moved the army on in order of battle for a couple of miles, when we camped.” On Saturday, March 16, 1527, the two armies met at Kanwaha. The battle began by a desperate charge of the Rajputs upon the emperor’s right, which he instantly supported from his reserves, while opening fire with his artillery from the centre. It was impossible to stop a Rajput charge, however; they came on, wave after wave, against the cannon, and the fight grew more and more desperate. After several hours of hand-to-hand conflict, Babar sent orders to his flanking columns to wheel and charge in the famous Mongol tactics, while at the same time he ordered his guns forward, and sent out the household troops at the gallop on each side of his centre of matchlockmen, who also advanced firing. This combined manoeuvre shook the enemy. Few Indians will fight when taken in the rear. The Rajputs were pressed into a disordered crowd, and nothing but their indomitable gallantry prolonged a battle that was fast becoming a massacre. Ustad Ali’s cannon did fearful execution, and at last the splendid chivalry of India gave up hope, forced its way through the encompassing Turks, and fled in every direction, leaving heaps of slain upon the fields. Many chiefs had fallen, and the heads of the noble Rajputs rose in a ghastly tower erected by their conqueror. Sanga escaped, severely wounded, and died soon after, but no raja of his line ever again took the field in person against an emperor of Babar’s house.

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Within a year the invader had struck two decisive blows which shattered the power of two great forces. At Panipat the Mohammedan Afghans went down; Kanwaha crushed the confederacy of the bravest Hindus. The storming of the fortress of Chanderi, the stronghold of Medini Rao, the great Rajput vizir of Malwa, completed the overthrow. When the upper fort was carried, the desperate garrison killed their women and children, and rushing forth naked threw themselves upon the Moslem swords, and such as came through leaped over the ramparts to certain death. There was no more trouble with the Rajputs.

It was otherwise with the Afghans. Beaten at Delhi, they were still strong in Bihar, and had even resumed the offensive when they saw the emperor absorbed in the Rajput campaign. But their time of retribution was at hand, and as soon as Chanderi had fallen, Babar set out in February, 1528, to reduce the eastern province. The Afghans fell back from Kanauj at his approach, and awaited him on the farther bank of the Ganges. Babar set up his camp opposite and ordered a pontoon to be thrown across the sealike stream. The Afghans mocked at so wild a project, but the bridge went on; and the skilful fire of the matchlocks and artillery, discharged from an island and from a battery on the bank, protected the engineers who were constructing the pontoon. Ustad Ali even succeeded in firing off the great cannon called Dig Ghazi (“victorious gun,” a title it had won in the battle of Kanwaha) no less than sixteen times a day, which was clearly a record performance

The Gigantic Howitzer “Malik-i Maidan”

This huge gun, called Malik-i Maidan, or “King of the Field,” was cast by Mohammad Rumi at Ahmadnagar in the year 1548. and was for its time a remarkable piece of artillery.

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at that time. On March 13 the bridge was finished, and some of the infantry and the Panjab troops were sent over to skirmish. On the three following days the artillery and the whole of the imperial forces crossed in safety, and the enemy, after stubbornly fighting, de-camped. They were hotly pursued nearly to Oudh, with the loss of their families and baggage, and many were overtaken and slain. The Afghan army was utterly dispersed for the time, and Babar returned to Agra for the rainy season.

The city was a very different place from the Agra he had found. He delighted in running water, and had sunk wells and built tanks among the tamarinds beside the Jumna, and planted roses and narcissuses in regular parterres. In India a “garden” includes a dwelling, and Babar’s Charbagh with its marble pavilions and beds of roses must have been a delightful palace. The Indians, who had never seen this sort of pleasure-ground, called it “Kabul.”

He was not left long in repose. The Afghans in Bihar were not yet quelled. Mahmud Lodi, the brother of Sultan Ibrahim, had arrived among them, and they flocked to the standard of their hereditary king. Jaunpur and most of Bihar declared for him, and the many factions laid aside their rivalries for the moment to support the last chance of an Afghan restoration. Babar received this news in the middle of January, 1529, while he was staying at Dholpur, preparing for a predatory campaign in Sind. He at once returned to Agra and led his army out. At the news of his approach the large

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army of the Afghans, numbering, it was said, a hundred thousand men, melted away: the Lodi pretender fled from before Chunar, to which he was laying siege; Sher Khan escaped from Benares; and as Babar pressed on to Baxar, several of the Afghan leaders came in to offer their submission, and their prince, finding himself almost deserted, sought protection with the Bengal army.

The kingdom of Bengal, as we have seen, had long been independent of Delhi, and Babar had no immediate intention of subduing it, so long as it did not interfere with him. But the protection it was affording to the rebels was not the act of a friendly power, and the massing of the Bengal troops on the frontier was ominous. Reinforced by twenty thousand men from Jaunpur, Babar resolved to force the passage of the Gogra in face of the Bengalis. He made unusually elaborate preparations, for he knew the enemy were skilful gunners and were in great force. Ustad Ali was to plant his cannon, European pieces, and swivels on a rising ground at the. point between the two rivers, and was also to keep up a hot fire from his matchlockmen upon the Bengali camp on the east bank of the Gogra. A little below the junction of the rivers, Mustafa was to direct a cannonade from his artillery, supported by matchlocks, on the enemy’s flank, and on the Bengal flotilla which lay off an island. The main army was formed in six divisions, four of which, under the emperor’s son Askari, were already north of the Ganges. These were to cross the Gogra by boats or fords and

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keep the enemy busy while the artillery was being carried across, and a strong force was sent ahead to divert attention. The fifth division, under Babar himself, was to support Ustad Ali’s batteries above the confluence, and then to cross the Gogra under cover of the guns; while the sixth went to the support of Mustafa’s artillery on the right bank of the Ganges.

On Sunday and Monday, May 2 and 3, 1529, these two divisions crossed the Ganges, and on Tuesday they marched on to the Gogra. Ustad All at the confluence was making excellent practice with his guns upon the Bengal vessels in the river. Meanwhile news came that Askari had got his divisions over the Gogra, and on the morning of Thursday, May 6, the battle began. The Bengal army, as was foreseen, moved up the river to meet Askari, and Babar at once ordered the fifth and sixth divisions to cross in any manner they could, swimming, in boats, or on bundles of reeds, and take the enemy in the rear. The movement was brilliantly carried out in the face of a determined resistance. Attacked in front and rear and flank, the enemy broke and fled. Good generalship had once more guided valour to victory. The result was the collapse of the Afghan rebellion and the conclusion of a treaty of peace with Bengal. In three battles Babar had reduced Northern India to submission.

It was his last exploit. The year and a half of life that remained to him he spent chiefly at Agra, endeavouring to set his new empire in order. For actual permanent organization, however, there was no time. A

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large part of his dominions was under very loose control, and the polity of Hindustan under his rule was simply the strong hand of military power. In the more settled regions the lands and towns were parcelled out in fiefs among his officers, or jagirdars, who levied the land-tax from the cultivators, the duties from the merchants and shopkeepers, and the poll-tax from the Hindus, and paid fixed contributions in money and military service to the emperor.

A scene at Agra

But the large zamindars, or landholders, were often so powerful that their dependence on the crown was little more than nominal, and India was still, as Erskine observes, “rather a congeries of little states under one prince than one regular and uniformly governed kingdom.” The tribes of the frontier and hill districts can hardly be said to have submitted in more than form, and in Sind on the west and Bihar on the east the king’s writ was lightly regarded. All the different provinces, however, according to a list in Babar’s Memoirs, west to east from Bhira and Lahore

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to Bahraich and Bihar, and north to south from Sialkot to Rantambhor, contributed to the revenue, which is stated at fifty-two crores of tankas or dams, which comes to £2,600,000 for the regular revenue from land-tax. Three-quarters of a century later his grandson Akbar drew a revenue of over £18,000,000 from the same source, though from a considerably larger area.

It was probably during the comparative leisure of his last year that Babar wrote that valuable description of Hindustan which displays his undiminished interest in natural history, and his singular quickness of observation. Though he had conquered his new empire, he did not love it. “The country and towns of Hindustan,” he writes, “are extremely ugly. All its towns and lands have a uniform look; its gardens have no walls; the greater part of it is a level plain.” He found the plains monotonous after the mountain scenery of Kabul and the well-watered orchards of Farghana. “Hindustan,” he adds, “is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society. They have no genius, no intellectual comprehension, no politeness, no kindness or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicrafts, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture. They have no good horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk-melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazars, no baths, or colleges, or candles, or torches – never a candlestick!”

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He would not have written this sweeping and wholly unjust condemnation had he lived longer in India and seen more of its people; and he does indeed admit that there are advantages, such as the abundance of workmen, and the “pleasant climate during the rains”; but, on the whole, to him “the chief excellency of Hindustan is that it is a big country with plenty of gold and silver.” One can see that even from his throne at Agra he looked back with regret to his own land, the land of melons and cool waters, and remembered with the pang of the exile the joyous days he spent beside the Kabul river.

He was not the man he had been. Fever and a wandering restless life, joined to frequent bouts of drinking and constant use of opium, had undermined a wonderful constitution. Yet between his fits of fever his vigour remained extraordinary. He could take up a man under each arm, and run with them round the battlements of a fortress, leaping the embrasures, and even in March, 1529, he notes: “I swam across the river Ganges for amusement. I counted my strokes, and found that I swam over in thirty-three strokes. I then took breath, and swam back to the other. side. I had crossed by swimming every river I had met, except only the Ganges.” He was also constantly in the saddle, and often he did his eighty miles a day. All this did not make for long life, and Babar’s snapped with the suddenness of an overstrained spring. .He passed away in his beautiful garden palace at Agra on the 26th of December, 1530 – a man of only forty-eight, a king of

Four Emperors: Babar, Humayun, Akbar, and Jahangir.

After a manuscript in the British Museum (Add. 20734).

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thirty-six years crowded with hardship, tumult, and strenuous energy – but he lies at peace in his grave in the garden on the hill at Kabul, “the sweetest spot,” which he had chosen himself, surrounded by those he loved, by the sweet-smelling flowers of his choice, and the cool running stream; and the people still flock to the tomb and offer prayers at the simple mosque which an august descendant built in memory of the founder of the Indian Empire.

Footnotes

1. Moghul – more accurately Mughal – is the Arabic spelling of Mongol, and is specially applied to the emperors of India descended from Babar and sometimes called in Europe the Babarids. They were however of mixed race; Babar himself was a Turk on his father’s side, though a Mongol on his mother’s, and he abhorred the very name of Moghul. His descendants introduced a strong Rajput strain by their marriages with Hindu princesses. The term Moghul is also applied to the followers of the Moghul emperors, and came to mean any fair man from Central Asia or Afghanistan, as distinguished from the darker native Indians. The various foreign invaders, or governing Moslem class, Turks, Afghans, Pathans, and Moghuls, eventually became so mixed that all were indifferently termed Moghuls.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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