Peering through the cracks in
the Baburnama: The textured
Lives of Mughal sovereigns
A. Azfar Moin
Southern Methodist University
This article examines the intertwined literary and political processes that moulded the texts of
Mughal sovereignty and shaped the lives of Mughal sovereigns. In historical terms it considers
the lives of Babur (d. 1530) and his grandson Akbar (d. 1605) and the ‘books’ associated with
them, the Baburnama and Akbarnama. However, in order to connect the two pairs, this article
follows an unconventional and less trodden path through Safavid political history, Iranian Sufism
and the Persian epic and storytelling tradition. By doing so, it reveals new, less intuitive perspectives on the cultures that produced these texts and their protagonists. Specifically, it shows
how Babur’s work and others like it were not only products of new literary tastes and reading
practices but also participated in the making of new institutions of kingship and sainthood that
evolved together in Mughal India and Safavid Iran over the sixteenth century.
Keywords: Mughal kingship, Timurid court literature, Sufism, Safavid Iran, Baburnama, Akbarnama
The self-authored memoir of Babur (d. 1530), founder of the Mughal (Timurid)
dynasty in India, has become arguably the most accessible and readable prose
text of its milieu. Partly this has to do with the uniqueness of the text, a rare early
example of a first person narrative that evokes, in the words of Stephen Dale,
‘universally recognizable human emotions’.1 Some credit must also go to W.M.
Thackston’s flowing English translation, which anyone can pick up today to see
how this cultivated prince made his way in the Persianate world of Central Asia,
Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Frances Pritchett for reading and commenting on an earlier
draft of this article .
1
Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises, p. 24.
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Iran and India.2 But even so, two obstacles face today’s reader of the Baburnama.
First, it was left unfinished; the narrative is incomplete, with major multi-year gaps
and large sections in draft annalistic form.3 Second, the lived culture of reading,
imagining and performing within which the Baburnama thrived is as much a relic
of the past as the literary language in which it was written, Chagatay Turkish.
This article makes an attempt to overcome these two obstacles together to make
better sense of both the text and its milieu. It examines the gaps in the Baburnama
to ask how such works may have developed a voice and a life well beyond that of
their authors and patrons. Babur’s book and others like it were not only products of
new literary tastes and reading practices; these texts also participated in the making
of new institutions of kingship and sainthood that co-evolved in Mughal India and
Safavid Iran. By the end, I hope to reveal additional, less intuitive readings that
open up new vistas on the cultural processes that simultaneously produced these
texts and their protagonists—that is, the books of kings and the selves of kings.
The Afterlife of the Baburnama
The Baburnama comes down to us in many forms: in official and illustrated
sixteenth-century Persian translations, in relatively faithful copies of the original
Turkish work, and in garbled Turkish versions that appear to have been partially
re-translated from Persian.4 Notably, no manuscript survives from Babur’s time.
The earliest and most complete Turkish copy dates from more than a century after
his death. Found in Hyderabad, India, this version of the Baburnama is thought
to be a copy of a master text in the Mughal imperial library because it adheres
closely to the official Persian translation commissioned by Akbar (r. 1556–1605),
Babur’s grandson. In short, although Babur’s original text was in Turkish, among
the surviving manuscripts the Persian translations predate the Turkish versions.
In terms of narrative content, the later ‘authentic’ Turkish and the earlier
‘official’ Persian versions of the Baburnama correlate well with one another, except
for one noticeable difference. This discrepancy is present where the first of three
prominent breaks occurs—literally at the margins of the text.5 The year is 908 AH
(1502–1503) and eighteen-year-old Babur is in dire peril. On the run after having
lost a battle, the desperate prince hides in a country garden with a few men and
sends for help. Soon, however, he senses betrayal and fears that his enemies have
discovered his location. At this juncture, the Persian Baburnama ends abruptly and
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama.
See for discussion, ibid., xix–xx.
4
For a discussion of the extant manuscripts of the Baburnama, see Appendix D in Babur and
Beveridge, The Babur-nama, pp. 2: ix–xvi.
5
There are several gaps in the Baburnama, the most prominent being 1503, 1508–1519, and
1520–1525. The text also ends abruptly a little before the author’s death. See Babur and Thackston,
Baburnama, p. xix. Also, see Haydar and Ross, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, p. 246n2.
2
3
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skips ahead to the events of the next year. However, the Turkish version continues
the story for a page or so before breaking off.
In this longer Turkish rendering of the event, Babur prepares himself for death
with solemn resolve. He bows down to say his last prayers. As his head touches
the ground, fatigue overtakes him and he sees the following dream:
I dreamed that Khwaja Ya‘qub, son of Khwaja Yahya and grandson of Khwaja
Ubaydullah [Ahrar], was coming toward me on a dappled horse, surrounded
by a group also mounted on dappled horses. ‘Grieve not,’ he said. ‘Khwaja
Ahrar has sent me to you. He has said that we were to assist you and seat you
on the royal throne. Whenever you are in difficult straits, think of us and speak.
We will be there. Now victory and triumph are coming to you. Raise your head
and awake!’6
As Babur rises and makes ready to fight the men who have come to arrest him,
he hears the sound of riders approaching. They turn out to be his trusted retainers
who chase away the aggressors. When Babur asks his rescuers how they knew where
to find him, one of them replies that Khwaja Ahrar had informed him in a dream:
When we fled from Akhsi and got separated, I came to Andizhan because the
khans had gone there. In a dream I saw Khwaja Ubaydullah [Ahrar] saying,
‘Babur Padishah is in a village called Karnon. Go, get him and come, for the
royal throne belongs to him.’7
The above anecdotes relate how the eminent Naqshbandi Sufi saint of Transoxania, Khwaja Ahrar (d. 1488)—who despite his death a decade earlier was
apparently still watching over his Central Asian dominions—played a miraculous
role in young Babur’s rescue and recognised his right to sit on the Timurid throne.
In a rigorous analysis of this variant Turkish fragment of the text, Annette Beveridge, an early translator of the Baburnama, rejected it as spurious.8 The evidence
she gave was broad and convincing. There were several anachronistic terms used
in the mentioned passage, such as the title of king (padishah) for Babur, which
he had neither earned nor adopted yet, going instead by the label ‘Mirza’ as was
the norm among Timurid aristocracy. The word throne (masnad) also indicated a
later usage, from after Babur’s conquest of Delhi more than two decades later, an
accomplishment that would finally win for him the wealth and status of a powerful sovereign and mentions in the chronicles of the time. Thus Beveridge judged
this tale of Babur’s miraculous rescue and recognition as king by the famous
6
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 138. For the Turkish and Persian translation, see Babur et
al., Baburnama (polyglot), pp. 242–43.
7
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, pp. 138–39. Babur et al., Baburnama (polyglot), pp. 242–43.
8
Babur and Beveridge, The Babur-nama, pp. 2: ix–xvi.
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Naqshbandi holy man to be a tall one, added to the text by someone who could not
resist the opportunity to fill in one of the cracks in the Baburnama.
Who might this co-author be? The current state of the archives provides few
hints, but Beveridge did note that it could have been someone as late as Babur’s
great grandson Jahangir (r. 1605–1627). Proud that he still knew some Turkish,
which most Timurids had lost in India by the seventeenth century, Jahangir related
in his own memoir that he examined and added to Babur’s text during a sojourn in
Kabul, where the latter lay buried.9 According to Jahangir, he made his authorship
clear by signing each of the four added sections. Although this manuscript has
not been found, Jahangir’s admission that he edited his ancestor’s work shows
that versions of the Baburnama were being augmented in the original Turkish
nearly a century after its initial composition and well after it had officially been
translated into Persian. With this observation, let us set aside the mystery—perhaps
unsolvable—of who authored Babur’s miraculous dream and turn our attention,
instead, to its cultural significance.
If there is an aspect of Beveridge’s thorough analysis that merits further discussion, it is her observation that the inter-related dreams of Babur and his rescuers
were ‘too apropos and marvelous for credence’.10 She found the miraculous quality
of the passage itself as an appropriate reason for rejection. In Babur’s time, dreaming was certainly considered a medium of miracles.11 But just being marvellous
was not sufficient to make a historical anecdote inauthentic in Babur’s time. On
the contrary, the Baburnama contains its fair share of amazing occurrences, fortunate coincidences and cosmic interventions. In more than one of these instances,
moreover, the Naqshbandi saints play a central role, appearing in Babur’s waking as
well as dream life to move his sovereign career along. This was not a coincidence,
for the Naqshbandi brotherhood was especially strong in Timurid Central Asia and
played an active role in politics.12
While still a struggling teenaged prince, Babur had asked for aid from
Khwaja Ahrar’s descendants and disciples in his first two attempts at capturing Samarqand—the prestigious seat of Timurid power in Transoxania. The
Naqshbandi Sufis had responded to Babur’s request: in 1496, in the form of 18,000
head of sheep to help pay his soldiers; and, in 1500, by way of an auspicious dream
in which Khwaja Ahrar gave him the good news of impending victory.13 It would
See Jahangir et al., The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, p. 109.
Babur and Beveridge, The Babur-nama, p. 2: xv.
11
The literature on dreams in Islam is vast. See Hermansen, ‘Introduction to the Study of Dreams and
Visions in Islam’; Kinberg, ‘Literal Dreams and Prophetic Hadiths in Classical Islam—A Comparison
of Two Ways of Legitimation’; Kinberg, ‘Dreams and Sleep’; Von Grunebaum, ‘Introduction’. For
a discussion of the use of dreams in early Islamic historiography, see Moin, ‘Partisan Dreams and
Prophetic Visions’.
12
Paul, ‘Forming a Faction’.
13
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, pp. 65, 99.
9
10
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not be fair to reject as inauthentic the latter of the two anecdotes and many others
like it in the chronicles and epics of the time, in which saints and kings interacted
at critical moments and complemented each other’s sovereignty.14 Quite the opposite, they should make us see that the dreams in the ‘spurious’ passage seem just
apropos and marvellous enough to satisfy the narrative requirements of the text.
But is it worth making anything more of this minor evolution in the Baburnama?
Was it not just a ruse that used the presence of a famous saint to enhance the Timurid’s prestige at a time in his life when he had few earthly accomplishments to his
name? To be sure, Babur was an inconsequential prince until the last four years of
his life when he managed to conquer northern India and ascend the fabled throne
of Delhi. This much is plainly evident from the Baburnama as it is from the lack
of importance given to Babur in contemporary sources in the early sixteenth
century. Thus scholarship on Babur has relegated the smoothing out of this particular wrinkle to the realm of footnotes and appendices. But this development at
the margins of the Baburnama can be of great use, for it brings to light cultural
transactions that remain largely invisible to us but were intuitively and immensely
significant for ‘native’ sixteenth-century readers.
Consider, for instance, how the insertion of this ‘miraculous’ episode affects
the typology of the Baburnama. The dream anecdote allows Babur’s book to be
treated as more than a chronicle (waqa‘i) as Babur called it himself, or as an early
foray into autobiography, as modern scholarship has judged it to be. With the added
saintly intervention, Babur’s work also contains elements of hagiography (tazkira),
a type of text that typically highlighted the miraculous life of a sacred and foundational figure. The tazkira of Sufi figures had become a particularly prolific genre
by the sixteenth century, and the cultural world it opens up is that of the saints of
Iran, Central Asia and India. It was in the names of these famous mystics that most
tazkiras were penned at the time, often after the holy man’s death, by their successors or disciples. Self-authored tazkiras were rare but not unknown in Babur’s
time, the most relevant being the work of the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasb who also
kept a record of his dream visions.15 Given his Sufi origins, Shah Tahmasb was
both a saint and a king, a point of some relevance to which we will later return.
Overall, the dream miracle in the Baburnama brings into focus an intertextuality that connected the realm of sixteenth-century kings and stories of their
deeds with the realm of saints and their tales of miracles and spiritual feats. Or,
to borrow a term from Textures of Time, the saintly dream serves as a sub-generic
marker that allows texts from different genres to be consumed simultaneously
14
For example, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (d. 1506), Babur’s uncle and the last Timurid ruler of Herat,
had a saintly encounter with a dervish named Baba Khaki whose blessings apparently paved the way
for the conquest of Herat. See Subtelny, Timurids in Transition, p. 63.
15
Safavi, Tazkira-i Shah Tahmasb. For a discussion of Shah Tahmasb’s tazkira and his use of dreams,
see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, pp. 295–334.
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in a hagiographical mode.16 This ‘textural’ perspective of the Baburnama as
multi-authored and straddling genres opens up new readings of it. Rather than
simply mining it for facts, we can try to imagine the ‘work’ it did, and that was
done upon it, within the intertwined political and literary cultures of sixteenthcentury India and Iran.
Kings and Saints: The Lovers of History
It is significant that the dreams in the Baburnama have to do with Naqshbandi
Sufis.17 For one, these saintly visions and prophecies set Babur apart as someone
with a noble and worthy soul. Moreover, the Naqshbandi content of these dreams
reflected their Central Asian context, a setting where this Sufi order wielded great
wealth and political influence. But, most generally, these dreams underscore a
cultural sensibility that perceived sovereignty simultaneously in spiritual and
material terms. This is because Babur lived—and the Baburnama was written—in
the age of saints.
In the post-Mongol centuries, between 1300 and 1500, Sufism evolved from
being a personal form of piety to a major social and political phenomenon across
Asia centred on the cult of Sufi saints.18 This process, however, was not limited to
the sphere of religion; it also left its mark on the political institutions and literary
conceptions of kingship.19 The ancient Persian maxim that prophets and kings are
twins—a common refrain in classical works of royal advice literature—must be
modified for Babur’s milieu where sainthood had taken the place of prophethood.
If prophecy had been about ‘law’, sainthood was about ‘love’. To see how this new
trope was used to reimagine sovereignty, let us briefly examine a work on the lives
of saints and sovereigns written in sixteenth-century Timurid Herat. The book is
aptly titled Majlis al-‘Ushshaq, or the ‘Assembly of Lovers’.20
At first glance it is a curious book that defies categorisation. It provides
biographical vignettes of 76 lives, mainly in a chronological fashion. These lives
are mostly of historical figures, that is, well-known kings, prophets and saints from
the Islamic past, but they also include heroes of famous epics and legends. The
16
For a discussion of the concept of ‘texture’, specifically of how it may be used to detect a ‘historical’
mode of narration, see Rao et al., Textures of Time. For a summary, criticism and defense of this notion,
see Rao et al., ‘Pragmatic Response’.
17
For Babur’s dreams, see Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, pp. 99, 138.
18
Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam; Green, Sufism.
19
This point is acknowledged but underdeveloped in historical scholarship. See Trimingham, The
Sufi Orders in Islam, pp. 67–104. For a similar perspective on pre-Mughal India, see Digby, ‘The Sufi
Shaykh and the Sultan’.
20
Also called Majalis al-‘Ushshaq (Assemblies of Lovers), this work is described in Rieu, Catalogue
of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 1: 351. A short biography of the author, Kamaluddin,
is given in Storey, Persian Literature, pp. 1(ii): 960–62. The manuscript copy I examined is Sultan
Husain Bayqara, ‘Majalis al-’Ushshaq’, British Library, London, MS Or 208.
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biographical descriptions are less historical, however, and more hagiographic and
panegyric. The book begins with a preamble on mystical love as epitomised by
the Quranic pair, Yusuf and Zulaykha (Joseph and Potiphar’s wife), a staple theme
of Persian mystical poetry. Then it narrates the life of the sixth Shi‘i Imam Ja‘far
Sadiq (d. 765), an author of much renown not only for Shi‘is but also for Muslim
mystics of all persuasions interested in esoteric lore and occult knowledge. From
there it proceeds on to the lives of famous Sufi masters, altogether 54 of them,
ending with the leading lights of the Naqshbandi order such as the previously
mentioned Khwaja Ahrar and his hagiographer, the mystical poet Jami (d. 1492),
whose shrine is in Herat. After the Sufis of history come the prophet–emperors of
the great Persian epics, Solomon and Alexander. These figures are followed by the
famous lovers of the Arabic and Persian romance tradition, such as Majnun and
Farhad. The final category is that of kings, all Muslim and Turkish, beginning with
the iconic Mahmud of Ghazni (d. 1030) and ending with the last Timurid ruler of
Herat, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (d. 1506), Babur’s uncle and the patron of the work.
What seems stranger than the odd and disparate figures making up this series is the
fact that each one is paired with a lover—hence the title.
Babur did little to hide his disgust for the work and its author, Kamaluddin
Husayn of Gazargah. According to him, Kamaluddin was a courtier and self-styled
Sufi (mutasawwif ) who, because of his modish manners and comportment, had
ingratiated himself with the ruler of Herat, Sultan Husayn. In Babur’s opinion
Kamaluddin wrote ‘tasteless and impious words, so much so that sometimes it is
near blasphemy, for he ascribes carnal love to many of the prophets and saints and
invents a paramour for each of them’.21 He also pointed out that although it was
Kamaluddin who wrote the book, he attributed authorship to his patron. Indeed,
later anthologists like the Safavid prince Sam Mirza praised Sultan Husayn as the
author of Majlis al-‘Ushshaq and found the work neither blasphemous nor tasteless.22 In fact, the large number of manuscript copies of the work extant today in
India and Iran attests to its popularity among the literati of Babur’s time and later—
a function perhaps of the work’s presumed royal authorship. We cannot, in other
words, dismiss Kamaluddin’s work just because of Babur’s distaste for it. This is
because the lasting fashions of Persianate high culture of the sixteenth century were
set in the Timurid court of Sultan Husayn and the city of Herat—fashions that his
descendants in India, including Babur, and the rising dynasty of the Safavids in
Iran would emulate over the sixteenth century to express the glory of their courts.
Even so, we may ask, what has ‘love’ got to do with it? The first thing to
note is that the author and patron of the book were akin to a pair of ‘lovers’.
Kamaluddin was a boon companion and trusted advisor of Sultan Husayn Bayqara.
More than just a court wit or spiritual counsellor, he had served his sovereign as
21
22
See Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 211.
See Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 1: 351.
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finance minister, ambassador and political fixer. The trope of love and spiritual
devotion was a way to hint at the close relationship between the king and courtier.
It may also explain why the authorship of the work became blended together,
erasing the distinction between author and patron, lover and beloved. Another
use of ‘love’ was to create a sequence out of distinct ‘historic’, ‘saintly’ and
‘epic’ lives. When paired with his lover, each saint, hero and king lost his distinctiveness and thus could be placed in a continuous series which collapses into the
last figure, that of the patron/author. In effect, the ‘Assembly of Lovers’
presented the Timurid ruler of Herat as an embodiment of all the great sovereign
‘lovers’ of the past, whether historic or epic, saintly or royal. If this perspective seems arbitrary or, what is worse, applicable only to sycophantic court
literature, it is because we have used it to interpret a text. But it is also useful for
understanding political life.
Kamaluddin did not merely write about holy men, heroes and kings but was
also actively involved in anointing sovereigns and mediating between saints and
warriors. This we know from Babur’s description of events in Herat after the
death of Sultan Husayn in 1506, a time when the region had become vulnerable
to the growing power of the Uzbeks. The Uzbek ruler Shaybani Khan, who traced
his descent from Chinggis Khan, had already driven out the Timurids—including
Babur—from Samarqand in 1500 and now threatened their other principalities.
Whereas Sultan Husayn had managed to use war and diplomacy to protect Timurid
Herat, his sons proved less capable. They were known for their elegant wine parties but little else; as Babur remarked, ‘Although these mirzas were outstanding in
the social graces, they were strangers to the reality of military command and the
rough and tumble of battle’.23 Thus after Sultan Husayn’s death, when the Uzbek
forces gathered near Herat in 1507, the panicked notables of the city pinned their
hopes on a Mongol warrior by the name of Zu’n-Nun Arghun. The selection was
made, according to Babur, by a group of religious scholars and holy men—mullas
and shaykhs—led by Kamaluddin.24
This is how they informed Zu’n Nun about his new role: ‘We are in touch with
the Qutb. He has named you ‘Lion of God,’ (Hizibrullah) and you will conquer
the Uzbeks’.25 According to Babur:
Zu’n-Nun Arghun, taken in by the above-mentioned flattery, took up a stand
with some hundred, 150 men at Kara Robat in the face of forty to fifty thousand
Uzbeks. When this massive force moved in they swept Zu’n-Nun’s men aside,
captured him, and cut off his head.26
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, pp. 224–25.
Babur noted: ‘It was due to this very Kamaluddin Husayn that Zu’n Nun Arghun was dubbed
“Lion of God.”’ Ibid., p. 211.
25
Ibid., p. 206. Babur, Thackston, and Khan, Baburnama (polyglot), p. 358.
26
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 248. Babur et al., Baburnama (polyglot), pp. 432–33.
23
24
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Faced with invasion and destruction, the religious elite of Herat had convinced
the unfortunate warrior that the Qutb—the axial saint of the age, a hidden Sufi
accessible primarily through dreams—had chosen him to be the saviour. The people
of Herat also placed their faith in their hero. Their expectation of his miraculous
victory against the Uzbeks was so widespread that, according to Babur, ‘the fortress
was not made fast, battle weapons were not made ready, reconnoiterers and scouts
were not sent to give information on the enemy’s advance, and the army was not
adequately prepared for battle….’27
What qualities enabled Kamaluddin to communicate with the Qutb and to know
the hidden signs of the time? It was his expertise in the art of jafr. This divinatory
form of knowledge originated as an occult technique associated with the sixth Shi‘i
Imam Ja‘far Sadiq—also a prominent figure in Kamaluddin’s ‘Assembly of Lovers’.
Traditionally, the Shi‘a used it for predicting the overthrow of the enemies of Ali,
the fourth caliph of Islam and son-in-law of the Prophet. It could also be used to
predict the apocalyptic rise of the saviour, an heir of Ali.28 Although Iran had not
converted to Shi‘ism in Babur’s time, Ali was immensely popular in the region as
the first saint (wali) of Islam and a chivalrous champion (fata) of the battlefield.29 In
this context, jafr belonged to a set of occult techniques, wielded by men of letters
and ambitious saints alike, sustained by the expectation of an appearance of Ali or
his surrogate in moments of peril and disorder. Although Babur did not elaborate
what the label ‘Lion of God’ meant, it is more than a coincidence that this was a
famous title of Ali—the central pivot of Kamaluddin’s scheme.
Babur declared Zu’n Nun Arghun to be ‘somewhat of a fool’, but in his
description of the Mongol nobleman’s misadventure we can also detect a hint of
awe and, perhaps, even envy. Not only a senior nobleman but the entire city of
Herat had been gripped by Kamaluddin’s saintly prophecy of a miraculous victory.
Had Babur not sought a similar level of support from the Naqshbandi Sufis in his
attempts on Samarqand? Indeed, if we see the ‘Lion of God’ episode as a competition for saintly sovereignty, we can imagine what a live enactment of Babur’s
‘literary’ dream would have looked like.
Furthermore, this ritual drama of a patron saint spiritually anointing a sovereign
also underscores a particular conception of history at work: past figures—historic and
epic, saintly and heroic, the ‘Qutb’ and the ‘Lion of God’—manifested themselves
in the present as dreams and inspirations. Such an active engagement with the past
animated both politics and literature. Accordingly, in light of his active political
role, Kamaluddin’s ‘Assemblies of Lovers’ must be seen as more than a whimsical
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 248. Babur et al., Baburnama (polyglot), pp. 432–33.
That Kamaluddin practiced jafr is stated in several contemporary accounts. See Storey, Persian
literature, 1(ii): 960. For a description of jafr, see Fahd, ‘Djafr’.
29
For the importance of Ali in Iranian and Central Asian Sufism, before the mass conversion to
Twelver Shi‘ism, see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, pp. 161–95; Hodgson, The Venture
of Islam, pp. 2:495–500; Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam, pp. 99–102.
27
28
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attempt to win favour at court. This book and its author participated in the same
cultural processes that produced the wayward fragment of the Baburnama as well
as men like Zu’n-Nun Arghun—the one a ‘text’ and the other a ‘self’ of sovereignty.
The Safavid ‘Lion of God’
That the selves of sixteenth-century saints and kings, and the texts recounting
their lives, were forged in the same historical kiln is also evident in the case of the
founder of the Safavid dynasty, a contemporary of Babur, Shah Isma‘il (r. 1501–
1524). After defeating the Uzbeks in 1510, the Safavid shah became the victor of
Herat and, indeed, of all Iran. Barely in his teens, Shah Isma‘il began his conquering
career in 1501 in northwestern Iran. By the end of the decade, he had also brought
eastern Iran and Afghanistan under his sway and launched an assault on Transoxania.
Today the Safavid shah is remembered as the ruler who imposed Twelver Shi‘ism on
the Sunni population of Iran. But this image is only partially accurate. Shah Isma‘il
is better understood as the leader of a militant and messianic Alid order rooted in
the Safavid Sufi shrine in Ardabil. His devotee soldiers saw him not as a bringer
of Shi‘ism but as the harbinger of the ultimate righteous order—as the mahdi (the
guided one or messiah), a manifestation of Ali sent down to earth to enact the final
millennium. With his rise to power, Shah Isma‘il became both the king and the saint
of Iran. To join the court of this Sufi king, one had to become his devotee.30
Babur described how one of his Timurid cousins, a son of Sultan Husayn
Bayqara, had become ‘a devotee (murid) of Shah Isma‘il’ and ‘died astray in that
heresy (batalat o gumrahi) in Astarabad’.31 This Safavid ‘heresy’ would have fit
neatly in Kamaluddin’s ‘Assembly of Lovers’. Safavid court ceremonies involved
Sufi initiation rites in which courtiers were ritually and painfully beaten with a stick
as they lay prostrate in front of the sovereign so they could become one with him—
lovers of the beloved.32 Moreover, the symbol of having being included in Shah
Isma‘il’s ‘assembly’ was the red headgear marking a Safavid devotee.33 It is for this
reason that Safavid soldiers were known as the red-heads or Qizilbash. Babur did
not mention any of this in the Baburnama. Indeed, how could he? For it would entail
admitting to the world that he too had become a devotee of the Safavid monarch.
In his last attempt on Samarqand in 1511, Babur played the role of a Safavid
vassal and devotee. The Safavids had targeted the Naqshbandi brotherhood
viciously during their conquest of eastern Iran and Central Asia. In the aftermath,
with his Timurid and Naqshbandi allies seriously weakened, Babur accepted
30
A comprehensive treatment of the rise of Shah Ismail as the messianic sovereign of Iran is in
Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs.
31
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 198.
32
Morton, ‘The Chub-i Tariq and Qizilbash Ritual in Safavid Persia’.
33
For a description and evolution of the Safavid ‘taj’, see Schmitz, ‘On a Special Hat Introduced
during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas the Great’.
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Safavid supremacy in return for military and political patronage. When he entered
Samarqand, it was as a Timurid puppet surrounded by a large Safavid army. Babur’s
own cousin, Mirza Haydar Dughlat, reported that the Sunni populace of Samarqand
was shocked to see Babur displaying his allegiance to the Safavid Shah by wearing the red ‘taj’ of the Qizilbash.34 Inconveniently for us but fortunately for Babur,
the account of the year in which this happened is missing from the Baburnama, the
second and largest ‘crack’ in the text that spans the years 1508 to 1519. In these
‘missing’ years, Babur and the Timurids witnessed a major enactment of sovereignty
in which sainthood and kingship merged together in the person of the Safavid shah.
Unlike Babur, Shah Isma‘il did not leave behind a self-authored memoir or diary
from his early days. But he did compose rousing poetry, it is believed, under the enigmatic pen name Khata’i or Sinner.35 Written in the Azeri dialect of Turkish, the poetry
of Khata’i is known less for its literary merits and more for its apocalyptic message:
The beautiful warriors are unleashed
On their heads is the crown of the dynasty
This is the mahdi’s time
To the cyclical world the eternal light has come36
Such verse was used in Safavid propaganda to recruit from among the Turkmen
tribes of northwestern Iran and eastern Anatolia. The Safavid missionary organisation (da‘wa) became established in these regions when, under Shah Isma‘il’s father
and grandfather, the Sufi order took a militant and messianic turn. This organisation
consisted of a series of deputies (khalifas) of the Sufi shaykh, managed by a powerful
chief deputy (khalifat al-khulafa).37 As the Safavid mission spread, Khata’i’s poetry
became widely adopted as devotional literature in different Turkish-speaking Sufi
communities and Alid sects in the region, many of whom were known for a deep
or ‘exaggerated’ (ghulat) devotion to Ali as a locus of divinity.38
This was an Ali not of history but of the oral storytelling tradition. Praised at
times to the point of divinisation, he was portrayed in popular epics as the one who
had brought order to the world wielding his double-pointed sword Zulfiqar and
riding his indefatigable mule Duldul given to him by the Prophet.39 A key belief
of ‘exaggerated’ Alid traditions was the transmigration of the soul (tanasukh),
Haydar and Ross, A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, p. 246.
For a translation, see Minorsky and Shah Isma‘il I, ‘The Poetry of Shah Isma‘il I’.
36
Khata’i’s poetry quoted in Gallagher, ‘The Transformation of Shah Ismail Safevi in the Turkish
Hikâye’, p. 175.
37
See Savory, ‘The Office of Khalifat al-Khulafa under the Safawids’.
38
See Mélikoff, ‘La Divinisation d’Ali chez les Bektachis-Alevis’. Also see Birge, The Bektashi
Order of Dervishes, p. 68.
39
The storytelling tradition in Iran, which sustained such ‘exaggerated’ Alid beliefs, is described in
Jafariyan, Qissah Khvanan dar Tarikh-i Islam va Iran. For a bibliography on Ali, see Poonawala and
Kohlberg, ‘‘Ali b. Abi Taleb’. For the mule Duldul, see Bashear, ‘Riding Beasts on Divine Missions’.
34
35
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which held that great figures of the past were reborn in present and future cycles
of time.40 Thus when in his poems Khata’i declared himself to be the Divine Truth
(haqq), Ali, Jesus, the twelve Shi’i Imams, the assertion was more than metaphorical. Not limiting himself to Arab Islamic figures, Shah Isma‘il also claimed to be
an embodiment of the great warriors and emperors of the pre-Islamic Iranian past:
‘I am Faridun, Khusraw, Jamshid, and Zahhak; I am Zal’s son (i.e., Rustam) and
Alexander’.41
When seen against the backdrop of Shah Isma‘il’s messianic manifestation as
another ‘Lion of God’, the courtly writings of Kamaluddin Husayn and the saintly
bravery of Zu’n-Nun Arghun begin to develop a more concrete and inter-connected
meaning. This backdrop also serves to highlight the desperation of the Naqshbandi
Sufis in the first decade of the sixteenth century; they witnessed the swift rise of a
rival brotherhood whose leader had a reputation of invincibility and whose soldier–
devotees rode into battle without armour, believing in the power of their saint to
protect them. The Qizilbash were also known for their cruelty and rapaciousness,
in which they seem to have outdone the Uzbeks.
When Herat fell to the Safavids, the Qizilbash put the city’s religious luminaries
to the sword, extracted treasure from its notables via torture, desecrated the shrines
of Naqshbandi Sufis, and on pain of death forced people to publicly rebuke the first
three caliphs of Islam—usurpers of Ali’s sovereignty in Qizilbash eyes.42 Despite
such Safavid oppression, however, Babur and his Timurid cousins were willing
to don the red hat of the Qizilbash and become Shah Isma‘il’s devotees. They had
little choice. Unlike the ill-fated attempt of Zu’n-Nun Arghun, the messianic project
of Shah Isma‘il had been a resounding success. As one after the other kings and
princes fell under his sword, the young shah began to enjoy a legendary status
comparable to Timur himself.
Shah Isma‘il now had to build a court to match his reputation. When the Safavid
leader set about acquiring the finest trappings of kingship, he naturally turned to
Timurid cultural forms. Safavid court culture developed in earnest after Herat fell
to Shah Isma‘il in 1510. This city—the seat of the last ‘classical’ Timurid court,
that of Babur’s uncle Sultan Husayn Bayqara—was renowned for its producers of
royal culture in the Persianate world. These littérateurs and artists now offered their
services to Shah Isma‘il. Thus as Timurid princes were submitting themselves to
the Safavid’s Sufi discipline, the latter began to fashion themselves as the legatees
of Timur. This mimesis between the saintly and the royal was to have a lasting
impact on both Mughal India and Safavid Iran.
40
For a discussion of the ‘exaggerated’ ghulat worldview of the early Safavids, which involved
a belief in the transmigration of the soul, see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, pp. 3–56.
41
Minorsky and Isma‘il I, ‘The Poetry of Shah Isma‘il I’, pp. 1027a–29a.
42
For a discussion of early Qizilbash tactics during their conquest of Khurasan, see Dickson, ‘Shah
Tahmasb and the Uzbeks’.
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Shah Isma‘il: The Life of Epics
It is significant that after the conquest of Herat, in 1510, Shah Isma‘il’s first great
act of cultural production was not the commissioning of a court chronicle but of a
grand, personalised epic. This was the Shahnama-i Isma‘il (Shah Ismail’s Book of
Kings), a versified and semi-legendary narrative of the Safavid ruler’s conquests.43
It was a work patterned on the foundational epic of Persian universal kingship
composed by Firdawsi (d. 1020), the Shahnama (Book of Kings).44 But the model
of a personalised epic to celebrate a ‘historical’ figure was one pioneered in Timurid
Herat to celebrate the legendary exploits of Timur. Indeed, Shah Isma‘il’s versified
epic is paired in several manuscripts with that of Timur.45 Overall, the Safavids
completed their transformation from warrior saints into universal monarchs by
embracing the classical Persianate vision of the Timurids.46
In his personalised Book of Kings, Shah Isma‘il is constantly extolled as the
Lord of Conjunction (Sahib Qiran), a title synonymous with Timur. The epic boasts
how the famous heroes of the Shahnama are no match for the martial virtues of
the Safavid ruler, who makes a drinking cup out of Isfandiyar’s skull and uses the
ring in Rustam’s ear as his lasso.47 Qasimi’s work also fuses the Iranian universalism of the Shahnama with heavy Alid and Sufi overtones. He depicts Shah Isma‘il
flourishing Ali’s sword Zulfiqar, calls him a monument (yadgar) of the Prophet’s
family, equates him with the mahdi and portrays his Sufis disciples ready for
battle.48 Finally, the Shahnama-i Isma‘il contains both ‘historical’ episodes, like
his conquest of Samarqand (during which Babur’s role is not mentioned), as well
as ‘legendary’ occurrences such as the appearance of demons in Isfahan who are
fought and killed by Qizilbash troops.49
The initial cultural path taken under Shah Isma‘il—that is, the production of
universal and personalised epics rather than chronicles—was an understandable
one.50 There was little point in commissioning a chronicle at the beginning of a
43
Shah Isma‘il commissioned this epic in 1510. The first four poets assigned to this project died
before completing it and their work is now lost. The fifth and final author was Muhammad Qasim
Gunabadi, also of ‘Timurid’ Herat, who used the pen name Qasimi. Qasimi completed this work in
1534, ten years after Shah Isma‘il’s death. It was recently published as Qasimi Gunabadi, Shah Ismaʿil
Namah. For a discussion, see Wood, ‘The Shahnama-i Isma‘il’, pp. 49–54.
44
In the early 1520s, Shah Isma‘il also commissioned a grand illustrated version of Firdawsi’s
Shahnama, which remains unsurpassed in its magnificence. It is reproduced in Dickson and Welch,
The Houghton Shahnameh.
45
Wood, ‘Shahnama-i Isma‘il’, p. 89. Also see Bernardini, ‘Hatifi’s Timurnameh and Qasimi’s
Shahnameh-yi Ismaʿil’.
46
Part of the argument below is a summary of Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, pp. 86–91.
47
Qasimi Gunabadi, Shah Ismaʿil Namah, pp. 87, 186.
48
Ibid., pp. 81, 82, 86, 91, 161.
49
Ibid., pp. 287–93.
50
Shah Isma‘il commissioned his first chronicle in 1519 or 1520, nearly a decade after work on the
first Safavid epic had begun. This chronicle, a mixture of verse and prose written by Sadruddin
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reign or dynasty because there was not enough material yet to chronicle in imperial
style. At an early stage, an epic provided a more appropriate form for invoking a
glorious past and for celebrating one’s place within it. But such courtly epics were
not mere celebratory poetry. They were also mythical models that shaped identity
and reflected social action. It is significant that Shah Isma‘il did not give his sons
proper Shi‘i or Arab names. Instead he named them Sam, Bahram, Tahmasb, Alqasp
and Rustam after heroes from the Shahnama and its offshoot, the Khawarnama
(Book of Khawar), which related the legendary exploits of Ali in the heroic mode
of the Persian epics. Similarly, on the battlefield, Shah Isma‘il shouted heroic verses
from the Shahnama to motivate his soldiers. And his soldiers are reported to have
carried out his every order, even that of devouring the flesh of the fallen enemy
to show their devotion to their leader.51 Indeed, in all its awesome gruesomeness,
the Safavid drama of the war was enacted on the scheme and scale of the great
epics. Much as how Shah Isma‘il made a drinking cup out of Isfandiyar’s skull in
the epic, his historical alter ego made one from the gilded cranium of the fallen
Uzbek ruler, Shaybani Khan.52 In sum, the epic genre was able to simultaneously
reflect the two social worlds that the Safavid Shah now straddled, the egalitarian
and antinomian realm of the ‘frontier’ warrior–saint and the ordered and ‘civilised’
dominion of the universal monarch.
The Safavid sovereign’s conquering career was brought to an abrupt end in 1514
when the Ottomans defeated him at Chaldiran. Although he survived the battle
and the Ottomans soon withdrew from Safavid territory, the blow was too great to
bear for Shah Isma‘il; he spent his next and last decade more in his cups than in
his saddle. Despite the setback, his dynasty continued and his exploits became the
stuff of legends. Over time, he became a central protagonist in ‘popular’ Persian
histories narrated in the storyteller (naqqal) style.53 In these tales, which in their
narrative schemes correspond surprisingly well with the broad structure of sober
court histories, Shah Isma‘il’s ‘miracles’ were openly and proudly recounted.54
He was presented as a warrior saint who had managed to unite the hopes of many.
There were long descriptions of his dreams, for example, before the birth of his
son and successor, Shah Tahmasb. And there were extensive descriptions of the
spiritual visions of his devotees, revealing how the boy Isma‘il was selected as the
messiah’s heir by the ‘Master’, a mysterious and veiled figure sitting on a throne of
gold who could have been taken for Ali, the mahdi, or what for many ‘exaggerators’
and Qizilbash warriors was much the same thing, Divinity.
Amini Haravi, was called the Futuhat-i Shahi. See Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah
ʿAbbas, p. 15.
51
Bashir, ‘Shah Isma‘il and the Qizilbash’.
52
Sarwar, History of Shah Isma‘il Safawi, p. 63.
53
Morton, ‘The Early Years of Shah Isma‘il in the Afzal al-tavarikh and Elsewhere’.
54
The discussion below on the Persian ‘popular’ histories and Turkish ‘romance’ tales about Shah
Isma‘il follows the study by Gallagher, ‘The Transformation of Shah Ismail Safevi in the Turkish Hikâye’.
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In the seventeenth century, when the Safavids had begun abandoning their
millennial and saintly heritage in favour of juridical Shi‘ism, the Turkish folklore
(hikaye) tradition retained a memory of the early Alid ethos Shah Isma‘il. This
largely oral genre also developed the Safavid founder’s ‘post-Messianic’ image.
In this retelling of the past, the Safavid sovereign retained just a faint glimmer of
his Alid self, which nevertheless occasionally revealed itself in battle:
Shah Isma‘il came, he entered the battlefield,
Advancing his horse, attacking the enemy,
Wielding Zulfikar, may it be painted with blood,
Lord have mercy! God, help me!
Otherwise, he was predominantly depicted as a ‘lover’. Called an ashik (lover),
Shah Isma‘il roamed the earth as a minstrel in search of union with his beloved,
fighting black giants and overcoming dangerous obstacles on his way to ‘Hindistan’.
The variety of genres and social contexts that moulded the many lives of Shah
Isma‘il can help us imagine the predicament faced by the court chroniclers of the
time. These ‘historians’ were constrained by the genre of chronicle writing. They
had to remain within the realm of the believable and verifiable—close to what we
recognise as history—while using a tasteful stock of metaphors to render the events
in the life of their protagonist. Yet, at the same time, they had to contend with the
epic tradition in both its oral and literary manifestations. They had to compete and
collaborate with it. Often, as was the case with Shah Isma‘il, the poetic and epic
versions of the protagonist’s life already existed and preceded the writing of formal
histories.55 In such instances, it was the latter that were beholden to the established
structures and memorialised truths of the former.
Then there was the matter of the social reach of a written text. No matter what
the quality of a court chronicle or the rewards for writing it, it had a limited readership and cultural impact during the life of the author or patron. It could not be
rapidly reproduced and circulated unless it was recast in an oral (poetic) or performative (epic) form accessible to a wider audience. At best, a hand-written prose
text preserved social discourse and, if successful, provided a model for action and
behaviour to a privileged few among future generations who would read it. And
even then, in order for a text to have this capability—that is, the ability to instil the
requisite habitus among the literate scions of the political and spiritual elite56—it
55
We can see a similar pattern in the case of Timur. Of the two major chronicles of Timur’s reigns,
the first was begun in the final four years of his 36-year reign, and the second more well-known one was
composed more than two decades after his death. See Woods, ‘The Rise of Timurid Historiography’.
However, Timur’s ‘epic’ legend had already developed by then. For example, when Ibn Khaldun met
him in 1401, he praised Timur as a Lord of Conjunction, equal to Alexander, and a conqueror blessed
by the planets. See Ibn Khaldun and Fischel, Ibn Khaldun and Tamerlane, pp. 35–36.
56
The habitus forming qualities of such texts is discussed in al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, pp. 89, 114.
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was necessary that its author or protagonist be famous enough to be worthy of
admiration and emulation. The social memory—preserved and transmitted via epics
and poetry—surrounding the icon of a prose text was a far more accurate index
of the work’s cultural effect than its authenticity or literary quality.57 And what if
the reputation of the icon had morphed over time? Then the text needed to evolve
to reflect this change. Typically, the epic and oral traditions had a temporal and
cultural priority over court histories. The former exerted a force upon the latter,
stretching and straining the official accounts.
Did not something similar occur in the case of the Baburnama? Babur’s career
followed a trajectory opposite to that of Shah Isma‘il. The Timurid had very
little success early on, reversing the trend only late in life. Throughout much
of the writing of his memoir, he was an inconsequential and dominionless
prince—one who even had to become the devotee of Shah Isma‘il. This very ‘unepic’ life is reflected in Babur’s frank, personal and fractured chronicle, which
he barely had a chance to refashion or restore in the four years between his
conquest of Hindustan and before his death. But soon thereafter, especially with
the success of his descendants, he began to transform into a key figure of a thriving dynastic realm. After India, Babur’s deeds had outstripped his chronicles. The
marvellous dreams added to Babur’s book, then, appear to be a remedy that was
meant not to enhance Babur’s historical repute but to help the Baburnama keep
up with it.
Babur’s Predicament: Charismatic Selves versus Confessional Texts
Would Babur have made or approved of such a ‘miraculous’ update to his text? More
broadly, would he have engaged in such ‘deviant’ schemes as those of Kamaluddin
or adopted the ‘heretical’ worldview of Shah Isma‘il? At first glance, there seems to
be little in the Baburnama to support this view and a great deal more that points in
the other direction, toward Babur’s commitment to Islamic juristic norms, toward
his rhetorical zeal for holy war (ghaza) and toward his desire to ritually emulate the
Prophet of Islam—all of which were expected from a good Muslim.58 But being a
good Muslim was not the same thing as becoming a good king. This point is worth
emphasising. To become an independent sovereign, an ambitious prince had to
set himself apart from ordinary men; he had to display a mark of being divinely
chosen. Babur faced the dilemma of most other would-be sovereigns: to become
sacred and cultivate a charismatic aura—that is, transform into an exceptional being
with ‘two bodies’ and ‘the royal touch’—it was necessary to engage with symbols
and practices that were, from a doctrinal and ‘routinised’ perspective, highly
57
A good case study of such a phenomenon exists for the North Indian warrior saint Ghazi Miyan.
See Amin, ‘On Retelling the Muslim Conquest of North India’.
58
Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam, pp. 15–37; Bodrogligeti, ‘Babur Shah’s
Chagatay Version of the Risala-i Validiya; Dale, The Garden of the Eight Paradises, pp. 168–77.
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deviant.59 Whatever Babur’s personal likes and dislikes, to harness charisma—and
to compete with established sovereigns like Shah Isma‘il—he too had to engage
with men like Kamaluddin and make use of their cosmological knowledge in the
practice and performance of kingship. But this charismatic process, by its nature,
could not be expressed openly in a confessional text such as the Baburnama; either
it could be referred to negatively, by denouncing another’s participation in it, or it
could be acknowledged obliquely and quietly in one’s own case.
For instance, take an episode in the Baburnama on the eve of a momentous battle
in India. As Babur and his army were about to face the powerful forces of the Indian
ruler Rana Sanga, an influential astrologer named Muhammad Sharif arrived from
Iran.60 Although an old servant and courtier of Babur, Muhammad Sharif offered
nothing but the darkest of forecasts: the planet Mars was in an inauspicious position, a sure omen for Timurid defeat. As fear spread among the Timurid soldiers
and morale began to flag, Babur resorted to ritual countermeasures. He ordered
the construction of a charitable building and the digging of a step well; he announced
the repeal of Mongol (un-Islamic) taxes; and, most crucially, he publicly pledged
to forever give up wine. As these efforts paid off, he managed to rally his men
and defeat the enemy. In the aftermath, however, Babur did something surprising;
he did not punish Muhammad Sharif. Although in his diary he cursed the astrologer
and called him ‘heathenish’ (kafirvash), he also admitted sending him away with
a handsome reward. In short, at a critical moment in his sovereign career, Babur
responded ritually to—and treated with patience and great generosity—a courtier
who wielded a form of knowledge similar to that of Kamaluddin.
Babur repeated this behaviour in his dealings with the Shattaris of Gwalior,
charismatic Sufi saints famous for their mastery over the planets and experts in
yogic forms of power.61 Made in India during the last two years of Babur’s life,
the Shattari–Timurid alliance barely received a mention in Babur’s memoir. He
noted a month or so before his death in the very last and incomplete entry—the last
crack in the Baburnama—that he had granted the request of Muhammad Ghaws
Shattari, a ‘powerful spiritual (‘aziz) man’, to settle a political matter in the region
of Gwalior.62 The Shattari Sufi had first ingratiated himself with the new ruler of
Hindustan two years earlier, when he helped the Timurids take a fortress in Gwalior.
These early Shattari efforts to ally with Babur paid off, much to the chagrin of
the Naqshbandi Sufis. Muhammad Ghaws and his brother enjoyed high status at the
court of Babur’s son, Humayun, who made extensive use of the Shattari technique
59
For a comparative and theoretical discussion on the charisma of monarchs, see Geertz, ‘Centers,
Kings, and Charisma’.
60
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 379.
61
The Shattaris were an important Sufi order in North India at the time of Babur and Humayun.
For a survey of the literature on the Shattaris, see Muqtadir, ‘Muhammad Ghawth Gwaliyari’; Nizami,
‘Shattariyya’; Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, pp. 2: 151–73.
62
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 461. Babur et al., Baburnama (polyglot), p. 807.
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for ‘calling upon the [Divine] names’ (da‘wat-i ismha) to harness the powers of the
stars. Not surprisingly, the Naqshbandis depicted the Shattaris as magicians and
fake Sufis in the same way as Babur had described Kamaluddin as a pseudo-mystic.
Indeed, there was much in common between the Shattaris and Kamaluddin, the
latter a master of divination ( jafr) and the former renowned for yogic and astral
magic. So when Babur praised Muhammad Ghaws’ spiritual credentials, he must
have known the deeply ‘heretical’ foundations on which they rested: in the year
1526, when the Timurid had made his foray into Hindustan, the Shattari Sufi had
allegedly made a celestial journey, prophet-like, to the throne of God.63
Why did Babur find the wayward spiritual assertions of men like Kamaluddin
and Shah Isma‘il distasteful but not the occult pretentions of Muhammad Sharif
and the deviant spiritual reputation of the Shattari shaykhs? The answer has to
do with the change in Babur’s sovereign status between 1507 and 1528. When
Kamaluddin had demonstrated his metaphysical prowess in Herat, Babur was not
the object of the former’s ritual attentions. He was still a struggling prince, making
a place for himself in Kabul after being hounded out of Transoxania by the Uzbeks.
Similarly, when in 1510 Babur entered Shah Isma‘il’s service, he had to put on the
red hat of the Safavid devotee. But two decades later, when he had the important
encounters with the Iranian astrologer and the Indian saint, Babur was no longer a
pillaging warlord and prince-for-hire. As the new master of Delhi, he was a major
sovereign in the making. This shift in status made Babur, increasingly, a centre of
ritual attention and a focus of cosmological knowledge. The Timurid sovereign
had to acknowledge and respond accordingly; he had to reciprocate ritually and
expose his ‘self’ for charismatic engagement.
Moving from Babur to the Baburnama—from the world of selves to the world
of texts—we can imagine a similar cultural logic behind Babur’s ‘spurious’ dream.
When, in 1500, the stripling and inconsequential Babur had needed the Naqshbandis’
assistance in taking Samarqand, he had received only a lukewarm response from
their leader Khwaja Yahya and no material assistance. But after Babur became the
emperor of Hindustan, Khwaja Ahrar—the deceased but spiritually active doyen of
the Naqshbandis—had ‘no choice’ but to intervene in the Baburnama and support
the sovereignty of the successful heir of Timur. By this time, Khwaja Ahrar’s living
descendants had also started taking an interest in Babur’s book. In 1528, Khwaja
Kalan, a prominent Naqshbandi Sufi and a grandson of the above mentioned Khwaja
Yahya, requested the Baburnama.64 Babur promptly sent a copy of his unfinished
text from India to Central Asia. Was the miraculous dream appended to this early
incomplete copy of the Baburnama? We may never know for certain. We do know,
however, that the value and meaning of the Babur’s text had begun to change with
Babur’s successful performance of sovereignty—even in the eyes of Sufi saints.
63
64
Kugle, ‘Heaven’s Witness’.
Babur and Thackston, Baburnama, p. 438.
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Akbar: An Epic of a Life
Safavid and Timurid political and cultural imaginations remained intertwined
over the sixteenth century even as the two dynasties established separate imperial
realms in Iran and India respectively. Just as the Safavids developed a style of
kingship from Timurid models, the Timurids saw much of value in Safavid modes
of sovereignty. There were many opportunities and reasons for this cross-pollination. Babur’s Safavid interlude has already been mentioned. His son, Humayun
(d. 1556), also came under the shadow of the Safavids when he sought refuge in Iran
after losing his throne to the Sur Afghans; he too had to don the red Safavid ‘taj’.65
The lives of the first two Timurids of India were certainly shaped by their direct
interaction with the Safavids. But when seen in comparative terms, the figure most
akin to Shah Isma‘il among the descendants of Babur in India was his grandson,
Akbar (r. 1556–1605), who laid the administrative and ideological foundations of
the Timurids’ Indian empire.
Both Shah Isma‘il and Akbar came to the throne at the young age of 12 or 13.
Both of them enjoyed rapid military successes early on. Most significantly, both
sovereigns used a messianic and saintly idiom to enunciate their sovereign selves.
Since Akbar’s career followed that of Shah Isma‘il’s by about half a century, it is
not surprising that contemporary observers remarked on the similarity between the
two and, indeed, charged Akbar with mimicry of the Safavid’s messianic project.
Thus Abdul Qadir Bada’uni, a disgruntled courtier of Akbar, recorded in his secret
chronicles: ‘Some shameless and ill-starred wretches also asked His Majesty [Akbar]
why, since a thousand years from the Hijrah were passed, he did not bring forward,
like [the Safavid] Shah Isma‘il the First, some convincing proof (burhan)’.66 The
‘proof’ implied here was that of messianic status of the saviour expected to arrive at
the end of a thousand years of Islam. The year of Bada’uni’s report, 990 AH (1582),
was when a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter had occurred, implying a grand change
in world affairs. And it was at this moment of time, tense with messianic expectation,
that Akbar promulgated his imperial order of discipleship (muridi).
Officially, this was an imperial institution in which officers and noblemen from
all religious communities and sects in the realm were encouraged to enrol in order to
demonstrate their devotion to the emperor above and beyond their own life, wealth,
religion and honour.67 Informally, however, it became famous as the controversial
Divine Religion (Din-i Ilahi)—controversial because Akbar’s enemies accused
him of abjuring Islam and attempting to replace it with his own sacred order.68
65
Jawhar Aftabchi, ‘Tadhkiratu ’l-Waqiat’, p. 122. For a discussion of this incidence, see Moin, The
Millennial Sovereign, pp. 125–27.
66
Bada’uni et al., Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, p. 2: 323. Bada’uni, Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, p. 2: 312.
67
Richards, ‘The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir’.
68
The controversy is discussed in detail in Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims
in Akbar’s Reign. For a new and revised perspective, see Moin, The Millennial Sovereign.
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The emperor denied this, but continued with the practice of accepting disciples.
His successor Jahangir and other Mughal princes also set up similar devotional
cults.69 Instead of recounting the details of this well-known episode, and resolving
the scholarly debates on it, the remainder of this article will shed new light on the
matter by examining the development of the emperor’s sovereign self from the
lens of literature and art produced at his court.
As a young sovereign, the first item Akbar commissioned his artists and writers
to produce was the adventurous tale of Amir Hamza.70 In history, Hamza was an
uncle and ‘milk-brother’ of the Prophet. Known for his bravery, he met a warrior’s
end in the battle of Uhud (625), the second one fought in the Prophet’s life. In
his epic manifestation, however, Hamza is born in Arabia with the horoscope of
a great sovereign. That day, the emperor of Iran is told by astrologers of the birth
of a boy who would bring his dominion to an end. The Persian king orders all
suspected male infants to be slaughtered. Hamza survives, however, and fulfils his
destiny by riding out of Arabia on a magical horse to battle sorcerers, dragons and
other monsters—and also to spread the order of Islam. In the end he does return
to Arabia, in apparent conformity with conventional historical time, to die a gory
death in the battle of Uhud.
The Mughal version of Hamza’s story included 1400 folios of painting, each
approximately two feet high and many with prose text on the reverse. Without
doubt it was and remains to this day the most elaborate and costly manuscript of
its kind ever produced.
Reportedly, Akbar so loved and absorbed the story of Hamza that he took to
narrating it himself in the style of a professional storyteller. The brave hero of the
Hamza story may have provided an inspiration for the exploits and adventures of
Akbar’s reckless teenage years when, for instance, he was known to jump on the
back of rampaging elephants much to the distress of his regents and ministers.71 It
is significant that the production of the Hamzanama coincided with the period of
Akbar’s religious outlook most commonly labelled as conservative, that is, orthodox Sunni. While the epic of Hamza does not by any means satisfy an ‘orthodox’
Islamic sensibility, it nevertheless has an unmistakably ‘Sunni’ tinge to it.
The Sunni dimension of Hamza’s tale is reflected in its neglect of the Prophet’s
cousin Ali—the quintessential chivalrous youth of early Islam, especially in
Iran. To make matters worse, Hamza is aided in his adventures by his childhood
companion Umar Umayya whose two-part name conflates the second caliph
Umar and the Umayyad dynasty, both considered arch-rivals of Ali and his descendants. These elements in the epic of Hamza underscore its distance from the Alid
69
That Jahangir had started enrolling courtiers as disciples while still a prince can be seen in an early
edict reproduced in Jalaluddin, ‘Sultan Salim (Jahangir) as a Rebel King’.
70
Seyller and Thackston, The Adventures of Hamza.
71
Ibid., p. 31.
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version of the past. No wonder that the famous Timurid era Sufi master and Alid
‘messiah’ Nurbakhsh (d. 1464) had complained about the legend of Hamza; he saw
it as part of a conspiracy by the Abbasids, a dynasty well-known for its treachery
towards the Alids, to take away from the bravery of Ali.72 As if in response to such
grievances, Ali’s no less fantastical adventures related in the Khawarnama were
commissioned and illustrated by his aristocratic supporters in Iran and India.73 The
point is that these adventure tales, no matter how legendary or temporally elastic,
could also satisfy a factional outlook or devotional stance. Moreover, besides
providing entertainment and enthusiasm, they drew upon collective creativity and
imagination to serve up alternative and parallel views of the past. Indeed in certain
cases these popular tales addressed large puzzles of historical change about which
the learned chronicle tradition had little to say.74
For instance, the Mughal version of the Hamza’s heroic tale was also a ‘historical’ explanation for the grand change of order in Iran from that of Zoroastrianism
to Islam. In it, the Muslim hero’s chief rivals included the ‘sorcerer’ Zoroaster
(Zardusht) and the leader of the ‘fire-worshippers’ Malik Iraj Nawjawan, who is
even depicted in one of the Mughal Hamzanama images as worshipping the sun.75
In this version of the Iranian past, the cause of change was Hamza, who wins the
battle for Islam in Iran and in the process even smashes a Zoroastrian temple or two.
Learned scholars were wont to complain that this view of Hamza’s importance is
not historically accurate but such protests were of little significance to the soldiers
who heard these stories around the campfire the night before battle.76 But, importantly, Hamza’s domination of Iran by bravery and war was only one telling of the
past. In alternative epic narratives, especially Alid ones in Iran, the story could also
conclude on a note of conciliation and collaboration. For instance, in the popular
tale of Abu Muslim, whose campaign for Alid sovereignty in eighth-century Iran
had made him a revered and popular hero of the storytelling tradition, the Iranian
past merges with the Islamic present when marriage ties bring together Alid heroes
and Persian converts from Zoroastrianism.77 In effect, when human agents were
needed to enact the divine plans of history in all their variety, the epics provided
ready protagonists to play the necessary roles. Also, we must keep in mind that
Bashir, ‘The Risalat al-Huda of Muhmammad Nurbakhsh (d. 869/1464)’, p. 119.
Husam al-Din, ‘Khawarnama’; Rustami, ‘Khawarnama Dakkani’. For a description, see Ethe,
Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, p. 1: 560–62.
74
The argument that the oral epic tradition is a key to understanding a people’s self-conception of
history and the process by which their community adopted Islam has been made in the case of Turkic
Central Asia by DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde. For a similar argument
for early modern Iran, see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, pp. 121–294.
75
Seyller and Thackston, Adventures of Hamza, p. 250.
76
See, for example, the complaints of the scholar and jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) against Turkmen
tribes who believed, erroneously, that Hamza had won all the major battles for Islam after the Prophet’s
death. Ibn Taymiyya, Minhaj al-Sunnah al-Nabawiyya fi Naqd Kalam al-Sh‘ia wa al-Qadariyya, p. 4: 12.
77
Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, pp. 131–38.
72
73
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this type of ‘history’ preserved in heroic narratives and romances circulated far
more broadly in sixteenth-century Iran and India than that of the formal chronicle
tradition.
In this light, it is important to see how Akbar’s interest in the epic and storytelling tradition expanded as his realm grew. In the first three decades of his reign,
major regions of north India were brought under Mughal suzerainty: Malwa (1562),
the Rajput states (1561–69), Gujarat (1573), Bengal (1576), Kabul (1585) and
Kashmir (1586). During this time, the emperor campaigned furiously, led many
battles personally and made dozens of marriage alliances with Indian kingdoms.
In an attempt to consolidate his gains administratively, in 1574 he launched the
mansabdari initiative, an administrative measure that offered both wealth and status
to attract and incorporate an extremely diverse class of noblemen, landowners and
itinerant warriors from all over India, Iran and Turkic Central Asia. In parallel,
Akbar launched an effort at cultural consolidation, by keeping his court writers
and artists busy with the production of Persianate and Indic epics, romances and
morality tales: Hamzanama (1562–77), Tutinama (c. 1560), Tilasm and Zodiac (c.
1565), Deval Devi Khizr Khan (1567–68), Anwar-i Suhayli (1570), Darabnama
(c. 1580), Gulistan-i Sadi (1581), Ramayana (in Persian,1584–89) and Razmnama
(Mahabharata in Persian, c. 1582–86). Besides these extant works, we also know
that there were other texts like the Shahnama and Abu Muslimnama that were
produced, read and performed at court. It was only toward the end of this stream
of conquest and cultural production that the attention of the court turned to more
historical works, those celebrating the emperor’s ancestors—Timurnama (c. 1584),
Baburnama (c. 1589), Tarikh-i Alfi (c. 1592-1594) and Jami‘ al-Tawarikh (c.
1596)—and those describing the achievements of the emperor himself—Akbarnama (1589–1598 and 1604).78 In Akbar’s life, the epics and heroic tales preceded
histories and, as we shall see, came to shape the emperor’s historical persona.
It was as if Akbar spent the first three decades of his reign absorbing the lore of
his expansive and expanding realm, the lives and adventures of all its inspirational
heroes and the wisdom of its past sovereigns. Moreover, instead of deciding upon
one version of the past or one ideal of humanity, he listened to and imbibed them
all. This is an important insight for it shows that the emperor’s patronage of these
diverse epics parallels the much vaunted broadening of Akbar’s ‘religious’ and
‘philosophical’ views as evidenced by the debates and discussions in the ‘House
of Worship’ (‘Ibadat Khana). The emperor began organising these disputations
in 1575, in which Brahmans, Yogis, Zoroastrians, Jesuits and all manner of Sufis
and Muslim scholars were invited to defend the truth of their sacred traditions.
Bada’uni, the same courtier who had complained secretly about the emperor’s
78
This list of illustrated texts produced at the Mughal court is based on Beach, The Imperial Image,
pp. 214–28. It is not exhautive, for it includes neither later reproductions of these texts and nor the
divans of Persian poetry.
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attempts to copy Safavid messianic methods, described these debates with deep
disgust because he saw them as a way for the emperor to ridicule and humiliate
Sunni Islam. Moreover, in his condemnation, the embittered courtier also railed
against Akbar’s patronage of the epics:
When he had had the Shahnamah, and the story of Amir Hamzah, in seventeen
volumes transcribed in fifteen years, and had spent much gold in illuminating
it, he also heard the story of Abu Muslim, and the Jami‘al-Hikayat, repeated…
But now he ordered those Hindu books, which holy and staid sages had written, and were all clear and convincing proofs, and which were the very pivot
on which all their religion, and faith, and holiness turned, to be translated from
the Indian into the Persian language, and thought to himself, ‘Why should I not
have them done in my name? For they are by no means trite, but quite fresh,
and they will produce all kinds of fruits of felicity both temporal and spiritual,
and will be the cause of circumstance and pomp, and will ensure an abundance
of children and wealth, as is written in the preface of these books.’ Accordingly
he became much interested in the work, and having assembled some learned
Hindus, he gave then directions to write an explanation of the Mahabharata,
and for several nights he himself devoted his attention to explaining the meaning to Naqib Khan, so that the Khan might sketch out the gist of it in Persian.79
Bada’uni’s reports underscore the emperor’s serious engagement with the epics
and sacred stories of all his diverse subjects. Despite their varying origins, these
narratives knit together comparable themes of sovereignty. For example, much as
the ‘Zoroastrian’ Shahnama consisted of cycles of miraculously conceived rulers
who wrought a righteous order upon the world, the ‘Hindu’ Ramayana also told
of the descent of divinity to earth in the form of a king, Rama, who fights evil and
inaugurates a long cycle of peace and justice. Much as the Shahnama inspired rulers in Iran and Central Asia, the life of Rama too served as an inspirational model
of ‘Hindu’ kingship, enabling Indian rajas to embody a saviour ethos as needed.80
What is more, the ‘time’ in which these Iranian and Indian stories unfolded was
much longer and cyclical than the linear biblical temporality of the Islamic chronicle
tradition. As such, the epic mode afforded a great deal more cultural flexibility,
allowing for multiple cycles of the past to exist and enabling a variety of heroes
and saviours to bring—again and again—order and justice to the world. Even
the unhappy Bada’uni, who had been tasked by Akbar with the translation of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata into Persian, found himself reflecting upon this
conundrum in his screed against the emperor:
And the opinion of this set of people [Brahmans] is that the world is very
79
80
Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, p. 2: 320; Bada’uni et al., Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, p. 2: 329.
Pollock, ‘Ramayana and Political Imagination in India’.
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old, and that no age has been devoid of the human race, and that from that event
100 thousand thousand years have passed. And yet for all that they make no
mention of Adam whose creation took place only 7000 years ago. Hence it is
evident that these events [of the Ramayana] are not true at all, and are nothing
but pure invention, and simple imagination, like the Shahnamah, and the stories
of Amir Hamzah, or else it must have happened in the time of the dominion of
the beasts and the jinns—but God alone knows the truth of the matter.81
Bada’uni’s criticisms against cyclical time of the Indian and Iranian epics, which
are mixed up with his criticisms of Akbar’s religious pursuits, are not to be taken
too seriously. Because elsewhere in his writings, where he defends the messianic
claims of his own favourite Sufi saints, he provides a detailed explanation for how
such temporal phenomena were indeed possible.82 He quotes the famous Sufi theorist
Ibn al-‘Arabi to explain how there could have been multiple ‘Adams’, each in a
different era of time; and how the divine soul could recycle through different eras
by overpowering and manifesting itself in human bodies, explaining the miraculous
return to earth of saints and messiahs. For all of Bada’uni’s alleged ‘orthodoxy’ he
subscribed to the same view of time that sustained Shah Isma‘il’s assertion of messianic sovereignty. What needs to be taken seriously, thus, are Bada’uni’s reports
that when Akbar inaugurated his spiritual order of devotees at the turn of the Islamic
millennium, he was proclaimed as the manifestation of past sovereigns, much as
Shah Isma‘il had.83 It was upon his manifestation as a truly ‘epic’ figure—another
Ali and another Rama—that Akbar’s ‘history’ could be written.
Akbarnama: The History of a Saint–King
Much like the opening scene of the Hamzanama, the chronicles of Akbar, the
Akbarnama, begin with a detailed discussion of the horoscope of the emperor,
drawn and evaluated by Indian as well as Iranian experts according to established
Indic and Greek theories.84 The result of all these efforts was to reveal what had
made Akbar’s father, Humayun, dance in circles ecstatically upon his son’s birth:
that the emperor’s horoscope was in ‘sundry degrees’ more perfect than even that
of his ancestor Timur the Lord of Conjunction.85 Akbar’s chronicle tells us that
this spectacular horoscope was to be expected as the emperor had been conceived
Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, p. 2: 337; Bada’uni et al., Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, p. 2: 347.
See his Najat al-Rashid, extracted and translated in Moin, ‘Challenging the Mughal Emperor’.
83
According to Bada’uni, Akbar was declared a manifestation of Rama by Hindus and of Ali by
Iranian Alid groups like the Nuqtavis. Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, pp. 2: 295, 326. Bada’uni et
al., Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, pp. 2: 287, 336.
84
See Orthmann, ‘Circular Motions: Private Pleasure and Public Prognostication in the Nativities
of the Mughal Emperor Akbar’.
85
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, p. 1–2: 111; Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak,
The Akbarnamah, p. 1: 42.
81
82
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originally when a divine light had entered the Mongol princess Alanquva. His
essence then passed through the ages, as marked by the recurring conjunction
of planets, through the purest of wombs, taking the form of other sacred bodies
until it was born as Akbar.86 The Mughal sovereign, in other words, was not only
conceived by divinity but was also the spiritual and bodily sum of many past
sovereign lives. However, the chronicle continues, this fact was apparent only to
a few at Akbar’s birth and remained so throughout his youth and early adulthood.
For in these early years the Mughal emperor had chosen to hide his true potential,
choosing to remain ‘under a veil’.87
The plot of Akbar’s early life spent as if under a veil resembles that of a great
saint or would-be messiah who spends his early years largely unrecognised as one.
Typically, in this initial stage of life the promised saviour remained hidden, waiting
for the right moment to reveal himself in a great act of emergence or manifestation
(khuruj). Indeed, the early life of Shah Isma‘il, the epitome of the warrior–saint,
was described in such a way in both its historical and epic versions.88
As a child the Safavid founder had found refuge in Gilan after his enemies
killed his father, Shaykh Haydar, a militant Sufi master. The fragile but expectant
mood of this moment was captured poignantly in Shah Isma‘il’s personalised epic
mentioned earlier, the Shahnama-i Isma‘il. The versified epic described the hidden
Isma‘il last moments behind the ‘veil’ in the form of a long epistolary dialogue
between him and his protector in which the young shah explains his decision to
emerge and manifest himself to the world.89 Later Safavid chronicles quoted these
very verses to describe the transformative moment of their leader.90 Even later
‘legendary’ histories in Persian related Shah Isma‘il’s messianic potential more
explicitly: as Shah Isma‘il leaves Gilan under protection, his companions have
visions of his divine anointment and decide to follow him as he ‘comes out’ (khuruj)
to fight and overpower his enemies. Finally, in the seventeenth-century Turkish
romance tradition, the young ‘lover’ spends his childhood underground, in a secret
bunker that only has one small window to let light in. There he studies and prepares
for his future until he breaks the window to emerge into the world. In short, no
matter what the genre, the instant of emergence, manifestation, or unveiling was
treated as pivotal in all the narratives about Shah Isma‘il. Indeed, it became a part
of his lore; a contemporary Italian traveller reported that the Safavid sovereign was
86
I have modified the translation from Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama,
p. 1–2: 45; Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak, The Akbarnamah, p. 1: 12.
87
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, pp. 3: 313, 316. Abu al-Fazl ibn
Mubarak, The Akbarnamah, pp. 3: 268, 270.
88
The khuruj episode of Shah Ismail’s life in various genres are discussed in Gallagher, ‘The
Transformation of Shah Ismail Safevi in the Turkish Hikâye’, pp. 188–90.
89
Wood, ‘Shahnama-i Isma‘il’, p. 72.
90
Morton, ‘Early Years of Shah Isma‘il’, p. 38.
91
It was Giovanni Rota au Doge, writing in 1504 or 1505 who made this report. Quoted in Aubin,
‘L’Avenement des Safavides’, p. 39.
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adored by his soldiers as a prophet and kept his face covered and veiled.91
In contrast to Shah Isma‘il, Akbar’s ‘unveiling’ occurred much later in life and
with much greater deliberation. It was enacted with great preparation at the moment
of the Islamic millennium as heralded by a Saturn–Jupiter conjunction in 1582.
By this time, the emperor had concluded his major conquests and made his
dominions secure. He had held religious discussions between the luminaries of
all the sacred traditions in his realm. Moreover, he had heard, seen and performed
the epics and legends of his lands. It was then that the emperor was revealed as
the Perfect Man, the saint of the age, who would formally accept his subjects as
devotees (murids).
The Akbarnama, completed almost a decade after its protagonist’s
‘unveiling’ described the whole affair in a tone of highly stylised diffidence.92 Akbar,
it stated, was reluctant to manifest his full spiritual potential. Initially, he displayed
it only in degrees, as circumstances demanded it and as his nobles, officers, court
scholars and common subjects clamoured for him to do so. Then he finally gave
into their demands. First he declared himself the supreme authority in all doctrinal
matters—the chief mujtahid (jurisconsult) of the realm. Even so, he maintained his
veil to a large degree, because the status of a jurisconsult was still less than that of
a saint.93 Later, when the time was right, he took the final step and revealed himself
fully as the ultimate holy man, the spiritual guide of the realm. However, when
the emperor’s actions generated misunderstanding and controversy, he moved to
dispel these. For instance, he abandoned certain rituals in public, such as the full
prostration (sijdah) before the sovereign, but allowed them in private.94
The thematic affinity between Shah Isma‘il’s unveiling and Akbar’s manifestation as the saviour was not a coincidence. Reminders of Shah Isma‘il’s miraculous
life and messianic success were readily available at the Mughal court. For instance,
there was Shaykh ‘Arif-i Husayni, a descendant of the Safavid founder, who went
by the moniker ‘Shah’ and was renowned for his miracles and thaumaturgy.95
According to Bada’uni, he could make gold out of burning paper, walk out of locked
rooms and bend time to his will. Moreover, the enigmatic Shaykh ‘Arif always
went around with his face veiled, refusing to uncover it for anyone. When Akbar
made one of his courtiers pester and cajole the Shah to drop his veil, he finally
revealed his face, but also cursed the offending man to die within a fortnight. The
92
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, pp. 3: 313, 316. Abu al-Fazl ibn
Mubarak, The Akbarnamah, pp. 3: 268, 270.
93
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, p. 3: 315. Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak,
The Akbarnamah, p. 3: 269.
94
This injunction appears in the ‘Regulations Regarding the Kornish and Taslim’ in Abu al-Fazl
ibn Mubarak et al., The A’in-i Akbari, p. 156. For the Persian, see Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak, A’in-i
Akbari, p. 142.
95
Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, pp. 3: 59–61; Bada’uni et al., Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh,
pp. 3: 98–101.
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curse, Bada’uni tells us, killed the courtier in exactly two weeks. Akbar was so
enthralled by the mysterious descendant of Shah Isma‘il that he exclaimed, ‘Shah,
either become like me, or make me like yourself.’
Akbar achieved his ambition to become like Shah Isma‘il. In fact, he achieved
much more; unlike the Safavid shah’s decade of glory, Akbar enjoyed a flourishing and victorious reign lasting more than half a century. For this reason, perhaps,
Akbar’s post-millennial chronicles offer a contrast to the lovelorn post-messianic
romances of Shah Isma‘il.96 At the time that Shah Isma‘il’s messianic reputation
was mellowing, Akbar’s was reaching its peak. As a rich telling of Akbar’s unveiling, the Akbarnama gives a full account of the emperor’s miracles. As an infant,
we are told, Akbar speaks in the cradle. As he grows, his clairvoyance and spiritual
potential become apparent. Whatever he draws or paints comes true. He experiences divine rapture. He gains perfect knowledge. Wild animals submit to his will.
All humanity clamours for his love. The Akbarnama’s list of its icon’s qualities as
a saint and holy man is long.97 But Akbar was not just an ideal Sufi saint; he was
also akin to the battle-hardened heroes of the epics. He was a sovereign of both the
material and spiritual realms. In this sense, his universalism was of the epic and
storytelling tradition. This connection was not merely rhetorical but also spilled
over into the domain of practice and performance. Indeed, some of the key symbols
and practices of Akbar’s new order of discipleship seem to have been inspired by
these timeless tales. A telling example is that of solar veneration.
When Akbar rolled out his millennial order in the 1582, the sun became a central
emblem of Mughal court rituals. All imperial disciples had to pledge reverence to
the ‘His Holiness the Great Light’ (Hazrat Nayyir-i ‘Azam). Akbar’s court sages
explained this practice as one originally taught to mankind by the Thrice Great
Hermes, an antediluvian prophet—Enoch in the Biblical tradition and Idris in the
Quran.98 It was widely held that the teachings of Hermes were discovered and
handed down by such intellectual luminaries of Islam as the great astrologer Abu
Ma‘shar al-Balkhi (d. 886) and the founder of the Illuminationist school of philosophy, Suhrawardi al-Maqtul (d. 1191).99 This may be so, but the question is how
Akbar—an unlettered prince who loved to work with his hands and to act out scenes
from the Hamzanama—would have made sense of the practice of solar veneration.
First, it must be noted that Akbar was not the first to begin this practice. His
Quoted in Gallagher, ‘The Transformation of Shah Ismail Safevi in the Turkish Hikâye’, p. 191.
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, pp. 1–2: 508–17. Abu al-Fazl ibn
Mubarak, The Akbarnamah, p. 1: 347–54.
98
Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak and Beveridge, The Akbar Nama, p. 1–2: 143; Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak,
The Akbarnamah, p. 1: 55.
99
For a history of Hermes in Muslim intellectual traditions, see Van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes. For
the significance of Hermes in Suhrawardi’s Illuminationist philosophy see Walbridge, The Wisdom of
the Mystic East. For a sense of how Illuminationist thought was used at the Mughal court to interpret
and appreciate even ‘Hindu’ wisdom, see Ernst, ‘Fayzi’s Illuminatinionist Interpretation of Vedanta’.
96
97
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father Humayun had modelled his court on astrological principles, giving a prime
role to the sun, the ‘planet of kings’.100 But Humayun’s elaborate court ceremonies
came to nought in 1540 when Sher Shah Suri drove him out of India into a long and
impoverished exile. Akbar was born in 1542, while Humayun was on the run. There
is little evidence that Humayun was able to revive his astrological ceremonies in
Delhi, which he managed to recapture only a year before he died. Also, we know
that Akbar did not resume solar veneration immediately after his father’s death. He
waited more than two decades to do so. What happened during this time?
If we take the consumption of epics and heroic romances as a guide to the truant
young emperor’s cultural education and changing tastes, we can attempt to outline
an answer. It is plausible that the practice of solar veneration first caught Akbar’s
eye in the theatrical tale of his childhood hero Hamza. As mentioned earlier, the
sun appears in Akbar’s illustrated Hamzanama as a venerable symbol of the preIslamic Persian order. While this work was surely not the emperor’s only source of
knowledge about solar veneration—a sacred practice found in several Indic traditions—it was nonetheless Akbar’s favourite story exalting the sun as a symbol of
Persian universalism. But, one may sceptically ask, had not Hamza brought the age
of Iranian sun-worshippers to a violent end and replaced it with the order of Arab
Islam? Certainly, but that had been divine plan for the previous millennium. The
turn of the new millennium was a time for symbolic inversion and cyclical renewal.
The sun was to serve as a universal symbol once again, an emblem of Universal
Peace (sulh-i kull ), under which Akbar reinstituted an older, broader, dispensation
bringing together Persians, Turks and Indians, and their astrologers, philosophers
and mystics.101 Thus during the millennial celebrations of 1582, there was a sustained
emphasis on Firdawsi’s Shahnama (Book of Kings), the archetype epic of Iran,
which marked the era of Persian eminence with the sun .102 In the same year, Akbar
ordered a translation from Sanskrit into Persian of the Mahabharata, the greatest
of Indian epics, in which the Mughal emperor was cast as an offspring of Surya,
the sun god.103 As the Mahabharata was being produced, a group of sun-venerating
Sufis being persecuted in Safavid Iran—the Nuqtavis—came seeking refuge at
Akbar’s court in India.104 The Mughal emperor welcomed them magnanimously.
In turn, these Sufis, who believed in the imminence of a millennial cycle of Persian
dominance, declared Akbar the expected saviour of the new era. And all this took
place before the Akbarnama was composed.
As has often been noted, Akbar’s religious enthusiasm and eclecticism stands
Orthmann, ‘Court Culture and Cosmology in the Mughal Empire’.
Asher, ‘A Ray from the Sun’. Ernst, ‘Fayzi’s Illuminatinionist Interpretation of Vedanta’, p. 59.
102
Shahbazi, ‘Flags i. Of Persia’.
103
Truschke, ‘The Mughal Book of War’, p. 518.
104
On the Nuqtavis and their millennial beliefs, see Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs,
pp. xxxiv, 68–78. Bada’uni accuses the Nuqtavis of anointing Akbar as the messiah. Bada’uni et al.,
Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, p. 2: 295; Bada’uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, p. 2: 287.
100
101
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Peering through the cracks in the Baburnama / 521
in a marked contrast from the sober and level-headed outlook of his grandfather
Babur. This contrast is mainly a result of the divergent tenor of their two ‘books’.
If it is easy today to admire the refreshing frankness and openness of the halffinished Baburnama, it is equally difficult not to be repelled by the overwrought
style and idiosyncratic vocabulary of the ultra-polished Akbarnama. When feeling charitable, scholars have described the book of Akbar as epitomising the Sufi
metaphysical mode of history writing, reflecting the zeitgeist of sixteenth-century
India and Iran.105 Yet there is no getting away from the feeling that one is reading
a narrative so full of miracles and wonders of its infallible icon that it is, to borrow
Beveridge’s phrase, ‘too apropos and marvelous for credence’. Indeed, almost all
of the Akbarnama seems just as contrived and spurious as the ‘rejected’ dream
episode of the Baburnama. But this tenuous link of similarity also opens up a new
perspective on the relationship between Babur and his grandson. The Akbarnama
seems to belong with Babur’s dream fragment because both texts are inspired
examples of the hagiographic and epic. They both bend the rules of the chronicle
tradition in order to keep up with the social reputation of their icons. The difference
between them is but one of degree. While Babur’s accomplishments came at the
end of his life and were notable, Akbar’s achievements began early and were
beyond belief. If the Baburnama could be touched up with a dream, the Akbarnama
had to be from the start an epic tale of a Hamza-like warrior’s transformation into
the universal saint and sovereign. But then had not Akbar achieved more in life
than what Babur could even in his dreams?
Conclusion
It is difficult to separate the lives of sixteenth-century kings from the texts of their
lives. The argument above certainly was certainly not an attempt to do so. It was,
instead, an effort to highlight the process by which the two came to be intertwined
in a new mode of writing, imagining and embodying sovereignty. In order to
see this process at work, however, we must explore the larger cultural imagination
of the time sustained by a variety of literary forms, oral traditions and commemorative practices surrounding the lives of sovereigns. Besides using the conventional
historical method, which begins by taking the ‘epic’ and ‘hagiographic’ out of
the ‘historic’, we must also devise ways to examine how these different modes of
narration came together to inform sixteenth-century conceptions of the past and
present. For, as was presented here, the heroic epic and the saintly hagiography
often preceded history. Indeed, the former informed the latter by shaping the lives
of kings as well as the stories told about them. Put differently, royal chronicles were
more than a panegyric record of courtly events; these texts narrated the efforts of
kings to live up to the ideals of the epics—both in person and as memories.
Thus to develop a feel for the complex textures of the Baburnama or the Akbar105
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, p. 3: 73.
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nama requires not only finding their most authentic and factual (or marvel-free)
versions, but also coming to terms with the literary and political dynamic that helped
create the marvellousness and divergences within them. This dynamic was the coming together of sainthood and kingship, exemplified by the Timurid–Naqshbandi
alliance in Central Asia, the Safavid–Qizilbash domination of Iran and the later
Mughal–Chishti collaboration in India.106 With this context in mind, the rise of
the Safavid Shah Isma‘il appears as a major structuring moment of early Mughal
history. But this moment was not merely a ‘political’ event that impacted Mughal
sovereignty. The Sufi master’s ascendancy in Iran and Central Asia was also a grand
‘literary’ event in the way it created ripples within the cultural imagination of the
time with its oral, hagiographic and epic retellings. As such it provided an enticing
pattern for later political and literary acts performed on the Mughal stage in India.
This stage, moreover, was not limited to the secluded throne-room and audience
halls of the emperor. It encompassed a much broader social setting that included the
court and the camp, the nobility and the soldiery, the chroniclers and the storytellers. These sites of culture sustained and held together two opposing worldviews,
stemming from what Jos Gommans has termed the two social ideal-types of the
‘courtly’ Mirza/Rajput and the ‘frontier’ ghazi/sadhu—the one refined, settled and
learned and the other warlike, mobile and enthusiastic.107 However, these two types
of identity did not divide imperial society as much as they made it inclusive and
coherent. For it was often from the ranks of the frontier warrior that the refined
courtier arose to serve the emperor. The sovereign, for his part, also had to perform
a dual role. He had to embody and perform the contrasting ideals of both these
archetypes. Indeed, it would appear that sixteenth-century sovereigns had deeply
fractured selves, as did most of the nobility. The king and his men inhabited both
social roles, playing the Mirza in the palace audience hall and performing the
ghazi on the marches and battlefields. We saw this in the case of Shah Isma‘il, the
epitome of ghazidom, who taught himself how to be the ultimate Timurid Mirza.
We also saw it in the case of Akbar who presided over the scholastic discussions
of the religious elite while also nourishing a keen interest in the epics and oral
traditions of the realm. These sovereigns knew how to switch, as it were, between
being the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘savage noble’.108
However, it must be said that this dichotomous self is not easy to spot at first glance
in the literature produced at court, especially in the chronicle genre. One reason for
this may be that these courtly texts reflected the learned and abstract ethos of the
Mirza more than the performative and organic one of the ghazi. Another less evident
reason, however, may be that our own tastes are too close to that of the Mirza, making
Alam, ‘The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation’.
Gommans, Mughal Warfare, pp. 39–66.
108
Ibid., 99.
109
On this point see the discussion on ‘The Three Forms of Scholastic Fallacy’ in Bourdieu, Pascalian
Meditations, pp. 49–84.
106
107
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us less attuned to the logic of the concrete embedded in these texts.109 Boiled down
to its symbolic essence, this logic consisted of acts of juxtaposition—of the pairing
of a saint and a king, for example, or of arranging in a series both saintly and royal
‘lovers’. It was a collective effort driven by a desire to arrange or complete a pattern
of signs taken from dominant cosmologies.110 Rather than opening up abstract and
logical questions, it resolved open ones concretely and analogically. It was an aesthetic
process that completed and satisfied. In the literary domain, the epic and romance
genres were its primary products but, as we have seen, the chronicle tradition did
not remain untouched by it. In the political realm, it produced rituals of embodiment
and corporeal practices such as robing, touching, gifting and dreaming, all geared
towards the bodily reproduction and transmission of sovereign charisma, the constitutive dynamic of both kingship and sainthood. These literary and political products
have to be studied together in order to make sense of the modes of sovereignty in
sixteenth-century India and Iran. But to do so we must follow sixteenth century kings
when they stepped out of the court of the Mirza and into the camp of the ghazi, and
become fans of epic heroes and devotees of miraculous saints.
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