Babur on Hindustan — The First Mughal Emperor's Description of the Country He Had Entered

Babur's father died when a pigeon-house on the edge of the fortress ravine collapsed. Babur,

who was eleven, wrote that his father flew, with his pigeons and their house, and became a

falcon. The same year the boy became a king, of a province he could not hold. He took

Samarkand, the city he wanted most, three times, and lost it three times. He spent his youth

with no army, no city and no money.

Then, in 1526, he came down through the passes and broke the Delhi Sultanate in a single

morning at Panipat.

And then he sat down and wrote a book. Not about the war. About the birds.

This is that book. It is the description of Hindustan that Babur left in his memoir: his

verdict on the country, and then the elephant, the rhinoceros, the peacock, the parrot, the

crocodile and the river dolphin, the mango, the plantain, the flowers. He is precise,

competitive, frequently rude, and completely unable to stop noticing. He opens with the

complaint — no good horses, no good bread, no baths, no candles — and then spends thousands of

words looking anyway. The complaint is loud and short. The noticing goes on for pages.

Inside

- seven selected sections of his description of Hindustan, reproduced complete;

- the register of the creatures — all forty-one of them, each with Babur's own term

 (the elephant hāt(h)ī, the kalah-fish, the water-hog that leaps like a fish but never

 leaves the water) and a note of what he says about it;

- a chronology of Babur's life, from Fergana to Agra;

- nine Mughal paintings and drawings, each a real object, captioned in full;

- a preface, a short life, a note on the sources, and a colophon.

The edition

Designed at 5 × 8 inches in the house historical register — Young Serif, Spectral and Archivo

on a warm paper ground, with lapis and gold for the Mughal illumination. 71 pages.

The text

Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish in the 1520s. This is the English translation

of Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842–1929), first published in London in 1922 and taken

from Project Gutenberg. Beveridge died in 1929, so the translation is public domain in the

United States and in the United Kingdom and European Union. Her bracketed clarifications and

her transliteration are kept as she set them; her marginal folio references and footnotes are

removed. The seven sections printed here are a selection from his account of Hindustan, which

runs on into the country's seasons, measures and revenues. The preface, the story, the

register, the chronology and the captions are original to this edition.

You receive

- a 71-page designed PDF at 5 × 8 inches, for screen reading or printing at home;

- a reflowable EPUB, with the plates intact and the fonts embedded, for Kindle, Kobo, Apple

 Books and phone;

- DRM-free — yours to keep and move between devices.

Newly set and edited by Vishal T · @whatiamreadingtoday7