Reading the Baburnama while travelling in what was once Babur's land

At the Babur Literary Museum in Andijan, Uzbekistan, dozens of copies of the Baburnama are arrayed in glass bookcases. There are modern editions and older publications, in Tajik, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, French, English, and other translations. Some are ornately bound; others are paperbacks in various degrees of dereliction. Inside my backpack resides a version for our times — a Kindle copy of the acclaimed 1922 translation by Annette Susannah Beveridge, this edition published by Rupa Publications in 2017.

I had ordered it in preparation for the trip to Uzbekistan, and have been reading it in bits and pieces. The Baburnama is part personal journal, part historical chronicle, and part record of observed minutiae. It is unique in the annals of literature — if for nothing else, for being the first autobiography in the Islamic world. It begins with a simple statement of a momentous event: “In the month of Ramadan of the year 899 and in the twelfth year of my age, I became ruler in the country of Farghana.”

Fergana, as it is spelt now, is at the fag end of our itinerary, which has meandered through the ancient Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, with transit stops in Tashkent. The Fergana Valley is a bowl surrounded by mountains, made fertile by the waters that flow down from them. “[Farghana] is a small country ... [It] has seven separate townships... Of those on the south, one is Andijan. It has a central position and is capital of the Farghana country. It produces much grain, fruits in abundance, excellent grapes and melons…”

Entrance to the subterranean quadrant

Babur’s love for his country’s produce — especially the fruit of the region — finds expression throughout his memoirs. At one point late in the narrative, when he has fled the internecine wars in his homeland and set up a nascent empire in “Hindostan” in the 1520s, he writes: “How should a person forget the pleasant things of [one’s own country]?... How should he banish from his mind the … melons and grapes? … a melon was brought to me; to cut and eat it affected me strangely; I was all tears!”

I can see his point. I am not a big fan of fruits myself, but in Uzbekistan, I happily gorged on the watermelon, musk melon, pomegranate, and grapes. Their sweet, voluptuous juiciness would seduce the most strident fructophobe. 

Baburnama editions at the museum in Andijan. Photo: Srijit Kumar

While the journal, like Babur’s life, commences in Andijan, Samarkand finds extensive mention through the memoirs. It was the capital of the Timurid dynasty, and fought for by all the rulers of the region. Babur took and lost the city twice, before moving to Kabul in 1504, and thence to Delhi and Agra. “Few towns in the whole habitable world are so pleasant as Samarkand… In the town and suburbs of Samarkand are many fine buildings and gardens of Timur Beg and Aulugh Beg Mirza.”

He goes on to describe some of Timur’s monumental creations. While much of what he describes fell to the ravages of time, renovation projects begun by the Russians in the 1960s and carried forward by the independent republic since 1991 have resulted in stunningly beautiful gates, mosques, madrassahs-turned-crafts centres, and bazaars and public spaces that are the centrepiece of Uzbekistan’s touristic oeuvre. 

The Meros Paper Factory. Photos: Aniruddha Sen Gupta

Babur also writes of one landmark that is a personal favourite of mine on the trip — the observatory in Samarkand of Timur’s grandson Ulugh Beg, under whom the arts and sciences flourished in the 15th century. “Another of Aulugh Beg Mirza’s fine buildings is an observatory... By its means the Mirza worked out the Kurkani Tables, now used all over the world.”

The main feature of the observatory is a giant quadrant device tunnelled into the hillside. Standing on the viewing platform at the top of it, I look at the small window in the wall opposite, which would in Ulugh Beg’s time have been a tiny portal to let a ray of sunlight traverse the instrument through the course of the day. I marvel at the scale and precision of it all.

Babur goes on to say about Samarkand that, “The best paper in the world is made there; the water for the paper-mortars all comes from Kan-i-gil, a meadow on the banks of the Qara-su (Blackwater).”

To my delight, I get to see that paper being made, at the Meros Paper Factory in Konigil. Here, a giant wooden wheel, turned by the rushing water of a stream, drives large wooden beams acting as pestles to pulp mulberry wood bark. One can imagine that it would not have been very different in Babur’s day. There’s something otherworldly about holding that paper in one’s hand and imagining that, 500 years before, this is what Babur may have written his journal upon!