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

Babur's love for his country's produce - especially the fruit of the region - finds expression throughout his memoirs

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