Sunil Sethi: On re-reading Babur Nama in 2007

AL FRESCO

Even though they are sometimes regarded as one long moan, the future emperor Babur's first impressions of Hindustan, recorded in his diary entries in 1526, are often alarmingly accurate. Among the many things on his hate-list are India's incompetent and inefficient urban water supply and irrigation systems. "Many though its towns and cultivated lands are, it nowhere has running waters. Rivers and, in some places, stagnant waters are its irrigation channels." He is repulsed by the "laborious and filthy way" buckets and crude Persian wheels are used to cultivate crops. He can't understand why Indian towns subsist solely on wells and rainwater collected in tanks. Why don't they dig water courses and construct dams, he asks. And answering his own question, he astutely observes: "Their crops are all rain-grown, and as the population of Hindustan is unlimited, it swarms in."

Five hundred years later many of the problems listed by Babur are still with us: stagnant, sickness-spreading open drains, waterlogged roads, polluted and parched rivers, controversial dams, monsoon-dependent harvests, farmers' suicides and, most of all, an unlimited population that "swarms in". To bolster the last observation he gives a vivid description of how slum-like settlements, without drainage or drinking water, tend to erupt almost overnight.

Dipping into the Babur Nama, 60 years after India's emergence as a nation-state, is a useful exercise if only to reflect that, for all the changes that have taken place, how little some things have changed since the 16th century. The stench of "urine and dung" that Babur records or the back-breaking labour of men and women carrying water from long distances could be descriptions from this year's Magsaysay Award-winning chronicler of rural poverty P Sainath's landmark book, Everyone Loves A Good Drought.

Sainath's is the grassroots view as opposed to Babur's, which is critical and from on high, but both have the admirable habit of allowing a story to tell itself in sharply etched and succinct passages. Their telescopic lens pulls in and out as a social record and they don't ramble in the telling. For instance, here is Babur at his sardonic best, on the lengths Indians will go to, to avoid paying tax by literally creating "tax shelters": "In many parts of the plains thorny jungle grows, behind the good defence of which the people of the parganas (provinces) become stubbornly rebellious and pay no taxes."

Babur's outlook is of the foreigner, the conquering general and empire-builder and, to be fair, not everything about India is dreary and loathsome. His descriptions of Indian fauna, flora, caste system, accounting and revenue collection and, above all, wealth, are generous. He's ecstatic on seeing a peacock or tasting a mango.

He also keeps an eye out for his army and treasury first ("pleasant things of Hindustan are ... that it has masses of gold and silver) and is always straining to impose some sort of order on its chaotic and ugly sprawl. Like contemporary rulers he wants to "modernise" India, even beautify it""make it "orderly and symmetrical" in his words""but he's not certain how, or if at all, the task can be accomplished. Crossing the Yamuna at Agra, he writes, the "grounds were so bad and unattractive that we traversed them with a hundred disgusts and repulsions..." Exactly the impression Agra leaves on new arrivals today. Like present-day rulers he's seized by the uncertainty of the project and repeatedly frustrated by the country's complex society and political fissures.

Being a romantic visionary, Babur dreams of turning "disorderly Hindustan" into a garden where "in every border rose and narcissus are in perfect arrangement". He's also surprisingly devoid of vanity and personal greed. When Humayun presents him the Kohinoor he diligently records the diamond's value "at two-and-half days' food for the whole world" but says he has no use for it, so "I just gave it back to him".

You don't have to rewind to 1947 for a balance sheet of India's successes and failures. Go back to the Babur Nama of 1526 and read a firsthand account of a ruler's headaches: clear, frank and straight from the heart.