The Bābur-nāma in English (Memoirs of Bābur)

The question of which were Bābur’s “Five expeditions” into Hindūstān has been often discussed; it is useful therefore to establish the dates of those known as made. I have entered one as made in this year for the following reasons;—it broke short because Shāh Beg made incursion into Bābur’s territories, and that incursion was followed by a siege of Qandahār which several matters mentioned below show to have taken place in 926 AH.

The march out from Kābul may have been as soon as muster and equipment allowed after the return from Lamghān chronicled in the diary. It was made through Bajaur where refractory tribesmen were brought to order. The Indus will have been forded at the usual place where, until the last one of 932 AH. (1525 AD.), all expeditions crossed on the outward march. Bhīra was traversed in which were Bābur’s own Commanders, and advance was made, beyond lands yet occupied, to Sīālkot, 72 miles north of Lāhor and in the Rechna dū-āb. It was occupied without resistance; and a further move made to what the MSS. call Sayyidpūr; this attempted defence, was taken by assault and put to the sword. No place named Sayyidpūr is given in the Gazetteer of India, but the Āyīn-i-akbarī mentions a Sidhpūr which from its neighbourhood to Sīālkot may be what Bābur took.

Nothing indicates an intention in Bābur to join battle with Ibrāhīm at this time; Lāhor may have been his objective, after he had made a demonstration in force to strengthen his footing in Bhīra. Whatever he may have planned to do beyond Sidhpūr(?) was frustrated by the news which took him back to Kābul and thence to Qandahār, that an incursion into his territory had been made by Shāh Beg.

Shāh Beg was now holding Qandahār, Shāl, Mustang and Sīwīstān.1550 He knew that he held Qandahār by uncertain tenure, in face of its desirability for Bābur and his own lesser power. His ground was further weakened by its usefulness for operations on Harāt and the presence with Bābur of Bāī-qarā refugees, ready to seize a chance, if offered by Ismā‘īl’s waning fortunes, for recovery of their former seat. Knowing his weakness, he for several years had been pushing his way out into Sind by way of the Bolān-pass.

His relations with Bābur were ostensibly good; he had sent him envoys twice last year, the first time to announce a success at Kāhān had in the end of 924 AH. (Nov. 1519 AD.). His son Ḥasan however, with whom he was unreconciled, had been for more than a year in Bābur’s company,—a matter not unlikely to stir under-currents of unfriendliness on either side.

His relations with Shāh Ismā‘īl were deferential, in appearance even vassal-like, as is shewn by Khwānd-amīr’s account of his appeal for intervention against Bābur to the Shāh’s officers in Harāt. Whether he read the khut̤ba for any suzerain is doubtful; his son Ḥasan, it may be said, read it later on for Bābur.

Precisely what Shāh Beg did to bring Bābur back from the Panj-āb and down upon Qandahār is not found mentioned by any source. It seems likely to have been an affair of subordinates instigated by or for him. Its immediate agents may have been the Nīkdīrī (Nūkdīrī) and Hazāra tribes Bābur punished on his way south. Their location was the western border-land; they may have descended on the Great North Road or have raided for food in that famine year. It seems certain that Shāh Beg made no serious attempt on Kābul; he was too much occupied in Sind to allow him to do so. Some unused source may throw light on the matter incidentally; the offence may have been small in itself and yet sufficient to determine Bābur to remove risk from his rear.1551

The Qandahār of Bābur’s sieges was difficult of capture; he had not taken it in 913 AH. (f. 208b) by siege or assault, but by default after one day’s fight in the open. The strength of its position can be judged from the following account of its ruins as they were seen in 1879 AD., the military details of which supplement Bellew’s description quoted in Appendix J.

The fortifications are of great extent with a treble line of bastioned walls and a high citadel in the centre. The place is in complete ruin and its locality now useful only as a grazing ground.... “The town is in three parts, each on a separate eminence, and capable of mutual defence. The mountain had been covered with towers united by curtains, and the one on the culminating point may be called impregnable. It commanded the citadel which stood lower down on the second eminence, and this in turn commanded the town which was on a table-land elevated above the plain. The triple walls surrounding the city were at a considerable distance from it. After exploring the citadel and ruins, we mounted by the gorge to the summit of the hill with the impregnable fort. In this gorge are the ruins of two tanks, some 80 feet square, all destroyed, with the pillars fallen; the work is pukka in brick and chunām (cement) and each tank had been domed in; they would have held about 400,000 gallons each.” (Le Messurier’s Kandahar in 1879 AD. pp. 223, 245.)

The day on which the keys of Qandahār were made over to Bābur is known, from the famous inscription which commemorates the event (Appendix J), as Shawwāl 13th 928 AH. Working backwards from this, it is known that in 927 AH. terms of surrender were made and that Bābur went back to Kābul; he is besieging it in 926 AH.—the year under description; his annals of 925 AH. are complete and contain no siege; the year 924 AH. appears to have had no siege, Shāh Beg was on the Indus and his son was for at least part of it with Bābur; 923 AH. was a year of intended siege, frustrated by Bābur’s own illness; of any siege in 922 AH. there is as yet no record known. So that it is certain there was no unremitted beleaguerment through five years.

When Bābur sat down to lay regular siege to Qandahār, with mining and battering of the walls,1552 famine was desolating the country round. The garrison was reduced to great distress; “pestilence,” ever an ally of Qandahār, broke out within the walls, spread to Bābur’s camp, and in the month of Tīr (June) led him to return to Kābul.

Two accounts of the sieges of Qandahār in this and next year are available, one in Khwānd-amīr’s Ḥabību’s-siyar, the other in Ma‘ṣūm Bhakkarī’s Tārīkh-i-sind. As they have important differences, it is necessary to consider the opportunities of their authors for information.

Khwānd-amīr finished his history in 1524-29 AD. His account of these affairs of Qandahār is contemporary; he was in close touch with several of the actors in them and may have been in Harāt through their course; one of his patrons, Amīr Ghiyās̤u’d-dīn, was put to death in this year in Harāt because of suspicion that he was an ally of Bābur; his nephew, another Ghiyās̤u’d-dīn was in Qandahār, the bearer next year of its keys to Bābur; moreover he was with Bābur himself a few years later in Hindūstān.

Mīr Ma‘ṣūm wrote in 1600 AD. 70 to 75 years after Khwānd-amīr. Of these sieges he tells what may have been traditional and mentions no manuscript authorities. Blochmann’s biography of him (Āyīn-i-akbarī p. 514) shews his ample opportunity of learning orally what had happened in the Arghūn invasion of Sind, but does not mention the opportunity for hearing traditions about Qandahār which his term of office there allowed him. During that term it was that he added an inscription, commemorative of Akbar’s dominion, to Bābur’s own at Chihil-zīna, which records the date of the capture of Qandahār (928 AH.-1522 AD.).

Khwānd-amīr’s contemporary narrative allows Ma‘ṣūm’s to dovetail into it as to some matters, but contradicts it in the important ones of date, and mode of surrender by Shāh Beg to Bābur. It states that Bābur was resolved in 926 AH. (1520 AD.) to uproot Shāh Shujā‘ Beg from Qandahār, led an army against the place, and “opened the Gates of war”. It gives no account of the siege of 926 AH. but passes on to the occurrences of 927 AH. (1521 AD.) when Shāh Beg, unable to meet Bābur in the field, shut himself up in the town and strengthened the defences. Bābur put his utmost pressure on the besieged, “often riding his piebald horse close to the moat and urging his men to fiery onset.” The garrison resisted manfully, breaching the “life-fortresses” of the Kābulīs with sword, arrow, spear and death-dealing stone, but Bābur’s heroes were most often victorious, and drove their assailants back through the Gates.

Meantime, continues Khwānd-amīr, Khān Mīrzā had died in Badakhshān; the news was brought to Bābur and caused him great grief; he appointed Humāyūn to succeed the Mīrzā while he himself prosecuted the siege of Qandahār and the conquest of the Garm-sīr.1553

The Governor of Harāt at this time was Shāh Ismā‘īl’s son T̤ahmāsp, between six and seven years old. His guardian Amīr Khān took chief part in the diplomatic intervention with Bābur, but associated with him was Amīr Ghiyās̤u’d-dīn—the patron of Khwānd-amīr already mentioned—until put to death as an ally of Bābur. The discussion had with Bābur reveals a complexity of motives demanding attention. Nominally undertaken though intervention was on behalf of Shāh Beg, and certainly so at his request, the Persian officers seem to have been less anxious on his account than for their own position in Khurāsān, their master’s position at the time being weakened by ill-success against the Sult̤ān of Rūm. To Bābur, Shāh Beg is written of as though he were an insubordinate vassal whom Bābur was reducing to order for the Shāh, but when Amīr Khān heard that Shāh Beg was hard pressed, he was much distressed because he feared a victorious Bābur might move on Khurāsān. Nothing indicates however that Bābur had Khurāsān in his thoughts; Hindūstān was his objective, and Qandahār a help on the way; but as Amīr Khān had this fear about him, a probable ground for it is provided by the presence with Bābur of Bāī-qarā exiles whose ambition it must have been to recover their former seat. Whether for Harāt, Kābul, or Hindūstān, Qandahār was strength. Another matter not fitting the avowed purpose of the diplomatic intervention is the death of Ghiyās̤u’d-dīn because an ally of Bābur; this makes Amīr Khān seem to count Bābur as Ismā‘īl’s enemy.

Shāh Beg’s requests for intervention began in 926 AH. (1520 AD.), as also did the remonstrance of the Persian officers with Bābur; his couriers followed one another with entreaty that the Amīrs would contrive for Bābur to retire, with promise of obeisance and of yearly tribute. The Amīrs set forth to Bābur that though Shāh Shujā‘ Beg had offended and had been deserving of wrath and chastisement, yet, as he was penitent and had promised loyalty and tribute, it was now proper for Bābur to raise the siege (of 926 AH.) and go back to Kābul. To this Bābur answered that Shāh Beg’s promise was a vain thing, on which no reliance could be placed; please God!, said he, he himself would take Qandahār and send Shāh Beg a prisoner to Harāt; and that he should be ready then to give the keys of the town and the possession of the Garm-sīr to any-one appointed to receive them.

This correspondence suits an assumption that Bābur acted for Shāh Ismā‘īl, a diplomatic assumption merely, the verbal veil, on one side, for anxiety lest Bābur or those with him should attack Harāt,—on the other, for Bābur’s resolve to hold Qandahār himself.

Amīr Khān was not satisfied with Bābur’s answer, but had his attention distracted by another matter, presumably ‘Ubaidu’l-lāh Khān’s attack on Harāt in the spring of the year (March-April 1521 AD.). Negociations appear to have been resumed later, since Khwānd-amīr claims it as their result that Bābur left Qandahār this year.

Mīr Ma‘ṣūm is very brief; he says that in this year (his 922 AH.), Bābur went down to Qandahār before the year’s tribute in grain had been collected, destroyed the standing crops, encompassed the town, and reduced it to extremity; that Shāh Beg, wearied under reiterated attack and pre-occupied by operations in Sind, proposed terms, and that these were made with stipulation for the town to be his during one year more and then to be given over to Bābur. These terms settled, Bābur went to Kābul, Shāh Beg to Sīwī.

There is much discrepancy between the dates of the two historians. Khwānd-amīr’s agree with the few fixed ones of the period and with the course of events; several of Ma‘ṣūm’s, on the contrary, are seriatim five (lunar) years earlier. For instance, events Khwānd-amīr places under 927 AH. Ma‘ṣūm places under 922 AH. Again, while Ma‘ṣūm correctly gives 913 AH. (1507 AD.) as the year of Bābur’s first capture of Qandahār, he sets up a discrepant series later, from the success Shāh Beg had at Kāhān; this he allots to 921 AH. (1515 AD.) whereas Bābur received news of it (f. 233b) in the beginning of 925 AH. (1519 AD.). Again, Ma‘ṣūm makes Shāh Ḥasan go to Bābur in 921 AH. and stay two years; but Ḥasan spent the whole of 925 AH. with Bābur and is not mentioned as having left before the second month of 926 AH. Again, Ma‘ṣūm makes Shāh Beg surrender the keys of Qandahār in 923 AH. (1517 AD.), but 928 AH. (1522 AD.) is shewn by Khwānd-amīr’s dates and narrative, and is inscribed at Chihil-zīna.1554