Babur Nama

‘The facts are as stated here I have set down of good and bad whatever is known.’ The Babur Nama, a journal kept by Zahir Uddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), the founder of the Mughal Empire, is the earliest example of autobiographical writing in world literature, and one of the finest. Against the turbulent backdrop of medieval history, it paints a precise and vivid picture of life in Central Asia and Afghanistan—where Babur ruled in Samarkand and Kabul—and in the Indian subcontinent, where his dazzling military career culminated in the founding of a dynasty that lasted three centuries. Babur was far more than a skilled, often ruthless, warrior and master strategist. In this abridged and edited version of a 1921 English translation of his memoirs, he also emerges as a sensitive aesthete, naturalist, poet and lover. Writer, journalist and internationally acclaimed Middle eastern and Central asian expert, Dilip Hiro breathes new life into a unique historical document that is at once objective and intensely personal—for, in Babur’s words, ‘the truth should be reached in every matter’.

Review
As a work of autobiography, the Babur Nama stands alone in the pre-colonial world… Its vital first person narrative, its evocation of emotions we all share, its elements of self-dramatisation, indeed, its apparently `modern’ sensibility… A work of world literature… With luck, Dilip Hiro’s edition will draw a new audience to the remarkable Babur. —

About the Author
Born in the Indian subcontinent, Dilip Hiro was educated in India, Britain and America, where he received a master’s degree at Virginia Polytechnic & State University. He then settled in London in the mid-1960s, and became a full-time writer, journalist and commentator. He has published twenty-seven books.