Babur

About Babur in brief

Babur was born 14 February 1483 in Andijan in the Fergana Valley. He was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza and a great-great grandson of Timur. He conquered Samarkand in 1494, only to lose it soon after. In 1504 he conquered Kabul, which was under the putative rule of Abdur Razaq Mirza. Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 CE and founded the Mughal empire. He died in 1530 in Agra and Humayun succeeded him. He ranks as a national hero in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. He wrote the Baburnama in Chaghatai Turkic; it was translated into Persian during the reign of his grandson, the Emperor Akbar. His memoirs form the main source for his life. They are known as the BabURNama and were written in Chagatai. Turkic, though, according to Dale, Persian is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology and vocabulary. The name is generally taken in reference to the Persian babur, meaning ‘tiger’ or ‘beaver’, and was borrowed into the Turkic languages of Central Asia. He married several times. Notable among his sons are Humayun, Kamran Mirza, and Hindal Mirza and his wife Nigar Khan. His remains were moved to Kabul and reburied.

He hailed from the Babur Khanate of Moghulistan, on the border of Uzbekistan, and his wife was the daughter of Qutul Khan, ruler of Babul Khan. He is buried in Kabul, but his remains were later moved to the city of Agra, where he was buried in a mausoleum. He also had a son, Abū Sa’id, who was the son of Abu Sa’id, the ruler of Abū Qutur Khan. Babu is Arabic for ‘Defender of the Faith’ and Muhammad honours the Islamic prophet. The difficulty of pronouncing the name for his Central Asian Turco-Mongol army may have been responsible for the greater popularity of his nickname Babur, also variously spelled Baber, Babar, and Bābor. The word repeatedly appears in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh and was borrowing into theTurkic languages. He and later Mughals used the title of Mirzani and Gurkani as regalia. His grandson Akbar also bore the royal titles Badshah and al-ṣultānu ‘l-ʿazam wa ‘l-ḫāqān al-mukkarram pādshāh-e ġāzī. Babur was a descendant of Timor and Genghis Khan through his father and mother respectively. He faced opposition from Rana Sanga, who at first promised to help Babur defeat Lodi.