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Writer's pictureHannah Landers

Andijan, Pigeons, and the Mughal Empire



What many people don't know is that those of us with ADHD develop hyperfixations. This means my husband and I try to see who can talk the most about things the other is only tangentially interested in, him with industrial disasters and the benefits of LED lightbulbs and me with niche histories and the benefits of expensive, ethical clothing brands.


One of my first fixations developed in my early teens. Throughout my childhood, my grandpa and I bought boxes of books from every library sale we could find. When we finished our books, we would swap them. When I was a tween I picked up a massive tome, Shadow of the Moon by M.M. Kaye from 1957. At the time, I was deeply invested in reading fantasy and sci-fi and couldn't get into this historical fiction that was also apparently...a romance? Ew. (Now, I mostly read romance, so psych!)


But at 14, I was reading a book or more a day so my supply tended to dry up faster than I could replenish it. My last recourse? Shadow of the Moon. The dense family history at the beginning was my first hurdle, but I dragged myself through it. When I reread it now, I sob through that introduction because it means so much to me; I know all the characters like they're my family. But the rest of the novel takes place in India in 1857. While this is not necessarily a niche history, the events of 1857 in India are not something most of my compatriots know about.


This sparked a years-long interest in Indian history and culture. So, much to my surprise and delight, last month, I found myself at the starting place of the Mughal Empire that swept across India starting in 1526. You could just read an Encyclopedia Britannica article on the Moghul Empire, but why when you can read my version?


The founder of the Mughal Empire was Babur who was born in the modern-day city of Andijan in 1483. The big deal for the Turco-Mongols of old was being able to trace your ancestry back to Genghis Khan. But if you want to know the exact degree to which Babur was related to Genghis Khan, it gets a little fuzzy. So, to help, I spent over an hour at a local coffeeshop diagramming just how they are related.

 

Note: If you want to be cool (and correct), it's actually pronounced "Chinggis" and xa:n (خ in Arabic and х in Russian)--not ka:n.

 

Genghis Khan was Babur's 12x great-grandpa on his mother's side. On his father's side, the famous ruler Amir Temur (Tamerlane) was Babur's 3x great-grandpa. Also, as you can see from the nifty diagram below, Babur's great-great-grandson was Shah Jahan who built the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. (Also, please don't take this chart as gospel; I'm not a historian, just a silly goose with a blog.)

Anyway, back to our boy, Babur. Even though we call him a Mughal, a mispronunciation of "Mongol", this is probably only due to that aforementioned affection for tracing your ancestry back to the great Khan. The tribe was more culturally and linguistically aligned with Turkic traditions. Babur spoke Persian, the lingua franca for the ruling class of the time, and Chagatai, a now-extinct Turkic language named after Genghis Khan's second son, Chagatai Khan (Babur's 11x great-grandfather).


Pigeons were a hot commodity in Central Asia, and Babur's father--Umar Shaikh Mirza II, was a man of his time. One of my favorite words in Tajik is kaftarxona (кафтархона), which means pigeon house or dovecote (unfun fact, the word columbarium now means a place for cremated remains, but it was also Latin for pigeon house). Anyway, Umar was in his shoddily constructed kaftarxona when it collapsed into a ravine killing him and leaving Babur as his successor at the tender age of only 11.


Young Babur maintained control of his empire through the grit and determination of his maternal grandmother (that Khan blood was khan-ing). The Timurids and Khans did not have a direct descendency rule, so their territories were divided over time into smaller and smaller warring kingdoms. The biggest prize of the day was Amir Temur's former capital of Samarkand (modern-day Uzbekistan), and wildly, Babur managed to conquer and hold the city for 100 days when he was only 15. Quite the feather in his cap.


With the desertion of his troops, an illness, and a rebellion back home, holding Samarkand was unsustainable and left Babur with no territory whatsoever. He rebuilt his army with Tajik warriors and managed to take Samarkand for a few more days, but lost it once again. He was now 21 and without a kingdom.


Babur floated around for a while, trying Tashkent (modern-day Uzbekistan) before invading and capturing Kabul (modern-day Afghanistan) after passing through the Hindu Kush (if you want another crazy war story about the Hindu Kush, Google what happened to the British in 1842). He hung out in Herat for a while, and even though he was horrified by the hedonism he saw there, he was impressed by the city's status as the epicenter of knowledge. He lost and won Kabul again. He invaded Samarkand and Bukhara but lost them to the Uzbeks. He bided his time and modernized his army with matchlocks and canons with the knowledge and help of the Ottomans.


After Babur lost Samarkand to the Uzbeks for the third time, he set his eyes on creating a new kingdom. Cue India and Pakistan. He had initially only planned on conquering Lahore in the Punjab (modern-day Pakistan). After a series of battles over several years, Babur managed to gain control of large swathes of land through a final victory after which a vassal of the ruler arranged for the women and children to be immolated in a wartime practice called jauhar.


Babur only ruled for four years until his death at 47. But those four years were filled with religious violence against Hindus, Sikhs, and non-Sunni Muslims. It's interesting to note that during the reign of Babur's grandson Akbar, there was a 180-degree shift to a period of religious tolerance.


Babur wrote an autobiography called the Baburnama which seems like a wild read. He writes of his abhorrence for the practice of elites keeping catamites and instead talks of his falling in love with a boy about his age whom he met in a market. He talks of hating drunkenness in others but frequently mentions his own imbibing. It is claimed that he was a religious ascetic due to the indifference he felt for his wives and concubines, but by his own words, he was a mere mortal who just didn't like his wives all that much. This New York Times article summarizes his contradictions better than I ever could, but in short, he was a complex man.


The playlist for this week is composed of a random mix of my favorite songs from Central Asia:


  1. Shabe Royaei by Aron Afshar

  2. Erkalaydi by Nilufar Usmonova

  3. Dukhtari Tojik by Nekruz Niyozov

  4. Bo'ldi Yurak by Munisa Rizaeva

  5. Qora Ko'zlar by Yulduz Usmonova

  6. Tentakcham by Xamdam Sobirov

  7. Surnay Lazgi by Lochin

  8. Blatata by Azzamchik

  9. Chorbogi Bolo by Elyor Meliboyev

  10. G'iybatchilar by Elyor Meliboyev

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