After retreating from northern Afghanistan back to Kabul sometime in 1514, almost nothing is known of Babur’s life until five years later when his narrative resumes in January 1519 as he and his men begin an attack on the fortress of Bajaur, over a hundred miles east-north-east of Kabul. By his own evidence Babur started 1519 still trying to pacify his petty Afghan kingdom, a “state” whose territories were then primarily concentrated along the section of the road that ran from northeast from Ghazni through Kabul and then east to the Khybar pass, extending perhaps to the banks of the Indus. His direct control of this modest region may have extended in 1519 fifty to sixty miles north of Kabul to the Hindu Kush passes, while he exercised a loose suzereignty over the Qunduz region in northeastern Afghanistan in the person of his cousin, Ways Mirza Miranshahi. The richer plains of Balkh along the Amu Darya immediately west of Qunduz were in 1519 probably divided between the Uzbeks, the Safavids and to some degree Babur himself. East of Kabul his authority was restricted in some areas to no more than a few miles to the north and south of the road.
Yet, little more than a month after subduing Bajaur, Babur crossed the Indus on a raid that led to the first, albeit temporary capture of Bherah, situated on the bank of the Jhelum river in the northwestern Panjab. The occupation of Bherah, an outlying district of the wealthy Lahore province, apparently led Babur to think seriously for the first time of taking Delhi, for according to his own testimony, after taking the town he sent a message to the newly enthroned ruler of Delhi, Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, claiming the territories Timur had conquered in 1398. By 1523 Babur established his authority in Lahore, the capital of the Panjab, little more than a hundred miles southeast of Bherah, and in November 1525 he led an army out of Kabul that in April 1526 defeated Ibrahim and founded Timorid rule in northern India. His conquest was an act of military imperialism legitimized by Timor’s brief invasion. It represented a dynastic conquest in the mold of the Ottomans and Uzbeks. Unlike the Safavid founder, Shah Ismail, Babur was not an ideologue and did not enter India on a religious crusade. Having failed to restore his own rule and Timurid fortunes in Samarqand, he invaded India for simple mulkgirliq reasons, to ensure the power and prosperity of his paternal and maternal relations, the Miranshahi Timurids and the Chaghatay Chingizids. Those practical political and material goals remained typical of the dynasty throughout most of its history, whatever the legitimizing affectations of later monarchs.
From Babur’s description it is apparent that the attack on Bajaur in January 1519 was no simple chapqun or raid, although it may have been partly that, but a pacification campaign by which he directly extended his power in the region. This can be inferred from his remark that after the successful assault and massacre of more than three thousand Dilahzak Afghan inhabitants of the fort, he sent heads of some of the captured and executed defenders as proof of his victory not only to Kabul but also north to Badakhshan, Qunduz and Balkh, perhaps to Ways Mirza in Badakhshan and Muhammad Zaman Mirza in Balkh. His purpose in capturing the fort and slaughtering so many Bajauris also seems to have been designed as a pointed lesson to other Afghans, for one of Babur’s new-found allies, the Yusufzai Afghan chief Shah Mansur who was present during these events, was sent back east to his Yusufzai kin with “chastising orders.” The Bajaur massacre seems to have had an immediate effect, for one of the competing rulers of Swat, Sultan "Ala" al-Din, offered his homage to Babur a short time later, evidently hoping to exploit the new regional power to counter a rival Afghan chief. Then following a typical post-battle interval of drinking, hunting and eating the local narcotic sweet kamali, Babur continued his campaign by marching due east into the Yusufzai homeland in Swat to attack tribesmen who had not yet submitted to him. While in the vicinity he consolidated his territorial gains by marrying Shah Mansur Yusufzai’s daughter. Babur’s alliance may have been strengthened with another Yusufzai marriage to one of his men, for he mentions that shortly after his marriage Shah Mansur’s younger brother “brought his niece to this yurt,” this “campsite.”
Babur justified what he terms the “general killing” or massacre of the Dilahzak Afghans of Bajaur by claiming that they were not only “rebels” but had adopted “the customs of unbelievers.” By this he does not seem to mean that they imitated their Kafiri neighbors, who never had been and as late as 1890 still were not Muslims. Rather he reports that some thirty or forty years earlier some of the Dilahzak Afghans and the Yusufzais had become heretics by joining a darvish or wandering ascetic or sufi by the name of Shahbaz Qalandar. Having said this without elaborating on the nature of this man’s “heresy,” he reports that after the brief seige of Bajaur, while visiting a nearby hill for the view of the countryside, he happened on the tomb of the qalandar and had it destroyed, since the tomb of a heretic sufi was not a fitting monument for such a lovely spot, where he then sat and enjoyed some ma'jun.
Heresy offended his aesthetic as well as his religious sensibilities, and like many religious men B§bur was more offended by heretics than by unbelievers. Yet he seems to have been more than just a little bit hypocritical when he invoked religion to justify the slaughter of so many Bajauri men—their captive women and children were soon released with the surviving male prisoners. From the time he arrived in Kabul B§bur treated Afgh§ns far more ruthlessly than he did his Turkic and Mongol enemies in Ferghanah. He regularly slaughtered Afgh§ns who either attacked or resisted him, memorializing his hostility with the minarets of skulls that dotted the countryside. When he describes the Bajauris as “ignorant, wretched people,” for refusing his first demand to surrender their fort, he expresses himself with the same visceral contempt used to characterize other Afgh§ns, some of whom he later ridicules for their lack of knowledge of etiquette, as “rustic and stupid.”
~~The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530) -by- Stephen F. Dale
No comments:
Post a Comment