![]() May no beloved be as pitiless and unconcerned as thou. May no person be as ravaged, lovesick and humiliated as I. When he sees Baburi in the Andijan Bazaar (modern-day Uzbekistan), he speaks of being ‘maddened’ and ‘afflicted’ and of walking ‘bare-hood, bare-foot, through street and lane’. He also punctuates the political narrative with poetry that reveals his feelings with an unmatched frankness. In it, Babur writes of the travails of being a king, of his grief at having lost his family, of his love for Kabul’s garden parties and his infatuation for a 14-year-old boy, Baburi. His memoirs, the Baburnama, is unparalleled in its candidness in the premodern Islamic world. While it is difficult to imagine a Mughal emperor break down at the sight of fruit, Babur was not afraid of expressing his most intimate emotions. ![]() In his memoir, Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur writes of the time when seeing a melon from his Central Asian homeland brought tears to his eyes. ![]() Here, we present the vulnerable side of a powerful and controversial emperor. Even in victory of the great land of Hindustan, Babur is lonely and desolate, as he expresses his pain through ghazals and rubais. In Baburnama, the Mughal Emperor’s memoirs, Babur expresses his most intimate emotions, among which is the yearning for his homeland.
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