The Baburnama (First Folio Society Edition)

BABUR, Zahiruddin Muhammad (trans., ed. & annot. Wheeler M. Thackston; preface to illustrations J. P. Losty; intro. Salman Rushdie). The Baburnama. London: The Folio Society, 2013.

Quarto (approximately 279 × 184 mm). Quarter blue crushed Morocco leather. Spine lettered and decorated in gilt. Elaborately decorated illustrated boards. Top edge gilt. Blue slipcase. lviii, 540 pp. 47 pages of full-colour plates reproducing Mughal miniatures throughout; several regional maps preceding the text; genealogies and bibliography. First Folio Society edition.

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) was born in Fergana, in what is now Uzbekistan, the son of a Timurid prince who could trace his lineage to Timur the Great on his father's side and to Genghis Khan through his mother. He spent his youth losing and attempting to recover Samarkand — the great Timurid capital — before establishing himself at Kabul in 1504 and turning his ambitions south. In 1526, at the First Battle of Panipat, he defeated the Sultan of Ibrahim Lodi with a smaller force by deploying field artillery — a novelty in the subcontinent — and in a single afternoon laid the foundations of the Mughal Empire, which his descendants would rule for the next three centuries.

The Baburnama — Babur's memoir, written in Chagatai Turkish throughout his life and campaigns — is a document of extraordinary breadth and literary quality. It is the earliest known autobiography in Islamic literature, and it is not a conventional royal memoir: Babur describes his military campaigns with strategic precision, but he also records his observations of the natural world — the plants, birds, and animals of every country he passed through — his personal sorrows and enthusiasms, his friendships, his love of poetry (he was a distinguished poet in his own right), his garden designs, and his complicated feelings about the India he had conquered but never loved. His account of the loss of Samarkand as a young man is among the most affecting passages of autobiographical prose in any medieval literature. He describes weeping openly in a melon garden after crossing a river that marked the boundary of his ancestral homeland for the last time, and the reader weeps alongside him.

Babur died in 1530 having ruled northern India for only four years. His grandson Akbar, who extended the Mughal Empire to its greatest reach, commissioned a Persian translation of the Baburnama and a series of illustrated manuscripts whose miniatures depicted scenes from Babur's campaigns and observations. The forty-seven colour plates in this Folio Society edition reproduce the finest of these Mughal miniatures, with a preface by J. P. Losty, formerly of the British Library's Oriental collections, contextualising their production and their relationship to the text.

The translation by Wheeler M. Thackston, Professor of the Practice in Persian and other Iranian Languages at Harvard University, is the definitive modern English rendering — complete, annotated, and rendered in prose of genuine lucidity. The introduction is by Salman Rushdie, whose own roots in the Mughal world make him an unusually apt guide to what Babur built and what his memoir means.

Near fine. Some very small and faint imperfections; slipcase shows mild shelf wear. Otherwise generally fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000585