Babur Nama is an autobiography of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, which he established in 1526 after defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi in the first battle of Panipat. More appropriately, Babur Nama is a memoir and a diary kept by Babur since he was ten years old until a year before his death in December 1530. Babur began chronicling events soon after he became the governor of Andijan (now in Uzbekistan) at the age of ten following the assassination of his father Omar Shaikh Mirza in 1493. Babur not only wrote daily events but also the personal and filial information about his contemporaries. He wrote himself till he stabilized himself as the Emperor in 1527, after which he dictated his memoirs. The fact that he wrote himself, or dictated what he wished to be penned down, makes Babur Nama a personal, coherent and a lucid chronicle. Babur had written the chronicle in Chaghatai Turkish. Annette Susannah Beveridge (1842-1929) translated it into English1. The original Babur Nama is in two volumes and runs into 906 pages with expansive, exhaustive footnotes by Beveridge.
October 2006, volume 30, No 10