Babur-Nama: Memoirs of Babur (Originally published in 1922)

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Babur

Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur (February 14, 1483 – December 26, 1530), also spelled Baber or Babar, was a Turko-Mongol Muslim conqueror from Central Asia who, following a series of setbacks, finally succeeded in laying the basis for the Mughal dynasty in South Asia. He was a direct descendant of Timur through his father, and a descendant also of Genghis Khan through his mother. Babur identified his lineage as Timurid and Chaghatay-Turkic, while his origin, milieu, training, and culture were steeped in Persian culture and so he was largely responsible for the fostering of this culture by his descendants, and for the expansion of Persian cultural influence in the Indian subcontinent, with brilliant literary, artistic, and historiographical results.

Babur's name

Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad (Persian: ﻇﻬﻴﺮﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ محمد, also known by his royal titles as al-ṣultānu 'l-ʿazam wa 'l-ḫāqān al-mukkarram pādshāh-e ġāzī), is more commonly known by his nickname, Bābur (بابر).

According to Stephen Frederic Dale, the name Babur is derived from the Persian word babr, meaning "tiger", a word that repeatedly appears in Firdawsī's Shāhnāma[4][5] and had also been borrowed by the Turkic languages of Central Asia.[6][7] This thesis is supported by the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, explaining that the Turko-Mongol name Timur underwent a similar evolution, from the Sanskrit word cimara ("iron") via a modified version *čimr to the final Turkicized version timür, with -ür replacing -r due to the Turkish vowel harmony (hence babr → babür).

Contradicting these views, W.M. Thackston argues that the name cannot be taken from babr and instead must be derived from a word that has evolved out of the Indo-European word for beaver, pointing to the fact that the name is pronounced bāh-bor in both Persian and Turkic, similar to the Russian word for beaver (бобр – bobr).
At that time the Chaghatái (descendants of Genghis Khan) were very rude and uncultured (bázári), and not refined (buzurg) as they are now; thus they found Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad difficult to pronounce, and for this reason gave him the name of Bábar. In the public prayers (khutba) and in royal mandates he is always styled 'Zahir-ud-Din Bábar Muhammad,' but he is best known by the name of Bábar Pádisháh.

— Babur's cousin, Mirzā Muḥammad Haydar

Sources for the biography

The main source for Babur's biography is a written account of his life, written by Babur himself. His memoirs are known as the Baburnama and are considered the first true autobiography in Islamic literature. He wrote the Bāburnāma in Chaghatai Turkic, his mother-tongue, though his prose was highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary. The work gives a valuable impression of Babur's surrounding environment.
I have not written all this to complain: I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.

— Bāburnāma

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