Book Excerpt: Did The Mughals Call Themselves 'Mughal'?

Babur: The Chessboard King. Aabhas Maldahiyar. Penguin. Pages 480. Rs 684.

In my observation, the subject of history has always been a casualty of biases, which come from different ends of extremities. Things about history need to be read in conjunction with context and time. You can only read about ‘historical instances’ but never learn ‘history’ if the ‘context’ goes ignored. The context creates perspectives through the region of the milieu and the witnesses.

In the case of Tīmūrids (distorted as Moghūls) too, we have more opinions and fewer facts on the mainstream table though they exist in abundance. We have seen extreme fantastical vilification by people like James Todd, while there is extreme eulogising by others.

There are many promoting the Tīmūrids (in the name of Moghūls) for good. But if I look at the records of Tīmūrids themselves, it seems that had anyone of them been alive, they would have possibly rejected all these narratives of glorification. The texts like the Baburnama etc. stand apart as the testimony of this matter. In the world of Turco-Mongols, secularism as it is glorified today, was never a virtue of glory back then.

It all begins with the name itself. They have always been addressed as Moghūls, but did they ever address themselves as so? While penning the Baburnama, Babur ensured a clear distinction between him being a Tīmūrid Prince establishing a Tīmūrid Gūrkāniyān Sult̤ānate and not the Moghūl, which has been a popular claim of late.

One may argue that Babur may have not used the term ‘Moghūl’ at all and hence the different term. But that too is not the reality. Babur has used the term ‘Moghūl/Mūghal/Mūgal’ more than 400 times in the Baburnama, drawing a clear distinction. In fact, he has the worst opinion of the ‘Moghūl clan.’

But the question that may arise is, why should we bring in the name of the clan while we are just chronicling their history? The answer lies in the fact that even this name distortion occurred only because there was something to hide.

Humbly speaking, the wrong name was used to create a narrative. Or else why suddenly in the nineteenth century, indologists would begin calling Tīmūrid Gūrkāniyān Mūghals almost after three centuries of their establishment in what they called Hindustan? Abul-Fazl in the Ain-i-Akbari does mention them being the empire of ‘Hindustan.’

So, coming back to the name, Timur never liked to see himself as Moghūl even though both he and Genghis Khān had a common ancestor Tumanay Khān (Figure 1).

Timur was in the tenth generation while Ghengis was in the fifth generation. Babur’s ancestors were sharply distinguished from the classical Mongols (Moghūls) insofar as they were oriented towards Persian rather than Turco-Mongol culture. According to John Joseph Saunders, ‘Timur was “the product of an Islamized and Iranized society,” and not steppe nomadic (Mongols).’