“Mughals not Mongols: Babur’s Indian Empire”
Mughals not Mongols: Babur’s Indian Empire
By Stephen Dale, Emeritus Professor of History, Ohio State University
Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) founded a Gurkhanian or Timurid empire in Hindustan in 1526. However, unlike his ferocious ancestor Timur, who sacked Delhi in 1398, Babur was a sophisticated, literate individual who envisaged ruling a cultured Perso-Islamic sedentary kingdom. Even before his death, his vision began to be realized in the Persianate gardens he and his Turco-Mongol begs constructed in and around Agra, the later site of the Taj Mahal. Local inhabitants referred to these riverside estates as 'Kabul,' a recognition of the fact that Babur saw the geometrically precise Persianate garden as the fundamental social and cultural institution of his Empire.
Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies ~ MESAS
South Asia Seminar Series
Date: Monday, November 5, 2018
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: Callaway S-319, Emory University
Contact: 404-727-2575, jmcghee@emory.edu
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