ABSTRACT
The fame of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (d. 1530) rests on two accomplishments – one political, the other literary. He had survived with empty hands the frantic scramble for power among his kinsmen (the descendants of Timur) in Central Asia and their final annihilation at the hands of the Uzbek Shaybani Khan in the closing decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Instead, Babur managed to get himself to India and establish the so-called ‘Mughal’ dynasty there – hence his political reputation. Equally important was his composition of a book, an autobiographical memoir written in Chagatay Turkic. Both the genre and his language of choice were peculiar. To write a history book on one’s own life was uncommon enough before Babur, but to write history at all in Chagatay (and not Persian) was also an exceptional act. What Babur has bequeathed to posterity is the record of the thoughts of an educated prince, an uprooted wanderer and, finally, a ghazi. As such, the Baburnama provides the perfect medium for testing the impact and the nature of imitation of other ghazis on scripting, and self-fashioning in general.
