NCERT calls Babur brutal: What history's shifting lens reveals about the Mughal emperor

Time of India

17-07-2025

NCERT describes Babur as 'brutal'
If history had a Twitter bio, Babur's might read: Brutal conqueror. Poet. Exile. Book hoarder. Empire starter. Occasional librarian. In a move that has sparked more than just academic curiosity, the NCERT's new Class 8 Social Science textbook
Exploring Society: India and Beyond
introduces young minds to Babur not as a romanticised founder of an empire, but as a 'brutal and ruthless conqueror, slaughtering entire populations of cities.'
His successors don't escape the editorial scalpel either: Akbar is presented as 'a blend of brutality and tolerance,' while Aurangzeb is noted for destroying temples and gurdwaras.
For all the clamour around revisionism, the real story lies in how Babur has been portrayed over time—sometimes with awe, sometimes with apology, and often with discomfort. From the candour of
Baburnama
to the cold calculations of colonial chroniclers, and from nationalist historians to modern reinterpreters, Babur's historical image has been as mercurial as a Timurid prince wandering between exile and empire.
Let's take a closer look at how history has handled Babur—warts, wisdom and war crimes included—and what this evolving portrayal means for the students now reading him in their first brush with Indian history.
Baburnama: The brutally honest autobiography
To understand Babur, one must begin with
Baburnama
(or
Tuzuk-i-Baburi
), the emperor's own diary, written in Chaghatai Turkish and later translated into English by Annette Susannah Beveridge in 1922. It's often celebrated as one of the most brutally honest autobiographies in global literature—part military log, part poetry anthology, part confessional.
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In his account of the 1519 Bajaur massacre, Babur wrote:
'As the Bajauris were rebels and at enmity with the people of Islam… they were put to general massacre… At a guess more than 3,000 men went to their death.'
He didn't just stop there. The bodies were used to construct macabre monuments:
'On the walls, in houses, streets and alleys, the dead lay… We ordered that a tower of heads should be set up on the rising-ground.'
But
Baburnama
also reveals an aesthete who loved gardens, books, and libraries, often raiding enemy libraries after conquests.
The paradox is potent: a man who beheaded enemies by day and rearranged bookshelves by night.
Colonial historians: Brutality as backdrop for British civility
British historians like Lane-Poole and Smith emphasized Babur's role as a foundational figure while highlighting his brutal ancestry, often to justify British rule.
The Imperial Filter: Stanley Lane-Poole's Dual Lens
In
Rulers of India: Babar
and
History of India, From the Reign of Akbar the Great to the Fall of the Moghul Empire
, Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) offered Babur a reluctant salute.
He called him 'a soldier of fortune and not an architect of empire,' subtly denying him the title of empire-builder while grudgingly admitting he 'laid the first stone of the splendid fabric that his grandson Akbar achieved.'
Lane-Poole, ever the Orientalist diplomat, cast Babur not as a destroyer but as a bridge—a connector of worlds. 'Babar serves as a crucial link between Central Asia and India, predatory hordes and imperial government, and Tamerlane and Akbar,' he wrote.
Babur, in this version, is less a brute and more a hinge in history, though one still slightly untrustworthy.
Vincent Arthur Smith: Lineage, Liquor, and the Lurid Legacy
If Lane-Poole offered reluctant praise, Vincent Arthur Smith (1848–1920) came wielding a colonial cold shower. In
Akbar the Great Mogul, 1542–1605
, he scoured Babur's bloodline and found only vice.
'Akbar's ancestors like Babar and Humayun were barbarous and vicious... Intemperance was the besetting sin of the Timuroid royal family...
Babur (was) an elegant toper... Humayun, the son of Babar, was even more degenerate and cruel than his father.'
If you can smell both the Victorian disapproval of alcohol and a fascination with dynastic decay, you're not wrong. Smith painted Babur less as a visionary ruler and more as a functional alcoholic in an inherited spiral of savagery—a sort of imperial soap opera with swords.
For Smith, Babur's worth was best understood through the blood-soaked mirror of Timur and Genghis Khan.
The sword may have been sharp, but so was the ancestral hangover.
William Erskine: The historian as humaniser
Enter William Erskine (1773–1852), a man who read Babur more closely than perhaps Babur read his own fate. In
A History of India under the two first sovereigns of the house of Taimur, Báber and Humáyun
(1854), Erskine built a more nuanced portrait.
Having translated Babur's
Tuzuk-i-Baburi
into English as early as 1826, Erskine's Babur is less beast and more bard.
He focused on Babur the Timurid prince—strategist, memoirist, nature lover. Here was a man who recorded the scent of melons and the feel of battlefields with equal literary grace.
Erskine's approach was methodical, empathetic, and archival. He dug deep into Persian manuscripts and resisted the impulse to reduce Babur to a stereotype. In an era when brutality sold books, Erskine chose balance—a historian before his time.
Elliot and Dowson: The imperial comparison set
No imperial historical survey is complete without a bit of moral contrast. Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson provided exactly that in their colossal eight-volume
The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period
(1867–1877).
Their project was ambitious but not innocent. The explicit aim? To demonstrate 'the immense advantages accruing to [Indians] under the mildness and equity of [British] rule' as opposed to the so-called tyranny of earlier Muslim rulers.
The duo collated Persian chronicles and battle records, often allowing the documentation of Babur's violence to speak for itself.
Early Indian historians: A calculated distance
Indian historians like Sarkar and Majumdar focused more on military strategy and administrative capability.
Jadunath Sarkar: The military strategist
Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958), knighted for his historical contributions and often lauded as 'the greatest Indian historian of his time,' was less interested in moral judgments and more in the mechanics of conquest. In works like
History of Aurangzib
and
Military History of India
, Sarkar treated Babur's campaigns with the cool detachment of a war strategist reviewing a chessboard.
To Sarkar, Babur wasn't simply a conqueror—he was a tactician who outmanoeuvred larger Indian armies with superior artillery, mobility, and battlefield positioning. It wasn't just blood that secured the throne—it was brains, and lots of logistical foresight.
R.C. Majumdar: The balanced chronicler
If Sarkar was the tactician, R.C. Majumdar was the careful referee of historical contradictions. Majumdar's accounts resist simplistic binaries. His Babur was not just a warrior but also a man occasionally capable of restraint—though only when it didn't get in the way of empire-building.
Majumdar doesn't erase Babur's violent streak—far from it. He acknowledges the blood spilled, the heads piled, and the strategy often wrapped in slaughter. But he also refuses to flatten Babur into a caricature of cruelty. Violence, Majumdar suggests, was not impulse—it was often calculus.
Contemporary historians: Modern reassessments
Modern historians show remarkable diversity—from Dalrymple's cultural humanist approach to Maldahiyar's harsh revisionist critique.
William Dalrymple
: The Cultural Humanist
In his 2020 introduction to
The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur
, William Dalrymple doesn't so much chronicle Babur as he curates his contradictions. Dalrymple's Babur is the thinking man's warrior—the literary sovereign who composed verses even as he conquered cities. Describing The Baburnama as 'one of the greatest memoirs in any language and of any age,' Dalrymple reframes the text not merely as royal autobiography but as an archive of shared humanity—'a testament to humanity in which the personal becomes universal.
'
This Babur was a connoisseur of beauty, addicted to books, and, amusingly enough, something of a bibliophilic bandit. 'His first act after a conquest,' writes Dalrymple, 'was to go to the library of his opponent and raid its shelves.' Imagine Alexander with a Kindle.
Dalrymple's tone is reverent, but it also invites modern readers to ask: Can a man write immortal prose and still stain his legacy with imperial ambition? According to Dalrymple, yes—and that's precisely the point.
Stephen Frederic Dale: The psychological biographer
In
Babur: Timurid Prince and Mughal Emperor, 1483–1530
(2018), Stephen Frederic Dale doesn't just look at Babur—he peers into him. This is less history than biography with a pulse. Dale's Babur is not an icon but a haunted émigré—a man carting the trauma of displacement across continents.
He paints a poignant psychological portrait: Babur 'suffered the regretful anguish of an exile who felt himself to be a stranger in a strange land.'
This is no conqueror reveling in plunder, but an uprooted soul trying to transplant a Central Asian dream into Indian soil.
Abraham Eraly: The political realist
Then comes Abraham Eraly with his sharp political scalpel, slicing through the romantic haze. In
The Mughal World: Life in India's Last Golden Age
, Eraly does not flinch. Babur, he argues, was not merely a tactician or a poet-in-armour—he was a man possessed by what Eraly calls 'ruthless machinations and brutal lust for power.'
This is an empire as a crime scene. Eraly's Babur is neither nostalgic nor noble; he's hungry, strategic, and stunningly effective at dismembering opposition.
Aabhas Maldahiyar: The revisionist critic
If Eraly is blunt, Aabhas Maldahiyar is positively unfiltered. In
Babur: The Chessboard King
(2024), Maldahiyar doesn't bother with psychological nuance or poetic redemption. He opens with fire—and never lets up.
To Maldahiyar, Babur is not just flawed; he is catastrophically unfit.
'A savage, weakened ruler,' he calls him. 'A dreadful administrator, an unwise economist, and a disastrous military commander.' There is no room for ambiguity here—Babur is not just history's anti-hero, but a cautionary tale.
Between the textbook and the truth
So where does that leave us—and our Class 8 students? NCERT's move to describe Babur as 'brutal and ruthless' isn't unfounded. But neither is the portrayal complete. Historical figures, especially those who built empires on bones and verses, deserve neither hagiography nor cancellation.
They require context—nuance, if you will.
Babur was a conqueror who wrote like a monk, a killer who composed couplets. Whether students are ready for that complexity is not just a curricular question, but a philosophical one.
Perhaps the best way to teach Babur is to let students read his
Baburnama
, and decide for themselves whether he was a poet in armour—or a warlord with a bookshelf.
Because in the end, the question isn't whether Babur was brutal. It's whether we're brave enough to teach the truth in full.
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