Fleshing out the Mughals

They are, as far as most of us are concerned, the denizens of dusty tomes and rare miniature paintings. For five centuries after they galloped across the plains of North India, enacted passionate love stories and hatched murderous plots, the Moghuls have been reduced to bland figures and simplistic subheadings by history textbooks. And while we can all recite “Babur the Conqueror, Humayun the Weak, Akbar the Great...” we know little about the tales behind the tags.
Which is partly why the ‘Empire of the Moghul’ series by Alex Rutherford has generated so much interest. The books belong to the bigselling genre of historical fiction — where skimpy facts are fleshed out with vivid descriptions and adorned with the glittering brocades of imagination . So Raiders from the North tells the incredible story of Babur — the 12-year-old king of remote, goat-infested Ferghana — who despite treacherous family members and rival warlords, led a massive army across the “jagged, snowy summits of the Hindu Kush” to become the Emperor of India. Brothers at War, the second book of the Moghul quintet, relates the equally compelling story of his son Humayun.
Humayun inherited his prosperous empire at the age of 23, and lost it at the age of 33 to the wily Sher Shah. He spent the next 15 years in exile with a ragtag army surviving sandstorms in the desert, snubs from former sycophants and meals of “dead mule boiled in a helmet” . But, perhaps, his worst moment was when his only son Akbar was kidnapped by his scheming half-brothers Kamran and Askari. The terrified toddler was actually tied to the walls of Kabul at one point to dissuade Humayun from attacking the city and regaining his kingdom.
Incredibly, however , this king who could well have “disappeared from history as if he had never lived” actually managed to win back his empire.
Rutherford creates a fascinating picture of Humayun, who is usually portrayed as an indolent weakling. Certainly, this Moghul ruler had an eccentric bent of mind and a dangerous fondness for opium and astrology, which lead him to issue strange orders — that, for example, all his courtiers wear red on Tuesday (the day of vengeance) and purple on Wednesday (the day of joy). Nevertheless, Humayun retained his faith in “destiny and dynasty” and always remembered that he was a descendent of Genghis Khan and Timur. He was proficient at wielding his sword Alamgir to decapitate enemy soldiers, and lived much of his life amidst acrid gunpowder , battle-axes , splattered brains and the shadow of sudden death.
Brothers at War recounts those battles in, perhaps, excessive detail. But for the rest, the book is extremely readable. Just the bare facts of Humayun’s life — the implacable hatred of his half-brothers , his split-second decision to marry the willowy Hamida, Akbar’s birth in remote Umarkot — make for a gripping story. And Rutherford (a pseudonym for the husband and wife team of Michael and Diana Preston) has mined the rich historical material to tell a cracking tale.
Many nuggets — for example, the manner in which armies were built with the promise of booty; or the way in which kingly alliances were formed — are revelatory. And while readers will hardly become experts on the Moghul empire, they will feel a moment of sympathy the next time they stumble upon a miniature painting or wander past the tomb of the second Moghul emperor.
Alex Rutherford Hachette 430 pages, Rs 495