Mongol Invasions of India - Timur and Babur

Timur and Babur

The Delhi sultans had developed cordial relations with the Yuan Dynasty in Mongolia and China and the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Middle East. Around 1338, Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq of the Delhi Sultanate appointed Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta an ambassador to the Mongol court of Emperor Huizong of Yuan China. The gifts he was to take included 200 slaves.

The Chagatai Khanate had split up by this time and an ambitious Mongol Turk chieftain named Timur had brought Central Asia and the regions beyond under his control. He followed the twin policies of Imperialism and Islamization, shifting various Mongol tribes to different parts of his empire and giving primacy to the Turkic people in his own army. Timur also reinforced the Islamic faith over the Chagatai Khanate and gave primacy to the laws of the Quran over Genghis Khan's shaminist laws. He invaded India in 1398 to make war and plunder the wealth of the country.

Timur's empire broke up and his descendants failed to hold on to Central Asia, which split up into numerous principalities. The descendants of the Mongol Chagtais and the descendants of Timur empire lived side by side, occasionally fighting and occasionally inter-marrying.

One of the products of such a marriage was Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. His mother belonged to the family of the Mongol Khans of Tashkent. Babur was a true descendant of Timur and shared his beliefs: he believed that rules and regulations of Genghis Khan were deficient as he remarked, "they had no divine authority."

Even though his own mother was a Mongol, Babur hated the Mongol race and wrote a stinging verse in his autobiography:

"Were the Mughals an angel race, it would be bad,

Even writ in gold, the Mughal name would be bad."

When Babur occupied Kabul and began invading the Indian subcontinent, he was called a Mughal like all the earlier invaders from the Chagatai Khanate. Even the invasion of Timur had been considered a Mongol invasion since the Mongols had ruled over Central Asia for so long and had given their name to its people.

The military heritage of the Mongols, unlike their secular laws, had no conflict with the question of religion. Hence both Timur and Babur continued the military system of Genghis Khan. One part of this system was the name Ordu - used for the collective of tents that formed the military camp — it was now pronounced Urdu. In all their campaigns in India the Mughal camp was called the Urdu and this word became current in the languages of the various soldiers that formed the body of this camp.

In time these Indian and foreign languages mingled together in the Urdu and a new language of that name was born. This language of the military camp survived in some of the North Indian cities after the fall of the Mughal Empire. The Urdu that passed through all these centuries of political changes ultimately became the language of poetry, of music, and of other forms of cultural expression—today it is recognized as one of the languages of Pakistan and modern India.