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It might make you think Babur was at odds with his own religion but he was a naturalist but also many documented works show that he had homosexual relations with men despite his orthodox religious views.
For more information on his views of other religions and his persecution of Hindus its worth reading Baburnama, which are his memoirs and peoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baburnama
https://www.rarebooksocietyofindia.org/book_archive/19617421...
We are complex chemical reactions, there are chemicals to make anyone do anything.
There are bacteria which can make people do things, there are viruses which can make people do things, just look at rabies and the aversion to water animals and humans develop.
Do you think you know about all the bacteria and virus in the world?
Do you think some of the knowledge of bacteria and virus, is with held from you?
Do you think you know about what all the chemicals do?
Do you think some of the effects of a chemical on a person is withheld?
I only have to visit a maternity ward to see women being given chemicals to give birth and even then the baby(s) might still need to be cut out.
Something like that you would have thought would come naturally. Is it the diet and/or culture like a religion that prevents women from giving birth naturally?
And then what effect does that have on the child(ren)?
Likewise considering cortisol and prolactin are part of the normal stress response chemicals, and prolactin increases lactation in mothers due to the screaming hungry baby, are mothers who can not breast feed, psychopaths?
So when reading the history of this person like any person, where no one today is in a position to verify the authenticity of the account or report, are the readers looking in the wrong place?
Edit. My USAF neighbours have reminded me with their subwoofer that I've forgotten environmental cues!
Interestingly Babur's military campaigns often involved the destruction and plunder of cities and regions. This resulted in the loss of cultural heritage and the suffering of local populations.
Interesting to see how the British Library celebrates the founder of the Mughal empire without mentioning even once the atrocities committed by the Mughals in the conquest and upkeep of the empire [1]. At the same time the British Library does all it can to meticulously portray the history of the west and especially the British Empire in a bad light where everything is put on a scale and weighed for racism, sexism, homophobia, slavery and more [2].
Here's a few choice quotes from the first source on what the British Library has no problems in portraying with this glowing article:
Dr. Koenraad Elst in his article “Was There an Islamic Genocide of Hindus?” states:
With the invasion of India by Mahmud Ghazni about 1000 A.D., began the Muslim invasions into the Indian subcontinent and they lasted for several centuries. Nadir Shah made a mountain of the skulls of the Hindus he killed in Delhi alone. Babur raised towers of Hindu skulls at Khanua when he defeated Rana Sanga in 1527 and later he repeated the same horrors after capturing the fort of Chanderi. Akbar ordered a general massacre of 30,000 Rajputs after he captured Chithorgarh in 1568. The Bahamani Sultans had an annual agenda of killing a minimum of 100,000 Hindus every year.
The history of medieval India is full of such instances. The holocaust of the Hindus in India continued for 800 years, till the brutal regimes were effectively overpowered in a life and death struggle by the Sikhs in the Panjab and the Hindu Maratha armies in other parts of India in the late 1700’s.
We have elaborate literary evidence of the World’s biggest holocaust from existing historical contemporary eyewitness accounts. The historians and biographers of the invading armies and subsequent rulers of India have left quite detailed records of the atrocities they committed in their day-to-day encounters with India’s Hindus.
These contemporary records boasted about and glorified the crimes that were committed – and the genocide of tens of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhist and Jainist, mass rapes of women and the destruction of thousands of ancient Hindu / Buddhist temples and libraries have been well documented and provide solid proof of the World’s biggest holocaust.
...over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the Subcontinent, Muslim Holy Warriors easily killed more Hindus than the 6 million of the Holocaust...
...The Muslim conquests, down to the 16th century, were for the Hindus a pure struggle of life and death. Entire cities were burnt down and the populations massacred, with hundreds of thousands killed in every campaign, and similar numbers deported as slaves. Every new invader made (often literally) his hills of Hindus skulls. Thus, the conquest of Afghanistan in the year 1000 was followed by the annihilation of the Hindu population; the region is still called the Hindu Kush, i.e. Hindu slaughter...
Will Durant in his book “The Story of Civilisation: Our Oriental Heritage”:
...The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period...
Francois Gautier in his book ‘Rewriting Indian History’ (1996) wrote:
...The massacres perpetuated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history, bigger than the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis; or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese...
Alain Danielou in his book, Histoire de l’ Inde writes:
...From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoliations, and destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of ‘a holy war’ of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilizations, wiped out entire races...
Irfan Husain in his article “Demons from the Past” observes:
...While historical events should be judged in the context of their times, it cannot be denied that even in that bloody period of history, no mercy was shown to the Hindus unfortunate enough to be in the path of either the Arab conquerors of Sindh and south Punjab, or the Central Asians who swept in from Afghanistan…The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed..Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster....
The list goes on but the message is clear, the Mughal conquest was a bloody and disgraceful history which, had it been perpetrated by white westerners would have been the subject of yearly discussions on shame, repent, self-flagellation and reparations. Since it was not white westerners but brown Arabs and Asians who perpetrated these acts of barbarism they are relegated to the sidelines of history with barely a mentioning where even that is put in a positive light - In between intense military activities, Babur somehow managed to find time to write his memoirs (Vāqiʻāt-i Bāburī). In these Babur records his ruthless victories, but at the same time writes unpretentiously of his personal feelings, revealing himself to be a scholar, a poet and a keen naturalist.
If the keepers of the British Library had any sense of honour they would treat the aforementioned deeds in the same way as they treat those done by western conquerors: either portray all history of conquest as the bloody gorefest it often was no matter the skin colour or religion or culture of the perpetrator or shuffle it all under the carpet. I prefer the former to the latter since all it requires is an objective view. What they do now is just as bad as what they most likely did during the times of the British Empire, they just reversed their stance on who the bad guys are.
[1] https://www.sikhnet.com/news/islamic-india-biggest-holocaust...
[2] https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2020/july/british-library-c...
What absurdity! By that logic you might as well ask Mongolia for reparations for the sins of Genghis Khan. Babur was simply his descendent. Yes India was conquered various times in history starting with the Aryans then the Arabs, then the Central Asian Mongol descendants. I hope you get over it eventually.
Unfortunately the OP's attitude of solely antipathy towards the Muslim role in India's history has become a key plank in the country's idea of itself in recent decades. It has helped powered the rise of authoritarian nationalism - does the ruling BJP party have any real platform aside from keeping Muslims in their place? Lynchings and beatings are common especially in small towns. Contrary voices are denounced as traitors.
Fascism weaponizes history.
> Unfortunately the OP's attitude of solely antipathy towards the Muslim role in India's history...
You clearly did not understand the intention of what I posted (criticism of the anti-Western attitude at the British Library), instead insisting on a perceived antipathy towards Muslims. If you follow the link I added the first thing you see is an explanation of how the page is not too be taken as criticism of a single religion.
Read it again and you might understand what I wrote and why. Don't forget to read the last few paragraphs which give context to what is written.
All that said I do consider it important that this part of history is not shovelled under the carpet just to appease a vocal group, especially not seen in the context of the constant stream of criticism of Western colonialism which tries to portray this as a specifically Western vice
You also do not seem to understand the reason for me mentioning the discrepancy between the way the British Library treats western and non-western colonial history. Yes, it would be silly to make demands of current Mongolia for the sins of Genghis Khan just like it would be silly to make such demands of whomever currently lives for the misdeeds of the Mughals just like it is silly to make such demands of the current inhabitants of the western world. Either treat all forms of colonialism for what they were and are, this being a natural consequence of the fact that humans are a belligerent species out for their own best and always willing to take advantage of whatever lead they have over their neighbours no matter whether they happen to live in the North, East, South or West... or put all forms of colonialism on the same moral scale. I would prefer the former treatment, others may prefer the latter but this is not how the subject is treated by the British Museum. They do their best to pain western colonialism in as bad a light as they can while glossing over equally bad - or worse - transgressions from elsewhere, the Mughal empire being a good example of such but Genghis Khan certainly has put his mark on the world as well by killing some 11-12% of its inhabitants [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...
And I hope you can separate colonialism from empire building. European colonization was meant to enrich the host state at the expense of the colony.
Whereas the Mughals outright conquered India, moved there and lived in it for the next 400 years. Their kids lived and died in India. They cut of their ties with their brethren in Samarkand and more importantly did not take India's wealth outside of India. The fact is most historic Indian Jewels (i.e. Kohi noor) are locked up in London, not Samarkand.
Comparing the Mughals with the European colonizers is silly. The fact is Mughals became as Indian as the natives who lived there. They married locals and looked like them eventually. See the last picture of the Mughal emperor imprisoned by the British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahadur_Shah_Zafar#/media/File...
He looks like a dark skinned Indian Yogi.
If you really want to go there I'll ask the following question: Europeans colonised the Americas and Oceania and lived - and live - there but they are still accused of living on 'stolen' land. Given your statements on the Mughals I assume the same holds true here? What about Europeans in e.g. South Africa, comparing racial apartheid (South Africa) to religious apartheid [1] (Mughal empire)?
Another thing to consider: had I posted something critical of some western coloniser instead of an islamic one it is unlikely there would have been any discussion on the subject as it is considered bon ton to do so - which goes straight back to my reason for posting in the first place.
[1] "The religious policy of the Mughal emperors", https://www.rarebooksocietyofindia.org/book_archive/19617421...
> Europeans colonised [...] Oceania and live there but they are still accused of living on 'stolen' land.
Which they've acknowledged, which makes it less of an accusation and far more a self evident uncontested fact.
On 3 June 1992 the High Court of Australia recognised that a group of Torres Strait Islanders, led by Eddie Mabo, held ownership of Mer (Murray Island). In acknowledging the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their land, the court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/06/02/five-...
You're moving the goal posts here. Does the fact that the Mughals - and for that matter no other colonisers other than some Western self-flagellating descendants from earlier colonists - never even thought of 'acknowledging they lived on stolen land' negate their actions? Clearly it does not.
when do you think the British Museum will be able to publish an article on the neoclassical watercolors of Adolph Hitler without mentioning antisemitism, the holocaust, or WWII?
Babur conquered India about as peacefully as Ashoka did a millennium and half before him. Both were warrior kings who took what they wanted, spared the compliant and punished those who resisted. Their killing or mercy had nothing to do with vengeance, hatred, ethnic superiority or preserving the master race.
You really need to catch up on history, barring the revisionist junk being preached by the ruling BJP in India. If the British Museum had led a display on Genghis Khan or Aurangzeb, that would have been in bad taste. But this is Babur for God sakes, about as cultured or docile a king could get in 16th century while still being a conqueror of India.
Babur, in his own words (the Baburnama), explicitly talks about the slaughter of apostates and infidels, creating towers of their skulls, the glory of being a killer of non-Muslims.
The ethnic hatred is not only everpresent, it is celebrated.
Why is this on hacker news.
Why not, it goes with the guidelines and spirit of HN. It's interesting. Is something missing?