The Baburnama
Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor
by Wheeler M. Thackston; Babur
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Editions of The Baburnama
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Paperback |
Publisher Modern Library |
Date 2002 |
Price $10.57 |
 NEW |
 |
ISBN |
Binding/Format Hardcover |
Publisher Oxford Univ Pr |
Date 1995 |
Price None Available |
Publisher Notes
Both an official chronicle and a highly personal memoir, the Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Central Asia and India during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is also the text most often quoted by historians and scholars of Mughal India. The prose of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, the first Mughal emperor, is described by its new translator Wheeler Thackston as frank, intimate, truthful, and unbiased. It is all the more astonishing, therefore, that the Baburnama is also the first real autobiography in Islamic literature. Babur had no historical precedent for his narrative, yet even today it is a remarkably engrossing volume to read. The interests that Babur expressed so eloquently in the memoirs - his profound curiosity about the natural world and human personalities, for example - defined also the directions that artists were to take. Dr. Thackston's translation provides many new insights into a particularly stimulating period in the world's history.
Media Reviews
"In setting out to write an autobiography, Babur did something that very few writers have done. He invented a form out of whole cloth. Babur's true literary peers, in this sense, are such epochal figures as Lady Murasaki and Cervantes. But this writer was also the founder of a great empire: Babur was Pizarro AND Cervantes."
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