Journal of early

modern history 18 (2014) 559-577

brill.com/jemh

Mughals, Mongols, and Mongrels: The Challenge

of Aristocracy and the Rise of the Mughal State
in the Tarikh-i Rashidi
Ali Anooshahr
University of California, Davis

Abstract

The present article seeks to re-evaluate the problem of the Central Asian military elite
that emigrated to Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century
during the foundation of the Mughal Empire. By reading the Tarikh-i Rashidi, the his-
torical composition of Mirza Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) and the main literary source for
the period, modern scholars have developed two distinct historiographical strands of
scholarship. Those mainly focused on Mughal India have used the text to argue for the
absence of a meaningful political culture among the Central Asian elite. Others, mostly
focused on Inner Asian history, have used the text for the opposite purpose of describ-
ing a fairly static “tribal” structure of Mirza Haydar’s world. I, on the other hand, will
abandon the imprecise and essentially meaningless concept of “tribe” and will rather
argue that Mirza Haydar instead chronicles the perspective of “aristocratic lineages”
whose world was collapsing in the sixteenth century and who had to adjust themselves
to changing conditions that saw the alliance of monarchs and servants through “meri-
tocracy” both in their homeland as well as the new regions to which they moved.

Keywords

Tarikh-i Rashidi – Mughal Empire – historiography – aristocracy – meritocracy

Introduction

One of the greatest challenges to the establishment of the Mughal Empire

(1526-1857) came from its own military elite, a group of Central Asian
commanders called the Turani or Chagatay Emirs. Scholars have generally

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/15700658-12342420

560 anooshahr

attributed the endemic refractoriness of this corps to culture. For instance

Ram Prasad Tripathi argued as early as 1936 that the Emperor Humayun
(d. 1556) was the first of the Timurid dynasty in Hindustan to challenge the
emirs by emphasizing divine rights of monarchy for the sake of political cen-
tralization which was then rejected by the Turco-Mongol elite in favor of cor-
porate sovereignty of other princes.1 Iqtidar Alam Khan later argued in 1973
that the older ranks of Chagatay emirs had a tradition of hereditary privileges
and would not easily bow to the single rule of one king.2 According to Richards
(1978) the final victory in this battle between the Mughal emperor and the
nobility was achieved under the Emperor Akbar (d. 1605) who managed
through formulating a quasi-religious ideology to transform the values of high-
status warrior-aristocrats from that of the “free” warrior-chief to the “slave”
warrior-administrator.3
More recent studies on the political and cultural milieu of Transoxania con-
firm the intractable position of the emirs. Maria E. Subtelny even suggests that
the Central Asians simply did not possess notions of loyalty as such.4 Stephen
Dale echoes a common sentiment when he states that Turco-Mongol elites
operated in polities that lacked necessary structures (mainly involving succes-
sion), and this led to endemic chaos. He writes, “No factor, neither kinship, nor
religion, nor language, nor age, nor love of chess or poetry or drink, nor nostal-
gia for past glories—nor any shared social connection, cultural characteristic
or personal habit—ensured lasting political cooperation among them.”5 This
line of argument continues today, ascribing a lack of orderly political tradition
to the Turani emirs.6
Such explanations are in part the result of the bias of the sources. All the
scholars listed above rely primarily on court-centric chronicles in which any
challenge to the monarchy is perceived as outrageous and unreasonable, hence
inexplicable and chaotic. How did the Turani emirs view the events of the early

1 Ram Prasad Tripathi, “The Turko-Mongol Theory of Kingship,” in The Mughal State 1526-1750,
ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi, 1998), 120-125.
2 Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Turko-Mongol Theory of Kingship,” in Medieval India—A Miscellany,
Volume Two, ed. K.A. Nizami (Aligarh, 1972), 8-19.
3 John Richards, “The Formation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir” in The
Mughal State 1526-1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi, 1998), 129.
4 Maria Eva Subtelny, “Babur’s Riva Relations: A Study in Kinship and Conflict in 15th-16th
Century Central Asia,” Der Islam 66 (1989): 104-5.
5 Stephen Dale, The Garden of Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia,
Afghanistan, and India (Leiden, 2004), 72. See also 215-16.
6 Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in
Early Modern South and Central Asia (New York, 2012), 7-71.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 561

Mughal rule? How did they see their place in their new society? For this we
must turn to the compositions of the emirs themselves such as the Tarikh-i
Rashidi of Mirza Haydar Dughlat—the Central Asian aristocrat, warrior, and
author who readily traveled or campaigned in the Oxus-to-Ganges region, be it
in Kabul, Kashghar, Kashmir, or Kannauj.7 His chronicle has been well-known
for over a century now. The British diplomat and explorer Ney Elias and the
young Orientalist Dennison Ross translated the book in 1898, during the rival-
ries between Russia and Great Britain in Inner Asia.8 The observation regard-
ing the apparent randomness of loyalties in this period were first stated by
Elias when he wrote, “in many cases they seem to have changed sides with as
little consideration for the rights and wrongs of the cause, as when they first
took a part in the quarrel.”9 However, another group of scholars subsequently
turned to Mirza Haydar’s composition in order to study a rather unchanging
“tribal” culture of Inner Asia.
In 1927, the Russian scholar V.V. Bartol‘d used the text in order to trace the
history of sixteenth-century Chaghatay “tribes and clans” in western and east-
ern Turkestan.10 After Bartol‘d, Veniamin Petrovich Yudin again went back to
the Tarikh-i Rashidi in 1962 in order to sketch a more detailed history, again, of
“Moghul clans and tribes.”11 The early work of Eiji Mano (in 1978) falls in this
category. Mano also catalogued the “tribal” groupings of Moghulistan and
argued that this particular group preserved the original Mongol culture until
the seventeenth century when the onset of Islam decreased nomadism, and
sedentarization broke down the tribal structure.12

7 For a biography of Mirza Haydar see Mansura Haidar, Mirza Haidar Dughlat as Depicted
in Persian Sources (New Delhi, 2002), and H.F. Hofman, Turkish Literature, A Bio-
Bibliographical Survey, Volume III (Utrecht, 1969), 156-163. For an earlier composition of
the author in eastern Turki see Ahmet-Zeki Validi, “Ein türkisches Werk von Ḥaydar-Mirza
Dughlat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 8 (1937): 985-989. For a study of later
Turki translations of the text see Tursun Sultanov, “Turkic versions of the Tarikh-e Rashidi
in the manuscript collection of the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental
Studies,” Manuscripta Orientalia 3 (1997): 17-29.
8 N. Elias and trans. E. Denison Ross, eds., A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia; being the
Tarikh-i-Rashidi of Mirza Muhammad Haidar, Dughlát (reprint New York, 1972).
9 Elias and Ross, A History of the Moghuls, 2.
10 Vasili V. Bartol‘d, Zwölf Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Türken Mittelasiens, von
Theodor Menzel besorgte deutsche Bearbeitung (Berlin, 1935), 216.
11 Veniamin Petrovich Yudin, “The Moghuls of Moghulistan and Moghulia,” The Central
Asian Review 14 (1966): 241-251.
12 Eiji Mano, “Part II. Moghulistan,” Acta Asiatica: Bulletin of the Institute of Eastern Culture
34 (1978): 46-60.

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562 anooshahr

In short, while scholars interested in Indian history have read Mirza Haydar’s
text as a check against dynastic narratives such the Baburnama for the recon-
struction of the events of the early sixteenth century and have found the book
to chronicle the lack of any apparent social structures, those interested in
Inner Asia have used the book for its detailing of precisely the opposite: the
long-term unchanging social structures (clans and tribes) that supposedly
dominated the region’s history. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
I would argue that these two modern historiographical trends are not mutually
exclusive, but their analytical framework needs to be modified as follows. The
predominant social structure of Central Asian emirs in Turkestan was not
timeless but was undergoing important changes in the sixteenth century. The
Moghul elite was desperately holding on to older loyalties that made progres-
sively less sense by the time Mirza Haydar wrote his book. These loyalties were
based on kinship, but cannot be called “tribal.” Anthropologists have long
stated that the term “tribe” is essentially a pseudo-concept, without a precise
meaning or definition or analytical value.13 I have, therefore, abandoned the
term and will rather use “aristocratic lineage” or “aristocracy” in order to refer
to the groups, described by Taikh-i Rashidi, which were tied together by bonds
of blood and ranked in relationship to one another according to inherited hier-
archies of status.
To be more specific, when read on its own terms and as the expression of the
worldview of the particular social group to which its author belonged, the
Tarikh-i Rashidi shows that the Mongol nobility that joined Babur and his
descendants in Kabul and India looked down with contempt upon the geneal-
ogy of their new sovereigns. Moreover, the collapse of the social order in Inner
Asia that accompanied the rise of the new power of the Uzbeks meant the
breakdown of some older hierarchies among the refugees in Kabul—where
the Mughal state had its embryonic origins—and this led to further tensions
among the military elite of the new polity in India. I will also argue that both in
India and Central Asia, the political structure was moving away from one dom-
inated by major aristocratic lineages to one dominated by kings and men of
lesser social standing who had been “trained” by the monarch. In short Mirza
Haydar bemoaned the growth of meritocracy (tarbiyat) over those who pos-
sessed aristocratic lineages (asl va nasab). The loyalties of the emirs were often

13 See the early discussion by Richard Tapper, Frontier Nomads of Iran (Cambridge, 1997),
5-10. While Tapper could not relieve himself of the weight of the term, more recent
anthropologists have abandoned it. See David Sneath, The Headless State: Aristocratic
Orders, Kinship Society, and Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007).

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 563

based on dogged adherence to older hierarchies that had already been dis-
rupted by new and changing conditions that had plunged their world into a
period of instability that lasted into the middle of the sixteenth century. In
order to appreciate this change we will have to modify our notions of the social
units to which the author refers. I will begin by analyzing the aristocratic out-
look of the Tarikh-i Rashidi.
What did the social world of a Turani emir look like in Central Asia? For
Mirza Haydar society was made up most broadly of two categories: “Moghul”
and “ra‘iyat.” The first word is generally translated into English as “Mongol”
which in modern times is understood as an ethnic term, in other words, a term
that implies a biological bond that transcends and unites hierarchical differen-
tiation. The second term can be translated as “subject” or more specifically
“peasant.” Mirza Haydar often uses it in the former sense. For example, he
writes that when Mirza Aba Bakr captured the town of Aqsu, “he took the pop-
ulation [khalayiq] of Aqsu captive, be they Moghul or ra‘iyat, and drove them
all to Kashghar.”14 There is a contrast then between the subjects and the
Moghuls who must therefore be understood as the ruling class, specifically a
military ruling class. The phrase above is echoed in the semantically related
phrase sipahi va ra‘iyat, “military and subject.”15 It is true that the Moghuls
were originally seen as a foreign people who dominated the region. In that
context, ethnic and social position would go hand in hand. However, by the
late fifteenth century such a distinction no longer existed. For instance, our
author had heard that when the famous Naqshbandi Sufi ‘Ubaydullah Ahrar
visited the Moghul ruler Yunus Khan, he had been surprised to find him to be
a “man of pleasant conversation, with a full beard, a Tajik face, and modesty
of speech.”16
Of course the absence of biological or physiological distinction between the
ruling elite and the subjects did not imply a lack of concern for genealogy and
bloodline. Quite the contrary: Mirza Haydar attributed the inherent value of
socially-important individuals to their lineage and expected their social posi-
tion to be determined by hereditary privileges. So for instance, he detailed with
pride and nostalgia the privileges inherited by his great ancestor Khudaydad
Dughlat (d. 1446) from the time of Genghis Khan. He could carry drums and
standards, he could give battalion standards to two of his attendants, he could
enter the khan’s assembly while armed, he could enslave whoever trespassed

14 Mirza Haydar Dughlat, Tarikh-i Rashidi, ed. ‘Abbasquli Ghaffari Fard (Tehran, 2004),
158-9.
15 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 182.
16 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 126.

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564 anooshahr

his hunting grounds, he could be an emir (commander) of the Moghul people/

state (ulus), he had the right to a certain amount of space between him and
other emirs who sat around him in formal gatherings.17 Some generations later,
the Dughlat emirs were allowed to dismiss battalion captains without asking
the khan’s approval first and were also given immunity for up to nine offenses.
Further rights were bestowed over the years, until Mirza Haydar’s time when
these rights were repealed—much to the incredulous disappointment of the
mirza.18 If we leave aside the author’s anger and resentment toward his own
era for now, his description above makes it clear that he attached great signifi-
cance to lineage and ancestral privileges that were derived from ancient kings.
As military elite, Moghuls spent most of their time camping and campaign-
ing. But this did not mean they were pastoralists, i.e. they did not engage in
animal herding for a living. Their role and right was to extract revenue from
whatever source they could manage. The economy of Inner Asia was some-
what diverse, and the khans and emirs made their income in a number of dif-
ferent ways. For instance Ways Khan (fl. 1418-29) earned his personal income
by farming.19 While in Turfan, he had wells dug up to be able to farm. The work
was mainly done by slaves (mamluk), though sometime a surprised observer
would see him partaking in labor.20 Emir Khudaydad, who ruled over Kashghar,
Yarkand, Khotan, and Aqsu did not own his own flocks and depended on those
close to him for his steeds.21 Mir Sayyid Ali (d. 1458) brought prosperity through
his good management to both farms and pasturelands.22 Babachaq Sultan,
when he escaped to an area known as Bai and Kusan, repaired the fort there
and had the area farmed.23 This is not to say that pastoralism did not matter to
the Moghuls—far from it. Rather, the khans and emirs mentioned by Haydar
Mirza were not herders, but a military aristocracy. As such, they appropriated
resources however they could.
The only exceptions to this pattern were the Kazakhs who were portrayed
by Mirza Haydar as a strictly pastoralist subsection of the peoples (ulus). He
writes that when in the Spring of 1512, Sultan Sa‘id went to visit Qasim Khan
the leader of the Kazakh, he found his host to be an old man of about seventy
who, while showing him all the proper etiquette, said to him, “We are men of

17 I use this translation following Munkh-Erdene discussed in more detail below.

18 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 82-85.
19 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 95.
20 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 95.
21 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 96.
22 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 105.
23 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 160.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 565

the steppe [mardum-i sahra’i]. There is no variety of delicate things here. Our
finest possessions [mata‘] are our horses, our most delicious meal is horseflesh,
and our best drink is horse-milk. There are no buildings or gardens in our
country. Our recreation is to inspect our flocks.”24 Again it must be noted that
Qasim Khan’s relationship to horses is ownership (as revenue source) and rec-
reational inspection. He does not engage in any labor toward them.
Even so, Mirza Haydar knew that the lifestyle of the Kazakhs was already on
the way to extinction. He wrote, “Today, no trace of Kazakhs has been left for
four years. In the past the Kazakh numbered a million, but in the year 944
(1537/8 CE), no trace at all has remained from such a population.”25 Nevertheless,
Mirza Haydar romanticizes the Kazakh as representing something authentic
about the ulus as a whole which the Moghuls had lost. This lost quality can be
understood only if we disabuse ourselves of preconceived notions about
Moghul “nomadism” or “pastoralism.”
To illustrate, it might be tempting to view Yunus Khan’s reign (beginning in
the middle of the fifteenth century) as the beginning of the sedentarization of
the Moghul ulus (albeit unsuccessfully) from a state of “nomadism.” Stephen
Dale for instance seems to imply this when he writes “Yunus Khan controlled
the vast swath of territory between the Oasis of Mawarannahr and north China
where Turco-Mongol nomadic and semi-nomadic steppe culture still flour-
ished in the late fifteenth century . . . At that time, Mughulistan was still a
region whose Mongol inhabitants, in Mirza Haydar’s words, ‘hated cities.’”26
Dale is referring to a passage in the text where Mirza Haydar describes the
revolt of the Moghul emirs against Yunus Khan who wanted to move them to
cities. But reading the text carefully will show that what is at stake is not the
preservation of “nomadic” culture. The issue is related to conflicting notions of
purity of lineage versus purity of lifestyle. Secondly, it is a military matter. The
Moghuls refused to abandon their camp for urban garrisons. This must be
argued in more detail.
According to Mirza Haydar, the emirs told the khan that they opposed him
because “the khan tries to bring us to towns and administrative centers [vilayat]
but we are loath to be in towns and administrative centers.”27 There is no talk
of forced settlement of pastoralists. The author writes specifically that Yunus

24 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 408. This translation is adopted from W.H. Thackston, Mirza Haydar
Dughlat’s Tarikh-Rashidi: A History of the Khans of Moghulistan (Cambridge, 1996), 178
modified.
25 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 405.
26 Dale, The Garden, 75-76.
27 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 123.

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566 anooshahr

Khan made this decision in the winter of 1452. At that point the Khan func-
tioned as monarch and the head of the army which numbered sixty thousand
men, as well as their families. They changed their location or camp (ordu) sea-
sonally. However, when that winter they camped near the Oxus River and the
army went out for a hunt, the campsite was attacked by an Uzbek force led by
an Uzbek prince. The Khan managed to return with a handful of attendants,
and he beat off the Uzbeks with the help of the women at camp.28 However the
traumatic lesson of the Uzbeks occupying his campsite while he was away was
not lost to the khan. It is after this point that he proposed to his emirs to move
to towns, which were fortified. In short Yunus Khan was not trying to force the
Moghuls to abandon pastoralism in favor of agriculture, or “nomadism” in
favor of “sedentarism.” Rather he was urging his commanders and their fami-
lies to be garrisoned behind city walls.
We must turn to a work composed at about the same time of the events
described above to make more sense of the issue. In his history of the Aqquyunly
dynasty, the Tarikh-i ‘Alamara-i Amini, Fazlullah Khunji (d. 1521) had argued
that ruling dynasties must be endowed with particular qualities in order to be
legitimate. One of these requirements was that their wives should not be
seized by an enemy so that there may not exist any doubt as to the purity of
their children’s paternity.29 This view of course applies to Yunus Khan and his
anxiety about the capture of his camp and women by the Uzbek prince. It was
no wonder that he wanted to move his followers into towns. Another incident
such as what had occurred would not merely humiliate him but would entirely
threaten the legitimacy of his line.
At the same time, the opposition of the Moghul emirs to this plan also finds
a supporting echo in Fazlullah’s prefatory treatise on dynastic legitimacy.
According to Fazlullah, cities had a corrupting influence, and the best dynas-
ties were those who spent most of their time in open country.30 This feeling
appears to be behind the rejection of Yunus Khan’s proposal to move his men
into cities. The phrase used by them to describe their sentiment toward the
move is a very strong “ba ghayat mustakrah,” wherein the last word has the
connotation of disgust (from the same root as “kirahat”) and the second indi-
cates “extremeness.” The connotation of revulsion toward towns only makes
sense if we understand their association with corruption. In short, what was at
stake here was a conflicting notion of aristocratic purity between the khan and

28 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 120-121.

29 Fazl Allah Ruzbihan Khunji, Tarikh-i ‘Alam’ara-i Amini, ed. Muhammad Akbar ‘Ashiq
Kabuli (Tehran, 2003), 25.
30 Fazl Allah, Tarikh-i ‘Alam’ara, 26.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 567

his emirs, the first of lineage and the second of character. It is precisely this
noble purity that Mirza Haydar and his informants admired about the Kazakh
elite.
Now that we have gained some insight into their worldview, it is necessary
to learn about the specific aristocratic families that made up the Moghuls and
their affiliation to one another. A vast network of relationships held this aristo-
cratic society together. The main families were descended from the office-
holders in Genghis Khan’s army whose position had become hereditary. So the
Dughlat, to whom our author Mirza Haydar belonged, were the descendants
and children of Emir Tulak who possessed the “rank” (mansab) of Dughlat in
the old days.31 By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Dughlat had
become a qabila, which is a kinship term that technically referred to a group of
(male) descendants of a single father.32 By the middle of the sixteenth century,
the Dughlat were also called a tabaqa, a term that suggested genealogical
succession as well as social notability and exclusivity.33 Indeed it is clear that
when he describes the Moghuls, Mirza Haydar is discussing great military-
aristocratic families. He refers to the Moghuls as a qawm.34 Thackston trans-
lates this as a “tribe,” but this translation is problematic. If we use it to mean a
(pastoralist) social grouping marked by bonds of kinship and relative equality
among the kin groups, then the term is inappropriate and misleading. In the
Tarikh-i Rashidi the word qawm refers to the main lineages not an entire “soci-
ety.” Moreover, various individuals are ranked in numerous hierarchies in rela-
tion to one another as well as to others outside their subgroup. In short, Mirza
Haydar’s usage is closer to the modern Persian qawm va khvish, meaning mem-
bers of one’s extended family.
Under this umbrella term our author lists the various “classes” of Moghuls,
or the tabaqat. These include the Dughlat, the Barlas, the Dukhuti, Begchik,
and others—all military units.35 The head of each class is called a khayldar,
meaning commander of a large (cavalry) force.36 For instance, when referring
to the commander of the Begchik, Mirza Haydar writes, “He is truly a man
deserving of the rank [mansab] of emirate [i.e. being an emir or officer] . . . He

31 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 21-22.

32 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 128, Ali Akbar Dihkhuda, Lughatnamah.
33 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 438. This is how the word is used, for instance, by Minhaj Siraj
Juzjani, author of the thirteenth-century history of Muslim dynasties entitled Tabaqat-i
Nasiri.
34 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 437, Thackston, Mirza Haydar, 194.
35 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 438-440.
36 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 442.

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568 anooshahr

has perfect lineage [dar kamal-i asl va nasab ast].”37 In short, unlike what mod-
ern scholars have supposed, the mirza has given us a list of Moghul military
nobility not an ethnographic description of a pastoralist tribe.
How did this ruling elite see its position in society? There was a very clear
sense of class privilege among these men. The elite were the monarch (khan),
the high-commanders (emirs), and the religious notables. Mirza Haydar con-
sidered everyone else to “belong” to either one of the top two categories. The
author’s description of the various inhabitants of Kashghar, which was a pos-
session of his family, makes this social view very clear. He divides the popula-
tion in the following way:

One is called the tümän, which consists of peasants [Perso-Arabic ri‘aya],

who belong [muta‘alliq’and] to the khan and pay their taxes annually to
him. Second is the qauchin which consists of the military, who belong
[ta‘alluq darad] to my forefathers [ajdad]. Next is the aymaq, each of
which gives a measure of grain and cloth. They also belong to
[muta‘allaqat] my forefathers [ajdad]. The fourth category consists of
holders of religious offices, and custodians of charitable institutions and
foundations, most of whom have some connection [mansub] to may
forefathers [ajdad].38

What we are dealing with is thus a ruling aristocracy that exploits the various
groups of people, be they farmers, soldiers, or other units.39 Peasants “belong”
to the khan, and the aymaq “belong” to the emirs. Together they provide the
revenue base. The soldiers, who do not pay taxes, still “belong” to the local
emirs. Finally there are the religious notables who are simply “connected to”
the local elite, presumably by either being born or married into them.
This aristocratic worldview was strongly opposed to processes of social
mobility. One key element was the issue of “tarbiyat” which could mean “train-
ing” or even “raising up,” thus a form of mentorship, but which also signified an
obligation, as in “good conduct.” Trainability, especially as it was applied to
people of lowly birth, was seen to be in conflict with an aristocratic ethos.
Mirza Haydar, therefore, emphatically declared his distrust of training people
of subservient social ranks. For instance he blamed Sultan Mahmud Khan’s

37 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 440.

38 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 433, Thackston, Mirza Haydar, 192.
39 Semi-pastoralists? the tribute of grain would suggest the aymaq either farmed it or trans-
ported it.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 569

(1463-1508) downfall on the monarch’s inability to appreciate the value of his

old emirs whom he had inherited from his father. He wrote:

The reason for those defeats was that there were many prominent emirs
who had been there since the time of Yunus Khan [1416-87]. However, like
all hereditary monarchs, [Mahmud] khan did not understand the value
of good people. Rather he believed that anyone whom he had trained
would turn out to be good. This is of course impossible. Thus, based on
this rotten belief, the khan trained a number of louts who constantly
strove to betray the great old emirs.40

Afterwards, having pushed out the old noble grandees, sometimes called ahl-i
isalat, the base-born people (ahad al-nas and arazil) who were around Sultan
Mahmud Khan foolishly advised the khan to train/raise (tarbiyat] Shahi Beg
Khan or Shibani khan.41 The future emperor of the Uzbeks ended up
fighting and defeating the Moghuls. Later Sultan Mamhmud Khan went to
Shahi Beg “trusting in the tarbiyat that he had done,” and was murdered by his
former disciple.42
In other words while tarbiyat was an important bond between Mongol gran-
dees and their retainers, it would be dangerous, so argued the mirza, to think it
was a substitute for antiquity of lineage and the inborn virtue of old nobles. In
fact, on certain occasions the emirs might even rise up and murder a person
who was overly favored by the king and whom they thought was their inferior.
This was the case of Temür, an Uyghur of Turfan, who was promoted by Esan-
Buqa khan specifically in order to humiliate the emirs of his father. The latter
(including an ancestor of the author), believing that the power and attention
given to Temür “violated the limits of moderation and tarbiyat,” assailed him
one day, cut him to pieces, and put the frightened young khan to flight.43
Mirza Haydar’s clearest statements regarding this matter are found in the
paragraphs describing the fate of the tyrant Mirza Aba Bakr who was attacked
and defeated by a coalition of Moghuls that included the author himself. Mirza
Aba Bakr, in his paranoia, had destroyed his best emirs such as Mir Vali
and Shahdana. In their place, he raised up (tarbiyat) some arazil, or “low-
born men.” Soon, his military strength declined “because it takes years for a

40 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 152.

41 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 371.
42 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 153-4.
43 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 106.

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570 anooshahr

commander such as Mir Vali to be found.”44 Mirza Aba Bakr recruited a new
soldiery out of peasants/subjects, craftsmen, gardeners, and farmers whom he
had trained (tarbiyat). To those of this group who were more capable, he
applied the title of “mirza” or “prince.” He did not realize that

It must take many years under the sun for an original [asli] stone to
become a precious stone, be it the ruby of Badakhshan or the agate of
Yemen . . . It takes only days for a handful of wool from the back of a sheep
to become an ascetic’s robe or a donkey’s saddle-cloth . . . Many are they
who have spent their entire lives practicing the charge and rigors of the
military life, and they have not learned it properly. Among a thousand
soldiers who have squandered their lives in this pursuit, not a hundred
valiant men are found and not one capable of commanding . . . [Aba
Bakr’s soldiers] were a multitude of men, but few of them understood the
meaning of being a man. It was an army empty of commanders but full of
weapons. [Verse]: a weapon not in the hand of a warrior is useless, a body
without a soul is worthless. Every merchant or man from the marketplace,
every peasant or farmer [barzakar], is riding a tame horse and wearing a
gold-studded sword and thinks himself a commander [mir ya sardar],
and thinks the work of courage and soldiery is an easy task.45

In short, the quality of aristocratic commanders was the result of years of good
breeding that could not be replaced even by the best training. Yet, as the lines
above suggest, the author was fully aware that the age of Moghul emirs was
ending. In Mirza Haydar’s time, the Moghuls were in disarray, the khans had
grown despotic and beyond control in their violent repression of the emirs,
and the great lineages were disappearing. Mirza Haydar narrates with sadness
and fondness his mentorship and friendship with the future ruler Rashid
Sultan. He recalls how he taught his young disciple the arts of fighting, how he
traveled with him and served on his expeditions, and how he helped put the
affairs of his government in good order.46 Yet, immediately upon his accession
to the throne, Rashid Sultan murdered the author’s uncle.47 In short, in the
good old days, it was the emirs that served as “trainers” (murabbi) to kings.
The recent violence, however, was a symptom of the breakdown of the order
of things in Inner Asia in the early sixteenth century. A new “people,” the

44 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 459.

45 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 458-9.
46 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 181.
47 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 183.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 571

Uzbeks were forming out of the ruins of Moghuls and Timurids, and survivors
were flocking southward to safety, to the kingdom of Kabul founded by
Zahiruddin Babur—himself a Timurid, or as Mirza Haydar says, a “Chagatay,”
prince. What would happen when these refugees came together in a topsy-
turvy world where the old hierarchies could no longer be maintained?
The troubles between Babur and the Moghuls in Kabul originate in these
contradictions.
The empire of Genghis Khan, wrote Mirza Haydar, was divided among his
four sons, leaders of the four states/peoples (ulus). One of these was the
Moghul state/people, who were subdivided into the Moghuls and the Chagatay.
However, on account of their hatred for each other, the Chagatay referred to
the Moghuls as the “bandits,” and the Moghuls called the Chagatay “half-
breeds.”48 Of course, since Moghul identity was an aristocratic one that prided
itself on lineage, as was argued above, then the derogatory designation for the
Chagatay, or the Timurids, obviously implied inferiority based on the impurity
of pedigree. Throughout Tarikh-i Rashidi, this is precisely the attitude exhib-
ited towards not only the descendants of Timur, but even the great conqueror
himself whom Mirza Haydar otherwise held in high regard. So for instance
under the khanate of Khizr-Khwaja Khan (fl. 1392-99), he writes: “When
[Khizir-Khwaja] Khan ascended the throne of the khanate and sultanate, the
stability of the institution of the khanate, which had been so shaken by Emir
Qamaruddin’s usurpation and Emir Timur’s domination, became firm again.
The old institutions and regulations, which had been in decline, were once
again renewed.”49 The old rules and institutions of the Moghuls, in which
Mirza Haydar took great pride (as seen above), were in fact threatened and had
declined because of usurpers and aggressors such as Timur.
The Timurid/Chaghatay ignorance of those important Moghul rules contin-
ued down the family line. In another episode, Mirza Haydar depicts his great
Dughlat ancestor, Emir Khudaydad stopping in the Timurid capital of
Samarqand on his pilgrimage to Mecca. There, the Timurid prince Ulughbeg
acknowledged the unparalleled mastery of Khudaydad over the law-code of
Genghis Khan (töra), and asked him to teach it to him. The old emir instead
chided the prince saying, “We have cursed Genghis Khan’s töra, abandoned it,
and have accepted Islamic law [shari‘a]. If Genghis Khan’s töra is good, and if
the prince, despite his vast learning, wants to abandon Islamic law and adopt
it instead, then I will teach him the töra and return home [instead of continuing

48 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 190.

49 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 82. The translation here is Thackston’s, slightly modified, Thackston,
Mirza Haydar, 29.

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572 anooshahr

to Mecca].”50 The embarrassed prince desisted and allowed the emir to pursue
pilgrimage. This is a very interesting jab at the Timurids. While acknowledging
the Moghul’s mastery of the old laws, and the Timurid’s ignorance of it, Mirza
Haydar’s ancestor even beats Ulughbeg at his own game, showing a greater
piety in Islam than his more urban and religiously learned counterpart.
But the most damning statement about the relationship between the
Moghuls and the Chagatay in Tarikh-i Rashidi, are put by the author into the
mouth of the Timurid prince Abu Sa‘id Mirza (d. 1469), Babur’s grandfather. It
is addressed to Yunus Khan, from whom Babur was descended on his mother’s
side. According to our author, it was Chagatay practice from the time of Timur
himself, to rule in the name of a Moghul Khan, who was symbolically acknowl-
edged as sovereign, to make up for the Timurids’ lack of legitimacy. By the time
of Abu Sa‘id Mirza, however, the Timurids were ready to assert more autonomy
from the Khans. Abu Sa‘id’s speech is worth quoting extensively:

When Emir Timur first emerged, the emirs did not obey him sufficiently,
but if he had set about reducing them to nothing, his strength would have
been sapped. The emirs said, “A khan must be established for us to
obey” . . . Now [Abu Sa‘id continued] that it is my [i.e. Abu Sa‘id’s] turn to
rule, my independence has reached a point that I have no need of a
khan . . . It is to be understood that henceforth you [Yunus Khan] will not
claim, as did former generations and khans of the past, that Emir Timur
and his family are your liegemen/servants [nawkar] from generations to
generations, because, although it was formerly so, it is no longer the case.
I [i.e. Abu Sa‘id] am now emperor in my own right. How can anyone
claim that I am his servant [nawkar]? You must now cease using the
terms servant and master [khadim va makhdum] and address me as
friend [dust].51

This curious passage sums up the nature of Chagatay/Moghul relationship

neatly. The power of the Moghul emirs and khans was eclipsed by the collec-
tive power mustered by the Chagatay. Moreover, the position of the Moghuls
had declined over the generations. However, the nature of the relationship was
initially one of master and servant. The word “nawkar” (Persianized version of
Mongol “nökör”), which according to Abu Sa‘id Mirza was used by the khans
when addressing the Timurids, has the implication of all-out servility as indi-
cated by the Persian synonym used here (khadim, literally “servant”). In short,

50 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 97-8.

51 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 110-11, Thackston, Mirza Haydar, 44, modified.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 573

the attitude of Moghul lineages such as the Dughlat or the Barlas toward the
descendents of Timur, such as Babur, was one of aristocratic condescension.
In fact the author, who otherwise loved Babur as a father figure, writes censori-
ously about the state his Timurid cousin had founded: “nowadays none of the
Chagatay has survived except for their kings, and these are the children of
Babur Padshah. Now, instead of the Chagatay, there has gathered around them
the commoners [ahad al-nas] of their hereditary domains.”52 Of course we
know how negatively the mirza viewed upstart base-born leaders in other con-
texts. One can thus infer that the kingdom of Kabul and its expanded version
in Agra was viewed by most Moghul aristocratic refugees that served it as
a state led by a half-breed prince and controlled by lowly, incompetent
social climbers.
We see this tension already in the early years of the kingdom of Kabul. Many
immigrants were flocking south to Babur’s small princedom while the Uzbeks
were routing various Moghul and Timurid armies. One such refugee was Sultan
Sa‘id Khan (d. 1533). He lost a battle to the Uzbeks and decided to go north and
spend his time raiding. After failing in that endeavor he went south to Kabul
and spent three years there. He accompanied Babur to Qunduz after the
Uzbeks were badly defeated by Safavids, but finally was given the province of
Andijan by Babur.53 Sultan Sa‘id Khan was thus quite typical of desperate
Moghuls who had emigrated to Babur’s domain in Kabul.
Yet, the old hostility between the Moghuls and the Chagatay were always
threatening to erupt. An early coup in 1505/6 by two Moghul notables, a
Dughlat and a Barlas, had almost brought an end to Babur’s hold over Kabul.54
Some years later, some of the Moghul emirs had pointed out to Sultan Sa‘id the
numerical superiority of the Moghuls over the Chagatay and had advised him
to kill Babur and ascend the throne himself.55 It was for this reason, so the story
runs, that Sultan Sa‘id asked Babur to send him away Andijan in order to avoid
a civil war.56 The old loyalties of the Moghuls in the Kabul kingdom was always
more powerful than their gratefulness to Babur. When Babur asks incredu-
lously in his memoirs, after describing the coup in Kabul, “Was my mother
not the daughter of Yunus Khan, and was I not his grandson?” the question is

52 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 190.

53 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 167-168.
54 Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, Baburnama, ed. W.H. Thackston (Cambridge, 1993),
197a.
55 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 373.
56 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 374.

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574 anooshahr

obviously rhetorical.57 Babur’s supposedly impeccable lineage, which modern

scholars assume gave him legitimacy, in fact counted for little among Moghul
aristocrats.58
Indeed, after Babur’s loss of Samarqand to ‘Ubaydullah Uzbek, we are told
that “Ayyub Begchik, Mir Muhammad, Yadgar Mirza, and Nazar Mirza, along
with the rest of the Moghuls attacked [Babur] Padshah one night. He threw
himself into the fortress with great difficulty.”59 This is not a matter of inherent
unruliness or love of freedom by the Moghul emirs. Nor is this behavior ran-
dom and chaotic. Rather, it is a symptom of the contempt in which they held
the half-breed Chagatys and the devotion they felt to their old family alle-
giances. When the young Mirza Haydar arrived in Kabul, these same “unruly”
Moghuls immediately came to serve him because of the loyalty that they
had sworn to his father.60 If anything then, these men were out of place in
the sixteenth century precisely for their tenacious fidelity to old allegiances
and bloodlines.
The condescending attitude of the Moghuls continued into Humayun’s
time. Mirza Haydar, who was present during the battle of Kannauj, in which
the Afghans defeated the emperor’s army, constantly complains about the
worthlessness of the emirs with whom he was forced to serve. He writes, “The
emirs held nothing but the empty title of emir. They owned plenty of treasures
and lands, but possessed not even a bit of sound judgment, foresight, vigor,
honor, and courage, which are the real foundations of being an emir.”61 Mirza
Haydar’s sharp criticism of the Chagatay emirs is not explicitly based on lin-
eage. However, it is clear that he thinks worthless people, who do not possess
good qualities, have been promoted and raised up in Humayun’s army. This is
thus a similar viewpoint to the author’s distrust of trainability, or tarbiyat, dis-
cussed above. The continued tension between the “Mughal” emperors in India
and their Central Asian notables must be seen against this backdrop. The emirs
jealously clung to an aristocratic ethos which was opposed to the meritocratic
order with which the emperor challenged them. Although Mirza Haydar does
not mention any names, it must have been particularly stinging for him to
serve under the commander of the Mughal army, Hindu Beg Qauchin, whose
sobriquet would place him among relatively lowly soldiers whom our author
thought “belonged” to his family in Kashghar.

57 Babur, Baburnama, 200b.

58 Most recently by Dale, Garden, 16-17 and Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, 19.
59 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 391.
60 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 399.
61 Mirza Haydar, Tarikh, 682.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 575

In sum, based on the testimony of Mirza Haydar, we cannot simply reduce

the nature of elite politics in the early Mughal state to an ahistorical “Turco-
Mongol” tradition. In the specific case of early Mughal India, the tensions that
necessarily accompanied the transitional phase of the sixteenth century resur-
faced at crucial moments of crisis (such as Babur’s defeats at Samarqand or
Humayun’s rout at Kannauj). Then the old loyalties could serve as a rallying
point, especially for aristocratic groups who saw their lineage as superior to
their recently-disgraced king and who could always blame the defeat on their
superiors who had come from undistinguished origins.
Mirza Haydar’s testimony should also help us to abandon the highly impre-
cise notion of “tribe” as an explanatory term in Mughal (and Moghul) history.
David Sneath has recently criticized the notions of egalitarian and segmentary
societies that go under the rubric of “tribe” or “tribal” and are applied indis-
criminately to all Inner Asian polities. He has put aside the problematic cate-
gory of “tribe” or “clan” as intellectual vestiges of the colonial era and has
instead proposed the concept of the “headless state”—polities formed and
dominated by aristocratic groups and weak monarchs—in order to explain the
character of some Central Asian states such the Manchus.62
One should avoid a sweeping generalization of Sneath’s findings.63 Peter
Golden is right to criticize Sneath for arguing for continuity among several
polities ranging from Ilkhans, as chronicled by from Rashid al-Din Fazl Allah,
all the way to the Manchus. Moreover, Golden’s demand that “If we are to
accept [Sneath’s] proposed tribeless order and ‘headless state,’ in which name-
less servitors, slaves, and other dependents cluster around power-wielding
‘aristocratic orders,’ we need to know much more about the latter and the
mechanisms by which they were able to attract and retain followers” is also
justified. This would require conducting a series of historicized micro-studies
of which the present article is meant to serve as a specimen.
For the early Mongol period (the early-thirteenth century) Lhamsuren
Munkh-Erdene has recently analyzed in great detail the surviving Mongolian
material and has confirmed and nuanced Sneath’s thesis. He argues in favor of
the role played by aristocratic orders in the formation of Genghis Khan’s
empire, though his findings do not support the claim that they lacked central

62 David Sneath, The Headless State. See especially 1-44 for his discussion of the original use
of the term in colonial anthropology.
63 Peter Golden, “Review of The Headless State: Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and
Misrepresentations of Nomadic Inner Asia by David Sneath,” Journal of Asian Studies 68
(2009): 293-6.

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576 anooshahr

leadership.64 Munkh-Erdene’s arguments are also relevant as they explain the

formation of novel elite identities in Genghis Khan’s new order. So for instance,
the term ulus, which initially referred to the Mongol state or empire, was
understood in the next generation to refer to descendants of military groups
who benefitted (and received special privileges) from the state.65 This explana-
tion fits very well with Mirza Haydar’s version of the origins of the noble houses
that controlled “Moghulistan” in the sixteenth century. As we saw above, Mirza
Haydar explained that each great family descended from individuals who had
initially held that sobriquet as ranks in Genghis Khan’s army. In short Sneath’s
explanation resonates quite well with the evidence of the Tarikh-i Rashidi.
The Moghuls of the early sixteenth century certainly looked down on the
unimpressive genealogies of the new emperors and resented the quick path to
social mobility provided to men whom they considered to be socially inferior.
Of course, looking forward, the eventual victory belonged to the Mughal
emperors and the meritocratic order that incorporated precisely individuals
from less remarkable bloodlines at the expense of the high-born Turani emirs.
Yet, it is worth noting that even the Mughal emperors continued to share
Mirza Haydar’s distrust of trainability. This fact can be observed in composi-
tions that reflected the courtly viewpoint. The massive Millenial History
(Tarikh-i Alfi), composed in the early 1580s at the Emperor Akbar’s behest, pro-
vides a good example of this ambivalence. On the one hand, the authors of the
text equated “tarbiyat” with the virtue of loyalty (vafa), praised it when it was
extended to slaves who later even sat on the throne, and lauded kings who
never humiliated those whom they had trained.66 Simultaneously, they knew
that tabiyat would invariably arouse the jealousy of aristocratic kin groups
(umara, qaba’il, or others), and they feared that those who had been lifted up
from low birth (bad-aslan, furumayagan) might turn against their master.67
Interestingly, the authors were particularly suspicious of Hindu notables who
were being raised up to positions of authority by the emperor. They used the
examples of Hemu, who usurped the rule of the Afghan kings, and the Rajputs
of Malwa who took over Sultan Mahmud Khalji’s state, as warnings against the
“raising up of pagans” (tarbiyat-i kuffar).68

64 Lhamsuren Munkh-Erdene, “Where Did the Mongol Empire Come From? Medieval
Mongol Ideas of People, State and Empire,” Inner Asia 13 (2011): 211-37.
65 Munkh-Erdene, “Where Did the Mongol Empire Come From?,” 219.
66 Qazi Ahmad Tattavi, Ja‘far Beg Qazvini, et al., Tarikh-i Alfi, ed. Ghulamriza Tabataba’i Majd
(Tehran, 2003), 2:1155, 6:4127, 8:5568.
67 Tattavi, Qazvini, Tarikh-i Alfi, 4:2953, 5:3015, 5:3494, 7:4619, 7:4724.
68 Tattavi, Qazvini, Tarikh-i Alfi, 8:5720, 8:5514.

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mughals, mongols, and mongrels 577

As we know, such admonitions by the authors went unheeded, and in the

next several decades, many Rajput leaders were incorporated into the Mughal
state. However, it is worth noting that the stigma attached to tarbiyat did not
disappear and was brought up at court as a reminder to those who might over-
step their bounds. Corinne Lèfevre has recently identified an interesting pas-
sage according to which the Emperor Jahangir once snapped at a certain Raja
Manohar (who had written a Persian couplet complaining to the emperor)
that the Raja’s misfortune was “also due to his name.” The courtier who
recorded this exchange explained it as a necessary correction of a Raja who
belonged to the savage Kachchwahas and had been raised to his present place
thanks to the “tarbiyat” of the emperor Akbar.69 Such a reprimand would cer-
tainly have pleased Mirza Haydar to a point, but then again for the Mirza and
others like him the problem of meritocracy was not so much a matter of under-
mining of royal authority but rather its threat to aristocratic lineages.

69 Corinne Lefèvre, “The Majālis-i Jahāngīrī (1608-11): Dialogue and Asiatic Otherness at the
Mughal Court,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55 (2012): 278.

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