Raiders from the North by Alex RutherfordMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
While the twelve-year old prince Babur is witnessing the sight of pinkening hilltop sunset standing alongside his father, his destiny takes a sharp turn as his father surmises into the dark night of death; leaving a mere young boy that he is, to govern the throne of his kingdom.
Young he might be, but the blood of his ancestors - of the warriors like Genghis Khan and Timur, flows in his veins. So, afraid and nervous as he is, shaky and stunned as he is, he wipes his tears and rises to the occasion, ready to put his feet into the deadly ocean of fire, as enemies lurk and lurch all around him, keen for a tiny crack of chance, to wipe his name off the planet and to employ their own puppet-candidate to rule the throne and gain booty.
With the help of a few trusted chiefs, his mother and his mighty grandmother Esan Dawlat, he allows himself to look past his beads of anxious sweat, as the khutba is read in his name in an urgent, secret affair, proclaiming Babur as the new king of Ferghana.
Nevertheless, kingship brings with it the confining fringes of boundaries and stacks of responsibilities. But kingship also brings with it the gifts of pride and dignity, the will to conquer the world and to dream.
But, paradoxically, what is a dream without challenges? Nothing!
The same holds true for a dream that, Babur as well his late father, had in their mind; the dream of ruling the city of Samarkand.
Throughout his lifetime, the turquoise-domed city of Samarkand, Babur’s greatest dream, acted for him, like a frippery-hypnotic opium pellet, causing him to wigwag swingily in and out of the city like a spinning bob, yet never actually retaining his hold over its throne. Samarkand, in Babur’s life was a moment of light that flickered like dots of evening candleflames, but finally extinguishing to the rule of the black-robed Uzbeks (the reason, probably, why, today it is called by the name of Uzbekistan). While getting to the throne of the city thrice, he had to ultimately let it go, just like a drifting dream and it was only then that his thoughts drifted towards the conquest of Hindustan, beginning from Delhi.
However, clearly, his journey from his mountainous kingdom Ferghana, all the way to Hindustan, was no thigh-slapping doddle, but a herculean, toilsome challenge, that he had to undertake.
Discarded as a king without throne during his young years, by the plottings of his own cousin brothers, uncles and rivals, Babur discovered himself to be turning into a petty raider, fighting for his survival, hiding, escaping, and surviving his days with nothing but pieces of old dry meat, stale flatbread and gulpfuls of riverwater; sleeping under trees and crossing icy passes capped with slippery snow; carrying his father’s eagle-hilted sword Alamgir hinged to his waist and donning the majestic tiger-emblemed ancestral ring in his finger, he raided from place to place, never allowing his enemies to have a breath of restful sleep. He was a king fallen into a raider - a raider with veins trembling of rage, his eyes red-rimmed with days of sleeplessness and his belly throbbing with a burning desire for sadistic revenge; his glinting swordtip thirsty for blood and his jewelled dagger waiting to play polo with the vermin heads and eyeballs of his greatest enemies. Yes, a raider he was, but a chalk-and-cheese one!
Babur was a raider from the north setting forth his mighty foot into the golden lands of Hindustan emerging from beyond the glaciers of Hindu Kush and currentlike waters of Indus river.
'Raiders from the North’ is the first part composing the ‘Empire of the Moghul’ series authored by Alex Rutherford.
The novel is a finely-stitched royal embroidery; woven together with the jewelled beads of words and golden threads of factual clippings extracted from Babur’s personal diary, the Baburnama. The author presents this timeline of Babur’s life, dipped in meticulous expositions, stirred scrupulously with tender - sometimes racy emotional curiosity and sausaged with lusciously peppery descriptions, only to be embellished in the reader’s mind as an unforgettable, brilliant gem-like opus of historical fiction.
The story of Babur’s life is not only glorious but more than that, inspirational. It is fascinating to note that while, when it was time for him, he feasted as wildly and voraciously as a king should do, with food, wine & entertainment surpassing the bounds of worldly pleasure, but during his time for conquest and war, he struggled too, perhaps even more than a common peasant, trotting like hungry wolves and foxes to gain conquest over the lands of the world, which, in his mind, were already his, and he, already the emperor of the world, the padishah.
On the account of his kingship and that he was betrayed by almost everybody he came across in his lifetime, some for his throne, some for his women and some for his lifeblood, still and all, he remained a king at heart, never allowing any women to be treated with disrespect or taken unwillingly into his harem, never breaking his word to his people, and never using his pride to underestimate his enemies either, though once, he had to sacrifice his own real sister Khanzada to the hands of his greatest enemy Shaibani Khan.
Aided by his bold grandmother’s lessons and foremost by his destiny, he gained conquest over the kingdom of Kabul, where he spent a major part of his imperial life, before getting pulled by the strings of his great destiny yet once again. This time, on the other side of the Indus river, towards the abundant lands of Hindustan waiting to be explored with its rich variety of gems, a wealthy range of exotic spices, flavourful cuisines, symbols of mythological gods and a vibrantly colourful culture!
And this was where he marked the line of history with the title of ‘Moghul empire’, punctuating the timeline with his conquest, first of Delhi, by slicing the head of Sultan of Delhi, and thereby, moving on to the fortress of Agra where he spent the rest of his life and also where he took his last breaths, his eldest and beloved son Humayun by his side.
The story of Babur, as presented through this marvelous novel, will cause you to absorb into your imagination, what it means to be a king. And believe me, it is not as nice as we already imagine it to be. It, after all, is not the throne that makes the king, a king, but rather the ragbag of his chilling challenges and thrilling adventures that teaches him the toughness of mind, the caution of instinct, the sensitivity of emotion and most of all, the faith in life, causing him to cultivate a perfection of thought that is beyond all skill.
The novel is not only impressive in terms of producing an organized chronicle of Babur’s inspiring lifeline, but also totally immersive with the elaborate depiction of dust-soaring battles, throat-cutting fighting scenes, geared-up cavalries, obscenities of whoredoms, dramas of emotions, mouthwatering cuisines of royal kitchen and other archaic sweetmeats of people’s everyday lives in the medieval time period!
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