The Bābur-Nāma in English (memoirs of Bābur)

The most remarkable thing about the Baburnama is that it should not exist. In an age when rulers commissioned officials to write their histories in third person, Babur sat down and wrote his own story in his own voice. The result is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, a document so startlingly personal that it had no precedent. Here is a man writing about his loneliness, his failures, his loves, his poetry, his despair at losing his ancestral lands and his eventual triumph in founding an empire. Babur gives us not just battles and politics but the texture of daily life in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He describes the fruits he ate, the gardens he planted, the friends he missed, the mountains he crossed. Four centuries before modern autobiography, one ruler dared to ask: who was I, really? The answer is one of the most intimate portraits of power ever written.