Miniatures of Babur-Namah

Miniatures of Babur-Namah - Hamid Suleiman

Bāburnāma is the name given to the memoirs of Ẓahīr-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530), founder of the Mughal Empire and a great-great-great-grandson of Timur. It is an autobiographical work, written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as "Turki" (meaning Turkic), the spoken language of the Andijan-Timurids. According to historian Stephen Frederic Dale, Babur's prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology, and vocabulary, and also contains many phrases and smaller poems in Persian. During Emperor Akbar's reign, the work was completely translated to Persian by a Mughal courtier, Abdul Rahīm, in AH 998 (1589–90). In many of the Mughal Miniature Paintings, painted in the time of Emperor Babur and afterwards, the artists have taken the love scenes and the scenes of bravery of Mughal princes as their subjects. Here the emperor Babur is shown as hunting. The Mughal era of miniature paintings owns a noteworthy page in the history of art of paintings in India. In Mughal Miniature, the artists have deviated from their Persian predecessors so far as the subjects of the paintings and their contents were concerned. Unlike most of the Persian paintings in Baburnama, the painters have develpped their taste for painting scenes of nature, too. Here the Miniature shows landcape with Squirrels, a Peacock and Peahen, Demoiselle Cranes and Fishes. It has enhanced the value of the miniatures, as the artistists were interested in painting landscapes, too, in addition to the war scenes and love scenes. A selection of ninety-six minatures.