Zahir ad-din Muhammad Babur Padishah in Durbar Price realised GBP 1,880, Estimate GBP 800 - GBP 1,200 Closed: 17 Oct 2003 Details Zahir ad-din Muhammad Babur Padishah in Durbar, Delhi School, 19th century Gouache and gold on paper, depicting the ruler enthroned in a palace courtyard before his courtiers, meandering floral border reserved with panels of nastaliq identifying the group, framed and glazed -- including border 55 x 34cm. Babur's memoirs form the main source for details of his life. They are known as the Baburnama and were written in Chaghatai Turkic, his mother-tongue, though, according to Dale, "his Turkic prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology or word formation and vocabulary."[4] Baburnama was translated into Persian during the rule of Babur's grandson Akbar. Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in the city of Andijan, Andijan Province, Fergana Valley, contemporary Uzbekistan. He was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza,[22] ruler of the Fergana Valley, the son of Abū Saʿīd Mirza (and grandson of Miran Shah, who was himself son of Timur) and his wife Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, daughter of Yunus Khan, the ruler of Moghulistan (a descendant of Genghis Khan). Babur hailed from the Barlas tribe, which was of Mongol origin and had embraced Turkic and Persian culture. They had also converted to Islam centuries earlier and resided in Turkestan and Khorasan. Aside from the Chaghatai language, Babur was equally fluent in Persian, the lingua franca of the Timurid elite. Hence, Babur, though nominally a Mongol (or Moghul in Persian language), drew much of his support from the local Turkic and Iranian people of Central Asia, and his army was diverse in its ethnic makeup. It included Persians (known to Babur as "Sarts" and "Tajiks"), ethnic Afghans, Arabs, as well as Barlas and Chaghatayid Turko-Mongols from Central Asia.

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