Baburnama - Memoirs of the Mughal Babur
The field of history is egregious for putting forward unfalsifiable hypotheses. It is easy to say X led to Y when you can never reproduce the conditions and put the claim to test. But the study of history, when done well, can strengthen our imagination. Our knowledge of causality might be extremely limited, but that does not stop us from learning how lots of different things fit together to make the world go round.
Baburnama is a testament to the kind of history that acknowledges its limitations yet remains an incredibly rich well of learning. Babur’s memoirs are certainly subject to editorial influence, both by himself and the people responsible for its subsequent reproductions. But the memoirs’ breadth sheds light on the sheer volume of things that determine the rise of an empire. They contain descriptions of fauna in the subcontinent as well as the tone Babur adopted when writing to his son Humayun (the second emperor of the Mughal Empire) for being tardy.
My favorite part in the memoirs is when Babur is making his first excursion into India. His attention to detail is unmistakable. He talks about how some villages use a water wheel while others still carry water in buckets. And he does not miss political connections. When listing animals in the subcontinent, he notes that people involved in elephant capture report directly to the exchequer.
Simplification can be helpful. But it does not have to come at the cost of depriving a subject of its richness. It can take the form of focus - the choice to study one thing over another, without ignoring the fact that a choice was made. The Baburnama is a curated account of an emperor who was less than egalitarian, to say the least. Studying it is still a choice to study the making of history as opposed to studying an explanation of history.