The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Thackston Jr., W.M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375761373 ISBN 13: 9780375761379

Publisher: Modern Library, 2002

Synopsis

Both an official chronicle and the highly personal memoir of the emperor Babur (1483–1530), The Baburnama presents a vivid and extraordinarily detailed picture of life in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Babur’s honest and intimate chronicle is the first autobiography in Islamic literature, written at a time when there was no historical precedent for a personal narrative—now in a sparkling new translation by Islamic scholar Wheeler Thackston.

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes notes, indices, maps, and illustrations.

About this title

Review:

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur was the first Mughal, or Mongol, emperor of India. A devoted warrior who fought by the bloodthirsty standards of his time, Babur was also a gifted scholar and ethnographer, and his memoir, The Baburnama--which translator and editor Wheeler Thackston heralds as the first autobiography in Islamic literature--paints a fascinating portrait of the lands he conquered, such as Hindustan: "A strange country. Compared to ours, it is another world. Its mountains, rivers, forests, and wildernesses, its villages and provinces, animals and plants, peoples and languages, even its rain and winds are altogether different." They were different indeed, and we're fortunate to have this beautifully illustrated record of Babur's wonderment at the new places he saw.

From the Back Cover:

“One of the classics of world literature.” —The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375761373
• ISBN 13: 9780375761379
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 608