Podcast

The Garden and the Sword is our podcast of Mughal history — the emperors, the wars, the gardens, and the three centuries that made modern South Asia. Narrative history drawn from the primary sources: the Baburnama, the Akbarnama, and the memoirs the emperors wrote themselves.

New episodes twice a week. Listen free wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode Nine — The Losing

Humayun, Part One · 24 minutes

Part One of a new series, on Humayun — the second Mughal emperor, the one who lost the empire and then got it back. This episode is the losing. In June 1539 the Emperor of Hindustan crossed the Ganges on an inflated animal skin handed to him by a water-carrier, because he could not swim and his army no longer existed. Eleven months later he lost the second battle too, and rode away from a throne he would not see again for fifteen years. The usual verdict is that Humayun was weak. The details are not wrong; the shape is.

Episode Eight — What Survives

The Baburnama, Part Six · 23 minutes

Part Six of six on the Baburnama. Eleven months after Panipat, Babur broke all his wine cups in front of his army, abolished a tax, and asked every man present to swear on the Quran that he would not retreat. Then Khanwa, Chanderi, the Ghaghra, and his death at Agra in 1530 after four and a half years of rule. And then the book: why it was written in Chaghatai Turkish rather than Persian, why it reads unlike anything else from its century, and how it survived.

Episode Seven — Panipat

The Baburnama, Part Five · 22 minutes

On the morning of 21 April 1526, on a dusty plain north of Delhi, a man who had spent thirty years losing things stood behind a line of carts and waited to be attacked. The battle took four hours. The road to it took seven years: five expeditions through the passes, a Lodi sultan who had alienated his own nobles, and two of those nobles writing to Kabul with an invitation they had not thought through. Babur counted everyone with him, twelve thousand, and wrote the number down.

Episode Six — Another World

The Baburnama, Part Four · 31 minutes

Around 1529, in Agra, the most powerful man in northern India was handed a melon, and cut it, and burst into tears. Not the battles — this is the country itself, through the eyes of the man who took it and never once pretended to like it. “Hindustan is a country of few charms,” he wrote — the most famous passage in the book and the most misread. And then the same eye turns the other way, and he writes the longest natural history in the manuscript: the rhinoceros, the peacock, and the parrot that spoke.

Episode Five — Kabul

The Baburnama, Part Three · 32 minutes

In October 1504 a twenty-two-year-old who had spent ten years failing to hold a city walked into one and was handed the keys. “Without a fight, without an effort,” he wrote. He held Kabul for the rest of his life. This is the decade in which Babur stops being a claimant and becomes a ruler — and writes the strangest and most beautiful thing in his book: a survey of a province nobody asked him to describe, down to its meadows ranked by mosquitoes and the thirty-four species of tulip he had counted.

Episode Four — The Throneless Time

The Baburnama, Part Two · 28 minutes · Urdu audio on YouTube

He took Samarkand at fifteen, after a seven-month siege, and held it for exactly one hundred days — he counts them himself. Within a week of riding out he had lost that city and his own kingdom too, both of them to a rumour that he was dying. This is the decade Babur called the fatrat: the throneless time. Two capitals taken and two lost, a sister handed to the enemy, and three years of wandering with nothing.

Episode Three — The Inheritance

The Baburnama, Part One · 29 minutes · Urdu audio on YouTube

Part One of six on the Baburnama — the first true autobiography in Islamic literature, and the strangest book any king of the sixteenth century left behind. On 8 June 1494 a man fell into a ravine at Akhsi with his pigeons. His eleven-year-old son inherited a small valley in Fergana, wrote the sentence that recorded his father's death, and thirty years later founded the Mughal empire almost by accident. This episode is about what Babur thought he was before any of that happened.

Episode Two — Babur: The Man Who Wrote Everything Down

62 minutes

The full life of the first Mughal emperor. He inherited a small kingdom at eleven and one of the most frightening names in Asia. What he wanted his entire life was a single city — Samarkand. He took it three times and lost it three times. India was the consolation prize, and he complained about it in writing until the day he died.

Episode One — The Boy Who Lost Samarkand

18 minutes

A throne at eleven. A kingdom lost before he was twenty. Two years of wandering with nothing. And one morning at Panipat in 1526 when twelve thousand men beat an army several times their size.