Note 1370 — SECTION II. KĀBUL666 (continued 4)

This statement, the first we have, that Bābur has broken Musalmān Law against stimulants (f. 49 and n.), is followed by many others more explicit, jotting down where and what and sometimes why he drank, in a way which arrests attention and asks some other explanation than that it is an unabashed record of conviviality such conceivably as a non-Musalmān might write. Bābur is now 37 years old; he had obeyed the Law till past early manhood; he wished to return to obedience at 40; he frequently mentions his lapses by a word which can be translated as “commitment of sin” (irtqāb); one gathers that he did not at any time disobey with easy conscience. Does it explain his singular record,—one made in what amongst ourselves would be regarded as a private diary,—that his sins were created by Law? Had he a balance of reparation in his thoughts?

Detaching into their separate class as excesses, all his instances of confessed drunkenness, there remains much in his record which, seen from a non-Musalmān point of view, is venial; e.g. his ṣubūhī appears to be the “morning” of the Scot, the Morgen-trank of the Teuton; his afternoon cup, in the open air usually, may have been no worse than the sober glass of beer or local wine of modern Continental Europe. Many of these legal sins of his record were interludes in the day’s long ride, stirrup-cups some of them, all in a period of strenuous physical activity. Many of his records are collective and are phrased impersonally; they mention that there was drinking, drunkenness even, but they give details sometimes such as only a sober observer could include.

Bābur names a few men as drunkards, a few as entirely obedient; most of his men seem not to have obeyed the Law and may have been “temperate drinkers”; they effected work, Bābur amongst them, which habitual drunkards could not have compassed. Spite of all he writes of his worst excesses, it must be just to remember his Musalmān conscience, and also the distorting power of a fictitious sin. Though he broke the law binding all men against excess, and this on several confessed occasions, his rule may have been no worse than that of the ordinarily temperate Western. It cannot but lighten judgment that his recorded lapses from Law were often prompted by the bounty and splendour of Nature; were committed amidst the falling petals of fruit-blossom, the flaming fire of autumn leaves, where the eye rested on the arghwān or the orange grove, the coloured harvest of corn or vine.