🏳️🌈🏺🇮🇳Badur x Baburi Mughals in love
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🇮🇳
Just as Persian influence spread west to Rumi’s Turkiye, a queer man named Badur reignited it east in 1526, founding the Mughal Empire, of Taj fame.
Babur was seventeen, newly married, & bored by life. Then he saw a boy in the camp bazaar. The boy’s name was Baburi—close enough to Badur that he thought it cute.
‘May none be as I, humbled & wretched & love-sick. No beloved as thou art to me’
In his memoir, he says that until then he had never wanted anyone, had never even talked about love. He says Baburi would come into his presence & he could not look at him, could not make conversation, could not manage words at all.
He was so love-sick he wandered, rude to friends & strangers alike.
“Nor power to go was mine, nor power to stay / I was just what you made me, o thief of my heart.”
This is the founder of an empire, the man who took northern India, but the most emotionally bare passage in his memoir is about a boy he was too shy to speak to. His autobiography, the ‘Baburnama’ is famous for its honesty, it records defeats as honestly as victories, in love & battle.
The empire he founded kept his taste, with naked carvings, lavish tombs, & boys. Mughal courts ran on Persian, & the best beautiful boy loving poets came east to Agra & Lahore, the inheritance from Baghdad, flowering now on the subcontinent.
Here the genre called ‘rekhti’ would give women their own poems of women loving women, with their own vocabulary & conventions.
’Urfi of Shiraz, who came to India young & attached himself to the Prince, the future Emperor Jahangir. They were lose enough that writers a century later were still gossiping about it.
Even before Babur for three centuries of the Deli Sultanates where poets like Amir Khusrau continued the Sufi Persian poetry. And although the Fatawa 'Alamgiri prescribed worse punishment for Muslims who were caught, homosexuality continued in the Persian tradition for 300 more.
