Humayun: The Emperor Who Lost and Regained an Empire

Nasir al-Din Muhammad Humayun was the second ruler of the Mughal dynasty, and his reign divides into two unequal halves separated by an exile of some fifteen years. He succeeded his father Babur in 1530 as master of a recently conquered and barely governed territory in northern India; by 1540 he had lost all of it to Sher Shah Suri; in 1555 he recovered Delhi; and in January 1556 he died from an accidental fall, leaving a thirteen-year-old son to inherit.

That sequence has given him an uneven reputation. He is the Mughal emperor who lost the empire, and the contrast with his father's boldness and his son Akbar's consolidating genius has not favoured him. But the reign is more consequential than the summary suggests. The exile drew the Mughals into a close relationship with Safavid Persia whose cultural effects on Mughal painting, architecture, and court life were lasting; and the restoration of 1555, brief as it was, re-established the dynastic claim on which everything afterwards depended.

Inheritance and Early Difficulties

Humayun was born on 6 March 1508 at Kabul, the eldest son of Babur and Maham Begum. He held provincial commands under his father, including at Badakhshan, and fought in the campaigns that carried the Timurid house into India, notably at Panipat in 1526.

He succeeded on Babur's death in December 1530, and the inheritance was more precarious than it appeared. Babur had won battles rather than built a state: the revenue system was unreformed, the Afghan nobility that had ruled north India before him remained largely intact in Bihar and Bengal, the Rajput states were unsubdued, and the Timurid convention of dividing patrimony among male kin meant the empire came encumbered with brothers holding independent power. Kamran Mirza held Kabul and Kandahar and later the Punjab; Askari and Hindal held further assignments. Humayun's authority over them was nominal, and their intermittent disloyalty shaped every crisis of his reign.

His first years were spent in campaigns on two fronts that could not be prosecuted simultaneously. In the west he confronted Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, taking Champaner and Ahmedabad in 1535 but losing the province again once he withdrew. In the east, Sher Khan Sur was building a power base in Bihar and Bengal that Humayun repeatedly moved against and repeatedly failed to eliminate.

The Loss of India

The collapse came in two battles. At Chausa, near Buxar on the Ganges, on 26 June 1539, Sher Khan's forces broke the Mughal army; Humayun escaped across the river and, by the well-known account, survived with the help of a water-carrier. At Kannauj, also called Bilgram, on 17 May 1540, the defeat was decisive. Humayun's army disintegrated, and with his brothers unwilling to commit their resources to his recovery, he abandoned north India.

The reasons for the failure are not obscure. Sher Khan commanded a disciplined, centrally paid army and an administration that could supply it; Humayun commanded a coalition held together by personal loyalty and dynastic sentiment, undermined by his own brothers. The contrast between the two men as organisers of state power is the substance of the episode, and it is the point on which the sources — including those written later under Mughal patronage — concur.

Exile

The years from 1540 to 1555 were spent as a fugitive and then as a guest. Humayun moved first through Sindh and the Rajput borderlands, seeking a base and finding none; it was during this period, at Umarkot in Sindh in 1542, that his son Akbar was born to Hamida Banu Begum. Denied support by Kamran in Kandahar and Kabul, he crossed into Persia in 1544 and was received by the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I.

The Safavid reception was generous and politically conditional. Tahmasp provided military assistance that enabled Humayun to take Kandahar and eventually Kabul from his brother, and the price attached to it is reported by the sources as an accommodation with Safavid Shi'ism on Humayun's part. The accounts of what exactly was required and conceded differ, and the episode has been read variously as a formal profession, a diplomatic courtesy, and a later embellishment; it is recorded here as a reported condition of the alliance whose precise terms the sources do not settle. The relationship with the Safavid state and with the cultural world of Persia had consequences beyond the immediate campaign: Persian artists, architects, and men of letters entered Mughal service in this period and after, and the distinctive Mughal synthesis in painting and building owes much to that transfer.

The Kabul Years

Humayun took Kandahar and then Kabul in 1545 with Safavid assistance, and the nine years that followed are usually passed over as an interlude. They were in fact the period in which the Mughal restoration was made possible.

The immediate business was the contest with Kamran, who took Kabul back and lost it again more than once between 1546 and 1553 as the loyalties of the Afghan and Central Asian commanders shifted between the brothers. The city changed hands repeatedly, and the accounts of these years are a catalogue of sieges, defections and reconciliations. It ended only with Kamran's capture and blinding in 1553.

Two things were accomplished alongside the fighting. Humayun assembled and held together a body of commanders and administrators — Bairam Khan foremost among them — who would form the nucleus of the restored empire's leadership, and who had chosen him at a point when he had almost nothing to offer. And he retained Kabul itself: a defensible base with revenue, astride the route into India, and the ancestral Timurid seat from which his father had launched the original conquest. A claimant with Kabul was a claimant with prospects; his years in Sindh and Persia had shown what a claimant without a base amounted to.

His son Akbar spent much of his childhood in these years at Kabul and in the field, and the practical military and political education this gave him is part of the explanation for the competence he showed on succeeding at thirteen.

From that base Humayun watched the Sur regime in India decay. Sher Shah had died in 1545 and his son Islam Shah in 1554; the succession that followed was disputed and the Sur domain fell apart.

Restoration and Death

In 1555 Humayun moved into the Punjab, and with the generalship of Bairam Khan defeated Sur forces at Machhiwara and then decisively at Sirhind. He entered Delhi in July 1555, fifteen years after leaving it, and re-established Mughal rule over the northern plains.

The restoration lasted about six months. On 24 January 1556 Humayun fell from the steps of his library building at the Din-Panah citadel in Delhi — the structure identified as the Sher Mandal — reportedly catching his robe as he rose from the call to prayer, and he died of the head injury a day or more later, on 27 January 1556 by the most commonly given date. Some accounts place the death slightly differently, and the variation reflects the state of the sources.

His son Akbar, then thirteen, succeeded under the regency of Bairam Khan. The Mughal empire as a durable institution was built in Akbar's reign, but it was built on a throne that Humayun had recovered months before his death.

Character, Learning, and Patronage

The sources present Humayun as a cultivated and personally courageous man whose weaknesses were of decision rather than of courage or intellect. He was widely read, with a particular interest in astronomy and astrology; the accounts describe him organising his court and even his administration around symbolic and astrological schemes, and he maintained the Timurid family tradition of literary patronage.

The most valuable source for his life is unusual in the historiography of the period: the Humayun-nama of his half-sister Gulbadan Begum, written at Akbar's request. It is a memoir of the imperial family from within the household, and it gives an account of Humayun, his brothers, and the women of the dynasty that no official chronicle supplies. Two servants who shared the exile, Jauhar Aftabchi and Bayazid Bayat, also left narratives.

His most conspicuous architectural legacy was raised after his death. Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, commissioned by his widow Bega Begum and completed in the early 1570s, is the first of the great Mughal garden tombs — a domed mausoleum of red sandstone and white marble set within a formal charbagh enclosure. It established the type that culminates in the Taj Mahal, and it was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. Its place in the development of the Indo-Islamic architectural tradition is more securely established than any of his own political achievements.

The Problem of the Brothers

The single most persistent cause of Humayun's difficulties was the Timurid conception of sovereignty he inherited, and it is worth setting out because it explains failures usually attributed to his character alone.

In the Timurid tradition, as in much of the Turco-Mongol political world, rule was the collective property of the ruling house rather than the exclusive possession of one man. Territory was distributed among adult male kinsmen, who held it with their own troops and revenues and who possessed a legitimate claim to the whole. Babur had himself risen in this system, contending with cousins for the Fergana inheritance, and on his death he left the pattern intact.

Humayun accordingly began his reign with three brothers holding significant power. Kamran Mirza held Kabul and Kandahar and swiftly took the Punjab as well, giving him control of the routes between India and Central Asia and of the recruiting grounds from which Mughal armies were raised. Askari and Hindal held assignments in India. Their loyalty was conditional and intermittent: Hindal was in open revolt at the moment of greatest danger from Sher Khan, and Kamran declined to commit his forces to the defence of India and later refused Humayun refuge, fighting him for Kabul over nearly a decade.

Humayun's response was to conciliate rather than to eliminate. He pardoned his brothers repeatedly, and the sources — including Gulbadan Begum, who was writing about her own family — present this as a matter of principle and temperament. The contrast with later Mughal practice is instructive: Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb each secured the throne by removing rival claimants within the family, and the empire they governed was correspondingly free of the divided sovereignty that crippled Humayun. Only late, and under extreme provocation, did Humayun have Kamran blinded and removed from contention.

The Gujarat and Bengal Campaigns

The military record of the first reign shows a commander capable of winning campaigns but unable to convert them into possession.

In Gujarat, Bahadur Shah's expansion into Malwa and Rajasthan provoked Mughal intervention. Humayun campaigned from 1535 and the operation was, in military terms, a success: he broke Bahadur Shah's army, and the fortress of Champaner — reputedly impregnable, sited on a hill and heavily garrisoned — was taken by escalade, a party scaling the rock at night with iron spikes driven into the cliff. Ahmadabad followed, and for a period Gujarat and Malwa were under Mughal authority.

He then withdrew to deal with the eastern threat, leaving his brother Askari in charge. The province reverted almost immediately: the Gujarati nobility rose, Askari's position collapsed, and the conquest evaporated without a battle. The pattern — successful assault, no administrative consolidation, rapid reversion — repeated in Bengal, where Humayun occupied Gaur in 1538 and found himself unable to hold or supply it, and where the monsoon and disease reduced his army while Sher Khan cut his communications with Agra.

The two campaigns together consumed roughly four years, produced nothing permanent, and gave Sher Khan the time he needed to consolidate Bihar and Bengal. The judgement of both the contemporary and the modern accounts is the same: Humayun could win provinces and could not keep them, because winning required an army and keeping required an administration.

The underlying failure was administrative rather than tactical. Babur's conquests had not been converted into a revenue system capable of supporting sustained operations at a distance, and Humayun made no serious attempt to build one. He fought with the resources of a conquest army — plunder, requisition, and the assignments of his nobility — against an opponent who had built a treasury and a supply system. Contemporary and modern accounts alike identify this as the decisive asymmetry.

The Persian Years and Their Cultural Consequence

The period of Safavid refuge, humiliating as it was politically, proved to be the most culturally productive episode of Humayun's life, and its effects on the Mughal empire were lasting.

At the Safavid court Humayun encountered a mature Persianate imperial culture at the height of its refinement — in manuscript painting, in architecture, in garden design, in poetry, and in the ceremonial of kingship. When he recovered Kabul and later Delhi, he brought elements of that world with him. The painters Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, recruited from Persia, entered Mughal service and became the founding masters of the imperial painting workshop under Akbar; the Mughal atelier's characteristic synthesis of Persian technique with Indian subject and colour begins with them.

The architectural consequence is equally traceable. The formal charbagh garden enclosure, the high double-shelled dome, and the vocabulary of iwan and arcaded facade that define Mughal building were Persian and Central Asian in origin, and their systematic application in India dates from this period and its immediate aftermath. Humayun's own tomb is the first full statement of the resulting style.

There is a wider point here about the Islamic world of the sixteenth century. The three great Muslim empires of the period — Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal — were connected by exactly this kind of movement of artists, scholars, soldiers, and exiled princes, and the shared Persianate high culture of the period was produced by it. Humayun's exile is a particularly clear instance of the mechanism at work.

The Restoration Campaign

The recovery of India in 1555 was made possible by the collapse of the Sur regime, but it still had to be executed, and the execution was competent.

Sher Shah had died in 1545 and his son Islam Shah in 1554, after which the Sur domain broke into contending fragments under rival claimants. Humayun, secure in Kabul since 1553, moved into the Punjab in late 1554. The campaign was directed in large part by Bairam Khan, the ablest of his commanders, who defeated Sur forces at Machhiwara and then decisively at Sirhind in 1555. Delhi and Agra followed.

Bairam Khan's role matters for what came next. When Humayun died months later, the regent held the empire together for the boy Akbar, defeated the Sur claimant Hemu at the second battle of Panipat in 1556, and governed until Akbar came of age. The continuity of Mughal rule across Humayun's sudden death was the work of the apparatus Humayun had assembled in exile rather than of any provision he made.

Chausa and Kannauj

The two battles that cost Humayun his empire are worth examining, because the reasons for the defeats were not accidental.

At Chausa, on the Ganges near Buxar, in June 1539, the two armies faced one another across marshy ground for some weeks. Negotiations were opened, and the accounts indicate that Humayun's camp relaxed its guard in the expectation of a settlement. Sher Khan attacked, driving the Mughal force onto broken and waterlogged terrain where its cavalry and artillery could not be brought to bear. The defeat was severe; Humayun escaped across the river, and the well-known account has him saved by a water-carrier who supported him on an inflated skin. Several senior figures of the dynasty died in the rout.

Kannauj, also called Bilgram, followed in May 1540. Humayun had returned to Agra, reassembled a large force, and moved east again — but with his brothers withholding their full support, and against an opponent who now held Bengal's revenues and had the initiative. The armies again camped opposite one another for weeks in conditions that favoured the side with better supply and discipline. When the engagement came, the Mughal army broke with little serious fighting; the sources describe a collapse of cohesion rather than a defeat in combat.

The common factor is instructive. In both battles Sher Khan chose the ground and the moment, and in both the Mughal force proved unable to hold together under pressure. Humayun's army was a coalition of contingents whose commanders had their own interests, sustained by requisition rather than by a supply system, and it dissolved when its prospects dimmed. That is an administrative failure expressed on a battlefield, and it is the reason the loss of two engagements meant the loss of an empire.

The Wilderness Years in Sindh

The period between Kannauj and the crossing into Persia is the least glamorous part of Humayun's life and among the most consequential.

Driven out of Hindustan, he moved through Sindh seeking a base from which to recover, negotiating with the local rulers and with the Rajput chiefs of the desert margins, and finding no one willing to commit to a defeated claimant. The party was reduced at times to considerable hardship, crossing desert country in summer with inadequate water; Gulbadan Begum's memoir and the narrative of Jauhar Aftabchi, who was present, describe these months in detail unusual for the period.

Two things of importance happened in Sindh. Humayun married Hamida Banu Begum, and at Umarkot in October 1542 she bore him a son, Akbar — the future emperor was born to a father with no throne, no territory, and no reliable ally. And Humayun's calculation shifted: with India closed to him and Kabul held by a hostile brother, the only available patron was the Safavid shah, and he turned west.

The Fate of the Brothers

The resolution of the fraternal problem, when it finally came, was late and reluctant.

Hindal Mirza, who had been in revolt at the moment of greatest danger from Sher Khan, was reconciled to Humayun during the exile and died in 1551 fighting on his behalf against Kamran's forces — the one brother whose end the sources present without reproach.

Askari Mirza was captured and sent under restraint on pilgrimage to Mecca, where he died. The arrangement was a characteristic Timurid solution: removal from the political field without execution.

Kamran Mirza was the persistent adversary. He held Kabul and Kandahar, took the Punjab, refused Humayun refuge after Kannauj, and contested Kabul repeatedly through the decade after 1545, taking and losing the city more than once. When he was finally captured in 1553, Humayun had him blinded — the standard means of disqualifying a Timurid prince from rule — and sent to Mecca, where he died in 1557. The accounts describe Humayun as reaching this decision under pressure from his commanders, who had had enough of a rival who could not be trusted and would not stay defeated.

Only after Kamran's removal was Humayun secure enough at Kabul to attempt India, and the sequence is not coincidental. The reconquest of 1555 was possible because the divided sovereignty that had wrecked the first reign had at last been ended, and the lesson was not lost on his successors: Akbar and every Mughal after him treated the elimination of rival claimants within the family as the first task of a new reign.

The Court of Humayun

Khwandamir's Qanun-i Humayuni, written at the court in the 1530s, preserves an account of Humayun's arrangements for his household and government that has no parallel in Mughal literature, and it reveals a ruler with a highly schematic conception of kingship.

Humayun organised the business of the court around the planets and the days of the week. Each day was assigned to a heavenly body, and the emperor conducted the class of business, wore the colour, and received the category of person that he judged appropriate to it — matters of state and justice on one day, religious and scholarly company on another, pleasure and music on a third, with his dress changed to match. He divided the officers of the state into groups by function, and devised graded arrangements of rank and precedence expressed in the layout of the audience hall. Certain furnishings were made to embody the scheme: the sources describe a large circular carpet marked with divisions on which people of different ranks and occupations were to stand.

Two readings of this are possible and the sources support both. It can be seen as the preoccupation of a man more interested in symbolic order than in the practical business of holding an empire together — which is broadly the verdict of the Akbarnama, written for a son who governed very differently. It can also be seen as an early and serious attempt to express Mughal sovereignty in ceremonial form, the same problem Akbar solved by other means and Shah Jahan solved in stone at Shahjahanabad. What is clear is that the scheme did not survive him, and that no later Mughal court was organised on astrological lines.

His personal interests ran in the same direction. He was a reader with a substantial library, and his attention to astronomy and astrology was genuine rather than merely ceremonial; the building at Delhi from whose steps he fell — the Sher Mandal — served him as a library and observatory. The manner of his death, on the stairs of that building, has struck writers ever since as an unkind comment on a scholarly emperor in an age that demanded soldiers.

Humayun's Tomb

The mausoleum in Delhi is Humayun's most important legacy, and it was not his doing.

It was commissioned by his widow Bega Begum, also known as Haji Begum, and built in the years around 1565–1572, under an architect of Persian origin. The design brings together elements that had existed separately and makes a single composition of them: a high double-shelled dome over a domed chamber, a symmetrical plan with chamfered corners and deep recessed arches on each face, red sandstone faced with white marble, the whole raised on a broad plinth and set at the centre of a walled charbagh — a garden quartered by water channels.

Its importance is that this configuration became the Mughal imperial tomb. Akbar's mausoleum at Sikandra, Jahangir's at Lahore, and above all the Taj Mahal — where the same elements appear in white marble and at greater refinement — descend from it. The building was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993 and has since undergone extensive conservation.

There is also a political reading. A monumental dynastic tomb in Delhi, placed near the shrine of a revered Sufi and among the burial places of earlier Muslim dynasties of India, asserted that the Mughals belonged in that succession — a claim worth making for a dynasty that had been expelled from the country fifteen years earlier and had only just returned. Shah Jahan made the same argument a century later when he founded his capital on the same ground.

Assessment

An assessment of Humayun has to hold two things together. As a ruler he failed at the central task of his reign: he inherited a conquest and did not convert it into a state, and he lost it to an administrator who could. The Timurid practice of shared patrimony, which he did not overcome until 1553, was a structural cause; his own hesitancy at decisive moments, on which the sources are consistent, was a personal one. He was, on the evidence of Chausa and Kannauj, a competent soldier who was not a competent organiser of war.

Against that, the dynasty survived because he survived. He kept the Timurid claim alive through fifteen years without territory, secured a base at Kabul, ended the fraternal challenge, and returned to Delhi when the opportunity came. Had he died in exile, there would have been no Mughal restoration in 1555 and no imperial inheritance for Akbar. The apparatus he assembled in those years — Bairam Khan above all — held the empire through his sudden death and his son's minority.

The exile also had a cultural yield that outlasted the political failure. The Mughal court's absorption of Safavid artistic and architectural practice, which shaped the visual culture of the empire for two centuries, dates substantially from his years in Persia and from the personnel he brought back with him. The painters who founded Akbar's workshop came by that route.

His tomb, built by his widow, became the model for Mughal funerary architecture and the ancestor of the Taj Mahal — a legacy that is genuinely his in subject if not in commission. It is a fitting summary of the reign that his most durable monument was raised in his name by someone else, out of materials he had brought back from the years when he had lost everything.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran, Surah Al-Imran (3:26) — "You give sovereignty to whom You will and You take sovereignty away from whom You will"; a verse repeatedly invoked in the Persian histories of his loss and recovery of the throne
• Quran, Surah al-Nisa (4:58) — on rendering trusts and judging with justice, the standard applied to rulers in the Indo-Persian literature of governance
• Quran, Surah al-Baqarah (2:155–157) — on patience under trial, the frame within which contemporary Muslim writers presented the years of exile
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Books of Leadership (Kitab al-Imarah) — the prophetic material on the responsibilities of rulers, the framework of contemporary judgement on his reign

Classical Islamic Sources

• Gulbadan Begum. Humayun-nama (Ahwal-i Humayun Padshah). Translated by Annette S. Beveridge. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1902. [Composed c. 1587] — the memoir of Humayun's half-sister, the indispensable source on the imperial household
• Jauhar Aftabchi. Tazkirat al-Waqiat. [Composed c. 1587] — eyewitness narrative by Humayun's ewer-bearer, who accompanied him in exile
• Bayazid Bayat. Tarikh-i Humayun. [Composed c. 1590]
• Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak. Akbarnama. Translated by H. Beveridge. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1902–1939. [Compiled c. 1590s] — the official Mughal account, which treats Humayun's reign as prologue to Akbar's
• Khwandamir. Qanun-i Humayuni (Humayun-nama). Translated by Baini Prashad. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1940. [Composed c. 1534] — a contemporary account of the court's institutions and ceremonial
• Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni. Muntakhab al-Tawarikh. Translated by G.S.A. Ranking. Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1898. [Compiled c. 1595]

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Dale, Stephen F. The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Asher, Catherine B. Architecture of Mughal India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. — on Humayun's Tomb and the origins of the Mughal garden tomb
• Eaton, Richard M. India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765. London: Allen Lane, 2019.
• Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Mughal State, 1526–1750. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Streusand, Douglas E. The Formation of the Mughal Empire. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Lal, Ruby. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. — on Gulbadan Begum and the household sources

Further Reading

• Beveridge, Annette S., trans. The History of Humayun by Gul-Badan Begam. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1902.
• Asher, Catherine B., and Cynthia Talbot. India Before Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Koch, Ebba. Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development. Munich: Prestel, 1991.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre, documentation on Humayun's Tomb, Delhi (inscribed 1993).