Author: Shuja Butt, Adeel

Annotation: This article analyses Zahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530) as a connective figure — a “bridge” — linking Pakistan, Uzbekistan and the wider Turkic world. Babur’s life spanned the Fergana Valley, Kabul and the southern subcontinent; his memoirs and poetry, written in Chaghatay Turkish, belong to the common classical heritage of the Turkic languages; and the empire he founded frames Pakistan’s official narrative of Muslim statehood in South Asia. The article first reconstructs the transregional “Chaghatay commonwealth” within which Babur wrote, then examines the two principal national appropriations of his memory — the poet-ancestor of post-Soviet Uzbekistan and the state-founder of Pakistan — before widening the lens to the broader Turkic world: the foundational Turkish scholarship of Köprülü, Arat and Yücel; the Kyrgyz memory of Babur on Sulaiman-Too in Osh; and the commemorative infrastructure of Turkic cultural institutions. It then considers how this layered heritage has been institutionalised in the diplomacy of the Organization of Turkic States era and in Pakistan’s deepening engagement with Central Asia. The article argues that Babur functions as a bridge in three registers at once — textual, geographical and institutional — and that his capacity to connect rests less on a single shared meaning than on the distributed, complementary character of the meanings the connected parties attach to him.

Keywords: Babur, Baburnama, Turkic world, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Chaghatay, shared heritage, cultural diplomacy, Organization of Turkic States.

Pages in journal: 152 - 159