Name Mir Baqi | ||
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Baqi Tashqandi, also known as Mir Baqi, was a Mughal commander (beg) originally from Tashkent, during the reign of the first Mughal emperor Babur. He is widely believed to have been made the governor of the province of Awadh. In 1528, he is believed to have founded Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, which later became the focal point of the Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. However, the historical evidence for these beliefs is scant.
Contents
Identity
In the Baburnama (Chronicles of Babur), no person of the name Mir Baqi (Baqi, the noble) is mentioned. Rather, Baqi appears with suffixes as Baqi Tashkindi (Baqi of Tashkent), Baqi Shaghawal, Baqi mingbashi (commander of a thousand troops) or Baqi Beg (commander). Scholar Kishore Kunal concludes that all these references are to the same individual, a commander of a thousand troops, and doubts that a nobleman called "Baqi" ever existed.
Career
Baqi served as a comamnder in the Mughal force of Emperor Babur.
In 932 AH (January or February 1526 AD), Baqi Shaghawal was given Dibalpur, near Lahore, as a fief, and sent to help in Balkh, presumably to quell a rebellion. After his return, Baqi appears to have been assigned as a commander in a force of six or sevel thousand troops headed by Chin-Timur Sultan. In 934 AH (1528 AD) the force was sent on an expedition to Chanderi. The enemy fled and the Sultan was ordered to pursue them. The commanders were given instructions "not to go beyond this [Sultan's] word".
In March 1528, the same force headed by Chin-Timur Sultan was sent in pursuit of Bāyazīd and Biban (Afghan nobles formerly in the employ of Ibrahim Lodi) near Oudh (Awadh). The duo however took control of Lucknow by May 1529 (935 AH), signalling a loss for the force. The defeat is attributed to Baqi, who was possibly in charge of the Mughal fort in Lucknow. Babur sent reinforcements under the command of Kuki and others. Bāyazīd and Biban fled at the news of reinforcements. However, Baqi and his team could not catch hold of them. The temporary loss of Lucknow to the rebels as well as Baqi's inability to capture them annoyed Babur. The monsoon had set in and the horses needed rest. Babur called a halt to the pursuit. On 13 June, Baqi called on Babur, who was apparently dissatisifed, and, on 20 June 1529, Babur dismissed (issued rukhsat) Baqi along with the army of Oudh that he was commanding. No more is heard of about Baqi Tashkandi until his mysterious reappearance on a supposed inscription on the Babri Masjid as "Mir Baqi" discovered by the British East India Company's surveyor in 1813.
Babri Masjid
Francis Buchanan-Hamilton (Buchanan) did a survey of the Gorakhpur Division in 1813–14 on behalf of the British East India Company. His report was never published but partly reused by Montgomery Martin later. Kishore Kunal examined the original report in the British Library archives. It states that the Hindus generally attributed destruction "to the furious zeal of Aurangzabe", but the large mosque at Ayodhya, presently called the Babri Masjid, was ascertained to have been built by Babur by "an inscription on its walls". The said inscription in Persian was said to have been copied by a scribe and translated by a Maulvi friend of Buchanan. The translation however contained two inscriptions. The first inscription said that the mosque was constructed by 'Mir Baqi' in the year 935 AH or 923 AH. The second inscription narrated the genealogy of Aurangzeb. The translator had a difficulty with the anagram for the date, because one of the words was missing, which would have resulted in a date of 923 AH rather than 935 AH. These incongruities and mismatches made no impression on Buchanan, who maintained that the mosque was built under the orders of Babur.
The Babri Masjid stands at a location believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of Rama. There are no records of the mosque at the site till 1672 and no known association with Babur or Mir Baqi prior to Buchanan's discovery of these inscriptions in the 19th century. The Baburnama does not mention either the mosque or the destruction of a temple. The Ramcharit Manas of Tulsidas (AD 1574) and Ain-i Akbari of Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak (AD 1598) made no mention of a mosque either. William Finch, the English traveller who visited Ayodhya around 1611, wrote about the "ruins of the Ranichand [Ramachand] castle and houses", but there was no mention of a mosque. Thomas Herbert described in 1634 the "pretty old castle Ranichand" which was an antique monument that was "especially memorable". However, by 1672, Kishore Kunal states that the appearance of a mosque can be inferred because Lal Das's Awadh-Vilasa was completed that year, which describes the location of birthplace without mentioning a temple. In 1717, the Moghul Rajput noble Jai Singh II purchased land surrounding the site and his documents show a mosque.
Writer Kishore Kunal states that all the inscriptions claimed were fake. They were affixed almost 285 years after the supposed construction of the mosque in 1528 AD, and repeatedly replaced. In 1877, Syed Mohammad Asghar the Mutawalli (guardian) of the "Masjid Baburi at Janmasthan" filed a petition with the Commissioner of Faizabad. The only inscription at the time was the word "Allah" above the door. In 1889, archaeologist Anton Führer recorded two inscriptions. One said that the mosque was erected by a noble 'Mir Khan' of Babur. Another said that the mosque was founded in the year 930 AH by a grandee of Babur, who was (comparable to) "another King of Turkey and China". The year 930 AH corresponds 1523 AD, three years before Babur's conquest of Hindustan. Moreover, the texts of these inscriptions were completely different from those documented by Buchanan.