Babur's dislike for India

Excerpt from the  Economist ( Babur, the first Mughal Emperor)

Babur stayed in Delhi to consolidate his power, but he hated India. His list of complaints offers a good indication of the things that mattered to a 16th-century emperor:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. There are no good-looking people, there is no social intercourse, no receiving or paying of visits, no genius or manners. In its handicrafts there is no form or symmetry, method or quality. There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food cooked in the bazaars, no hot baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

The only things Babur liked about India were the abundance of gold and silver and the weather after the monsoon. He built gardens to remind him of Kabul, but flowers do not do as well in India as in the crisp Afghan air. His friends could not stand the heat, and went back to Kabul. As ruler, he was stuck there, pining for the jollity of the old days. In 1528 he wrote to one of his oldest friends, Khwajah Kalan, "With whom do you spend time? With whom do you drink wine?"

It was not just the friends that Babur missed. He had given up drinking because of his health, and admits that "the craving for a wine-party has been infinite and endless for two years, so much so sometimes that it has brought me close to tears." The knowledge that wine was forbidden sharpened his yearning for "the permitted flavours of melons and grapes" that flourished in Kabul. When he cut open a melon, he wept. "How can one forget the pleasures of those lands?" Once he had got his affairs sorted in India, he wrote, he would "set out immediately".

He never did. His health failed, and two years later he was dead, at 47. He was buried at Agra, disinterred sometime between 1539 and 1544 and buried again on a green hillside with a stream running through it. An inscription placed there by his great-great-grandson Shah Jahan, creator of the Taj Mahal, describes it as "this light garden of an angel king".