One man’s meat is another man’s poison, according to an old adage. A different twist to that would be “One nation’s hero is another’s villain” or the more popular refrain these , “One country’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist”. I was starkly made aware of this on a recent visit to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which was for centuries the cross-roads of the famed Silk Route from China to Europe. In India, Uzbekistan is not so well known for this attribute but for two historical characters from that distant land.
One of them is regarded with repugnance in India as the embodiment of terror and cruelty. He is known in India as Timur -i - Lang ( Timur the Lame ) and in history books as Tamerlane, though his real name was Tarmashirin KhanBarlas. Timur got his nickname when he seriously injured his right leg during his youth in a campaign in Afghanistan as a mercenary for the Khan of Sistan. Despite his infirmity, Timur was an extremely successful warrior leader and founded the Timurid dynasty whose empire extended over most of West, South and Central Asia . In 1398, Timur invaded India and defeated the reigning ruler of the Delhi sultanate, Mahmud Shah of the Tuglaq dynasty . Accounts of that campaign maintain that his army slaughtered lakhs of residents of Delhi. But then, Timur was notorious for massacres in the many regions that he overcame and it is rumoured that his many conquests would have caused the deaths of over 17 million people. But if Timur is abhorred as some sort of monster in India, in his native Uzbekistan he is lauded as an epic hero. It is not just his military exploits that are extolled. According to several accounts , Timur was an enthusiastic patron of the arts, architecture (many of the buildings he commissioned still stand in Samarkand), calligraphy and painting. He is reputed to have created a variant of chess and encouraged a style of wrestling called Kurash. Uzbekistan has given pride of place to Timur by installing a statue of him on horseback in the centre of Tashkent’s Independence Square, a large open area in the city centre embellished with gardens, fountains and skirted by museums.
Uzbekistan was occupied by Czarist Russia in the mid-19th Century and later by the USSR. Although the Soviets modernised Uzbekistan , there is little love for the Russians in that country. It is interesting to note that when Uzbekistan broke free from the Soviet Union in 1991, the first thing the new government did was remove Lenin’s statue from this square and substitute it with that of Timur. Strangely, while Timur is an Uzbek who is loathed in India, a fifth generation descendant of his, Zahir al-Din Muhammad, is held in high esteem here. This gentleman, more popularly known as Babur, also invaded India, defeated the then sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodi in 1526 but, unlike his predecessor, did not ravage the city.