History as we know it has precious little to do with recording chain of events in a chronological manner. Instead it has been pulled to one side, distorted and rewritten by whatever power ruled the writers at that point of time. In lieu of this it has come to mean only one thing – glorification of human beings sometimes beyond their natural abilities by men who were paid or coerced into doing so.
That goes to prove one thing – History is nothing more than the story of human interactions written by individuals whose lives were impacted as a result of these interactions in any way. Rulers like Prithiviraj Chauhan entrusted their court poets like Chandbardai to write stories of their bravery the way they wanted it written. These initial interactions started chain reactions of sorts stretching across generations as oral renditions of these works were the accepted norm in medieval India. Hence a thread of history began as a result of human interaction and spread due to the need of people to earn a livelihood. This oral telling and retelling was distorted further as time went by and came to form legends – stories in which it is very difficult to separate fact from fiction purely because the starting point itself was mainly fiction.
This raises a pretty interesting point – History and legend are both stories about people who comparatively had the maximum impact on lives at a particular point in time – especially the lives of those who actually wrote what posterity would call “History”. If Babar had ruled and died in Farghana, the world would not have heard of him. No one dwells on the fact that he was driven out of both Samarkand and Farghana and only managed to take India by chance. But since he could impact the lives of the entire northern half of this great country and had some of the greatest scholars of those times in his court - he could commission the "Babarnama"and tell the world what he wanted to say.
In retrospect,decisions as to what should be "history" are a very conscious process- taken by people who are powerful enough to impact human lives and thus change the course of "events" to a set of stories of personal achievements that over time become history.