Ans.

You probably know that the word “Mughal” means “Mongol” in Persian, and Babur adopted it to refer to his Mongol heritage. So there is a definite link between the two. However, on a related note the Mughal and Mongol empires were very different entities. On a historical scale, they have only 3 degrees of separation though:

    Genghis Khan --> The Chagatai Khanate --> Timurlane --> Babur

So in the beginning we had one...

    Genghis Khan, who built the Mongol Empire from scratch by around 1225 CE. Along the way he conquered what are today the 5 Central Asian republics, including Uzbekistan.
    This Central Asian region was given to his son Chagatai, and when the empire split it became the Chagatai Khanate. In the 1340s, the Chagatai Khanate broke up into a Muslim Western Khanate and an Eastern Khanate. The Western Khanate is the region that Timur and Babur would come from.
    Timurlane was a warlord for the Western Chagatai Khanate gaining prominence around 1360 CE. He came from a Mongol tribe called Barla, which had converted to Islam and become thoroughly Turkicized/Persianized. Timur, having come from a tribe that was once part of Genghis’ army, aimed to revive Genghis’ empire. He was not a descendant of Genghis, so he married one to gain legitimacy. In 1399 Timur conquered Delhi, adding “Hindustan” to his empire. He left 3 months later but the Sultanate acted as a vassal state till well after he had died.
    Anyway, Timur’s successors were weak and his empire collapsed. Out of that rubble emerged Babur, from the Ferghana Valley in present-day Uzbekistan. Babur eventually became king of Afghanistan because of his Timurid ancestry. From there in 1526 CE, he would eventually capture Delhi (inspired by Timur’s earlier invasion and using it as a justification). He decides to call his dynasty the Mughal dynasty, because it means Mongol, and the Mongols themselves at this time did not have a high enough reputation.


So yes, Mughal means Mongol, though there are important differences and you mostly cannot use those terms interchangeably.