Vagabond Princess: Establishing Gulbadan's Place In Mughal History

Set in the early decades of the Mughal Empire, this first ever biography of Princess Gulbadan, the daughter of Emperor Babur, offers an enthralling portrait of a charismatic adventurer and the multicultural society in which she lived. Following a migratory childhood in Kabul and north India, Gulbadan spent her middle years in a walled harem established by her nephew Akbar. Longing for the exuberant itinerant lifestyle she had known, she led, with Akbar's blessing, an extended pilgrimage by harem women to Mecca and other parts of Arabia.

Amid increasing political tensions, the women's "un-Islamic" behavior forced their return, which was lengthened by a dramatic shipwreck in the Red Sea. Gulbadan wrote a book upon her return, the only surviving work of prose by a woman of her times. A portion of it is missing, either lost to history or redacted by officials who did not want the princess to have her say. As she contemplates the story of the missing pages, Lal breathes new life into an extraordinary Mughal figure, and establishes her place in a history that has long been dominated by men's actions and words. 

Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan - An Excerpt

August 1997  

The British Library, London 

I waited with nervous anticipation as I skimmed through the card catalogue in the tall wooden cabinets behind the service desk of the Asian and African Studies reading room. A majestic, high ceilinged rectangular room, it had several long tables, each of which could comfortably seat up to four readers on each side. Lamps with light-blue shades stood in contrast to the yellow tables. Large portraits of Indian rajas and other aristocrats from the former British colonies dominated one side of the high walls. Rows of bookshelves holding printed guides and other catalogues drew patrons’ attention. Every now and then, the library staff looked toward the area where readers pored over the special collections. 

Earlier in the day, I had asked to see the sixteenth-century princess Gulbadan Begum’s book, classified as Or. 166 in the British Library. Gulbadan, literally “Rosebody,” was the beloved daughter of Babur, the patriarch of the magnificent Mughals of India, and the first and only woman historian of the Mughal Empire.

Writing as events unfolded, she captured the gritty and fabulous daily lives of ambitious men, subversive women, brilliant eunuchs,  devoted nurses, gentle and perceptive guards, and captive women and children who died in war zones. Yet Gulbadan’s stellar book was relegated to the margins of history—to mere footnotes in volumes on Mughal politics,  war, economy, and agrarian histories, all written by men. 

Before I left India for Oxford, I had seen a 1902 English translation of Gulbadan’s work by Annette Beveridge, a British colonial-era scholar. It was obvious that Gulbadan was a woman of many quests and journeys.  Yet her work had been sidelined by modern historians, who shared Beveridge’s publisher’s belief, articulated in a letter accepting the translation for publication, that it was “of unique interest. . . . A little history . . . it is but a  little thing.”

The “little history” of men’s and women’s daily lives that enraptured the princess is in fact a masterpiece that came out of an insightful witnessing of hard politics and much more. No distant bystander, she was close to the people whose lives she chronicled. Thus her book was both hers and theirs,  a lively prose work that shines with unrivaled granular details of Mughal wandering life. 

On that August 1997 morning, as I waited to hold the book of this adventurous woman, I did not yet know the depth of her radical thinking, her daring life story, tied intricately to one of the greatest adventures in the late sixteenth-century world. Two decades would pass before I joined together the pieces of her fascinating life. 

My curiosity was piqued. I dug through the British Library’s resources and discovered that it housed over eleven thousand Persian manuscripts.  This vast pool included the princess’s father’s poetry and thousands of miniature paintings, such as the one in which he greets courtiers at ‘Id, his slender face captivating the viewer. In another, Gulbadan’s nephew Emperor Akbar, seated on a boulder under a tree, instructs his courtiers that the slaughter of animals must cease. Scores of breathtaking Mughal works and others from the wider Islamic world can also be found in this collection— folktales, allegories, so-called morals for the heart, human, animal, vegetal terrestrial worlds, both pictorial and written.

Much later, I would find a magnificent miniature drawing in which Gulbadan stands in profile holding her book. The artist captured the special status that the princess clearly enjoyed by placing her at the edge of the central frame, which immediately attracts the viewer’s attention.

In 1868, the British Museum purchased Gulbadan’s manuscript from the widow of Colonel William Hamilton, who had collected nearly a thousand manuscripts from Lucknow and Delhi. The Delhi collection, which includes  1,957 Arabic, 1,550 Persian, and 157 Urdu manuscripts, represents what remained in 1858 of the famed Mughal Imperial Library—those items that had not been gifted, sold, or seized during constant raids and incursions, beginning with Nadir Shah’s invasion of Delhi in 1739.

India’s British colonial government acquired the collection, estimated at 4,700 volumes, at a sale in 1859. In 1867 another 1,120 less valuable items were sold. The remainder was to be given to the newly completed Indian Museum in Calcutta, but instead everything ended up in the India Office Library in London in 1876.3 Gulbadan’s book was in one of the trunks holding the lesser items from the  Delhi collection. 

As I stood by the catalogues and open shelves, I looked beyond the service desk, imagining a secret crypt that held prized books and manuscripts.  “Or. 166—Ruby Lal”: my musings were interrupted by a gentle call from an  Englishwoman in her fifties. I gave her the counterfoil of the library request  slip, and she instructed, “Please take it to the special collections table.” I  barely listened to her; my eyes were on her hands. She opened the gray cloth folded over the manuscript. The princess’s book! Bound in faded wine-red leather with gold rim, it evoked the splendor of another age. 

Taking it to my table and placing it atop a wooden book stand, I began turning the pages very slowly, as if seeking blessings from a sacred text. A little book with no frontispieces or margins. The pages, which included blank flyleaves, were impossibly thin. Later I found out the exact dimensions: 229  by 140 millimeters (9 by 5½ inches) per leaf. There were eighty-three folios with approximately fifteen lines on each page. Although there was no colophon or date, based on the state of the paper and the writing style the British  Library dated the text to the seventeenth century. 

Each day as I returned to Gulbadan’s writing, I experienced a deeper affinity with the soft texture of the book, the light golden pages dotted with faint coffee-colored blemishes, the aging inside and outside, the words penned in coal black ink, and the cursive, or nasta‘liq, script. As I touched  Gulbadan’s book, its contents, familiar from the Beveridge translation, felt new. I felt a direct communication with the woody aroma of the pages, which brought the scenes Gulbadan described to life.

Amid the Persian sentences, I spotted a few Turkish words as well as Hindavi ones—the language from which modern Hindi evolved. I could hear Gulbadan speak thus, heir that she was to intermingled languages. A word here, a phrase there making its way into a sentence in another language, like humans moving from one place to another, establishing homes in foreign lands.