A female writer with privileged access to the Mughal court
VAGABOND PRINCESS
The great adventures of Gulbadan
RUBY LAL
280pp. Yale University Press. £22 (US $30).
AWRITER KNOWN, if at all, for a fragment of a Persian manuscript entitled Conditions in the Age of Humayun Badshah scarcely invites scrutiny. Even the publisher of the only English translation had his reservations. The manuscript, although “of unique interest”, he thought “but a little thing”. Undeterred, Ruby Lal, a professor of South Asian studies at Emory University in Atlanta, has been pondering it for more than a decade. She trailed her interest in two earlier works on Mughal culture and society; now, in Vagabond Princess she presents a highly appetizing and exhaustively researched biography of the text’s author.
The case for doing so is strong. For one thing, despite its discouraging title, the Conditions is largely autobiographical and is the only prose composition about Mughal India written by a female contemporary. Better still, Gulbadan Begum (the “Rose-bodied Princess”) writes from a privileged position of intimacy with the inner workings and vicissitudes of the early Mughal court. Her father was Babur, the founder of Mughal rule in India and first of the six “Great Mughals”; her elder brother was Humayun, the ill-fated second; and Akbar, the third and the main architect of the empire, was her esteemed nephew and patron. It was he who commissioned the Conditions as a contribution to the Akbarnama, the three-volume record of his reign. Gulbadan, like her English contemporary Elizabeth I, died in 1603. Aged eighty, she had long outlived both her text and most of her royal relatives.
As if all this was not surprising enough, in 1576 Gulbadan had cut loose. Resenting the close confinement of Akbar’s new seraglio, she had obtained the emperor’s permission to lead a largely female pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. There she and her companions stayed on as mujawir (“sojourners” or unofficial residents) for four years. They were then further delayed by being shipwrecked off the coast of Aden. Hence the “vagabond” of Lal’s title.
Migratory habits and alfresco living were typical of the early Mughals. Aged seven, Gulbadan had made the three-month journey from Kabul to Agra to join her father. Babur himself had spent his entire career on the move. As a descendant of Timur (Tamerlane), he had inherited imperial expectations but limited prospects. “There were simply too many kings about and not enough kingdoms”, wrote E. M. Forster in his Babur essay. Timur “had produced so numerous a progeny that a frightful congestion of royalties had resulted”; in Uzbekistan “one could scarcely travel two miles without being held up by an Emperor”.
