Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
2012, vol. 7
Boundary Crossings in the Islamic World:
Princess Gulbadan as Traveler, Biographer,
and Witness to History, 1523–1603
Jyotsna G. Singh
P
rincess Gulbadan was the daughter of the emperor Babur (1483–
1530), the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India and a direct
descendant of Timur (Tamburlaine). She was about eight years old when
her father died in 1530, and years later, when her nephew Akbar asked
her to write about her half-brother and his father, Humayun, she produced a vivid and detailed picture of the turbulent years of the conquest of
Hindustan (India) by her father and later rule by her brother. Stimulating
topics and events in her account include border-crossings from Kabul to
Indian cities such as Lahore, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri; various military
campaigns by the rulers; and the complex kinship structures of the Muslim
aristocracy, especially the role of women in relationships with men, other
women, and children. Only one manuscript copy of Gulbadan’s Humayun
nama, as it is known, has been found, and there is no direct mention of
the work in the period.1 Although a seemingly unfamiliar work among
the many biographies and manuscripts of the Mughals, including her
father’s more famous Baburnama (ca. 1528–1530, translated into Persian
in 1589), Gulbadan’s narrative is unique in illuminating the world of early
In contrast, another history of Humayun, Tarikh-i-humayun, was reproduced
several times on its completion. For a full account of the provenance and publishing history of this work by Gulbadan, see Annette Beveridge, “Introduction,” Humayun nama,
ed. and trans. Annette Beveridge (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1902), 77–79. All
future quotations from this text will be cited by page numbers in parentheses.
1
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modern Islamic kingdoms and cultures from a Muslim woman’s perspective. And, importantly, in offering a non-European perspective, Gulbadan’s
memoir pluralizes and interrogates subsequent European history of the
early modern period by charting the formation of Hindustan through the
writing of the “culturally other” within intra-Islamic social, political, and
cultural formations.2
One has to place an imaginary compass point in early modern
Timurid cities like Kabul, Herat, Samarkand, or Lahore, and the Safavid
and Turco-Mongolian kingdoms of the west and north — including some
parts of the Ottoman Empire to the east — to understand this central/
south Asian Muslim world and to get a sense of the many intermingling
peoples and communities within a broad central Asian Muslim aristocracy,
often perceived as the Timurid cultural sphere.3 The languages within this
circle also proliferate: Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Hindi/Hindustani.
From the Ottoman vantage point, Hindustan or India is the point farthest
east in the Muslim world picture. Thus, Gulbadan’s travels in this world
from Kabul to cities in Hindustan such as Agra, including a journey to
Mecca in between, produce nuanced, gently gendered accounts of varied
“cross-border relationships, affiliations, and social arrangements” that
resulted from the sweeping thrust of early Mughal conquests.4 In imagining this early modern Islamic world, we cannot think in terms of the category of the “nation” but, rather, more in the context of cultural, linguistic,
religious, and lineage affiliations by which the inhabitants of these regions
Michel De Certeau, “Ethno-graphy,” The Writing of History, ed. and trans. Tom
Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 210. See also the Introduction.
3
For a discussion of the different strands of the Timurid lineage and territories, see
William Thackston, “The Genghisid and Timurid Background,” Baburnama (New York:
The Modern Library), xxxv-xlvii. All future quotations from this text will be cited by
page numbers in parentheses. For the use of the compass metaphor see Jyotsna G. Singh,
“Naming and Un-Naming All the ‘Indies’: How India Became Hindustan,” Indography:
Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
forthcoming. A discussion of the compass metaphor also is found in Shankar Raman,
Framing India: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern India (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), 280–82.
4
For a discussion of such complex networks of cross-border affiliations, see Steven
Vertovec, Transnationalism (London, Routledge, 2009), 2.
2
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Boundary Crossings in the Islamic World
233
imagined their communities and kingdoms. Boundaries were inevitably
porous, given that their invaders were conquerors who traversed borders
across and beyond the traditional Islamic worlds.
Gulbadan’s memoir captures this sense of almost nomadic movements into unstable and unfamiliar territories and depicts as well the
beginnings of a new empire that implanted itself in Indian life for posterity. She spent her childhood under the rule of her father Babur in Kabul
and Hindustan; her girlhood and young wifehood saw the fall, exile, and
return of Humayun, her half-brother; and her maturity and failing years
were under the protection of her nephew, Akbar. Although her incomplete manuscript ends abruptly and does not cover actual events beyond
Humayun’s rule, Gulbadan’s vision of the Mughal dynastic and familial
networks and their attendant power struggles opens up a complex picture
of the Central Asian Islamic worlds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This essay, I hope, will expand early modern Europe’s increasing
awareness of a trans-national and trans-cultural global world. This was
a world that Europeans began to recognize through their travel, explorations, commerce, and emerging colonization, but one that they could
not always “translate” — either linguistically or culturally — in intelligible
terms for themselves. While the traffic in goods and people brought the
Islamic, especially the Ottoman, world closer to Europe, intra-Islamic
interactions remained beyond the purview of European historicism for
which Christian Europe remained the center of inquiry.5 Gulbadan’s
narrative of early Mughal history offers a detailed exposition of a highly
localized profusion of characters to counter the broad thrust of European
memory-making and also describes the establishment of the far-reaching
Timurid culture, which included Turco-Mongolian communities that had
incorporated a Persian civilization.
For my definition of European “historicism,” see Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000). He calls for an “unraveling” of “the necessary entanglement of history — a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory — with grand
narratives of rights, citizenship, the nation state, and public and private spheres” (43).
5
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Jyotsna G. Singh
Starting with Babur’s now famous Baburnama, which is generally
considered the first true autobiography in Islamic literature, the writing
or commissioning of autobiographies/biographies and chronicles became
a standard practice of the Mughal rulers of Hindustan. “Although the
biographical sketch had long been an integral part of the literary legacy
and biographical dictionaries for various classes abounded, the autobiography as we know it was unheard of when Babur decided to keep a written
record of his life” (Thackston, xviii). He chose to write it in Chaghatay
Turkish, which, by the end of his grandson Akbar’s reign (1556–1605),
was not much in use in the Mughal court, but an aristocrat Abdul-Rahim
Khankhanan translated it into Persian and presented it to Akbar in 1589,
aptly after the ruler had visited Babur’s tomb in Kabul. Later, in the reigns
of the two successive Mughal rulers, Jahangir and Shahjahan, many copies
of the Persian translation were produced, some of them lavishly illustrated.
The circulation of Babur’s memoir is symptomatic of the popularity of
biographies/autobiographies or individual chronicles, which became the
practice in the Mughal court: consider Akbarnama, (ca. 1596) the chronicle of Akbar’s life, commissioned by the king and written by Abu’l Fazl,
the court historian; Tuzk-i-Jahangiri, the autobiography of the Emperor
Jahangir (1569–1609); and the Shahjahannama, a historical biography
of the Emperor Shahjahan (1628–1658) compiled by the royal librarian.
We have to view Gulbadan’s Humayunama in this historically-attuned
writing culture of the Mughal court; when she was in her fifties, Akbar
had ordered historians to chronicle the lives of his father and grandfather.
Thus, one can assume that Gulbadan wrote her account in the context of
existing sources and models of writing. The details of Gulbadan’s life are
largely unchronicled, except that she lived most of her adult life in Agra
and Fatehpur Sikri and died in 1603 at the age of eighty. She was particularly mourned by Hamida-banu, Akbar’s mother, and the emperor himself
carried her bier for a short distance.
Throughout her account Gulbadan evokes a sense of an ancestral cultural community, which is apparent from her father, Babur, calling for “the
families of Sahib Qiran [Tamburlaine] or Chinghiz Khan” to join him in
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Hindustan after the conquest of that land.6 Furthermore, she writes about
the impact of these forays on the domestic and social arrangements within
the communities of women. The narrator weaves together the public and
private worlds, most importantly, by taking the readers inside the women’s
private quarters and experiences as they were affected by the larger forces
of war and conquest. Thus, Gulbadan’s attention seems divided between
domestic arrangements and military and political events, between deeds of
conquest and internal disputes and intrigues. Domestic female households
were comprised of the emperor’s multiple wives, with somewhat overlapping or shared maternal roles. Gulbadan’s mother, Dildar Begum, was one
among several wives of Babur, and she bore him five children. His favorite
wife, Maham, mother of the heir, Humayun, apparently adopted Hindal,
one of Dildar’s sons, and also adopted and reared Gulbadan from the age
of two, before her father left Kabul on his many expeditions. Gulbadan
refers to her as “my lady.”
Overall, the narrator depicts the women’s kinship ties as complex,
certainly lively, and important to dynastic stability, as these domestic relationships also show the affiliations between the different branches of the
descendants of Timur and Genghis Khan. Thus, “the long list of names,
confusing though they may be for the reader, show how closely related
the different branches of the Timurid and Chinghisid families were.”7
Furthermore, according to Annette Beveridge, “there was no complete
seclusion of these Turki women from the outside world as came to be the
rule in Hindustan. The ladies may have veiled themselves, but . . . they
received visitors more freely, and more in accordance with the active life
of much-travelling peoples” (7). Aristocratic women associated with the
rulers and court life played a prominent role in the Mughal empire from
its beginnings, which Gulbadan’s memoir covers, and perhaps more so
when the rule was consolidated under Akbar, Jahangir, and Shahjahan.
Chinghiz Khan is the spelling used by Annette Beveridge of the familiar version
of the name Genghis Khan. The adjective Chinghisid is also used by various translators.
7
For a further discussion of the role of women in aristocratic Mughal households,
see Annemarie Schimmel, The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art, and Culture
(London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 143–66. All future quotations from this text will be
cited by page numbers in parentheses.
6
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Annemarie Schimmel gives us some background on the specific role of
women in the Timurid culture: “In order to understand the prominent role
of women in the Mughal court [that Gulbadan’s memoir reveals] it has to
be borne in mind that women in the Central Asian regions, from which the
‘House of Timur’ originated, enjoyed considerably more freedom and were
more active than one imagines in those Central Islamic regions” (144).
The opening pages of Gulbadan’s memoir pay honor to her lineage:
First of all, by way of invoking a blessing on my work . . . a chapter is written about my royal father’s deeds, although these are
told in his memoirs. From his Majesty Sahib Qiran [Timur or
Tamburlaine from whom the Mughals were descended] down
to my royal father there was not one of the bygone princes who
labored as he did. . . . [T]he toils and perils which in the ruling of kingdoms befell our prince, have been measured out to
few, and of few have been recorded the manliness, courage, and
endurance which he showed in battlefields and dangers. Twice
he took Samarkand by force of the sword. . . .” (Beveridge, 84)
Gulbadan traces the path of her father’s (and, later, her brother’s) conquests within the Afghani regions and gradually into Hindustan: “In seven
or eight years since 1519, the royal army had several times renewed the
attempt on Hindustan.” She records her father’s decisive victory at Panipat
in Hindustan against the current Muslim ruler: “he [Babur] arrayed battle
at Panipat against Sultan Ibrahim. . . . By God’s grace he was victorious . . .
[and] the treasures of five kings fell into his hands” (93). Conquests by the
male rulers also meant a showering of gifts on the Mughal women, which
is evidence of the seizure and movement of goods and bodies from the
conquered peoples to the new rulers. According to the Mughal princess,
her victorious father tells his followers returning to Kabul
When you go, I shall send some of the valuable presents and
curiosities of Hind which fell into our hands through the victory over Sultan Ibrahim, to my elder relations and sisters and
each person of the harem . . . to each begum [lady] to be delivered
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as follows: one special dancing girl of the dancing-girls of Sultan
Ibrahim, with one gold plate of jewels — ruby and pearl, cornelian, diamond, emerald and turquoise . . . and two small mother
of pearl trays full of ashrafis [gold and silver coins]. (95)
Among the “dancing girls” from Hindustan could well be some Hindus
women, but we are not given any details; it is only apparent from
Gulbadan’s perspective that the Mughal conquest of Hindustan was a
harbinger of wealth.
The conquest of the new land resulted in both a sense of displacement and of fluid boundaries for the conquerors and their kin. Gulbadan’s
memoir captures the personal dimensions of this displacement, but, interestingly, her account, unlike her father’s, does not offer details of the new
land. Instead, we learn how the Mughals brought with them their existing kinship networks and relations. Thus, her vivid childhood memories
of geographical names and settings evoke deeply affective family scenes.
After the victory at Panipat, Gulbadan notes, her father sends a call for
households to follow: “Whoever there be of the families of Sahib Qiran
[Tamburlaine] or Chinghiz Khan, let them turn towards our court. The
most High has given us sovereignty to Hindustan; let them come that we
may see prosperity together” (97). In response to his call “all the begums
[high ladies] and khanums [women] went, ninety-six persons in all, and
all received gifts to their heart’s desire” (97). Among these were daughters
of “His Majesty’s maternal uncles” (97). The location where this female
group settled was the city of Agra: “He [Babur]] ordered that buildings be
constructed in Agra on the other side of the river, and a stone palace with
a garden built for him and his harem. He also had a palace built in the
audience court, with a reservoir in the middle and four chambers in the
four towers” (98).
Although Gulbadan records that the Mughals claimed Hindustan by
building edifices, often including gardens due to the hot climate (“One day
it was extremely hot” [97]), she also reminds her readers of the Muslim’s
sense of alienation from the Hindu land. In 1527, facing a Hindu rana
(chief ) joined by other rajas (kings) and ranas, “who now became an
enemy,” Gulbadan’s father addressed all the
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amirs, khans, and sultans [rulers and chieftains]: Do you know
that there lies a journey of some months between us and the
land of our birth and familiar city [Kabul]? If our side is defeated, where are we? Where is our birthplace? Where is our city?
We have to do with strangers and foreigners. (99)
After a battle was won on the hill of Sikri, where later the important Mughal
city of Fatehpur Sikri was built, we hear of the young Gulbadan’s arrival
in 1528 with Maham, her adopted mother, from “Kabul to Hindustan. I,
this insignificant one, came in advance of my sisters, and paid my duty to
my royal father” (100). Such journeys from Kabul to the Mughal establishments in cities such as Agra were probably arduous and long and revealed
the Mughal conquerors’ ambition. Gulbadan’s accounting of these journeys
vividly brings to life both the intimate and ceremonial details, rather than
the hardships. When Maham was on her way, Babur, her husband,
met her near the house in the advance camp. She wished to
alight, but he would not wait . . . [and later, they were joined
by an elaborate display]: nine troopers, with two sets of nine
horses and the two extra litters which the Emperor had sent,
and one litter, which had been brought from Kabul, and about a
hundred of my lady’s Mughal servants, mounted on fine horses,
all elegance and beauty. (101)
Gulbadan narrates that within the Mughal communities, while the members were involved in familial interactions and intrigues, they were also
facilitating the consolidation of their new rule. The rituals and political
intrigues that followed Babur’s death and the succession of Gulbadan’s
half-brother, Humayun, offer an illuminating picture of the consolidation
of a new quasi-national entity, the Mughal Empire of Hindustan. When
Babur died on December 26, 1530, his daughter notes,
Black fell the day for children and kinsfolk and all . . . [but]
the death was kept concealed. After a while an amir of Hind
said, “It is not well to keep the death secret because when such
misfortunes befall kings in Hindustan, it is the custom of the
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bazaar [common] people to rob and steal: God forbid that the
Mughals not knowing, they should come and loot the houses
and dwelling-places. It would be best to dress someone in red,
and set him on an elephant, and let him proclaim that the
emperor Babur has become a dervish and has given his throne
to the Emperor Humayun.” This his majesty ordered to be
done. . . . On December 29th, 1530, Humayun mounted the
throne and everyone said, “May all the world be blessed under
his rule.” After that . . . he was pleased to order: “Let each keep
the office, and service, and lands, and residences which he had,
and let him serve in the old way.” (110)
Humayun, the new emperor, reinforced his official edicts with rules
requiring familial and communal ties with “his own people”: “After that
he [Humayun] came to visit his mothers and sisters and his own people,
and he made inquiry after their health and offered sympathy, and spoke
with kindness and commiseration” (110). Gulbadan elaborates on her
own familial intimacy with the new emperor but also reminds us that his
travels took him to campaigns beyond the new land: “his Majesty used
always, so long as was in Hindustan, to come to our house” (111). The
narrative somewhat blithely declares that after Babur’s death, “his Majesty
[Humayun] was in Hind, the people dwelt in repose and obedience
and loyalty” (111). This belies the turbulent history of Humayun’s rule,
which includes several military campaigns, displacements and exile back
to Kabul, struggles with the Afghans, and the rebellious behavior of his
brothers Kamran and Hindal that Gulbadan later recounts. The Humayun
nama ends on a note of triumphalism and cruelty, symptomatic of the
power struggles that had shaped the early years of Mughal rule. Humayun
consolidates his rule, his son Akbar’s birth and circumcision are celebrated,
but Gulbadan’s narrative ends abruptly in mid-sentence with Humayun’s
order to blind his brother Kamran, the “breacher of the kingdom” (201).
She notes, “the Emperor gave an order . . . ‘Blind Mirza Kamran in both
eyes.’ The Sayyid [follower] went at once and did so” (201).
Although this final moment perhaps signals a dramatic oriental despotism, it also reminds us of European beheadings and torture of rulers
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and enemies found, for example, in Shakespeare’s history plays. Overall,
while Europeans and English are completely absent in Gulbadan’s account
of the formation of the Mughal rule, she offers Western historians an entry
into intra-cultural Muslim worlds removed from European networks of
access and intelligibility. And from the hindsight of history, we also learn of
the powerful rulers of India with whom the British travelers, traders, and
royal emissaries such as Thomas Roe, would have to contend in the early
seventeenth century.
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