Person · Mughal princess and memoirist
Gulbadan Begum
Also known as Gulbadan Bānū Begum, Gul-Badan Begam, Gulbadan Banu Begum, Princess Rosebody
A daughter of Babur, born at Kabul in 1522, who at Akbar's request wrote the Humayun-nama, an account of her half-brother Humayun's life in plain Persian. It is the only surviving writing by a Mughal royal woman of the sixteenth century, and it records the household's wandering life between Kabul, Agra and Lahore, Humayun's exile and his feud with Kamran. She also made the pilgrimage to Mecca, returning in 1582 after seven years away.
- Date
- 1522–1603
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- Mughal
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The only known manuscript is a battered, incomplete copy that breaks off mid-sentence in 1552, during the blinding of Kamran Mirza. It reached the British Museum from Colonel G. W. Hamilton's widow in 1868 and was little known until Annette Beveridge translated it in 1901.
Some scholars suspect she wrote in Turkic and that the surviving Persian text is a translation.
Connections (5)
- Historical linkHumayun
Gulbadan was eight when Babur died in 1530 and was brought up by her elder half-brother Humayun. Her Humayun-nama, titled in the manuscript Ahwal Humayun Padshah, follows his reign, his loss of India to Sher Shah Suri in 1540, his marriage to the young Hamida Banu during his exile, and the long struggle with his brother Kamran Mirza, which she records with evident grief. The surviving text stops in 1552, four years before Humayun's fatal fall at the Purana Qila.
- PatronageAkbar
Akbar brought his aunt from Kabul into the imperial household at Agra in 1557, and later ordered her to write down whatever she knew of Babur and Humayun, while Abu'l-Fazl was writing his own Akbarnama; it is believed her memories were meant to feed that history. He paid for her pilgrimage to Mecca and sent a noble as escort. When she died in February 1603, aged eighty, Akbar helped carry her bier, and he is said to have mourned her until his own death in 1605.
- Historical linkZahiruddin Babur
Gulbadan was Babur's daughter by Dildar Begum, and in 1528 she came from Kabul to India with a stepmother who, on Babur's command, adopted her. Her memoir's pages on her father are few, since she was eight when he died, but they keep stories told in the harem: a huge gold coin sent from India to be hung round the neck of the blindfolded Kabul jester Asas, and Babur circling the bed of the gravely ill Humayun for four days, praying to die in his son's place.
- PilgrimageMecca
With Salima Sultan Begum and other royal women, Gulbadan made the Hajj, a journey of some three thousand miles over mountains and deserts that Akbar provisioned with an escort, attendants and gifts to be given as alms. She stayed in Mecca for nearly four years, and her almsgiving drew people from as far as Syria and Asia Minor. A shipwreck at Aden delayed her return for several months, and she reached Agra again only in 1582, seven years after setting out.
- BirthplaceKabul
Gulbadan was born at Kabul in November 1522, when the city had been her father Babur's seat for nineteen years, and she spent most of her life there. After Humayun lost India to Sher Shah Suri in 1540 she returned to Kabul to live with a half-brother, who tried to recruit her husband against Humayun, and she stayed until Akbar summoned her to Agra. Wikipedia's infobox gives her burial place as the Gardens of Babur in Kabul, though the article text does not confirm it.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Gulbadan Begum". Annette S. Beveridge (trans.), Humayun-nama: The History of Humayun by Gul-Badan Begam (1902); Ruby Lal, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (2024).
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