The remarkable Princess Gulbadan, flower of the Mughal court

In 1587, the Mughal Emperor Akbar, himself illiterate but with grand vision and even greater ambition, commanded his courtier Abu’l-Fazl to write an official history of his reign and dynasty. An order went around Akbar’s court that anyone who was ‘gifted with the talent for writing history’ should put pen to paper and record the events that had shaped their times. Unusually for a male-dominated society, this included the emperor’s aunt. The 64-year-old Princess Gulbadan was well placed to provide a first-hand description of the creation and consolidation of the Mughal empire, for she was the beloved daughter of the Emperor Babur, who founded the dynasty, and the half-sister of Akbar’s father, Humayun. Yet when her account was finally translated into English at the beginning of the 20th century, even the publisher called it ‘a little thing’. Thanks to Ruby Lal, we now know it to be of immense value. The only surviving prose from a woman of that time, it is lively and uniquely revealing.

Gulbadan, whose name means ‘body like a rose’, was born in 1523 in the Bala Hisar, the great fort of Kabul, at a time when Babur was still fighting to create his empire. When she was six, Babur ordered his wives, children and female relatives to leave Kabul and join him in Hindustan. It was a slow, grand, nine-month procession, covering less than 100 miles a month and involved crossing the Kyber Pass and River Indus. Gulbadan never forgot the adventure, but more than the journey itself, it is the snapshots of the court and glimpses of daily life in the female quarters that stand out in her account. When Babur visits his women – most memorably in the gardens he loved – Gulbadan captures the excitement, joy and sense of completeness everyone experiences when the emperor is present.