In the summer of 1997, professor and historian Ruby Lal sat tucked inside the British Library, turning the delicate pages of a book written by 16th-century Princess Gulbadan Begum, the first and only female historian of what Lal calls the “magnificent Mughals of India.”
Gulbadan, whose name translates to “Rosebody,” was a writer, poet, respected matriarch and learned adventurer who survived scandal and shipwreck, leading 11 women on an extraordinary six-year holy pilgrimage across dangerous seas into Arabia. Her genre-bending book — part stream-of-consciousness memoir, part cultural and political history — detailed the daily lives and trials not only of princes and politicians but also of transgressive women, eunuchs, wet nurses, guards, courtesans and children.
It was a “masterpiece that came out of an insightful witnessing of hard politics and much more,” writes Lal in ”Vagabond Princess” (Yale University Press), her recently released biography of Gulbadan, a “lively prose work that shines with unrivaled granular details of Mughal wandering life.”
Despite most historians’ attempts to marginalize her story, Gulbadan’s book speaks to us now through Lal’s own rigorous scholarship. In writing “Vagabond Princess,” based on the manuscript that she first encountered that day in the library, Lal returns Gulbadan’s story to the center of Mughal history.
Lal is an Emory University professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies and author of the books “Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World,” “Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness,” and “Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan.”
She recently spoke with ArtsATL about writing “Vagabond Princess” and what it means to be a feminist historian.
Credit: Danish Saroee
Credit: Danish Saroee
Q: Tell me about your first encounter with Princess Gulbadan. What did it feel like for you discovering her memoir?
A: I’d seen her book in translation by Annette Beveridge, but the detail, the stream-of-consciousness style of narration … there was something quite physically moving about [seeing the original memoir]. On that August afternoon in 1997, when I held it in my hands, it felt like a sacred moment — turning every page that was so fragile, reading slowly the Persian sentences from right to left, soaking in the atmosphere.
With the tactility of the text, I was very transported. It felt like a sacred moment, like a connection.
Q: One of the big ideas you were contending with in your research at this time was that there was no real feminist history of the Mughal Empire. Can you speak more about what you mean when you say feminist history?
A: It was in my first book, “Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World,” in which I first brought [Gulbadan’s] memoir center stage, brought scholarly attention to it as a text source.
There were two aspects, at that time, that I was dealing with. One was that there was no feminist history — by which I mean, there was nothing on the feminine experience.
When we think of the great Mughals of India, we immediately think Taj Mahal. But the Taj Mahal wasn’t there at that time. So who were these people? How did the dynasty come into being? And in terms of the feminine experience, how were women participants in the making of the politics and the empire? There was no sense of that, and that’s really what my book did.
But it’s not just that I found a woman’s source [Gulbadan’s memoir], and I thought, “Oh, this is brilliant.” Of course, it was an extraordinary source. But it was also about the politics of asking questions. It was about working with the politics of a rather male field in which, for no good reason, sources had been marginalized or erased out of our consciousness.
Gulbadan was the only woman historian of the Mughal empire. She was invited at the invitation of her nephew, Akbar the Great, to write this extraordinary book. It’s unique not only for the dynasty, but for her era actually, because royal women [at that time] mostly wrote poetry.
What does it take for a man, or male scholars, to discard a source like that? As I write in “Vagabond Princess,” this is about male disbelief around feminine experiences and around women-oriented sources.
All of this constitutes a feminist practice, or, for me, a feminist form of writing history.
Credit: Courtesy of Yale University Press
Credit: Courtesy of Yale University Press
Q: How does Gulbadan come to be author of what we know as the only surviving female-authored historical memoir from the Mughal Empire?
A: Gulbadan is born in Kabul in 1523, and after her father’s initial conquests, she is the first girl to travel in the caravan that he invites to come to India as part of resettlement of his territory. She only has about five years with her father, and then he dies, and the empire goes to her brother, Humayun, whom she was very close to.
Akbar the Great, [her nephew], [later] establishes the first walled, red sandstone harem, which was a gesture toward respectability for his women. The whole projection of himself was as this god-like emperor, so his women had to be goddess-like, and the way to do that was to make them inaccessible and invite them to live behind the walls.
Gulbadan, along with other multigenerational women, go for the first time to live behind these walls, and it is from there that she leads her pilgrimage.
When she returns, Akbar’s empire is in a very strong position, and this is the time he wants to commission the first imperial history of the empire.
He invites various members, older generations, older imperial servants, officers to contribute their memories of their forefathers. And there was only one woman he invites amongst them, because of her standing, and that is Gulbadan —who is experienced, learned, highly thought of. She is a formidable matriarch, along with his mother, and that is the background into which she comes to write.
Q: As a feminist historian, what do you think we lose as students of history, as citizens of the world, when these stories, these women, women like Gulbadan, are excluded from scholarship and from our understanding of culture?
A: I think it’s linked with this knee-jerk reaction that we all have, which is that as we go forward in time, we are making progress. An extension of that is the idea that things in the past were really barbaric. They were very patriarchal systems, these courtly societies. But the extraordinary thing is the immense creativity and power, even the freedom, that women had [at the time].
I think we’d all do well to remember, to learn about these experiences. And I think that is why I’ve turned to writing for a wider audience, to share these incredible stories.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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