Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan

4 ideas

1. Gulbadan's women-led pilgrimage to Mecca

   In the mid-1570s Gulbadan Begum, Babur's daughter, then in her fifties, led a party of Mughal royal women out of Fatehpur Sikri on the hajj, a journey of roughly seven years that included about four years in Arabia. The women stayed so long and distributed alms so openly that Ottoman authorities issued orders for them to leave. The episode is a concrete case of elite women using religious duty as licence for independent movement and public action far beyond the emperor's control.

2. Empire-building enclosed women who once moved freely

   Under Babur and Humayun, Mughal women lived a peripatetic life of camps, flights, and campaigns, taking part in negotiations, marriages, and survival decisions. As Akbar consolidated a settled, ceremonial empire, the harem was codified into a walled, hierarchical institution that recast royal women as symbols of sacred sovereignty. Their mobility and visible agency shrank as a result. Institutional stability for the state was purchased partly by narrowing women's room to act.

3. Read official chronicles for what they omit

   Akbar's court history, compiled by Abul Fazl, barely mentions the women's pilgrimage, and Gulbadan's own memoir survives incomplete, breaking off before those years. Lal treats silence and missing pages as evidence of what the imperial record chose not to preserve, not as proof that nothing happened. She reconstructs women's lives by cross-reading surviving fragments, foreign sources such as Ottoman documents, and the gaps themselves.

4. Memoir as counter-record from inside power

   Gulbadan's Humayun-nama was commissioned by Akbar as source material for his official history, but she wrote it in plain, domestic, eyewitness prose. It records births, quarrels, feasts, exile, and women's voices that the grand chronicle flattened. A work produced to serve the state's narrative thereby became the only surviving woman's account of early Mughal life, a parallel record of how empire actually felt from within the household.

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