Boundary Crossings in the Islamic World: Princess Gulbadan As Traveler, Biographer, and Witness to History, 1523–1603 Jyotsna G

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 rincess Gulbadan was the daughter of the emperor Babur (1483– P1530), 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 1 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. 231 EMW12.indb 231 8/28/12 12:30:39 PM 232 EMWJ 2012, vol . 7 Jyotsna G . Singh 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 imagin- ing this early modern Islamic world, we cannot think in terms of the cat- egory of the “nation” but, rather, more in the context of cultural, linguistic, religious, and lineage affiliations by which the inhabitants of these regions 2 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. EMW12.indb 232 8/28/12 12:30:39 PM 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 move- ments into unstable and unfamiliar territories and depicts as well the beginnings of a new empire that implanted itself in Indian life for poster- ity. 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 incom- plete 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 cen- turies. 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, explo- rations, 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. 5 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). EMW12.indb 233 8/28/12 12:30:39 PM 234 EMWJ 2012, vol . 7 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 particu- larly 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 EMW12.indb 234 8/28/12 12:30:39 PM Boundary Crossings in the Islamic World 235 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 overlap- ping or shared maternal roles.

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