Portrait of a Charismatic Adventurer

Vagabond Princess, the first ever biography of Gulbadan Banu Begum, the daughter of the first Mughal Emperor Babur and his third-oldest wife Dildar Begum is a captivating capture of life-in-movement—the travels of Gulbadan from Afghanistan to Agra with her father, her life in mansions, harems but also tents. A keen adventurer who had a migratory childhood, the Princess had exuberance and loved a buoyant lifestyle. She became a phenomenal witness at the age of six and a half years to the emerging Mughal rule, to the perennial warfare that she grew up with, the turbulent exile of her brother Humayun and then as an adult to the consolidation of the Mughal Empire under her nephew Emperor Akbar. A charismatic woman, Gulbadan spent her middle years in the walled harem established by Akbar, who sought her support to pen down her personal memories of the reigns of Babur and Humayun so as to affirm the legitimacy of the dynasty and construct the official imperial past. Akbar’s announcement in 1587 in this regard, despite being an ummi, who could not read or write, transformed the idea of record-keeping in Mughal history. It was in this context that at the age of sixty-four, even as Gulbadan indulged in the depths of Persian prose and poetry, she wrote the biography of Humayun, Ahval-i Humayun Badshah that provides a vivid, dramatic account of extraordinary, epoch-making events from the reign of Babur to that of Akbar.