Historicising The Harem

Historicizing the Harem: The Challenge of a Princess's Memoir
Author(s): Ruby Lal

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Fall, 2004), pp. 590-616
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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HistoricizingtheHarem:
TheChallenge
of a Princess's
Memoir
RubyLal
AFTER THE BATTLE OF PANIPAT in 1526, which gave Babur, the first
Mughal king, a foothold in India, his close friend, Khvajeh Kilan, expressed
a desire to return to his home in Kabul. As Babur (reluctantly) gave him
permission to go, he asked him to carry "valuable presents and curiosities
[tuhfehva hadyeh]of Hind" to his relations and other people in Kabul.'
Two generations later, when asked to record her memories of the
Mughal forefathers for the imperial history, the Akbarnama,Babur's daugh
ter, Gulbadan Banu Begum, reconstructed Babur's conversation with
Khvajeh Kilan as follows:
I shall write a list, and you will distribute them [the gifts] according to it.... To
each begam is to be delivered as follows: one special dancing-girl of the dancing
girls of Sultan Ibrahim [Ibrahim Lodi, the king Babur defeated at Panipat], with
one gold plate full of jewels-ruby and pearl, cornelian and diamond, emerald
and turquoise, topaz and cat's-eye-and two small mother-o'-pearl trays full of
ashrafis,and on two other trays shahrukhis,
and all sorts of stuffs by nines-that is,
four trays and one plate. Take a dancing-girl and another plate of jewels, and one
and present, in accordance with my directions, tomy
each of ashrafisand shahrukhis,
elder relations the very plate of jewels and the self-same dancing-girl which I
have given for them [sic]. I have made other gifts; convey these afterwards. Let
them divide and present jewels and ashrafisand shahrukhis
and stuffs tomy sisters
Feminist 30, no. 3 (Fall2004).C 2004by Feminist Studies, Inc.
Studies
590
Ruby Lal 591
and children and the haramsand kinsmen, and to the begams and aghas and nurs
es and foster-brethren and ladies, and to allwho pray for me.2
Gulbadan's recordof her father's inventory is strikingfor several reasons.

Itbrings to lifequestions of correct deportment in the preparationof gifts
and themanner of presenting (and accepting) them-so central to the sen
sibilities of the Timurid-Mughal world. It isparticularly notable for
depictingBabur'sdomestic life.The Begum gives us glimpses of the range
of Babur'sdomestic relationshipsand associations,with the old aswell as
the young. The list of gifts is a pointer to the centrality and the hierarchi
cal character of these relationships.Babur gave clear instructions about
what should be given to whom and in what order. So the elder relations
were to be given the following presents first:a dancing girl,
(vali-u-niImatan)
a plate of jewels, and a plate each of ashrafis and shahrukhis(designation for
coins), to be followed by "other gifts" that Babur had listed for them.
Similarlyhis sisters,kinsmen and theirwives, heads of households, nurses,
and childrenwere to receivepresents later in accordancewith Babur's list.
The Begum's memoir pays a great deal of attention to such illustrative
inventories.Inher elucidation, the detailsof presents and invitationsserve
not merely as a descriptive catalog, but as symbols of the privileges of
seniority. They index the creation and maintenance of hierarchical rela
tionships, aswell as the importanceof building alliances and reinforcing
kinship solidarities.
At another point in hermemoir, Gulbadan discussesthe timeHumayun,
the second Mughal king, spent with the royal women when his court was
settled for awhile in Agra:
On court days [ruzhayedivan],which were Sundays and Tuesdays, he used to go to

the other side of the river. During his stay in the garden, ajam (Dil-dar Begam)
and my sisters and the ladies (haraman)
were often in his company. Of all the tents,
Ma'suma Sultan Begam's was at the top of the row. Next came Gul-rang
Begam's, and ajam'swas in the same place. Then the tent of my mother, Gul-barg
Begam and of Bega Begam and the others. They set up the offices (kar-khanaha)
and
got them into order. When they had put up the pavilions (khaima)and tents (khar
gah) and the audience tent (bar-gah),the Emperor came to see the camp and the
splendid set-out, and visited the begams and his sisters. As he dismounted some
what near Ma'suma Begam's (tent), he honoured her with a visit. All of us, the
592 RubyLal
begams and my sisters, were in his society. When he went to any begam's or sis
ter's quarters, all the begams and all his sisters used to go with him.3
Note the careful attention paid to precise rules: designated days to go to

the other side of the river, the careful arrangement of the tents of women,
the king himself coming to see the arrangement, the manner and timing
of his visits, the deportment required of those who accompanied him, and
so forth.
Now compare the above extracts with a statement on the Mughal harem
that appears in K.S. Lal's TheMughal Harem (1988), one of the few academic
accounts of the subject:
The termMughal harem conjures up a vision of a sequestered place ensconcing
beautiful forms in mysterious magnificence.... [T]he young girls were not
exposed to all the celebrations in the Mahal [palace] in which sex orgies domi
nated or the master bargained for beauty and love on occasions.... Naturally,
every lady of consequence tried to win the master's undivided love and openly
competed to gain ascendancy in the harem. Women's beauty gave them a power
as undefined as unique.... There were other tensions though not so deep in
effect. These may be classed under the generic term jealousy. But on this we
need not dwell much for the harem was not meant for the old and ailing. Itwas
meant to be a bright place, an abode of the young and beautiful, an arbour of
pleasure and retreat for joy.4
What we have here is the portrait of a sexualized, secluded, feminine

domain (albeit not for the "old and ailing"), centrally premised on a crude
principle of sensual pleasure that was supposed to regulate the "private"
lives of imperial women and men. The single sentence on the harem in the
volume on the Mughals in the "New Cambridge History of India" series'
John F. Richards's TheMughal Empire (1993) reproduces this image: "Ideally,
the harem provided a respite, a retreat for the nobleman and his closest
male relatives-a retreat of grace, beauty, and order designed to refresh the
males of the household."5 It is echoed again in R. Nath's description in his
Private Life of theMughals (1994). The emperor Jahangir, for instance, was in
Nath's view "a sensuous person" who "indulged excessively" both in wine
and women. "By a routine estimate, he had nearly 300 young and beautiful
women attached to his bed, an incomprehensible figure in the modern age.
This shows his over-indulgence in sex and his excessive engagement in the
harem [sic]."6
RubyLal 593
This receivedimageofMughal private lifehas been powerful in blinding

historians to the density and variation of domestic lifeprojected in the
contemporary records, such asGulbadan Banu Begum's Ahval-iHumayun
Badshah,which Iuse asmy central counterpoint in this article.The extracts
from Gulbadan's memoir cited at the beginning of this article,which
could be set besidemany others in her text, reveala harem fardifferentfrom
that commonly presented to us. The complexity of relationships that
emerges in these isnotable. By contrast, the academicaccounts that I jux
taposewith the Begum's memoir appear devoid of any historical depth
and unaware of the intricacyof relationshipsand activitiesand themulti
facetedand intimatecommunity found in the harem.
This article examines the possibility of writing a history ofMughal
domestic life. In thinking about this question, I have not unearthed any
new sources. Instead, I have returned to sources that have been available
all along (imperialchronicles, ethical digests, visual representations,and
architectural remains).This revisitinghas involved listening to "peripher
al" stories and voices, "drowned in the noise of statistcommands."7It has
alsomeant looking atwell-known but neglected sources (such asGulba
dan'smemoir) and using themmore centrally.The return to themain
stream officialchronicles in the light of theseperipheral sources isno less
instructivefor themany new insights it allows.On the basisof this "redis
covered" archive, then, I suggest severalways inwhich another history
may be brought into view. I hope that this will be a gendered and more
self-consciouslypolitical history that cannot simply be hived off as "sup
plementary," and that accounts such as the one I put forward here will
serve to reopenother questions of central importance toMughal history.
THE KINGS AND THEMEMOIRIST

As a first step, I provide a brief introduction to the Mughal memoirist
Gulbadan Banu Begum and to the first three Mughal kings before I dis
cuss the possibilityof constructing a history of earlyMughal domestic life
through theBegum'smemoir.
Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) was a descendent of the
Mongol ruler Chingiz Khan (1167-1227) on his mother's side and Timur
(1336-1405),theTurkic-Mongol ruler,on his father's.He spentmost of his
594 RubyLal
life fighting with the princes of other Timurid territories in parts of Cen
tral Asia and Afghanistan. Most notable among these combats are Babur's
long drawn-out struggles with the Uzbiks, the direct descendants of
Chingiz Khan through his son Juchi. Defeated in these struggles to gain a
territorialfoothold, Baburwas pushed toAfghanistan.He finallyacquired
a territorial base in Hindustan in 1526 by defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of
Delhi. Thus he laid the foundation ofMughal rule in India.
Nasir al-DinHumayun (1508-1556),Babur's son, encountered massive
difficulties in retaining his father's conquests in India. The biggest chal
lenge to his kingship came from Sher Khan Sur who ruled southern Bihar
in eastern India. After being defeated by Sher Khan in 1540 near Kanauj,
Humayun became an exile in Persia and parts of Afghanistan. In 1554,
however, he led his army back and fought a victorious battle and restored
the Mughal monarchy. What is called the Mughal "empire" of India with
all its pomp and splendor came to be securely established only in the time
of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (1542-1605), the son of Humayun.
Gulbadan Banu Begum was the daughter of Babur, sister of Humayun,
and aunt of Akbar. She was born in 1523 in Afghanistan and traveled to
Hindustan (to Agra) at the age of six, after Babur had made some substan
tial conquests in that region. Her mother was Dildar Begum, but Maham
Begum, the senior wife of Babur, took charge of her. As her memoir
reveals, Gulbadan witnessed the early turmoil of Babur and Humayun's
reigns: she and her husband, Khizr Khvajeh Khan, seem to have spent
much of their time wandering with what may be described as her peri
patetic Mughal family home.8
Gulbadan was thus a close witness to the making of the Mughal monar
chy, seeing it through many vicissitudes-from the inception of the
Mughal kingdom in the early conquests of Babur to its established splen
dor in Akbar's reign. She came to write about all this at the behest of her
nephew, Akbar,whose efforts to consolidate and institutionalizeMughal
power included the command that a comprehensive and authoritative
official history be written of its early stages and of his reign. It was in this
context that Gulbadan wrote her Ahval-i Humayun Badshah.
RubyLal 595
THE RECEIVED HISTORY

It isperhapsnot too far-fetchedto suggest that India'santicolonialnation
alism has provided the frameworkfor themost important recentwritings
on Mughal history. In line with the nationalist agenda, Mughal historians
have labored(explicitlyor implicitly) to demonstrate the political consoli
dation and "unity" of India under the Mughals, the autonomous develop
ment of the subcontinent, and even its secular inclinations. Indeedmany
Mughal histories have been written as if the empire was no more than a
preamble to "modern" India.Since the 1950s,historians ofMughal India
have concentrated heavily on the political administrative institutions of
Mughal rule. Closely allied to these are studies focused on agrarian condi
tions, economic change, traderelations,and the attendant class struggles.
There has been considerable writing in the area of what might be called a
socio-economic history, both in the context of agrarian relations and in
that of trade and trading networks.
Apart from the close and detailed investigation of political, military,
revenue, and agrarian matters, the Mughal court has also been studied
selectively, mainly as a site for factions and party politics. Inmost of these
histories of theMughal court and political institutions, the premise of
investigation is that these are sites of "high" politics and that this political
world iscuriously unified.9In addition, receivedhistories treat these insti
tutional sites as fully developed from the moment of their birth, fixed and
knowable, if occasionally complicated in form.Numerous studies of the
Mughal empire present it as it appears from the heyday of Akbar's rule
from the capital cities Fatehpur-Sikri and Agra, with all its regal parapher
nalia, grandeur and power, and project the picture backward to cover the
time of his two predecessors.
What happens to the history ofMughal social life in this context? In the
existing literature, this history takes two main forms. The first is a state
ment that appears under the generic title "social conditions and life of the
people." This amounts to no more than a journalistic listing of items of
daily use and festivities and pastimes, which are described in such general,
commonsensical terms that they give the reader a history that seems to be
valid for all times.'0Within this genre of Mughal social histories, another
remaindered category may be noted: "culture," which refers to works of
596 RubyLal
art, architecture, and intellectual life.When it is not glossed in the jour

nalistic manner pointed above, this area becomes the domain of specialists
(art for art's sake): art forms, history of styles, painting techniques, vari
eties of artifacts, and so forth. Where the historian retains a political con
cern, histories of Mughal art and architecture have demonstrated the
splendor of the Mughal court as the legitimizing indicator of the rule and
the glory of an emperor. It is only recently that historians have begun to
question the thrust of this legacy and tomake broader suggestions regard
ing the importanceof architecturalhistory for allMughal historians.11
More directly relevant to the subject of the current investigation is a
second strand inMughal social history, which is best described as belong
ing to the genre of biographies of "women worthies." Studies of this kind
focus on the visibilityof imperialwomen and theirpower. An interesting
feature of this writing is that it has come to be seen by male historians as
sufficient to its subject (that is,women), and there has been little attempt
to rethink long-held assumptions about Mughal court and society. At
best, such biographies are seen as (mild) correctives: of course, there were
women too-some of them quite talented! This reluctance to think about
women's histories as "history" is obviously not restricted toMughal histo
riography alone. There is greater irony here. Although these studies of
Mughal women opened up a neglected area of investigation, the women
biographers themselves excluded the possibility of querying or even rais
ing new questions about the accepted boundaries of family and house
hold, public and private spheres, gender relations and political power. In
these biographies, one finds little to suggest that the communities of
Mughal elite women were a part and parcel of imperial designs and the
making of this monarchy and therefore that an investigation of their lives
and conditions is vital to any understanding of it.
Rekha Misra wrote an early book in this style of reinstating Mughal
women to "history," with an appropriately indicative title, Women inMughal
India (1967). It is a study of the visible aristocratic Mughal women (who had
been given a place in the imperial records or the narratives of European
travelers) in the form of biographical sketches, inwhich the author unsur
prisingly ended up with a fairly close replication of the sources. Twenty
three years later this was still the dominant trend in writings on Mughal
RubyLal 597
women. In 1990, Renuka Nath wrote a book in the same biographical

mode, merely adding a few more elite women to Misra's list. In 1993,
Ellison Banks Findly produced another biography, farmore detailed than
the above,but following prettymuch in the footstepsof her predecessors.
The subject here isNur Jahan, wife of Jahangir (the fourth Mughal emper
or), the "Empress of Mughal India" as Findly calls her.'2What is astonish
ing is that these relativelyconventionalworks of the 1990sareproduced at
a time of lively, engaged debates concerning feminist historiographyand
the agency of women high and low.13
There have nonetheless been some significantexceptions to the kind of
socialhistory outlined above.Aside fromTapanRaychaudhuri'searly and
unusual investigation of social life under the reign of Akbar and Jahangir
in Bengal, several recent writings have opened up new avenues of analysis
in the realm of Mughal social history. The work of Stephen Blake on the
Mughal imperial capital, Shahjahanabad, in the years 1639-1739, for exam
ple, examines the structure of the imperial household. He makes the case
that the Mughal state was a patrimonial bureaucratic structure, in which
the emperor and his household were of overwhelming importance.
Historians like John Richards, Burton Stein, Noboru Karashima, and G.
Berkemer have acceptedBlake's formulations, albeitwith slightmodifica
tions. Following this line of enquiry, Rosalind O'Hanlon has recently
examined the construction of an imperial masculinity under Akbar as
part of the strategy of governance under the third Mughal monarch.'4
However, this welcome attention to the changing images of power, the
willful construction of imperial "charisma" and the related details of spa
tial arrangements and bodily regulation, still tends to remain excessively
emperor-centered. In spite of their proposition that the imperial house
hold was the model on which other realms of the empire (the court and
the society-at-large) were to be built, neither Blake nor O'Hanlon pays
much attention to the activities and relationships-or even the identity-of
the other inhabitants of the imperial family. Thus we find little discussion
of how the denizens of the inner apartments adopted and negotiated pre
scriptive norms, and of how these were contested and negotiated. Even
the king appears in these accounts as an abstract category, produced in the
frame of inherited ethical moral texts. When the figure of the monarch is
598 RubyLal
represented in this way, it is not surprising that the king's intimate circle,
the invisiblemembers of the domestic world-who struggled to fashion
themselvesand surely contributed to the emergence of new attitudes,val
ues, and behavior-form littlepart of the investigations.
THE QUESTION OF SOURCES

How then might we work toward an alternative history of the Mughals,
one that takes distance from the legacy of overwhelmingly political,
administrative, and institutional accounts and of those social histories in
which history is presented in such static terms that it gives the reader an
image of royalty valid for all times and places? The first thing to do is to
challenge the received wisdom that surviving sources are inadequate.
The discussion that follows, centering on the question of the archive in
the time of the first three Mughal kings, should help to show that the
inadequacy of source materials is only part-and perhaps a small part-of
the problem. Let us begin with an examination of the records that make up
the accepted archive for early Mughal times. For Babur, his memoir, the
Baburnama, and the Tarikh-i Rashidi of his cousin Muhammad Haydar
Dughlat, have remained the most popular texts for scholars. Babur wrote
the Baburnamamainly between 1526-1529 in his native Turkic language,
known today as Chaghatay.'s The text was translated into Persian in the
court of Akbar. Muhammad Haydar Dughlat spent most of his career in
Kabul. He was in close contact with Babur during this period, and his work
(composed in 1545-1546) is valuable as it highlights the political and cultur
al intricacies of those parts of Central Asia and Afghanistan that Babur was
dealing with at the time.
The chronicles usedmost extensively for information on Humayun's
reign are the following: the Qanun-i Humayuni, an account of the rules and
ordinances of the king's reign, composed in 1534 by one of his officials,
Khvandamir, and the Tazkirat-ul-Vaqi 'at, a rather candid account put
together in 1587by JawharAftabchi,Humayun's ewer-bearer.16
Then there
is the Tazkireh-i Humayun vaAkbar of Bayazid Bayat, an officer of Humayun.
This is a history of the reigns of Humayun and Akbar from 1542 to 1591,
which was completed in 1590-1591.'" The first official history of the
Mughal court was commissioned by Akbar, and the biographies by Jawhar
RubyLal 599
Aftabchi and BayazidBayatmentioned abovewere produced in response

to his order that servants of the state record their impressions of past
times as part of the process of collecting material for the book. The result
ing volume, Akbarnama(completed in 1596), and its official and equally
voluminous appendix, the A 'in-iAkbari(an administrativeand statistical
report on Akbar's government in all its branches), written by a close
friend and courtier of the emperor, Abu'l Fazl 'Allami, have remained the
most important sources for all histories of his reign. Apart from the
Akbarnama, the Muntakhab-ut-Tavarikhof 'Abd al-Qadir Badauni, a severe critic
of Akbar's policies who wrote his history in secret, has also been impor
tant. Historians have found the Muntakhab-ut-Tavarikh a useful counter to
the panegyric account of Abu'l Fazl 'Allami. In the same way, scholars
have found a neutral middle ground in the cautious, evenhanded manner
of description of the Tabaqat-i Akbari, written by another member of
Akbar's court, Nizam al-Din Ahmad."8
For a long time now, a canonical position has been ascribed to these
kinds of sources. The choice of certain sources as basic and central has in
turn tended to perpetuate certain kinds of histories. The interest in agrari
an, administrative, and institutional histories, for example, has made
chronicles such as the Akbarnama and the A'in-i Akbari appear essential to
any undertaking inMughal history. The Akbarnama and the A 'in-iAkbari
have been singled out as "foundational" sources in this way, not only
because of their supposed "accuracy" and "objectivity," but because they
are official compilations dealing directly with political administrative mat
ters-and closest in that sense to amodern state's archive. Relying on texts
such as the Akbarnama, historians have often uncritically reproduced the
primary sources themselves and therefore duplicated one or another
chronicler's assessments of the empire, imperial relations, and other relat
ed matters. In this way many of our modern histories have turned out to
be not very different from the primary text (or texts) out of which they
are constructed.
HarbansMukhia's well-known study entitled Historians
andHistoriography
during theReign of Akbar (1976) serves to illustrate my point about the pivotal
position ascribed to certain Mughal sources. In the three central chapters
of the book, the author discusses the three "major" historians of Akbar's
600 RubyLal
empire: Abu'l Fazl 'Allami, 'Abd al-Qadir Badauni, and Nizam al-Din
Ahmad. He goes on in his penultimate chapter to discuss "Some Minor
HistoricalWorksWritten duringAkbar'sReign."While reading this chap
ter, I expected to find Gulbadan's text among the "minor historical
works." Instead, all we find is a footnote in which the author explains why
he has not included Gulbadan's memoir. "The reason is," he explains,
"that I feel I have practically nothing to add to what its translator, Mrs.
Beveridge, has said in her introduction to the translation."'9
Mukhia's comment invites some reflection. His reasons for not includ
ing the Begum's memoir in his monograph stem partly of course from
the fact that the author distinguishes between major (political, adminis
trative, and emperor-centered) and minor sources (of royal women, ser
vants, and so forth), privileging the "hard politics" of the former against
the "soft society" of the latter. The presumption of the supposedly central
character of some sources, as opposed to the peripheral (or minor) status
of others, derives in this case from a belief that despite limitations, certain
texts like the Akbarnama are authentic because they were based on "official
documents as well as memoirs of persons involved in, or witness to, the
events."20Mukhia, of course, is not alone in this belief in the "authentici
of these sources.2'
ty,"hence "reliability,"
It is in this troubling context of a rather simple (transparent) reading, if
you will, of the Mughal archive that Iwish to explore the "minor" text,
the Ahval-i Humayun Badshah, left to us by Gulbadan Banu Begum and to
show by a critical engagement with it, how many hidden dimensions of
Mughal history may yet be probed.
THE CHALLENGE OF A PRINCESS'S MEMOIR

In 1587, in preparation for the writing of the Akbarnama,Akbar issued an or
der to the "servants of the State" and "old members of the Mughal family"
to write down or relate their impressions of earlier times.22 Itwas in accor
dance with this order that Gulbadan Banu Begum produced her memoir.'
What Gulbadan wrote, however, was no panegyric. Her writing was
markedly different from anything that others produced at the time
(including biographies, exemplary accounts, chronological narratives,
and normative accounts), as the list of the sources used for the compila
RubyLal 60I
tion of the Akbarnama shows.24Interestingly, the genre title thatGulbadan

chose was different from all of these: ahval,aword meaning conditions,
state, circumstances, or situations.' Does this title index a different con
ception ofwhat a history of the times should be? It isnot possible to give
a straightforward answer to this question. A disadvantage is that only
one copy of Gulbadan'sAhvalsurvives today.26This manuscript, now held
at the British Library, is incomplete, ending abruptly some three years
beforeAkbar's accession.
Turki was Gulbadan's native language, and one can trace many Turki
words in the Persianmanuscript. Yet we do not know if shewrote both in
Turki and in Persian.FromHumayun's time on, the influence of Persian
had clearly increasedin theMughal court.GulbadanBanu Begum, his sis
ter is almost certain to have learned the language as she grew up in these
surroundings. By the time shewrote her memoir, Persian had already
been declared the language of administration at all levels.As Muzaffar
Alam puts it, it had emerged as "the languageof the king, the royal house
hold and the highMughal elite."The nomination ofGulbadanBegum to
write amemoir of the times, aswell as the Persian verse attributed to her,
indicatesher standing as a "learned"person.27
For all that,we know littleaboutGulbadan's total literaryoutput or her
education.We cannot know thereforewhat models theBegum drew on
to write her own text. It iswithout any didactic purpose, and lies outside
the "mirror for princes" genre that seems to have been prevalent then.
Gulbadan readsome contemporarymemoirs and chronicles of the kings,
including her father's memoir, but the Baburnamawas clearly not the liter
ary model for her Ahval.7 Annette Beveridge tells us that the Begum had a
copy of Bayazid Bayat's Tazkireh-i Humayun vaAkbar in her library, and that
she found a copy of Khvandamir's Qanun-i Humayuni inscribed with the
Begum's name.' Yet Gulbadan did not imitate the styles of either of these
accounts, which were in any case contemporaneous with her own and
perhaps unavailable at the time of her writing. The Ahval-i Humayun Badshah
might thus be classed as an "open" text belonging to no recognized genre.
Whatever we may conclude about the problems of authorship and of
personal memory, given the uncertainties surrounding the Begum's
memoir, one thing is clear. Ifmost chronicles of the age aimed to be
602 RubyLal
authoritativehistories in themanner of the generic (panegyric)historiesof

rulers, Gulbadan moved away from this genre to produce an account of far
more modest incidents in the lives of Babur and Humayun. Her account of
the everyday lives of this royal family in peripatetic circumstances is a
unique piece of writing. Even a brief description of the contents and the
organization of Ahval serves to illustrate this point. The surviving copy of
the memoir is divided into two parts. In the first part, Gulbadan discusses
the period of her father Babur's life. This includes detail quite similar to
that contained in Babur's memoir, about his peripatetic life, his wars and
victories at the time, and the early years of his establishment of Mughal
rule inHindustan. The specialnessof theBegum'smemoir, however, is to
be found in the images she provides of her father's "home" life: extensive
information about his marriages, his wives and children, and his relation
ships with his kith and kin, especially the senior women of the Mughal
lineage. The memoir is remarkable not only for this rare account of
domestic life, but also for the complexity that the author brings out in
those episodes that are discussed in other chronicles of the time. Consider
the inventory of gifts and instructions for their presentation that Imen
tioned at the beginning of this article. In his own brief discussion of the
same event, Babur makes only a casual, and far less interesting, mention
of the presents.'
The second part of Gulbadan's memoir begins on the nineteenth folio
with the reign of her brother, Humayun. Here too, alongside a discussion
of the king's expeditions and reconquest of Hindustan, the memoir pro
vides other kinds of fascinatinginformation.We learnofMughal women
lost during wars, as well as of Akbar's birth in the harsh circumstances of
the itinerant lives of Humayun and his wife, Hamideh Banu Begum. Gul
badan's record of royal women's articulations about how they should
marry are telling. So is her elaboration of Humayun's frequent visits to
the senior women of the family and the tension that arose between him
and his wives owing to these continual visits. Add to these the impressive
detail provided about the celebrations and feasts held by the senior
women on various occasions, and we have a lost world of the court in
camp brought to life in a way that no other chronicle of the time even
approaches.
RubyLal 603
Gulbadan's substantialtreatmentof the involvement of severalMughal

women inmoments ofmarriage, childbirth, "adoption,"and death; in the
celebrations of feasts; and in times of strategy and planning points to the
complexweb of people and practices involvedwith the processesof early
Mughal imperialformation. Inhermemoir, we hear of forbiddenfeelings,
hierarchical but intimate relationships, and acts contrary to the logic of
imperial power. In this way, we are reminded of the flesh and blood of his
torical figures, well known and not so well known, as well as the limita
tions and inventiveness of their lives. What the text provides is a rich,
inflectedsenseof the domestic livesof the earlyMughals.
The two extracts from the Ahval-i Humayun Badshah cited in the first sec
tion of this article are enough to indicate the kinds of questions that the
text immediately raises, and that it is necessary for us to ask about the
imbrication of the Mughal domestic world in the everyday life of the
courts and kings or, equally, the imbrication of courts and kings in the
everyday life of the domestic world. Let me discuss one more episode to
delineate further the potential of Gulbadan's memoir. The event that I
consider here is described in the accounts of both Jawhar and Gulbadan. It
concerns the place and meanings of negotiation in a royal marriage, and
shows how Mughal women and men were partners in the production not
only of heirs but also in the enhancement of imperial rituals and of "cor
rect" ways of being and conducting oneself.
In the midst of a protracted war between Humayun and his stepbrother
Kamran, there was a brief pause when Humayun permitted Kamran to
march to Kabul and he himself left for Bikaner. At Pat, Humayun's step
mother Dildar Begum organized an entertainment "atwhich all the ladies
of the court were present." Among these was Hamideh Banu Begum, the
daughter of the preceptor of another of his stepbrothers, Mirza Hindal.
Humayun made enquiries about her and stated his wish to marry her. On
hearing this, Mirza Hindal is reported to have said: "I thought you came
here to do me honour, not to look out for a young bride.... This dis
pleased Humayun, and he left. Dildar Begum then patched up matters:
"you [Hindal] are speaking very improperly to his Majesty, whom you
ought to consider as the representative of your late father." Dildar Begum
gave "a nuptial banquet" the next day, "after which she delivered the
604 RubyLal
young lady to his Majesty, and gave them her blessing." Humayun and
Hamideh Banu Begum then proceeded to Bhakkar.31 Mirza Hindal's
response toHumayun's expresseddesire tomarry Hamideh Banu Begum,
and Dildar Begum's firm chiding of Hindal are both statements about the
necessity and importance of correct behavior in thematter of seeking
brides and making marriages, as also in interaction between a younger and
older brother.
The above details are found in the Tazkirat-ul-vaqi 'atof Jawhar. However,
the same affair is given a somewhat different rendering in Gulbadan's
Ahval-iHumayun
Badshah.
Although the account of Hindal andHumayun's
argument over Hamideh Banu Begum and of Dildar Begum's interven
tion is very similar, what Jawhar's memoir does not mention, but Gulba
dan's does, is that Hamideh Banu Begum initially refused to be married to
Humayun. Gulbadan reports an exchange between Hamideh Banu
Begum and Dildar Begum. The former objected when she was invited to
Dildar Begum 's quarters on Humayun's insistence: "If it is to pay my
respects, Iwas exalted by paying my respects the other day. Why should I
come again?" For forty days, according to Gulbadan, Hamideh Banu
Begum resisted seeing Humayun a second time. Finally, Dildar Begum
advised her, "After all you will marry someone. Better than a king who is
there?" Hamideh Banu Begum's reported response was: "Oh yes, I shall
marry someone; but he shall be aman whose collar my hand can touch,
and not one whose skirt it does not reach."32
What is important in Gulbadan's rendering is not the facticity (or literal
veracity) of this exchange between Dildar Begum and Hamideh Banu
Begum, but the fact that she was willing to put such a conversation into
her text. This says something about her understanding of the cultural prac
tices of the time. One may thus see Gulbadan's account of Hamideh Banu
Begum's reluctance as a statement about continuous debate, and tension,
inmatters of appropriate behavior in the lives of people at the court. In one
of the communications that Hamideh Banu Begum is supposed to have
sent to the emperor, she says: "To see kings once is lawful [jayizast];a second
time it is forbidden [na-mahramast]. I shall not come." Humayun responds to
the concern implicit in Hamideh Banu Begum's refusal to visit him a sec
ond time: "If she is not a consort we will make
[na-mahram-and], her a consort
[mahram Theirmarriage follows.
misazim]."33
RubyLal 605
The marriage ofHumayun andHamideh Banu Begum shows thatwom

en's choice in matters of matrimony was amatter of widespread concern,
aswere genealogy and dynasty, especiallyin theTimurid-Mughalcontext.
In this instance the details of the negotiation of marriage are especially
striking for the careful attention paid to tradition,protocol, and legality,
and to the minute rules of social interaction-the number of times it was
legitimate (jayiz) to visit a king, the equal status that had to be sought in
marriages, aswell as the importance of getting married when a king
desired to enter into a relationshipwith a noblewoman.
QUESTIONS OF TRANSLATION
Annette Beveridge, the colonial scholar, accomplished the truly com
mendable task of unearthing, translating, and presenting the Ahval-i
Humayun to the scholarlyworld. Yet itwould be surprising if,one
Badshah
hundred years on, we did not have some questions about the way in
which thatwork was done. The process bywhich Gulbadan'smemoir was
made available to us, and the mutations that took place in the course of
thatprocess,need to be borne inmind by themodern historian.
As a first step, it will help to keep in mind Beveridge's own social and
intellectual context. She was born Annette Akroyd (1842-1929)in Stour
bridge, a small town just west of Birmingham, England. A daughter of "a
self-made man of England's rising middle class," she was brought up as a
Unitarian in religion and "radical" in politics.4 In 1861, she enrolled at the
Unitarian-supported Bedford College in London. Her education was
shaped by the ideology of nineteenth-century scientism,with an added
emphasison domestic and personal life.35 She shared the nineteenth cen
tury'sunquestioned belief science'sobjectivityand its ability to "repre
in
sent" reality. In this triumphalistvision, the institutions,practices, tradi
tions, and belief-systems of the West were rational, and those of other
(non-Western)partsof theworld were presented asbeing backward,ifnot
uncivilized.Beveridge'spublic opposition to the IlbertBill of 1883,seeking
to empower Indiancivil servantswith criminal jurisdictionover European
subjects in country stations, was very much in accord with these views.'
How does this self-confidentcolonial context affectBeveridge's transla
tion of the Ahval-i Humayun Badshah?The first point to note is that the Vic
606 RubyLal
torian translator's fixed frame of knowledge also "fixes" the stories she
reads in the Ahval. As a result, numerous interesting nuances are lost and
what appears before the reader is a flattened picture of early Mughal
domestic life. This may be witnessed in Beveridge's literal paraphrasing in
many instances and in her attempt to find exact English equivalents of
Persian words that have complex histories and associations. Itmay also be
seen in the "aristocratic" (yet colonial bourgeois) sensibility with which
she regards the characters of the memoir.
Consider this passage, which evokes marriage practices in the time of
Humayun. In the memoir, the conversation between Maham Begum and
others is placed two years after Babur's death (1532) when Humayun was
trying to retain and expand his father's territories in India. In Beveridge's
translation,Gulbadanwrites:
My lady,who was Maham Begam, had a great longing and desire to see a son of
Humayun. Wherever there was a good-looking and nice girl, she used to bring
her into his service. Maywa-jan, a daughter of Khadang
[?Khazang], the cham
was
berlain (yasawal), in my employ. One day (after) the death of his Majesty
my
Firdaus-makani, lady said: "Humayun, Maywa-jan is not bad.Why do you not
take her into your service?" So, at her word, Humayun married and took her
that very night.
Three days later Bega Begam came from Kabul. She became in the family way.
In due time she had a daughter, whom they named 'Aqiqa.Maywa-jan said to
Lady (Aka)Maham Begam, "Iam in the family way, too." Then my lady got ready
two sets of weapons, and said: "Whichever of you bears a son, Iwill give him good
arms.".. . [She]was very happy, and kept saying: "Perhaps one of them will have a
son." She kept watch till Bega Begam's 'Aqiqawas born. Then she kept an eye on
Maywa-jan. Ten months went by. The eleventh also passed. Maywa-jan said: "My
maternal aunt was inMirza Ulugh Beg's haram.She had a son in the twelfth
month; perhaps I am like her." So they sewed tents and filled pillows. But in the
end everyone knew she was a fraud.37
"My ladyMaham Begam, had a great longing and desire to see a son of
Humayun," Gulbadan tells us. In this world, as elsewhere, itwas the role
of the younger wives to produce heirs; in their turn, at a later stage, they
themselves instructed younger wives about such responsibilities.This
duty of elder women to advise the young and of the young to carry for
ward the name of the family through reproduction was of no small mo
RubyLal 607
ment in the Timurid-Mughal world. Maywa-jan and her "services" would

fit this tradition.The production of royal children was amuch-desired
event, for such an esteemed birth meant the perpetuation of the eminent
Timurid-Mughal family. The task was especially crucial in the time of
Babur and Humayun when the risk of the disappearance of the family was
very real, on account of the Uzbik threat that Babur faced in Central Asia,
and later because of the Afghan challenge encountered by Humayun in
Hindustan. It was an urgent requirement in these circumstances to pre
serve the lineage, and, to achieve that, marriages and the birth of children
was essential. It was in this context that Maham Begum made the point
about male heirs. She looked for wives for Humayun for the momentous
task of producing heirs to the throne.8
In her discussion of the episode described above,Beveridge draws the
followingpicture ofMaham Begum:
Maham Begam was a clever woman, and both aswife and aswidow made herself
felt in her home. Lady Rosebody [Gulbadan Banu Begum] lifts the pardaand shows
us the Empress-mother busied in duties not often thus disclosed to the outside
eye. In telling the story, which for the sake of itsmany special points we quote in
full, she has no air of being indiscreet, and is, asmay be seen, quite matter-of-fact.39
Beveridge sees inMaham's activities more "a clever ... Empress-mother"

than a senior woman with wisdom, status, and authority, who would
have seen it as her duty to advise and guide her younger kinsfolk and to
sustain the name and honor of her family. She elevates this "elder" to a
rarefied and singular position that is far removed from the projection of
plural, and sometimes overlapping, circles of intimates and authorities in
the peripatetic Mughal world of Gulbadan's memoir.
Indeed, according to Gulbadan's memoir, a striking characteristic of
the early Mughal domestic world seems to be that kinship networks
were extended to form new familial communities. The talk of blood
remained, but the idea of consanguinity was also built around practices
such aswet-nursing and notions of fostering. Many of Akbar's nurses and
their husbands were to become influential in his court. Their many-sided
participation in the affairs of the monarchy shows how these relationships
and communities continued to shape notions of family and kinship, and
court politics itself.
608 RubyLal
In this context of highly open and variegated domestic relations, the

attribution of "cleverness" and "singularity" to Maham Begum by
Beveridge is perhaps too hasty. One example of this kind of slanting, which
is accompanied by an assimilation of early Mughal society and mores into
something more recognizably Victorian, is the use of the honorific "My
Lady" for Akam and other cognate terms. This form of address is found dis
persed throughout the translation, as also in the first line of the extract
fromGulbadan thatwe have been considering here. Beveridge ponders
over the meaning of "Akam"at one point. She writes: "the Turki Aka is used
as a title of respect from a junior to a senior. It has also the sense 'elder
brother,' which makes application to a woman doubtful. Babar uses the
word ... and Mr. Erskine [a contemporary scholar of Beveridge] suggests to
read 'my Lady' [sic]."' Beveridge declares it hard to find the equivalent word
for akam in English, but her eventual choice of "My Lady" fails to capture
the tone of affection and respect in the original and calls up inappropriate
associations with elevation and romance in the late-medieval European
(knightly) tradition.Aka, aTurki word (used formen), is close in essence
to khanumor begum.Reverence, privileged status, and deference (that came
with enhanced age) are marked characteristics of all of these words, and
they are somewhat lost in Beveridge's more rarefied phrase.
In a similar way, we might ask questions about the word havasak in the
translation cited above. In the last line of the passage, the word "fraud" is
used for the Persian word havasak.The latter, which is not found as such in
Persian dictionaries, is an affective diminutive of havas,meaning desire,
caprice. Although Beveridge interprets havasakas a pejorative, Maywa-jan's
craving for a child is hardly unexpected, given the Timurid-Mughal con
text of the politics of marriage and reproduction, and the quick dismissal
of her state as "fraudulent"-rather than, say, as a case of hysterical preg
nancy-amounts to a reduction of the ambivalence and tension that
marks Gulbadan's text.41
Despite the evident problems of translation, it is not difficult to see the
memoir's rich potential in helping us comprehend the processes at work
in the making of the Mughal monarchy and its domestic world. Against
the background of fragments from the Ahval-i Humayun Badshah, it is possible
to consider the conditions and ways of domestic life under the early
RubyLal 609
Mughals. Gulbadan's documentation of the place and responsibilitiesof

Mughal women andmen allows us to explore themeanings of relation
ships and the kinds of conflict, and solidarities,making for diverse forms
of community among them.Different kinds of relationshipsare indexed
in the participation of women and men in the making of marriages, in fes
tivitiesand other celebrations, and in the observance of rituals at births
and deaths andmore everyday occasions. It is through an excavation of
these relationships and events that we are able to delineate forms of
Mughal sociability aswell as think through other concepts: those of
motherhood and wifehood, for instance; the ways inwhich marriages
were effected (andwhy in thoseways); or the prevailingnotions of duty,
loyalty,and love.42
Gulbadan thus allows us to imagine the domestic life of the early
Mughals as a realm in which many different kinds of duties and activities,
bonds of solidarity,notions of sexuality, questions of reproduction and
reproductiverights (and duties), and varyingmoments of celebrationand
joy and loss and grief come together.She takesus through the complex
set of relations inwhich women of the nobility were involved in the
domestic sphere,pointing to the public political affairsthatwere necessar
ily conducted here aswell as in the courts, and through all this to the very
differentmeanings attaching to family,married life,and domestic affairs
in this sixteenth-centuryworld.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
If themultiplex characterof Gulbadan'smemoir opens some fascinating
arenas for us, it also helps us read other Mughal chronicles very different
ly, for these too are richer in meaning and content than the historians
have made them out to be.
In histories of the Mughals, there is a sharp focus on the personality and
politics of theMughal kings and theirmost prominent lieutenants.The
emperor, his nobles, and theirpoliticalmilitary exploits are explored over
and over again; other worlds are hardly even noticed. There are two prob
lems that flow from this. First, as feminist writings have shown in so many
other contexts, a large part of human experience falls outside "history."
This happens partly because ordinary, everyday, domestic events are not
610 RubyLal
neatly documented by the state or institutionalized in public archives. As a

consequence, the account of the great historical changes and develop
ments also fails to come to life. Few Mughal histories have been histories of
people building lives, relationships, or domestic worlds; and even the
descriptionof themomentous and the extraordinarysometimes becomes
empty. Gulbadan's Ahval-i Humayun Badshah draws our attention to the im
portance of the quotidian at the very moment of extraordinary, momen
tous events.
The challenge of her memoir may be summed up in many ways. Per
haps the easiest point to note is that she raises important questions about
life and activities in the household of the early Mughals. Gulbadan's text
poses a second, and less obvious, challenge too. Gulbadan shows us the
Mughal empire in a very different light from that of the official histories
and much of its subsequent historiography. Her empire is not yet fully
institutionalized. Although Gulbadan's text was actually used as a source
for the official chronicle of Akbar's empire, interestingly it is her text, and
not the imperial history, that tells us about the making of theempire.
What the
Akbarnama (and the A 'in-iAkbari) provides is an institutionalized history of
an empire already in place-fully formed, so to speak. Gulbadan's text, by
contrast, shows us the empire (and its history) beingfonned.
Thus her Ahval appears important in at least three ways. First, chronologi
cally speaking, it evokes a powerful impression of an empire that is not
already known or made, a political formation taking unsteady steps from
infancy tomaturity. Second, in terms of domestic manners and emotional
life, the text provides much food for thought on the less tangible (and less
documentable) aspects of Mughal history. Finally, on the question of his
tory (and empire) itself, the text serves as a symbol of how official "history"
came to be written. Of course, Gulbadan's memoir ended up as historio
graphical flotsam, suggesting both the entrenched politics and the
machinations involved in the construction of historical archives.
Once we have been alerted to some of these hidden dimensions of
Mughal history by a text like Gulbadan's, we discover that the canonical,
mainstream sources long used by Mughal historians themselves yield in
formation on many "hidden" matters when we go to them with new
questions: unusual and unexpected evidence on the rough and tumble of
RubyLal 6II
social life;on everyday struggles, fears,and pleasures;on the construction

of new subjectivitiesand new historicalconditions.
Consider an extraordinarymoment that brings together the power of
Akbar's regime on the one hand and the contrary nodes of power on the
other: the pilgrimage toMecca undertaken by the women of Akbar's harem
in 1578. This pilgrimage should be set in the context of Akbar's reign in
which courtly and domestic spacescame, for the first time, to be distinctly
separatedfrom each other. A neatly compartmentalized harem(shabistan-i
Iqbal), designed to place women in a strictly segregated place, now ap
Akbar's cho
peared-for "good order and propriety,"Abu'l Fazl argued.43
sen chronicler devoted a full chapter, A 'in 15, to the imperial regulations
of the harem, the first official statement on the royal household in the
career of Mughal dynasty. In this statement, the women were officially
designated the pardeh-giyan,
the veiled ones. This increasedthe invisibilityof
the royal women, now more elevated and at the same time more secluded
than ever before. The theory of Akbar's empire, seen to good effect in the
organization of the sacred, incarcerated harem,was however never so suc
cessful as to wipe out contradictions, tensions, human volition, or unex
pected departures-all that is the stuff of human history. Although in the
changing environment of Akbar's reign, a great deal was done to regulate
the domestic arrangements, there is (not surprisingly)considerable evi
dence-like this hajj of imperial women led by Gulbadan Begum-to show
how women andmen continued to negotiate the prescriptive, thereby
appropriating, translating, and recasting the imperial vision inmany ways.
It is interesting to note that the most detailed account of this women's
hajj is in fact contained in Abu'l Fazl's official compendium, the Akbarnama.
Although this unique hajjmay be seen as a sign of the "Islamic" claims of
this polyglot empire, this journey, at the same time, maps the desires and
agency of imperial women. The hajj of Gulbadan and her relations shows
us the kinds of activities that were still possible in the red sandstone
palaces of Fatehpur-Sikri and Agra in the late sixteenth century.44 It was a
bold and significant adventure, given the constraints of the passage and
other restrictive circumstances, and one that was largely initiated and
planned by the elder women. This collective women's pilgrimage remains
an unparalleled event in the annals of the Mughals, highlighting for us
612 RubyLal
that although Akbar's haremwas secluded, sacred, and even inaccessible to

most people, it was by no means closed off from the world, unconcerned
with politics, or bereft of power or interest inpublic affairs.
We never hear of such an incident again in the reigns of Akbar's well
established successors.Although people continued to perform the hajj
under the later Mughals, the extraordinary venture of a group of royal
women going on a pilgrimage was never to be witnessed again. Is this
because the empire was now too well established? Or because the royal
women, now better "incarcerated,"had far lessopportunity to takeexcep
tional initiatives and set off on such a pilgrimage? Indeed, the royal
women's hajj led by Gulbadan Begum comes as a startling discovery
because, although the Akbarnama
provides considerable detail about the
hajj, historians have paid little or no attention to it.45Once such challeng
ing complexities are noted in one set of materials, it is to be hoped that the
historian will look at other texts with a different eye.
Thus, the easily available but neglected memoir of aMughal princess
enables us to raise questions about aMughal "becoming" that Mughal his
torians have all too often skirted. This relates both to the coming into being
of an empire, and to the simultaneous institution of an archive. By making
it possible for us to see how one of the most vaunted Mughal sources (the
Akbarnama) came into being, rendering its own "sources" peripheral as it did
so, the memoir opens up the question of the making of sources, even as it
raises questions about the assigned limits ofMughal history.
Gulbadan's text challenges some of Mughal historiography's most
beloved propositions, such as the one that the sources are simply not
available for this or that inquiry. Sensitized by the Begum's account of the
struggles involved in the establishment of a new royal life and culture,
one also learnswhat other ("central,"official) frequentlymined sources
are capable of telling us about these processes. For what Gulbadan's Ahval-i
Humayun Badshah suggests very clearly indeed is the fact of the fluidity and
contestation that went into the founding of this new polity in its new set
ting-not only its new power and grandeur, but also its new regulations
and accommodations, its traditions and its hierarchies. Her writing points
to the history of a subjectivity and a culture, of political power and of
social relationships, struggling to be born. Historians wishing to extend the
RubyLal 6I3
frontiers of Mughal history cannot but ask, as part of this endeavor, for a
more sustainedhistory of everyday livesand associationsbasedon sources
such asGulbadan's memoir, but hardly on that alone.
Notes
An earlier draft of this article was presented at the
Johns Hopkins University History
sem
inar and the Berkshire Women's conference Connecticut,
(April 1999) History (Storrs,
to thank the participants in those to my col
June 2001). Iwish meetings. Special thanks
at for their readings, criticisms, and to
leagues Johns Hopkins encouragement?especially
Veena Das, Toby Ditz, Rita Costa Gomes, Jane Guyer, Gyan Pandey, Deborah Poole,
also to Talal Asad,
Pamela Reynolds, Gabrielle Spiegel, and Judy Walkowitz. My gratitude
CM. Nairn,
Stephen Dale, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Leslie Peirce, Prakash, Tapan
Gyan
and Romila Thapar for their careful and sug
Raychaudhuri, reading thought-provoking
over the years. Thanks also to Naveeda Khan for her response and to Brinkley
gestions
Messick and Nick Dirks for an extended conversation on the of the archive.
question
A Note on Transliteration and Citations. There is no

system for transliteration
standard from
Persian into I have used the modified version
of the InternationalJournal ofMiddle East
English.
Studies (IJMES) system developed and used by Layla S. Diba and Maryam Ekhtiar for their
edited volume, Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 (New York; LB. Taurus,
in association with the Museum of Art, For better
publishers Brooklyn 1998). readability,
all diacritical marks have been removed. The have been retained in quo
original spellings
tations. As a result, certain names appear with in my text that differ from some
spellings
in the quotations. All the information included in square brackets ismine.
spellings
1. Gulbadan Banu Begum, Ahval-i Humayun Badshah, British Library MS, Or. 166; The
trans. Annette Susannah 2d ed. (1902;
History of Humayun: Humayun Nama, Beveridge,
Delhi: Low Price Publications, I use the Persian and the
reprint, 1994). manuscript
translation in this article. 94; see Gulba
English simultaneously Beveridge, Humayun,
dan, Ahval, fol. 9b.
2. Ahval, fol. 9b-10b.
Beveridge, Humayun, 95-96; Gulbadan,
3. A. Beveridge, Humayun, 129T130; Begum, Ahval, fol. 29b-30a.
4. Kishori Saran Lai, The Mughal Harem (Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1988), 19, 135, 139, 143,
152.
5. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
1993),62.
6. R. Nath, Private Life of theMughals 1526-1803 (Jaipur: Historical Research Documenta
tion
Program, 1994), 13,15,17.
7. Ranajit Guha, "The Small Voice
of History," in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 3.
614 RubyLal
8. Beveridge, Humayun, 1, 8-9, 2.

9. See Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at theMughal Court, 1707-1740 (Delhi: People's
Publishing House, 1959); M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility underAurangzeb (London: Asia
1966); Richards, The Mughal Empire.
Publishing House,
10. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, ed., The Mughul Empire (Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan,
1974).
11. Monica Juneja, ed., Architecture inMedieval India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001).
12. Rekha Misra, Women in
Mughal India, 1526-1748 (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967).
Renuka Nath, Notable Mughal andHindu Women in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries A.D.
(New Delhi: Inter-India Publications, 1990); Ellison Banks Findly, Nurjahan: Empress of
India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Mughal
13. To take only one example of an extraordinary book on the Ottoman imperial harem
that came out the same year as Findly's, see Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women
and Sovereignty in theOttoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
14. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,
P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City inMughal India, 1639-1739
1969); Stephen
(Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Hermann Kulke, ed., The State in
India, 1000-1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 38; Rosalind O'Hanlon,
and Body: Gender and the Construction of Imperial Service
"Kingdom, Household,
under Akbar," unpublished paper.
15. Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur Mirza, Baburnama, trans, and ed. W.M. Thackston,
parts 1-3, Turkish transcription, edition, and English

Persian translation (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University 1993); and Annette
Press, Susannah trans., Babur
Beveridge,
nama Padshah Ghazi (1921; reprint, Delhi:
(Memoirs of Babur) of Zahiru'd-din Muhammad Babur
Low Price Publications, 1997); E. Denison Ross, trans, and N. Elias, ed., The Tarikh-i
Rashidi ofMuhammad Haidar Dughlat: A History of theMoguls of Central Asia (London: S. Low,
Marston and Co., 1895).
16. M. Hidayat Hosain, ed., The Qanun-i Humayuni of Khwandamir, Bibliotheca Indica series
260, no. 1488, Persian text, Preface (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1940);
Jawhar, Tazkirat-ul-Vaqi'at: The Tezkereh al Vakiat or Private Memoirs theMoghul Emperor
of
trans. Charles Stewart
Humayun, (1832; reprint, Lucknow: Pustak Kendra, 1971).
17. M. Hidayat Hosain, ed., Tadhkira-i Humayun wa Akbar of Bayazid Biyat, Bibliotheca Indica
series 264, no. 1546, Persian text (Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1941).
18. Abu'l Fazl vAllami, Akbarnama, 3 vols., trans. Henry Beveridge, The Akbar Nama ofAbu-l
Fazl (1902-39; reprint, Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1993); Abu'l Fazl vAllami, Ain-i
Akbari, 3 vols., trans. H.F. Blochmann and H.S. Jarrett, The A-in-I Akbari (1873, 1894; re
print, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society, 1993); NAbd al-Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab-ut
Tavarikh, trans, and ed. George S.A. Ranking, W.H. Lowe, and Wolseley Haig,
Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, vols. 1-3 (1884-1925; reprint, Delhi: Renaissance Publishing
trans. B. De and Baini
House, 1986);
Nizam al-Din Ahmad, Tabaqat-i Akbari, 3 vols.,
Prasad, The Tabaqat-i Akbari ofKhwajah Nizammudin Ahmad (1936; reprint, Delhi: Low Price
Publications, 1992).
RubyLal 615
19. Harbans Mukhia, Historians andHistoriography during the Reign of Akbar (New Delhi: Vikas
154nl.
Publishing House, 1976), xvi,
20. Mukhia, 71.
21. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Akbar: The Architect of theMughul Empire (1978; reprint, Delhi:
Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1987), 2,6.

22.
Beveridge, Humayun, 83, and nl.; Gulbadan, Ahval, fol. 2b; Akbamama, 1: 29.
23. Henry "The Memoirs
Beveridge, of Bayazid (Bajazet) Biyat," Journal of theAsiatic Society
1-4 (1898): 296.
of Bengal, 62, parts
24. Akbamama, vol. 1 (see introduction, esp. 29-33, including notes).
25. Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, 2d ed.; and Soleyman
Haim, Shorter English Persian Dictionary, 3d ed., see "ahval."

"Woman to Woman:
26. BritishLibrary, MSS Eur C176/ 221, 1-2;M.A. Scherer, Annette,
the Princess, and the Bibi," Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 3d. series, 6 (1996): 208-9.
27. Muzaffar Alam, "The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Politics," Modem Asian
Mughal
Studies 32, no. 2 (1998): 324, 325; Annette Susannah Beveridge, "Life and Writings of
Gulbadan Calcutta Review 106 (1892): 346-47.
Begam (Lady Rosebody),"
28. Beveridge, Humayun, 83; Gulbadan, Ahval, fol. 2b.
29. Beveridge,Humayun, 76,78.
30. Babumama, trans. Thackston, 634-35; and Babur-nama, trans. A.S. Beveridge, 525-26.
31. Tazkirat-ul- Vaqi at, 31.
32. Beveridge, Humayun, 150-51; Gulbadan, Ahval, fol. 43a.
33. Beveridge, Humayun, 151; Gulbadan, Ahval, fol. 43a.
34. Scherer, "Woman to Woman," 198.
35. Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women Victorian India (London: Seeker and Warburg,
of
"Woman to Woman," "Annette Akroyd
1976), 188-89; Scherer, 197, 209; also, Scherer,
Oriental Scholar" diss., Ohio State University,
Beveridge: Victorian Reformer, (Ph.D.
1995).
36. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly Englishman" and the "Effeminate Bengali" in
the LateNineteenth Century (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995), 58-60;
"Annette Akroyd Beveridge,"
Scherer, chap. 5.
37. Ahval, fol. 21b-22a.
Beveridge, Humayun, 112-13; Gulbadan,
38. For an elaboration of these propositions, see my book,
forthcoming "Domesticity
and Power in the Early Mughal World" U.K.: Cambridge University
(Cambridge,
Press, forthcoming 2005).
39. A.S. "Gulbadan
Begam," 353-54.
Beveridge,
40. 89-90.
Beveridge, Humayun,
41. The context of Timurid-Mughal allow us to read havasak
reproductive politics might
as a condition to women who become desirous of having children and
applicable
to have symptoms of pregnancy breasts and stomach, and milk pro
begin (swelling
of a child. Hysterical as it is
duction) without any biological conception pregnancy,
termed in current medical is itself a fairly complex phenomenon.
terminology,
There are several realms in the spectrum of hysteria, thus acquiring many forms and
conditions. I am thankful to Dr.
Ajay Wasan (research fellow at the
underlying
6I6 RubyLal
HarvardMedical School) and Simone for these details.

Taubenberger
42. Lai, "Domesticity and Power," chaps. 5 and 7.
43. Ain-i Akbari, 1:45.
44. see Lai,
For details, "Domesticity chap. 7.
and Power,"
45. The mention of Gulbadan Banu in Richards's The Mughal Empire appears
single Begum
in a reference to the women's The is as the initiative of
hajj. pilgrimage represented
the emperor Akbar and completely misses the initiative of the see also,
Begum;
Michael N. Pearson, toMecca: The Indian Experience, 1500-1800 (Princeton,
Pilgrimage N.J.:
Markus Wiener, 1996), esp. chap., "The Mughals and the Hajj," 105-21.

Historicising The Harem

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Historicizing the Harem: The Challenge of a Princess's Memoir

Author(s): Ruby Lal

Gulbadan's recordof her father's inventory is strikingfor several reasons.

On court days [ruzhayedivan],which were Sundays and Tuesdays, he used to go to

Note the careful attention paid to precise rules: designated days to go to

What we have here is the portrait of a sexualized, secluded, feminine

This receivedimageofMughal private lifehas been powerful in blinding

THE KINGS AND THEMEMOIRIST

THE RECEIVED HISTORY

art, architecture, and intellectual life.When it is not glossed in the jour

women. In 1990, Renuka Nath wrote a book in the same biographical

THE QUESTION OF SOURCES

Aftabchi and BayazidBayatmentioned abovewere produced in response

THE CHALLENGE OF A PRINCESS'S MEMOIR

tion of the Akbarnama shows.24Interestingly, the genre title thatGulbadan

authoritativehistories in themanner of the generic (panegyric)historiesof

Gulbadan's substantialtreatmentof the involvement of severalMughal

The marriage ofHumayun andHamideh Banu Begum shows thatwom

ment in the Timurid-Mughal world. Maywa-jan and her "services" would

Beveridge sees inMaham's activities more "a clever ... Empress-mother"

In this context of highly open and variegated domestic relations, the

Mughals. Gulbadan's documentation of the place and responsibilitiesof

neatly documented by the state or institutionalized in public archives. As a

social life;on everyday struggles, fears,and pleasures;on the construction

that although Akbar's haremwas secluded, sacred, and even inaccessible to

A Note on Transliteration and Citations. There is no

8. Beveridge, Humayun, 1, 8-9, 2.

parts 1-3, Turkish transcription, edition, and English

Idarah-i-Adabiyat-i-Delli, 1987), 2,6.

Haim, Shorter English Persian Dictionary, 3d ed., see "ahval."

HarvardMedical School) and Simone for these details.

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