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Encountering Mughal Women was a month-long project in July 2020 for an artist residency titled “The Untold Edition.” I worked with one text, the Humayunnama, a historical account of early Mughal India, penned by Gulbadan Begum (d. 1603). Gulbadan Begum was the daughter of Babur, who founded the empire that is now known for the Taj Mahal. Babur wrote an autobiography and his daughter followed in his footsteps.

As a historian, I’ve engaged with Mughal women’s lives only through the written word; I’ve read Gulbadan Begum and written about her and I’ve published articles about Mughal women and gender in Islamic history. For “The Untold Edition,” I decided to engage with Gulbadan’s text, the Humayunnama though a different, more tactile medium. I wanted to illustrate scenes from the text using a style of illustration that would work in a children’s book. While my Instagram has finished sketches, this blog also shows the process of making my illustrations and includes thoughts about the connection between word and image, history and storytelling.

Why Gulbadan Begum?

I chose Gulbadan Begum because her text is full of scenes from everyday life, and it’s easy to imagine these scenes. Her Humayunnama is a rare instance of a Mughal text penned by a woman and since I already know it quite well, and have spent a lot of time wandering around Mughal India in my head, it’s easy to dive into her writing. Also, and this is probably my primary reason for choosing her, she’s simply not well-known, and I think she should be.

Both men and women built tombs for spouses and parents; there was nothing unusual about Shah Jahan doing so for his wife. The more interesting story is that the Taj Mahal was based on a design chosen by one of Shah Jahan’s female ancestors. But since women are only interesting as objects of love, and not as subjects in themselves, this story is left untold. As Virginia Woolf puts it in “A Room of One’s Own”—women hold power and importance in male imagination, but are denied importance in the absence of a male gaze. I remember presenting a paper at an academic conference about Gulbadan’s view of history and being asked questions about her love life by two male scholars; one white, one brown, and both holders of PhDs. There are so many more things to say about women.

Week 1: Translation–Annette Beveridge (d. 1929) and Gulbadan Begum (d. 1603)

How do we know about Gulbadan? Gulbadan’s history of her brother Humayun now exists as an incomplete manuscript penned in Persian/Farsi. The manuscript was translated to English by Annette Beveridge (d. 1929) an Orientalist scholar in British India. Her husband Henry Beveridge was in the Indian Civil Service and an Orientalist scholar himself. For the first week of the project, I got interested in how a British woman encountered a Mughal woman. Did she feel an affinity with her or did she see her as foreign? My own positioning was interesting too. I think mostly in English, but I grew up on the land the Mughals ruled. This means I feel a cultural affinity with Gulbadan but speak the same language–literally!– as Beveridge. I liked reading about Gulbadan through a female translator. It was a Chloe-liked-Olivia moment. My preliminary sketch is below; I imagined some sort of crossing between worlds and tried to see how I’d go about drawing that.

In my reading, I noticed that Annette Beveridge writes of Gulbadan with affection and admiration. She spent so much time with the text that she felt she knew Gulbadan. Beveridge writes, “She becomes a friend, even across the bars of time and creed and death.” I decided to translate this line to Farsi, the language Gulbadan would have understood had Beveridge been able to speak to her. The line that appears on my painting below is a translation. I am grateful to my Iranian friend Reihaneh Fakourfar for making my literal translation more poetic!

Notes: This took a while and I think the proportions are off. I started with ink, which didn’t sit too well on this paper. Then I tried to cover up some mistakes with watercolor. Then I added color pencil followed by ink washes. I like the idea behind this but may want to do another version sometime. I’m happy with the turquoise because there is no situation in life in which I’m not happy with turquoise!

If you do a Google Images search for “harem,” you’ll be awash in images of women who seem to have nothing better to do all day than lounge on beds or periodically get up to dance (not a bad life, but still!). Exhibit A:

Edward Said’s Orientalism addresses the degree to which these portrayals of non-European cultures were steeped in colonial imagination and far from reality. I routinely run into history books in which–usually when addressing the decline of an empire–a historian throws up his hands and says well, there were wars, economic crises, political mistakes, and then there was harem intrigue. The women were scheming too much, they made kings indolent, and then everything fell apart. Lazy kings also spent too much time in the harem (according to this line of argument), when they should have been out on the battlefield. Let’s correct these misconceptions.

• As historian Leslie Peirce argues, the word “harem” comes from the Arabic root H-R-M, which refers to what is sacred, protected, and forbidden. The reason the king’s household was called the harem was because kings were seen as sacred and the king’s inner sanctum, the “harem” was the most sacred space of all. The word had nothing to do with women; rather it had to do with the sanctity of the king’s body.
• Both men and women gained and lost power within the household and it was in the interests of everyone to maintain their power. This means that the household/harem wasn’t a private place where the king could retreat from his public political life; the harem was the most political place of all.
• Women and men in the Mughal Empire played active political roles. Mughal texts reveal especially the role played by senior women–mothers and aunts–in negotiating alliances, advising kings, and in many cases, preventing conflict before it happened. Babur is at pains to point out how respectful he was to his mother and his aunts and Gulbadan Begum, in her writing, does the same.

For the second week of my residency, I focused on an incident that makes me laugh. While making his bid for power in Central Asia, Babur faced opposition from his cousins. Gulbadan narrates how two of his cousins, after rebelling against Babur, were spared his wrath because Babur’s maternal aunts intervened. One of them had to be dragged out of a rug in which he was hiding. I think about how this family anecdote must have been remembered. Did the old women of the family sit together and laugh about that time when the Mirza hid in a rug? Did Gulbadan, who was just a child when Babur died, hear it from the older women, so that–when she was writing as an old woman herself–she jotted down what she remembered? Did writing it make her smile? I imagine the women sitting together and chuckling over their hot-headed sons and then shaking their heads and getting on with the task of managing them.

I wrote down Gulbadan’s narrative in Farsi so I could feel how her hand would have formed the words she was writing and then I drew some preliminary sketches. I can never keep my Mirzas straight, so I drew a rough family tree too. There’s something about writing in Farsi as opposed to just reading it that brings me closer to the text and to Gulbadan Begum. This is the language in which Gulbadan thought about her past, and these are the letters her hand knew how to shape; always, Beveridge’s English reads faster for me, but I keep coming back to the Farsi, which feels familiar in a different way, close as it is to Urdu, my mother tongue.

Here is Beveridge’s translation along with Gulbadan’s original:

• 

• 

And here is how I imagined what transpired. I drew the images first and separated the frames for them. Then I put in relevant text in Farsi.

Once upon a time, a dear friend and fellow historian was writing about Aurangzeb (d. 1707), the last powerful Mughal king. We shared an interest in this much-misunderstood king, who was devious, passionate, tormented, and given to dark, dark moods. He had issues with trust and forgiveness. Some people blame him for the end of the Mughal Empire and others blame him for all that is wrong with South Asia. If you’re reading this and you know something about astrology, you may already have guessed he was a Scorpio. I suggested as much to my friend: I said something along the lines of “Dude, how about using his sun sign to explain why he did the things he did?” My friend laughed and refused to entertain this. Astrology isn’t something you’re supposed to put much stock in if you have a PhD, and if you do in fact subscribe to explaining things by invoking the stars, it’s polite to keep this to yourself. Astronomy is respectable; astrology is not.

For much of human history, this hasn’t been the case. The Mughals, like their contemporaries, the Safavids and Ottomans, cared about the stars. Beyond studying the stars to plot long journeys and pilgrimages to Makkah, the Mughals also consulted their astrologers before major battles and had charts drawn up for newborns.

There’s a section in Gulbadan Begum where she writes:

“The blessed birth of the Emperor Humayun, the first-born son of His Majesty Firdaus Makani (Babur), occurred on the night of Tuesday, 4th Zilqada, 913 A.H. (March 6, 1508) in the citadel of Kabul, when the sun was in Pisces”

I also thought about the Huma, which is a mythical bird. If the shadow of the Huma falls on you, then it means you will be king. Hence, the name Humayun. In my sketchbook, I wrote out the Farsi and the English and made some rough sketches of who I wanted in my drawing. I wanted Babur and his wife Maham (who was Humayun’s mother), and who plays a prominent role in Gulbadan’s text. I wanted something that symbolized Pisces, and I wanted a Huma bird. The great thing about mythical birds is that no one’s seen them, so you can do whatever you like. Even though I’m a Virgo (sun and moon), I’m not obsessive about getting things exactly right. This may be because Scorpio is my rising sign and I was born prematurely and was supposed to be a Libra. (Ali Olomi has an excellent twitter thread on astrology in the Islamic world, with details on each sign, that I highly recommend)

After I was done with the sketch I put on some music (MUNA!) and got to work at 3.00 AM, the best hour for doing these things. Here’s what I came up with:

Gulbadan Begum writes short biographical notes about the women in her circle; these tell us about a woman’s family, her skills, and what she received as her share in the spoils of war. Gulbadan’s writing is not different in this from her father’s; he too provides his readers with biographical notes about the people he knows. Quite often my students–on reading Gulbadan–cannot tell whether her text is written by a woman or a man. This leads to interesting discussions. Do women write differently? Or, does expecting them to do so, say more about us than it does about them? For instance, students are surprised when they come to the realization that they expect male-authored texts to focus on war and female-authored texts to focus on family. Gulbadan’s focuses on both, and as we’ve learned, nothing was more political than family. If there’s little difference between male and female writing in Mughal India, it means we need to ask how the Mughals differentiated gender.

In her biographical notes, Gulbadan mentions two women, Mihr Angez Begum and Shad Begum who “had a great love/affection for one another.” They used to wear men’s clothes, she writes, and had many accomplishments. The women played polo, shot bows and arrows, and they were also skilled musicians. Close bonds between women in Mughal India weren’t unusual; both men and women inhabited largely homosocial worlds in a society in which heterosexual marriage was nonetheless seen as an important duty they had to fulfill. In his memoir, Babur writes about falling in love with a boy called Baburi; the infatuation leads him to write some poetry and wander around lovesick, and the poetic tradition with which the Mughals were familiar is filled with homoerotic encounters between men. We can conclude that women’s worlds carried the possibility of similar attachments, similarly charged intimacies. So I imagined these two women to be part of Gulbadan’s world; maybe other women thought of them as those two who were always together, and maybe they admired them for their skills and their adventures, and maybe they sat around them when they played their instruments and laughed at their jokes. In my preliminary sketch, they looked conspiratorial, knowing, and playful :

Trying to draw these women made me aware of gender fluidity in a more tangible way than just reading about it. For one, male and female figures are not dressed all that differently in Mughal art; nor are their bodies rendered all that differently. What differentiates men and women is usually breasts and facial hair. I knew I wanted to draw one woman with a weapon (I like swords more than bows and arrows!) and another with a musical instrument, but how was I to make sure they didn’t look like two men, or–horrors!–a man and a woman?

And here’s my final sketch:

Below is a list of the texts that have influenced my project on Gulbadan Begum and that may be of interest to you.

Primary Source

Gulbadan Begum, Ahval-i Humayun Padishah or Humayunnama. Translated by Annette Beveridge. The text and its translation is available here: https://archive.org/details/historyofhumayun00gulbrich

Secondary Sources

Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (Columbia University Press, 2012)

Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005)