In Velvet-Lined Rooms

No space​ has elicited more lurid Orientalist fantasies than the harem, once found in elite residences across the Islamic world. In practice, most harems (haram in Persian) were unremarkable sites of domestic labour. What caught the attention of Western Europeans were the enslaved women, as well as the social mores dictating that respectable women rarely appear in public. Early travellers sometimes compared harems to nunneries (as strictly regulated, hierarchical, female-dominated spaces), but by the 19th century Westerners tended to view them as prisons or as the depraved sex palaces depicted in the paintings of Ingres. Even in the early 1990s, some scholars were still imagining the royal harems of the Mughals or Ottomans to be places of orgiastic pleasure. Since then, a pioneering group of historians – most of them women – has turned these assumptions on their head. Imperial harems were in fact regimented institutions, where sexual relations (a matter of state survival, after all) were carefully managed. At least for their most privileged inhabitants, harems were the headquarters for political and diplomatic operations of the highest order.

Ruby Lal has made a career of bringing to light the lives of Mughal women. Her latest book is a study of Gulbadan Begum, the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. During her lifetime the Mughals rose from being a Central Asian dynasty struggling to establish a foothold in South Asia to become the rulers of one of the largest and wealthiest empires in the world. Gulbadan was born in Kabul in 1523, a few years before her father, Babur, conquered large parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain; she came of age in the reign of her half-brother Humayun, who pushed the imperial boundaries eastwards as far as Bengal; and she died in 1603, during the reign of her nephew Akbar, the most celebrated of Mughal emperors. She is also the only Mughal woman known to have written an imperial history. Conditions in the Age of Emperor Humayun was composed at Akbar’s behest when she was 64. Since it foregrounds women and children, Gulbadan’s history helps Lal achieve the rare feat of viewing the rise of the Mughals from a female perspective.

Gulbadan spent much of her youth in the gardens and tents of the peripatetic Mughal court. Babur began building a capital in Agra in the late 1520s, but he and his retinue continued to spend much of their time on the road, often in pursuit of conquest. This was no rugged or simple life. Mughal encampments were palaces unto themselves, comprising pavilions, reception halls and sprawling tents subdivided into dozens of gold and velvet-lined rooms. The gardens in which these encampments were erected were equally artful, featuring splendid viewing decks overlooking terraced hills cut through by geometric waterways. Still, life with the army had its hardships. In one disastrous campaign in 1539, Emperor Humayun’s wife was taken captive, and countless other women drowned attempting to flee enemy lines.

As Gulbadan grew older, she became one of Humayun’s trusted advisers. She and other ‘female guardians of the empire’, as Lal calls them, were especially adept in matters of conciliation. When Humayun’s brother Hindal tried to usurp the Mughal throne in 1538, it was Hindal’s mother, Dildar, who was sent to sue her wayward son for unity. But although Lal is reluctant to admit it, Muslim gentlewomen of South Asia weren’t only peacemakers. The mother of Ibrahim Lodi, an Afghan leader whom Babur had defeated at Panipat in 1529, tried to poison Babur to avenge her son’s death (the attempt failed, but Babur complained of the effects of her potion for the rest of his life).

Women helped ensure the longevity of South Asian monarchies in more conventional ways too – above all with their wombs. Since Islamic law recognised the offspring of a free man and his female slave as legitimate heirs, many Muslim rulers relied on concubines to propagate their dynasties (this struck Western European observers as depraved, but went a long way in helping to produce royal heirs). Women also fostered stability by promoting courtly ritual. It was Gulbadan’s aunt Khanzada who decided when it was time for Prince Hindal to marry, and it was she who arranged the feast to honour his wedding. On the day of the celebration, she presided over the magnificent assembly from a divan she shared with Humayun, a striking move that, in the ceremonial language of the day, put her on a par with the monarch.

Gulbadan’s roving life was eclipsed by the coming of Akbar, the son of Humayun and Hamida, who was born under an especially auspicious star and is remembered as the Mughals’ great institution-builder. As Lal recounted in her first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (2005), Akbar was also the founder of a clearly delineated Mughal harem. Where the constant movement of earlier generations had made segregation by sex all but impossible, as the monarchy settled somewhat so too did a designated space for women and children. In consequence, Akbar ‘ended up robbing his women, notably those of Gulbadan’s generation, of the vagabond nature within them’.

Vagabond Princess, as the title suggests, is the story of Gulbadan’s resistance to this new order. Displeased with her confinement, or so Lal speculates, she undertook the hajj in the company of eleven other royal women. Just as they are now, Mecca and Medina were inundated with visitors during the hajj season: in 1580, 200,000 people and 300,000 animals were present at the prayer at Mount Arafat, the spiritual climax of the five-day hajj ritual. But all year round, the two cities were havens for wanderers, exiles and the poor, and Gulbadan ended up staying in the Arabian Peninsula for four years.

There are many accounts of the hajj before the modern era, most of them written by and about men. Women have always taken part, though, and Lal has managed to excavate a feminine hajj. Gulbadan and her companions travelled from Gujarat by boat and landed at the Red Sea port of Jeddah (meaning ‘grandmother’ in Arabic, ostensibly in reference to Eve, who is said to be buried in the city). Glimpsing the Kaaba in Mecca for the first time, the women may have recalled traditions casting the building as a bride, with its sacred and inviolable nature hidden beneath gold-embroidered cloth. Near Medina was the Garden of Women, where a well provided water said to heal seventy female ailments; inside the city, not far from the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad, was the burial place of his beloved daughter Fatima. Had the company arrived overland from Iraq, they would have travelled on the network of roads commissioned by Zubayda, the wife of the eighth-century Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. It was a geography built by, around and for women, and Gulbadan and her retinue upheld the tradition of female charity, liberally distributing alms wherever they went.

Male power triumphed in the end, however. In 1578 the Ottoman sultan Murad III, who ruled over this part of the Arabian Peninsula, learned of the travellers’ almsgiving, which he viewed as a Mughal challenge to his sovereignty – itself evidence for the seriousness with which men took the activities of women. Only after multiple expulsion orders did Gulbadan and her companions finally capitulate in 1580. Scrambling to leave the peninsula, they set sail at an unpropitious time of year and were shipwrecked off the Yemeni coast. They finally returned to Mughal territory in 1582. Though they received a hero’s welcome, Lal describes their return to the palace as a moment of loss, the passing of the ‘vigour of life-in-movement’.

It isn’t easy to write the history of globe-trotting women of the premodern era, and narrating the life of any premodern Muslim woman is especially difficult, since women themselves rarely wrote and men thought it improper to divulge details about their female relatives. Lal includes the story of a male colleague of hers who asked incredulously whether she really had the sources to complete her PhD dissertation on the Mughal domestic sphere. She has again proven that she does.

Yet the record leaves many silences. Gulbadan’s own history – which exists in a single manuscript copy held in the British Library – ends mid-sentence, with the blinding of Humayun’s brother in 1553; perhaps, Lal suggests, the account wasn’t to Akbar’s liking. She tries to plug the gaps by drawing on other scholarly studies. Occasionally, though, she resorts to distinctly modern putty. She views Mughal women as more peace-loving than men, more emotional and always yearning to be free. She describes Gulbadan’s writing as collective rather than individual, embodied rather than cerebral, intuitive rather than objective. I’m not a Mughal historian, but I have read plenty of male accounts from the period – South-West Asian and Western European alike – that were collective, embodied and intuitive. There may well be something distinct about Gulbadan’s writing but, if so, it would have been helpful to have a more precise account of just what that is.

In a previous book, on the Mughal empress Nur Jahan, Lal writes that when she was a child her mother used to regale her and her sisters with epic tales of bygone women, telling them whenever they misbehaved that they should be more like these moral exempla. Vagabond Princess is written in the same rapturous mode, and Lal is open about the intimate connection she sought with Gulbadan. Such intimacy animates much good history. But this same intimacy keeps Lal from moving beyond her personal distaste for female ‘incarceration’ in the harem – or, indeed, from pausing to consider the harem from the perspective of its less exalted residents. It may be that some Mughal women resented the shift to a more settled palace life. Yet it may also be that they embraced the respectability that their aloofness now afforded them, or didn’t see harem life in terms of freedom at all. Recognising such complexity might have made Gulbadan a more complicated feminist hero, but also a more believable one.