Gulbadan Begumthe HarborESFJ

In the late 1580s, at the Mughal court, an order reached Gulbadan Begum from her nephew, the emperor Akbar. She was in her sixties. He asked her to write down whatever she knew of the doings of his grandfather and his father, the emperors Babur and Humayun.

Akbar wanted material for the great official history of his reign. His aunt was one of the few people left who remembered the early years. She was born in Kabul around 1523, a daughter of Babur, while her family's power was still being won and lost. Her brother Humayun spent years as a king in exile, and the family went with him.

She was not a court historian. She had spent her life inside the family: its households, its journeys, its weddings and its mourning. Harbors do that kind of noticing for decades and are almost never asked to write it down.

So the first thing she did was apologize.

Then she remembered everything.

Akbar had asked about two emperors. Gulbadan wrote about their families. Her Humayun-nama is full of what official chronicles leave out: wives and aunts, feasts and gifts, who sat where, who traveled with whom, who was kind to whom. A court historian would call that detail. To a Harbor, it is the whole of life. Who came. Who was welcomed. Who was remembered.

Her most famous scene took place in Sind in 1541, when she was about eighteen. Humayun, then a king in exile, wanted to marry a young woman named Hamida Banu. Hamida said no. She would marry, she said, but a man whose collar her hand could reach, and not one so far above her that she could not even reach his hem. By Gulbadan's account she held out for some forty days. She went on to become Akbar's mother.

We know about that refusal because Gulbadan wrote it down. A young woman saying no to a king is exactly what official history forgets. Hamida stayed her friend for the next sixty years.

What she left out was herself. In 1575 she set out from court on the pilgrimage to Mecca. She stayed in Arabia nearly four years, and on the way home her ship was wrecked at Aden. She was back at court in 1582. Her book says nothing about any of it. Its pages record who was given which gift at a wedding. Of her own shipwreck there is not a line.

In February 1603, at about 80, she lay dying. Hamida, by then an old woman too, came to her bedside and called her by the pet name she had used for decades: “Jiu!” Gulbadan opened her eyes and quoted a line of verse.

“I die, may you live!” Then she died. Even her last words were a wish for someone else. When her body was carried out, Akbar himself helped carry the bier for some distance.

Akbar had asked her for two emperors. She handed him the whole household, and kept back only her own story.