GUL-BADAN BEGAM (Princess Rose-body) was a daughter of ahru-d-dīn Muḥammad Bābar, in whom were united the lines of highest Central Asian aristocracy—namely, that of Tīmūr the Tūrk, through his son Mīrān-shāh; and that of Chingīz the Mughal, through his son Chaghatāi. He was born on February 14th, 1483, and succeeded to his father's principality of Farghāna when under twelve. He spent ten years of early youth in trying to save his small domain from the clutch of kinsmen, but, being forced to abandon the task, went southwards in 1504 to Afghānistān, where he captured Kābul from its Arghūn usurpers.

Princess Gul-badan was born somewhere about 1523 and when her father had been lord in Kābul for nineteen years; he was master also in Kunduz and Badakhshān; had held Bajaur and Swat since 1519, and Qandahār for a year. During ten of those nineteen years he had been styled pādshāh, in token of headship of the house of Tīmūr and of his independent sovereignty. To translate pādshāh, how­ever, as is often done, by the word emperor would give a wrong impression of Bābar's status amongst rulers at this height of his rising fortunes. Nevertheless, Gul-badan was born the child of a strong and stable chief, and of one who was better followed in war than his nominal domains would allow, because his army was drawn for the most part from tribes not under his government, and was not territorial and of Kābul but personal and inherited.

Bābar says that he cherished the desire to conquer beyond the Indus for nineteen years. At the date of Gul-badan's birth he was engaged in the attempt, and succeeded when she was about two and a half years old. He then became the first Tūrkī sovereign in Hindūstān, and the founder of its miscalled Mughal dynasty.

If the princess had first seen light in London instead of in Kābul, she would have had Henry VIII for king, and the slumbers of her birth-year might have been troubled as men marched forth at Wolsey's will to fight and lose in France. Her personal vicissitudes were the greater that she was a Tīmūrid and Tūrk. She spent her childhood under her father's rule in Kābul and Hindūstān; her girlhood and young wifehood shared the fall and exile of Humāyūn; and her maturity and failing years slipped past under the protection of Akbar.

Her mother was Dil-dār Begam—the Heart-holding Princess—of whose descent, it is noticeable to observe, neither her husband nor her daughter gives any informa­tion. This peculiarity of omission she shares with Māham, the wife of Bābar's affection and the mother of his heir; and with Gul-rukh, the mother of Kāmrān and 'Askarī. All three ladies are spoken of by our begam with the style befitting the wives of a king; all were mothers of children, and for this reason, if for no other, it seems natural that something should be said of their birth. Bābar frequently mentions Māham, and calls her by this name tout court. Dil-dār's name occurs in the Tūrkī version of the Memoirs, but not in the Persian, and she is there styled āghācha— i.e., a lady, but not a begam, by birth. Gul-rukh is, I believe, never named by Bābar. This silence does not necessarily imply low birth. It may be an omission of the contemporarily obvious; and also it may indicate that no one of the three women was of royal birth, although all seem to have been of good family.

Three Tīmūrids had been Bābar's wives in childhood and youth. These were: 'Āyisha, who left him before 1504 and who was betrothed to him when he was five; Zainab, who died in 1506 or 1507; and Ma'sūma, whom he married in 1507 and who died at the birth of her first child. Māham was married in Khurāsān, and therefore in 1506; Dil-dār and Gul-rukh probably considerably later, and after the three royal ladies had passed away from the household. The next recorded marriage of Bābar is one of 1519, when a Yusufzāi chief brought him his daughter, Bībī Mubārika, as the seal of submission. She had no children, and was an altogether charming person in the eyes of those who have written of her.

To return now to Dil-dār. She bore five children, three girls and two boys. The eldest was born in an absence of Bābar from Kābul and in Khost. This fixes her birth as occurring somewhere between 1511 and 1515. She was Gul-rang (Rose-hued), named like her sisters from the rose; then came Gul-chihra (Rose-cheeked); and then Abū'n-nāṣir Muḥammad, the Hindāl of history, who was born in 1519; next was Gul-badan (Rose-body); and last a boy, whom his sister calls Alwar, a word which looks like a sobriquet drawn from the Indian town. He died after the migration of the household to Āgra, and in 1529.

Princess Gul-badan was born some two years before Bābar set out on his last expedition across the Indus, so her baby eyes may have seen his troops leave Kābul in November, 1525, for the rallying-place at Jacob's Village (Dih-i-ya qūb). It is not mere word-painting to picture her as looking down from the citadel at what went on below, for she tells of later watching from this view-point which would give the farewell glimpse of the departing army, and, as weeks and years rolled on, the first sight of many a speck on the eastern road which took form as loin-girt runner or mounted courier.

We who live upon the wire, need a kindled imagination to realize what it was to those left behind, to have their men-folk go to India. With us, fancy is checked by maps and books, and has not often to dwell on the unknown and inconceivable. To them, what was not a blank was probably a fear. Distance could have no terrors for them, because they were mostly, by tribe and breeding, ingrain nomads; many of them had come from the far north and thought the great mountains or the desert sands the desirable setting for life. Such experience, however, would not help to understand the place of the Hindūs, with its heats, its rains, strange beasts, and hated and dreaded pagans.

It is not easy to say wherein lies the pleasure of animating the silhouettes which are all that names, without detail of character, bring down from the past. Perhaps its roots run too deep and close to what is dear and hidden in the heart, for them to make way readily to the surface in speech. But it is an undoubted pleasure, and it is what makes it agreeable to linger with these women in Kābul in those hours when our common human nature allows their thoughts and feelings to be clear to us. Sometimes their surroundings are too unfamiliar for us to understand what sentiments they would awaken, but this is not so when there is news of marches, fighting, defeat, or victory. Then the silhouettes round, and breathe, and weep or smile.

Bābar left few fighting men in Kābul, but there remained a great company of women and children, all under the nominal command and charge of Prince Kāmrān, who was himself a child. His exact age I am not able to set down, for Bābar does not chronicle his birth, an omission which appears due to its falling in one of the gaps of the Memoirs. Bābar left the city on November 17th, and was joined on December 3rd by Humāyūn at the Garden of Fidelity (Bāgh-i-wafā). He had to wait for the boy, and was much displeased, and reprimanded him severely. Humāyūn was then seventeen years old, and since 1520 had been governor of Badakhshān. He had now brought over his army to reinforce his father, and it may well be that Māham had something to do with his delayed march from Kābul. She could have seen him only at long intervals since she had accompanied Bābar, in 1520, to console and settle her child of twelve in his distant and undesired post of authority.

Shortly after the army had gone eastwards, disquieting news must have reached Kābul, for three times before the middle of December, 1525, Bābar was alarmingly ill. What he records of drinking and drug-eating may explain this; he thought his illness a chastisement, and set himself to repent of sins which were bred of good-fellowship and by forgetfulness in gay company; but his conflict with them was without victory. He referred his punishment to another cause than these grosser acts, and came to regard the composition of satirical verses as a grave fault. His reflections on the point place him near higher moralists, for he says it was sad a tongue which could repeat sublime words, should occupy itself with meaner and despicable fancies. ‘Oh, my Creator! I have tyrannized over my soul, and if Thou art not bountiful to me, of a truth I shall be numbered amongst the accursed.’ These are some of the thoughts of Bābar which lift our eyes above what is antipathetic in him, and explain why he wins the respect and affection of all who take trouble to know him.