Not long after January 8th, 1526, a messenger would reach Kābul who took more than news, for Bābar had found manuscripts in the captured fort of Milwat, and now sent some for Kāmrān, while he gave others to Humāyūn. They were valuable, but not so much so as he had hoped, and many were theological. This and other records about books remind one that they were few and precious in those days. How many that we now rank amongst the best of the sixteenth century had not yet been written! There was no Tārīkh-i-rashīdī, and the very stuff of the Tūzūk was in the living and making.

On February 26th Humāyūn created news which would be as welcome to Māham as it was to Bābar, for he was successful in his first expedition on active service. This occurred at Ḥiṣār-firoza, and the town and district were given to him with a sum of money. News of the victory was despatched to Kābul from Shāhābād; and immediately after Bābar's record of this in the Memoirs, there occurs a passage of varied interest, although it seems to European ears a somewhat strange commemoration of a detail of toilette: ‘At this same station and this same day the razor or scissors were first applied to Humāyūn's beard.’ Bābar made an entry in June, 1504, of the same act accomplished for himself. It was one which Tūrks celebrated by festivity. The entry quoted above is made as though by Bābar, but it is followed by an explanation that it is inserted by Humāyūn in pious imitation of his father's own. Humāyūn did this in 1553-4, shortly before he set out to recover his father's lost domains in Hindūstān. The date is fixed by his statement that he made the inter­polation when he was forty-six.*

Humāyūn's little victory would be dwarfed by the next news of the royal army, for April 12th, 1526, brought the battle of Pānīpat and the overthrow of Ibrāhīm Lodī Afghān, the Emperor of Hindūstān. The swiftest of runners would carry these tidings to Kābul in something under a month. On May 11th Bābar distributed the treasures of five kings, and left himself so little that he was jestingly dubbed beggar (qalandar). He forgot no one, but sent gifts far and wide to kinsmen and friends, and to shrines both in Arabia and 'Irāq. Kābul was specially remembered and a small coin sent for every soul within it. Gul-badan tells what was given to the ladies, beginning with the great begams, the aunts of frequent mention. It was certainly a wonderful day when the curiosities and splendid things of Hind were unpacked for their inspection, and very welcome, too, would be the amīr who escorted the precious caravan. He was Bābar's friend, Khwāja Kilān, who had extorted a most unwilling leave from India on the ground that his constitution was not suited to the climate of that country, a delicate assumption of blame to his own defects which it is to be hoped he conveyed to the ladies as a reassurance. After the gay social fashion of the time, no doubt he helped the ladies to run day into night in the tale-telling they loved. It appears probable that there was no such complete seclusion of Tūrkī women from the outside world as came to be the rule in Hindūstān. The ladies may have veiled themselves, but I think they received visitors more freely, and more in accordance with the active life of much-travelling peoples, than is the case in Hindū or Moslim houses in India at the present day.*

The little Gul-badan will have had her present with the rest, and probably, like some others, it was chosen by her father specially for her. He sent a list with the gifts so that each person might receive what he had settled upon. This he is said to have done both in allotting the jewels and the dancing-girls, the latter of whom are mentioned as sent to the great begams. Their novel style of dancing ranks them amongst the ‘curiosities of Hind,’ but nothing is said about their views of presentation to foreign ladies in Kābul. Certainly Gul-badan will have seen them dance, and she will also have enjoyed the joke played off by Bābar from Āgra on an old dependent called 'Asas (night-guard). This and all the begam's stories are left for her to tell, as she does later in this volume.

There came with the gifts an injunction which calls out the remark, that at all crises Bābar gave expression to religious feeling and performed due devotional ceremonies. He had desired Khwāja Kilān to arrange for the ladies to go out of the city to the Garden of the Audience-hall, so that they might there make the prostration of thanks for the success of his arms. They were to go in state, and to remain some days. He must have sighed as he planned an excursion so much to his liking and in which he could not share. The act of thanksgiving would be done under a summer heaven, in an enchanting June garden, of which the snowy hills were the distant girdle. Our princes will have gone out with the rest, and with theirs her small figure, bravely attired, will have bowed forehead to the earth in thanks to the Giver of Victory. Tender thoughts will have travelled to the absent, and especially to him who loved his Kābul as Bābar did.

It is remarkable in him that, longing to return home as he did, he should have had endurance to remain and fight on in Hindūstān. His constitution was assuredly not suited to its climate. His men hated it; his closest friend had left it; Humāyūn and other intimates were soon to follow the khwāja on leave; but he resisted all influences, even when he had become so homesick that he wept at sight of fruit from Kābul. Only love of action, desire to be great, and capacity for greatness, could have held and upheld him at his self-chosen post. It cannot be called a small matter on which the history of hundreds of years turns, and yet it was but the innate quality of one man, and that man very human. Bābar stood fast, and India had Akbar and his splendid followers and all the galaxy of their creations in sandstone and marble.

When Gul-badan was about two years old, and therefore shortly before her father left Kābul, she was adopted by Māham Begam to rear and educate. Māham was the chief lady of the royal household and mother of Bābar's eldest son; she was supreme, and had well-defined rights over other inmates. Perhaps this position justified her in taking from Dil-dār two of her children, Hindāl and Gul-badan, as she did in 1519 and 1525. Before 1519 Māham had lost four children younger than Humāyūn; they were three girls and a boy, and all died in infancy. So it may have been heart-hunger that led to the adoptions she made, or they might be the outcome of affection for Bābar (it is said she was to him what 'Āyisha was to Muḥammad), which determined her, if she could not rear her children for him, at least to give him his children with the stamp of her love upon them. In some cases which are mentioned by Bābar, adoptions were made by a childless wife of high degree from a slave or servant, but no such reason seems behind those from Dil-dār. She is spoken of in terms which preclude the supposition that (as Ḥaidar puts it in another place,) she was outside the circle of dis­tinction.

The story of Hindāl's adoption is briefly this: In 1519 Bābar was away from Kābul on the expedition which gave him Bajaur and Swat, and which brought into the royal household Bībī Mubārika Yusufzāi. On January 25th he received a letter from Māham, who was in Kābul, about a topic which had been discussed earlier between them— namely, the adoption by her of a child of which Dil-dār expected the birth. Now she repeated her wishes and, moreover, asked Bābar to take the fates and declare whether it would be a boy or girl. Whether he performed the divination rite himself, or had it done by some of the women who were in camp with the army, (he speaks of it as believed in by women,) it was done, and the result was announced to Māham as promising a boy. The rite is simple: Two pieces of paper are inscribed, one with a boy's name and one with a girl's, and are enwrapped in clay and set in water. The name first disclosed, as the clay opens out in the moisture, reveals the secret. On the 26th Bābar wrote, giving over the child to Māham and communicating the prophecy. On March 4th a boy was born, to whom was given the name of Abū'n-nāṣir with the sobriquet of Hindāl by which he is known in history and which is perhaps to be read as meaning ‘of the dynasty of Hind.’* Three days after birth he was taken, whether she would or no, from Dil-dār to be made over to Māham.

It is clear that Dil-dār objected; and although the separation could not have been so complete where the real and adoptive mothers are part of one household as it is under monogamous custom, it was certainly hard to lose her firstborn son in this way. She had still her two elder girls. Gul-badan was born four years later and removed from her care at the age of two, by which date, it may be, she had her son Alwar. In after-years Dil-dār, as a widow, lived with Hindāl, and she had back Gul-badan while the latter was still a young and unmarried girl.