Humāyūn-nāmah - The Humāyūn-nāmah

IT was in October, 1900, that the late Mr. F. F. Arbuthnot made arrangements with me for the publication of this volume. It has now to put forth bereft of his guidance. I can but trust that he would have given to the finished work the welcome with which he greeted the small portion I was able to show him in print. It is natural to feel towards him what he has expressed in his dedication of the Assemblies of Al Ḥarīrī to Chenery, and to hope he may be glad of the fulfilment of this piece of his work.

The little history which is reproduced in this volume has few, if any, compeers, inasmuch as it is the work of a Musalmānī, and lights up her woman's world. She writes colloquially and without pose, and is unaffected and spontaneous. For these reasons I have tried to make an accurate copy of her text, and to preserve her characteristics of orthography and diction; and this the more that the British Museum MS. may be her very own, unique, and autographic. With a few chosen exceptions, I have reproduced all her deflections from common rule without comment; my additions to the MS. are limited to a few iẓāfats and other signs of which example is given at some place in the MS..

Princess Rose-body has rendered one essential service to history, by giving precise details of relationship in her own and some contemporary families. Up till now, however, no use has been made of her information, and her book has remained, both in India and Europe, a literary parda-nīshīn .

The Biographical Appendix, which I have modelled in admiration of Professor Blochmann's in his Aīn-i-akbarī, will, I hope, be of use to future writers. It is the outcome of the notes of several years, but it is incomplete and over brief. Nevertheless, it discloses the elements of many a romantic story.

One of an author's most agreeable final touches is the expression of thanks to those who have helped his book on its way. My obligation to my husband is too great to be told. I am much indebted to Mr. A. G. Ellis for his unfailing kindness during the long and pleasant time of my work in the British Museum, and to my friends Mr. E. H. Whinfield and Mr. W. Irvine for the expression of their opinions on several perplexing points. As I have said in writing of the plates, I owe all my illustrations but one to Mr. Bourdillon, B.C.S..

The printing of a book so full as is this one of unfamiliar names and of diacritically-marked letters entails a heavy tax upon proof-readers and compositors. I wish to express my sense of this, and to thank Messrs. Billing, their proofreaders and their compositors for what they have done to accomplish a difficult and tiresome task. My thanks are indeed due and are offered to Messrs. Drugelin for the patience and skill with which they have dealt with Persian copy from my untrained hand.

I now venture to express, in Mr. E. Granville Browne's words, the thought which haunts all who make a book, and to beg my critics to listen to their plea:

‘Now, seeing that to fail and fall is the fate of all, and to claim exemption from the lot of humanity a proof of pride and vanity, and somewhat of mercy our common need; therefore let such as read, and errors detect, either ignore or neglect, or correct and conceal them, rather than revile and reveal them.’

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AUTOGRAPH NOTE OF SHĀH-JAHĀN.
[To face p. xiii.

THE page of the MS. selected for reproduction in Plate I. contains several words which I have found difficult, and concerning which explanation will be welcomed. It and Plate No. II. make silent protest against printing, and plead that the sun best shows the grace and beauty of manuscript.

With the exception of the first illustration, all the plates are photographic reproductions from a splendidly illustrated Persian MS., entitled the Tārīkh-i-khāndān-i-tīmūriya, which is the choicest volume in the library with which Maulvī Khūda-baksh Khān Bahādur has enriched the city of Patna.^0-13

The Emperor Shāh-jahān appears to have paid R.8,000 for the illustrations in the volume. The MS. itself is of older date, and Mr. Beveridge has found in it some portions, at least, of the Tārīkh-i-alfī. The title-page is wanting.

The volume has a further distinction, inasmuch as it bears on an opening page an autograph note of Shāh-jahān. This is reproduced (as Plate No. II.) on the opposite page, and by its charm and grace is worthy of that royal fount of creative beauty.

The pictures of Bābar's devotion of himself and the triad connected with the birth of Akbar are admirable; they repay close attention and enlargement under a glass.

I am indebted for these pictures, first to Mr. Beveridge who, when he examined this Tārīkh in 1899, thought of my book, and, secondly, to Mr. Bourdillon, the then Commissioner of Patna, who most kindly photographed them for us.

This history, which contains an abridgment of the affairs of his Majesty, Ṣāḥib-qirān Gītī-sitānī (Tīmūr), and of his glorious descendants, and of the events of the days of 'Arsh-āshyānī (Akbar)—May God make clear his proof!— down to the twenty-second year of his reign, was written in the time of Shāh Bābā (Akbar).

Signed: Shāh-jahān Pādshāh, son of Jahāngīr Pādshāh, son of Akbar Pādshāh.

GUL-BADAN BEGAM (Princess Rose-body) was a daughter of Ẓahru-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.

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.⁶

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.⁷

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.’¹⁰ 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.

Bābar was separated from his family for over three years after he left Kābul in 1525. The tedium of waiting for news or for his return was broken for the ladies by several interesting home events, and by several items of Indian news which must have stirred the whole community in Kābul. On August 2nd, 1526, Māham gave birth to a son who was named Fārūq, but he too died in babyhood and his father never saw him. In December, 1526, there occurred to Bābar what must have roused anger and dread in all Kābul, for he was poisoned by the mother of Ibrāhīm Lodī Afghān. How Bābar conveyed the news of this to his people at home can be seen, because he has inserted the letter he wrote to allay anxiety, as soon as recovered strength permitted. Gul-badan has given the main points of the crime. She observes that Bābar had called the ‘ill-fated demon,’ mother, and had shown her kindness, a sectional view which leaves out the Afghān mourner, Buw'ā Begam, whose son had been defeated and killed, his dynasty overthrown, and herself pitied by the man on whom she tried to avenge herself. Her fate is worth commemorating. She was first put under contribution—i.e., made over for the exploitation of her fortune to two of Bābar's officers— and then placed in the custody of a trusty man for conveyance to Kābul. Perhaps she dreaded her reception there, for she contrived to elude her guards in crossing the Indus, threw herself into the water, and was drowned.

The letter above-mentioned is full of what one likes in Bābar. He quotes, ‘Whoever comes to the gates of death knows the value of life,’ and says, with thanks to Heaven, that he did not know before how sweet a thing life is. Here, too, he shows that he felt the tie which bound him to the Power in whose hands are the issues of life and death. He, his daughter, and his cousin and literary compeer, Ḥaidar Mīrzā Dughlāt, frequently express religious sentiment; and here Bābar exhibits the human graces of kind thought and solicitude to lessen the anxieties of his distant household and people. He forced himself to live again, in words, the horrible experiences of which he wrote while still in retirement, and four days¹¹ only after their occurrence.

Three months later Kābul had news of an uplifting victory, inasmuch as it had been won from men of alien faith, whose overthrow was a plenary religious duty to the Moslim. It was fought on March 13th, 1527, against Hindū Rājpūts under Rānā Sangā, and at Khānwa, on the skirts of the yet uncrowned hill of Sīkrī. It was preluded by dread amongst the Musalmāns, and by solemn acts which should make them more worthy to be the tools of Heaven and to enforce the stern belief that in battle with the pagan there was vengeance of the cause of God. Men declared repentance for sin and took oaths of abstinence; gold and silver drinking-vessels, probably of Persian handicraft and artistic beauty, were broken up and given to the poor; wine was poured out upon the ground, and some was salted into vinegar. Where the libation of penitence was offered, the earth was dedicated to the uses of an almshouse with chambered well. So strengthened, the Musalmāns went into the fight and made great slaughter of valiant foes.

The victory was followed by change in the personnel of Bābar's army, which had long been wearying for home and murmuring against Hindūstān. This was especially so amongst Humāyūn's Badakhshīs, who were accustomed to short service of one or two months, and it was now almost sixteen since they had left even Kābul. Only promise of immediate leave to follow had induced some men to stay for this one fight, and they had been told that when it was over, all who desired it should have freedom to go. Many amīrs had given ‘stupid and unformed opinions’ against remaining in Hindūstān at all, and down to the humblest followers these views had found acceptance. As has been said, nothing would persuade Bābar's closest friend to stay with him, although before his final decision was acted on, his master had called a council, and had expressed himself with directness and vigour.

‘I told them that empire and conquest could not exist without the material and means of war; that royalty and nobility could not exist without subjects and dependent provinces; that by the labour of many years, after undergoing great hardships, measuring many a toilsome journey, and raising various armies—after exposing myself and my troops to circumstances of great danger, to battle and bloodshed, by the Divine favour I had routed my formidable enemy (Ibrāhīm), and achieved the conquest of numerous provinces and kingdoms which we at present held. And now, what force compels, what hardship obliges us, without visible cause, after having worn out our life in accomplishing the desired achievement, to abandon and fly from our conquests, and to retreat to Kābul with every symptom of disappointment and discomfiture? Let anyone who calls himself my friend never henceforward make such a proposal; but if there is any among you who cannot bring himself to stay, or to give up his purpose of return, let him depart. Having made this fair and reasonable proposal, the discontented were of necessity compelled, however unwillingly, to renounce their seditious purpose.’

After the Rājpūt defeat the time came for the promised leave, but there is no mention in the Memoirs of a general exodus. Humāyūn went with his Badakhshīs, and also, as he seemed ‘uncomfortable,’ Mahdī¹³ Khwāja, Khānzāda's husband. He, but not only he, had been through one hot season in the plains and another was approaching,—a discomposing fact, and one to wing the fancy and the feet to Kābul. He, however, left his son Ja'far in his government of Etāwa, and returned to India himself in 1528.

Humāyūn said farewell on April 16th, 1527, and betook himself to Dihlī, where he broke open the treasury and stole its contents. If he had needed money to pay his men, his act might have taken different colour and have been leniently described; but he had had lavish gifts in money and kind from Bābar, and had been allowed to keep the great diamond which the Rānī of Guālīār had given him as the price of family honour and which, there is good ground to believe, is the Koh-i-nūr. Treated as he had been, his act was a crime, and base and mean. Perhaps it may be set to the credit of the older Humāyūn that the record of his theft has survived 1553-4 and his then perusal and annotation of his father's Memoirs. By that time he had suffered many painful consequences of his own acts, and may have concurred with his father's judgment on his younger self. Bābar was extremely hurt by his unexpected conduct and reproached him severely. There was enough now known of Humāyūn's character to awaken doubt of his fitness to rule, and to need all his father's great affection to veil and forgive. From Dihlī he returned to Badakshān, and is next heard of in the autumn of 1528, when he announced the birth of his first-born son, Al-amān. Al-amān was the child of that Bega (Ḥājī) Begam of whom the histories all speak, when in 1539 she is captured by Shīr Shāh at Chausa.

Together with the news of Al-amān's birth came that of a marriage of Kāmrān with a daughter of Sulṭān 'Alī Begchik. Bābar sent congratulatory gifts to both sons in response; and he has included his covering letter to Humāyūn in his text. It is frank, fault-finding, and affectionate. It objects to the name given to the child; it urges action: ‘The world is his who exerts himself’; it objects to Humāyūn's complaints of the remoteness of Badakhshān, and tells him that no bondage is like the bondage of kings, and that it ill becomes him to complain. It attacks Humāyūn's spelling and composition, and ends this topic with words good to quote: ‘You certainly do not excel in letter-writing; and you fail chiefly because you have too great a desire to show off your acquirements. For the future, write unaffectedly, clearly, and in plain words, which will give less trouble to writer and reader.’ Some remarks about Kāmrān have a coming interest; Bābar faintly praises him as a worthy and correct young man, and enjoins favour for him, without a hint of suspicion that it could ever be in Kāmrān's power to show favour to Humāyūn. Humāyūn is also desired to make friends with Khwāja Kilān and with Sulṭān Wais of Kūlāb. He failed with the khwāja, who on Bābar's death joined the worthy and correct Kāmrān. Humāyūn kept on better terms with Sulṭān Wais (Qibchāq Mughal), and at a later date owed much to his daughter, the inimitable Ḥaram (Khurram), who stands up in history bold, capable, haughty, and altogether strongly outlined.

Something must now be set down about Bābar's third adult son, who was a younger full-brother of Kāmrān and is known in history by his sobriquet of 'Askarī, which indicates a camp as his birthplace. Neither his birth nor Kāmrān's is mentioned in the Memoirs, as we now have them,—an omission which other sources allow to be explained by their falling in one of the gaps of the book. 'Askarī was born in 1516 (922H.), and during a period of storm and of camp life. His name first occurs in the Memoirs as having presents sent to him after the battle of Pānīpat, when he is classed with Hindāl, as suited their ages of nine and seven, and they received various gifts, and not, like their two seniors, sums of money. In 1528 he was in Multān, but there is no entry of an appointment, perhaps because it would fall in the gap which extends from April 2nd to September 18th. On the latter day he was received, in home fashion, by his father in his private apartments at Āgra, and then, having spent till December 2nd with him, he was furnished with munitions of' war for a campaign in the eastern districts. Special injunctions were given to the officers to consult with him as to the conduct of affairs. The interest of these details is their relation to the boy of twelve. Few years were needed in those days to support military command. Humāyūn had gone to Badakhshān at eleven; Bābar had been a fighting king at twelve. Boy chiefs were common when fathers were so apt to die by violent means; so were baby figure-heads of armies such as that few-monthed Persian baby who (like an angel's semblance on an ancient battleship) led his father's army for Humāyūn's help in 1544.

On December 12th other signs of dignity were bestowed on the boy 'Askarī: not only a jewelled dagger, a belt, and royal dress of honour, but the insignia of high command, the standard, horse-tail, and kettle-drums; excellent horses, ten elephants, mules and camels, the equipage of a royal camp, and leave to hold a princely court and sit at the head of a hall of state. The small boy's mind is clear to us about the horses, for where is the child of twelve whom they would not delight? But what was in it about the elephants? and how did he look when he inspected their bulky line?

He bade farewell to his father on the 21st,—the Emperor being in his bath, a statement which exhales the East,—and after this, though there are many details of his campaigning, nothing of living interest is set down in the Memoirs about him. In the future he was Kāmrān's shadow, and displayed a loyalty to mother-blood which was natural under the difficulty of being loyal to Humāyūn, but which made him a Tīmūrid foe to his house, who initiated nothing and walked always in the bad path marked out for him by the ‘worthy and correct’ Kāmrān.

Coming back from this excursion into the future, to the simple topic of Bābar's presents to his children, there can be mentioned a set which is quite delightful in its careful choice and appropriateness. It was sent to Kābul in 1528 for Hindāl, and consisted of a jewelled inkstand, a stool inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a short robe of Bābar's own, and an alphabet. What could be better for the royal schoolboy of ten?

In 1528 an order was issued which brought about an event of extreme importance to the ladies in Kābul,— namely, that they should migrate to Hindūstān. There was delay in the execution of the royal command; and having regard to the number of ladies, the difference of opinion as to the advisability of going at all, discussion as to the details of the journey, and also remembering that (as the facts about the migration come out in the Memoirs,) there would be many who thought their family interest might be better served by remaining in Kābul, it is not remarkable that there was delay in starting the cavalcade.

The migration was amply dictated to many of the party by Bābar's wish to see his own people again; but it is clear that the enforced levée en masse of the ladies was a result of considerations of policy and peace. The city was full of women who, by birth or marriage, were attached to various branches of the Tīmūrids, and there was conflict of aims and palpable friction. It may well be that Kāmrān's government provoked unrest, because he was the son of a mother of less birth than were very many of the resident begams of Kābul.

The Emperor was put in full possession of the state of affairs by a letter from Khwāja Kilān which reached him in camp on February 6th, 1528, and which was brought by a servant who, in addition to the written words, gave him all the news of Kābul by word of mouth. Bābar replied to the khwāja on February 11th by that letter which those who know the time and writer rank amongst the truly interesting epistles of the world. The tenor of the khwāja's own is clear from it, and in part reply the Emperor writes:

You take notice of the unsettled state of Kābul. I have considered the matter very attentively and with the best of my judgment, and have made up my mind that in a country where there are seven or eight chiefs, nothing regular or settled is to be looked for. I have therefore sent for my sisters and the ladies of my family into Hindūstān, and, having resolved on making Kābul and all the neighbouring countries and districts part of the imperial domain, I have written fully on the subject to Humāvun and Kāmrān… Immediately on receiving this letter you will, without loss of time, attend my sisters and the ladies of my family as far as the Nīl-āb (Indus); so that, whatever impediments there may be to their leaving Kābul, they must, at all events, start out within a week after this arrives; for as a detachment has left Hindūstān and is waiting for them, any delay will expose it to difficulty, and the country, too, will suffer.’

Who were these seven or eight chiefs in Kābul? Not men! The fighting chiefs were almost all in India; even Mahdī had rejoined the army before the date of this letter. Bābar's word ‘sisters’ is a guiding light, and it does not altogether exclude the influence of the men who, though in Hindūstān, were in touch with Kābul and its friction and intrigues. First of sisters was Khānzāda, who had certainly a holding for her support; and who had influence of birth and personal, as having sacrificed herself in her earlier marriage to secure Bābar's safety. She was now the wife of a man, Mahdī Khwāja, who, if the story told of him by the author of the Ṭabaqāt is true even in gist, was such as to suggest him as a possible successor of Bābar to the powerful and sensible Khalīfa. There was, since her husband was with Bābar and all great ladies had been left in Kābul, Shahr-bānū, Khānzāda's half-sister, wife of Khalīfa's brother, Junaid Barlās, and mother of a son. There was also, it is probable, another of 'Umar Shaikh's daughters, Yādgār.¹⁸

Besides Bābar's sisters de facto, there were others of courtesy. Such was Sulaimān's mother, whose anxieties for his future were, however, about to find happy end by his reinstatement in 1530 in his hereditary government of Badakhshān. There were the families of three men of Tīmūrid birth, grandsons of Sulṭān Ḥusain Mīrzā Bāyqrā, all of whom were in India, and all of whom were men of high pretension. They were,—Muḥammad Sulṭān Mīrzā, the arch-rebel of the future; Qāsim Ḥusain Sulṭān Mīrzā, son of an Uzbeg father; and Muḥammad-zāman Mīrzā, son of Ḥusain's son, Badī'u-z-zāman. There were in Kābul the people of Yādgār-nāṣir also, Bābar's half-nephew. These instances will suffice to show the reality of the elements of unrest which conflicting family interests and jealousies might and did foment in Kābul; they do not include the many others furnished by Bābar's personal circle, and by his numerous and influential aunts.

Two Tīmūrid ladies, Fakhr-jahān and Khadīja, both paternal aunts of the Emperor, had gone to Hindūstān so early as November, 1527. With whom they went or why they went is not recorded. The first was the wife of a Tīrmīzī sayyid, member of a religious family with which royal alliance was frequent, and she would find relations of her husband in the army. The second, Khadīja, has no man mentioned as her husband, an omission by Bābar and Gul-badan which surprises, and which the chance word of another writer may easily fill up. Perhaps these aunts joined their nephew in response to his invitation of April, 1526, that kinsfolk and friends would come and see prosperity with him. They brought their children, and were met outside the city by Bābar on November 23rd, and by him conducted in a lucky hour to their assigned palace¹⁹ in Āgra.

Fakhr-jahān and Khadīja stayed eleven months, and were bidden good-bye before their return journey to Kābul on September 20th, 1528. After all, Khadīja did not go, having affairs of her own to detain her, and this delay allowed the Emperor to pay her another of the Friday calls which he habitually made, during the time of his occupation of Hindūstān, on his elder kinswomen. On the 17th three sisters of Fakhr-jahān and Khadīja arrived in the suburbs and were welcomed. From all these Bābar could hear the news and gossip of Kābul, and thus add to the impressions which led to his order for the begams to join him in India.

Apropos of the aunts of frequent mention, it may be said that both Bābar and Ḥaidar convey the opinion that deference to elder women was a permanent trait of their age and set. Comings and goings of aunts are set down; houses and incomes provided; advice is sought; troubles are carried to them for sympathy; they are ambassadors of peace; their nephews vie with one another as to who shall entertain them; in short, both the Tūzūk and the Tārīkh indicate distinct deference to women of an elder generation.

A good deal about the exodus of the ladies can be gleaned from Bābar and from our princess, who now comes on the scene in her small person of five or six. The order for it was given at latest in 1528; this is clear from the royal letter to the khwāja and from the fact that Māham started in January, 1529. Bābar heard on March 22nd that all had really left Kābul, which news, taken with the arrival of the main cavalcade three months after her, suggests that Māham started first and travelled quickly, as being of a small company, and that the rest set off in detachments, as they and their transport were ready. The whole party would get off between January 21st and the end of February; this can be surmised, because the letter of March 22nd would be about a month in reaching Bābar. Most of the journey would be made by horse-litter, and some perhaps by palki with bearers. Men frequently dropped down the Kābul River on rafts, being thus able to do in twelve hours what ten marches covered; but one cannot suppose the ladies would make this adventurous journey, which was attended by risk even when people did not fall off the raft after potations, as some of Bābar's companions had done. Probably the road taken was that by But-khāk (Dust of Idols) and Jagdalik, and by Jalālābād and the Khaibar; but there is no certainty, because there is no information.

Gul-badan travelled with Māham in advance of her sisters, and thus had experiences all her own and a reception by her father unalloyed by numbers. Her liveliness would while away the tedium of the five months' travel, and help to distract Māham's sad thoughts from the loss of Fārūq, her youngest born. Unfortunately, she sets down nothing about the journey until near its end. Letters between the Emperor and the travellers were frequent. One of the couriers, named Shīrak (Little Lion), who was despatched by him on March 5th, carried not only letters to Māham, but was entrusted with a copy of the Memoirs which had been made to send to Samarqand.²¹

On April 1st, and at Ghāzīpūr, Bābar heard that the ladies had been met at the Indus on February 19th by their military escort under his master-of-horse, and by this amīr convoyed to the Chanāb. This might fitly be told of Māham's party, for there are other records of covering the distance to the Indus in about a month.

On the 22nd a servant of Māham brought letters to Arrah from her whom he had left at the Garden of Purity (Bāgh-i-ṣafā), near Pind-dādan Khān, and this is the last such entry. Māham reached Agra on June 27th, and Bābar met her outside the city at midnight.

Gul-badan gives amusing particulars of her own arrival, all of which she shall be left to tell. She followed Māham into Āgra on the 28th, not having been allowed to travel with her through the previous night. Then she saw her father. Of him she can have kept only a dim memory, and it is likely enough she would stand in some awe of him and his deeds, but no word he has written suggests that a child needed to fear him, and she soon experienced ‘happiness such that greater could not be imagined.’ Happy child! and happy father, too! who recovered such a clever and attractive little daughter. It is not only her book that lets us know she had a lively mind, but the fact of its composition at an age when wits are apt to be rusted by domestic peace. Only a light that was strong in childhood would have burned so long to guide her unaccustomed pen after half a century of life, and only a youth of happy thoughts and quick perceptions have buoyed her, still gay and vivacious, across the worries and troubles of Humāyūn's time.

There were pleasant days after the coming to Āgra, when Bābar took Māham, and the child also, to see his works at Dholpūr and Sīkrī. He had always been a builder and a lover of a view, a maker of gardens and planter of trees. Much of the scenery of his new location displeased him; he thought the neighbourhood of Āgra ‘ugly and detestable’ and ‘repulsive and disgusting,’ words which do not now link well with that Āgra which he and his line have made the goal of the pilgrim of beauty. It is difficult to go back in fancy to the city without a Tāj, with no Sikundra near and with Sīkrī uncrowned.

Dholpūr and Sīkrī had much to show of work done by the orders of the Emperor,—‘my royal father,’ as Gul-badan generally calls him, using the home word bābā invariably. At Sīkrī, amongst other buildings, was that in which she says he used to sit and write his book, i.e., the Tūzūk. There, too, the great battle which had been fought in 1527 will not have been ignored to ears so sympathetic as Māham's. Perhaps here the little girl first learnt dimly what it was to be a Ghāzī, and to fight on the side of Heaven. She says that when these excursions had been made, and three months after her own arrival had sped by, the begams, with Khānzāda as their chief, came within meeting distance of the capital, and that the Emperor went out to welcome them. There is nothing of this in the Memoirs, which are silent after the arrival of Māham as to the doings of the royal ladies. The reunion was soon to be clouded by anxieties and loss.

A brief return in the story of Humāyūn must be made here. In the summer of 1529 he heard in Badakhshān of his father's failing health, and, without asking leave, set off for India. He passed through Kābul, and there, to Kāmrān's surprise, met him, who had just come up from Ghaznī. The two conferred, and persuaded the ten-years-old Hindāl, who was under orders for Āgra, to take up the government of Badakhshān. Humāyūn then continued his march, and arrived in Āgra without announcement to his father.

He came to the presence just when, by a coincidence which Māham may have helped to bring about, his parents were talking of him. It would be natural for the mother, who cannot have been ignorant of her son's coming, to stir gentle thoughts of him and to warm his father's heart towards him before they met, and by this to break the shock of the unpermitted absence from duty.

Bābar was greatly angered by the desertion, which in truth placed Badakhshān in difficulty by withdrawing both troops and control. Its consequences were important, and caused him profound regret. To stand fast across the mountains and to push out the royal holdings beyond the Oxus from the vantage - ground of Badakhshān was a cherished dream, and one which he had taken steps through both Humāyūn and Kāmrān to realize. He wished Humā-yūn to return to his post, but the latter, while saying he must go if ordered, was not willing to leave his people again. Bābar then asked Khalīfa to go, but this request was evaded, and there is much to arouse surmise that Khalīfa saw in it the act of someone who wished him absent from the scene of crisis now foreseen as near. In his objection to leave Āgra, affection for his old master would be a natural factor; another was his own supreme influence, the sequel of his character and of Bābar's recent failure in health; and springing from his power was, perhaps the dominant factor of his objection to leave,—a disposition to supplant Humāyūn in the succession by a ruler of less doubtful character.

The fate of Badakhshān was decided by its bestowal on its hereditary chief, Sulaimān Mīrzā, Mīrān-shāhī, now a boy of sixteen, while Humāyūn's youthful locum tenens was ordered to come to India. Humāyūn betook himself to the idle enjoyments of his jāgīr of Sambhal, and was there, in a few months, attacked by illness which threatened life and which led to the remarkable episode of Bābar's self-sacrifice to save him. The narrative of this stands in all the histories and need not be repeated, but for the sake of making our princess' details clear, it is as well to state what was the rite performed by Bābar.

There was and is in the East belief that if offering be made of the thing most precious to the suppliant, and if the offering be accepted, Heaven will give the life of a sick man in exchange. The rite observed is simple: first prayer of intercession is made; then the suppliant walks three times round the sick man's bed. Of Bābar's sincerity there is no doubt; in mind and heart he gave himself; he felt conviction that, after the circuits, he had borne away the illness. Humāyūn was restored and Bābar died,—a return from the gate of death and an entry there which might have occurred without Bābar's rite, but none the less was the self-sacrifice complete because he believed in its efficacy and was willing to die.

His health worsened rapidly after this and he made ready to go. Marriages were arranged for Gul-rang and Gul-chihra; the amīrs were addressed; Humāyūn was counselled and named to the succession. Bābar died on December 26th, 1530. ‘Black fell the day,’ says his daughter; ‘we passed that ill-fated day each in a hidden corner.’

The question of Khalīfa's wish to supersede Humāyūn is of great interest. It is written of by Niẓāmu-d-dīn Aḥmad, in the Ṭabaqāt, who had the story he retails from his father, Muqīm, an old retainer of the Court. Abū'l-faẓl repeats the main statement, which is that Khalīfa had had thoughts of superseding Humāyūn by Muḥammad Mahdī Khwāja, the husband of Khānzāda Begam.²⁵

A few of the many points involved in Niẓāmu-d-dīn's story find fitting entry here. Bābar must have been long conscious of the fact that he was not so strong as before he faced the Indian climate; he did not send for Humāyūn; he wished him to leave when he came unasked; he had 'Askarī in the full dignity of a commander near him; as he lay dying, he was fretfully anxious for Hindāl's coming; he and Khalīfa were friends of many years' testing; both knew the faults of Humāyūn; if Khalīfa had planned to set the latter aside, it is likely that the thought was not altogether absent from the mind of Bābar; it is not credible that Khalīfa should have regarded a supersession as practicable, if he had no acquaintance with the Emperor's doubts as to Humāyūn, and without knowing that these were shared by others than his master and himself, for the nomination would be made by Bābar and to his chiefs.

Muḥammad Mahdī Khwāja is one of those men about whose birth and descent particulars are looked for with the sure hope of success in the search. Yet nothing is said on the topic by Bābar or by Gul-badan. When he first appears on the scene (in the Persian version, and presumably also in the Elphinstone text), he is not introduced, as it is customary for Bābar to introduce, with some few words indicating family. This omission may be a result of forgetfulness bred of familiarity, or it may be, and most probably is, that he himself first met Muḥammad Mahdī at a date which falls in one of the gaps of his book.^25a

Niẓāmu-d-dīn's statements must have some corn of truth, and they imply that by birth, as well as by marriage and military rank, Mahdī was a man who, without outrage, might be raised still higher. There are hints which make it seem probable that he was a Tīrmīzī sayyid and the son of a Tīmūrid mother. The suggestion of Tīrmīzī parentage is supported by the burial of Abū'l-ma'ālī Tīrmīzī in the place of interment of Mahdī and Khānzāda.²⁶

It has suggested itself to me as possible that Khalīfa's plan of superseding Humāyūn was meant to apply only to Hindūstān, or at least to a part of Bābar's dominions. Abū-sa'īd had partitioned his lands amongst his sons; provinces so varied as Bābar's seem to demand division even more than his grandfather's had done. We look back to Bābar across Akbar's Indian Empire, and may not give sufficient weight to the fact that Dihlī and Āgra were not the centre or the desired heart of Bābar's. He wanted Farghāna and Samarqand and much more beyond the Oxus, and he had taken decisive steps towards securing his object through both his elder sons, and had given them charge and work of extension in those countries. Kābul was the true centre of his desired empire, and to force the Uzbegs back in widening circle was his persistent wish.

If Mahdī or any other competent man had ruled in Dihlī, by whatever tenure, this would not necessarily have ruined Humāyūn, or have taken from him the lands most coveted by Bābar. All Bābar's plans and orders were such as to keep Humāyūn beyond the Hindū-kush, and to take him across the Oxus. The dislike of the royal army to Hindūstān was a large factor in the question of centralizing government there, and so too would be the temptations to indolence afforded by its climate and customs, to which it was easy to foresee from Humāyūn's life in Sambhal that he would readily succumb.

Kābul was made an imperial domain by Bābar's written command to both elder sons, and his own words leave one in doubt as to his further intentions about it. To whom Hindūstān would have been given if Humāyūn had obeyed orders and had held fast in Badakhshān, there is nothing to show, but weight is due to the gist of the story of the supersession. Kāmrān declared that Kābul was given to his mother Gul-rukh, and Humāyūn gave it in fief to Kāmrān at his accession. There is mist over the scene from which only the accomplished facts emerge. Humāyūn came to India; he was Māham's son; she was there; Khalīfa let Mahdī fall; Humāyūn's personal charm reasserted itself over Bābar's anger, and he became Emperor of Hindūstān and all the imperial domains.

Child though Gul-badan was at her father's death, she must have been impressed by the events that preceded it: Alwar's death; her own accident at Sīkrī; her father's premonitions and dervish-moods; Humāyūn's sudden arrival and the anger it caused; his illness and the dread for his life; her father's awe-inspiring rite and its bewildering success; her sisters' marriages, which could not be joyful; the haunting suspicion of poison; the end and the blank,—all too much for so short a time in strange scenes and in a disabling climate.

Following the death came the forty days of mourning, and of good works and gifts at the tomb in the Garden of Rest at Āgra. Sīkrī furnished a part of the endowment for its readers and reciters, and Māham sent them food twice daily from her own estate. The tomb was put under the guardianship of a man whom our begam calls Khwāja Muḥammad 'Alī 'asas (night-guard), and who may be he that ‘never killed a sparrow,’ and may be Māham's brother. If so, he will be heard of again under other and widely different circumstances in 1547. As is well known, Bābar's body was conveyed to Kābul, and there laid to rest in the spot chosen by himself.

In Bābar's history the man holds the interest and lifts the eyes over his shortcomings to his excellence. No character demanding admiration attracts interest to Humāyūn, but yet his story is one which it needs a master-hand to unfold. A Tolstoi could depict his faults and merits; his qualities and defects rolled a tide of retribution over him and those bound to him as surely and visibly as it does over Anna Karēnine and her associates. From the historic standpoint, Mr. Erskine has told the tale in a way to hold his readers, and it befits this humble introduction to build up only such framework as will support details, some of which concern the ladies of the time, and others of which may interest readers who are not Orientalists.

In order to realize how fully the fate of the ladies was involved in that of the Emperor, it must be remembered that his occupation of Hindūstān was unrooted, military and the sport of war. When we in Britain have to lament a reverse of arms, we do it in safe homes and we brace ourselves to what will come next, in the familiar surroundings of the daily tradesman, the usual postman, and the trivial comforts of the hearth. Even Colonials had a refuge under the flag at measurable distance from their outraged homes in 1899-1900. But when the Tīmūrids were defeated in 1539-40, and driven from Āgra and Dihlī and Lāhōr, there was no refuge open to all. Their head, Humāyūn, had none; a brother took his last. Like the Israelites, he and his followers then wandered in deserts and hungered and thirsted; dwelt in strange lands, pursued and attacked, exiled and humiliated. The course of events was less historic than biographical, was individual and not national. There were no nations behind Bābar and Humāyūn; there were only ruling families who came and went as they could or could not get the upper hand of other houses; and there was the dumb mass whom the earth nourished, and labour of whom fed, in luxury of life and strength of alien arms, whatever dynasty had just struck hardest.

An enumeration of the chief events of the downfall of Humāyūn and of his years of exile will give our required framework. He became Emperor in December, 1530. In the next year Kāmrān took possession of Lāhōr and the Panjāb, in addition to his grant of Kābul, and he was allowed to remain in possession of these wide and potential lands. In 1533 there were rebellions of the ‘mīrzās.’ By 1535 Gujrāt had been overrun, and in 1537 was lost. Years of indifference fostered the growth of Shīr Shāh Afghān's power, and there were campaigns against him in Bengal, which began well and ended ill. There was growing indignation against Humāyūn's character and private life, and this culminated in the attempt to set him aside for Hindāl in 1539. Through months of indolence and folly, he dropped oil on his own descending wheels, and practically abdicated the throne; finally, there were the crushing reverses of Chausa on June 27th, 1539, and of Kanauj on May 17th, 1540. Then came the flight of the Tīmūrids to Lāhōr, and their exodus from the lands that had been theirs east of the Indus.

Māham was spared the worst of these misfortunes; she died before Hindāl's marriage, which Jauhar places in 1537. Her son had certainly addicted himself to drugs before her death, but his worst lapses into sloth followed it, and it was after 1537 that the pace of his descent became rapid. Much can be learned from our princess of the reaction of outside events on the inner circle, and she gives details which could only be gathered in that circle. This is particularly so as to Hindāl's rebellion and the home conference about it, and about the murder in his name, but not by his act, of Humāyūn's favourite, Shaikh Bahlūl. Gul-badan, like the good sister she was, makes excuses for her brother, and those who have not her bias of affection, can add others and stronger. Hindāl was nineteen, a good and successful young general; he was supported by men of rank and age, some of whom had come from Gaur, and had seen Humāyūn's army perishing in that sink of fever and corruption, and Humāyūn buried within its walls. There was no ruler in Hindūstān; Shīr Shāh was between Humāyūn and the capital. The ‘mīrzās’ were lifting up their heads again, and a chief was needed. Hindāl was perhaps always the best of Bābar's sons in character, and certainly so when Humāyūn had become the changeling of opium. He had the Friday prayer (khuṭba) read in his own name; and on his behalf, Nūru-d-dīn Muḥammad, a son-in-law of Bābar and grandson of Sulṭān Ḥusain Bāyqrā, murdered Shaikh Bahlūl. The motive of the crime appears to have been desire to place the death as an impassable barrier between the royal brothers.

The news of Hindāl's rebellion stirred Humāyūn to move from Gaur. His march to Āgra was broken off tragically by the rout at Chausa, where he lost 8,000 of his best Tūrkī troops by sword or river. Here Ma'sūma was widowed, and here a terrible blank was made in the royal household by the loss of several women. Bega's (Ḥājī Begam) capture is known to all the histories, and so, too, is her return to Humāyūn. Shīr Shāh promised safety to all women found in the camp, and there is no reason to doubt that he did his best for them. But there had been fighting round their tents before his guards arrived, and some of Humāyūn's amīrs had perished in trying to defend them. It came about that there were losses of women and of children as to whose fate no word was ever heard again. Amongst them was 'Āyisha Bāyqrā, the wife of Qāsim Ḥusain Sulṭān Mīrzā. The next name in our begam's list takes us far back. It is that of Bachaka, a head-woman servant (khalīfa), and one such and so named had escaped from Samarqand with Bābar's mother in 1501. The one lost at Chausa had been a servant in Bābar's household, and may have been she of the memorable siege. Next are named two children, a foster-child and Bega's 'Aqīqa of six years old. Two of Humāyūn's wives of low degree also disappeared.

When Humāyūn had been rescued from the river by a lowly water-carrier, he made way to Āgra, and there had a conversation with Gul-badan about the loss of 'Aqīqa. The princess was then seventeen years old, and a comment of his, which she sets down, lets it be known that she is now a married woman. Humāyūn told her he did not recognise her at first, because when he went away with the army (1537) she wore the tāq, and now wears the lachak. The tāq is a cap, and the lachak,—a wife's coiffure—is a kerchief folded crossways, tied under the chin by two corners, and capable of much more elaboration and ornament than this simple description would lead one to suppose. This is Gul-badan's nearest approach to informing her readers of her marriage, and she never mentions her husband as such. He was her second cousin, Khiẓr Khwāja Khān, Chaghatāi Mughal, and of the line of the Great Khāns. His father was Aiman Khwāja, and his mother a cousin of Ḥaidar Mīrzā Dughlāt. One ancestor was that Yūnas whose fate as a chief of nomads was in such entertaining contrast to his taste as a lover of cities and books. Khiẓr had many other noteworthy kinsfolk, but to tell of them would lead too far afield. It is useful, however, to say that Gul-rang and Gul-chihra had married two of his uncles, and that his brother Yasīn (Ḥasan or Aīs)-daulat, the Fair Sulṭān, became the husband of Kāmrān's Ḥabība. He had two other brothers in India, namely, Mahdī and Mas'ūd. Their father and one at least of them came from Kāshghar to Āgra just after the death of Bābar.

Shortly after this interview Humāyūn took the field against Shīr Shāh, and Kāmrān, deserting his post, left Āgra and led off his 12,000 troopers towards Lāhōr. Under his escort went an immense convoy of women and helpless people, and he wished to take Gul-badan also. She was extremely unwilling to go and only partially resigned herself when she saw that it was Humāyūn's will. She bewailed herself as parting from those with whom she had grown up, and no uninitiated reader could guess that she was going with her father's son. She was a clever and attractive girl whose society was welcome to all her brothers, but in Kāmrān's wish to take her now there is something more. It is possible that he who liked her, thought of her safety; it is probable that, as he had attached two of her husband's brothers, Yasīn-daulat and Mahdī, and perhaps the third, Mas'ūd, he desired to have Khiẓr too. Gul-badan's departure from the home circle was perhaps her first adventure into the foreign world as a married woman. By going when she did and under the escort of Kāmrān's strong force, she was spared a terrible journey which her mother and the rest of the royal party made under care of Hindāl, with foes in front and behind, and at great peril.

There now followed that amazing battle at Kanauj, in which 40,000 men in armour fled, without a gun fired, before 10,000. Here again, as at Chausa, the deaths in the river were appalling, and here again the Emperor was saved by a lowly man. Again the remnant made its way to Āgra; but, says Ḥaidar, ‘we made no tarry; broken and dispirited, in a state heart-rending to tell, we went on to Lāhōr.’ Their road took them to Sīkrī, of which the memories and witness to Bābar's genius for living must have rubbed salt into the wounds of their spirit. Many ladies had remained in Āgra, and Humāyūn spoke to Hindāl of the difficulty of getting them safe to Lāhōr, and confessed that he had often regretted not killing 'Aqīqa with his own hand. Hindāl combated the suggestion, born of defeat, that a mother and sisters should be killed, and himself fought his way through country folk and Afghāns, and convoyed them safe to Lāhōr.

Here was a mighty gathering of Tīmūrids and their following, and five months slipped by in uncertain counsels and fruitless talk. The four brothers met often to discuss plans, and it seems that the emptiness of this in practical result lay in what was in the mind of Kāmrān and made him object to every course proposed. He wished to make terms for himself with the daily approaching victor, and to keep Lāhōr and the Panjāb; but if this could not be, he meant to hold fast to Kābul and keep Humāyūn out of it. The fief of Kābul had been granted to him by Humāyūn; Humāyūn therefore could resume it. That he would now do so was Kāmrān's expectation; so, when Humāyūn proposed to go to Badakhshān, Kāmrān would not hear of it, because the road thither lay through Käbul, and once in that beloved city, it was highly improbable that Humāyūn would move further.

On October 30th, 1540, something decisive had to be done, for Shīr Shāh had crossed the Biah and might appear at any hour. ‘It was like the Day of Resurrection,’ says our princess; the confusion was extreme, and, like the simile, impossible for us to realize. It has been said that 200,000 souls left Lāhōr in flight on that day; an overtax of all resources of transport.

Happily for the fugitives, the Rāvī was fordable, but the Chanāb required boats and the Jehlam was in flood. Many episodes unfolded themselves in the duāb of the Rāvī and Chanāb. Ḥaidar Mīrzā took his departure for Kashmīr, hoping to secure in it a royal retreat; Hindāl and Yādgārnāṣir deserted and went south for Multān; Humāyūn was urged to put further mischief out of Kāmrān's power by his death; he refused,—a refusal which would be upheld in the ḥaram, ever faithful to the injunctions of Bābar, and knowing these better than the real risks caused by Kāmrān's disloyalty. Penetrating everything was the irritation aroused by Kāmrān's opposition to the royal march for Kābul,—irritation which diffused itself and barely missed a sequel of bloodshed.

The depression and gloom of the men who were the responsible leaders of the fugitive mob must have been deep and painful; but what was in the minds of their dependents,—the ordinary troopers, the helpless women, the comfortless children, and the camp-followers?

There were many striking scenes in the lives of Bābar and Humāyūn, but none more dramatic than that in which the latter's flight through the Panjāb ended. A little west of the Jhelam, at Khushāb, the road runs through a ravine of an outlying spur of the Salt Range. Beyond this it forks, north-west for Kābul and south-west for Sind. Kāmrān asserted his intention to enter the defile first, perhaps with the object of closing the Kābul road. Humāyūn insisted on his right to take precedence, and blows threatened between their followers. Mediation was made by Abū'l-baqā, the man who had led Bābar to offer himself for his son in 1530. He directed Humāyūn's attention to the superior force of Kāmrān, and he told Kāmrān that it was the right of Humāyūn to take precedence. In the end Humāyūn marched first and took the southern road. At the fork of the ways each commander and many a man must have made or confirmed his choice between the brothers. And so the mighty caravan split itself, and followed Kāmrān and 'Askarī or Humāyūn.

With the Kābul section many women went to the safer asylum. They had no choice to make where the roads parted, but those of them who saw their litters turn southwards and themselves carried by a strange road, of which they knew that it took them from the old home in Kābul, must have had some bitter feelings about their destiny. I believe Gul-badan went with Kāmrān. She does not say so, but it comes out with tolerable clearness incidentally. Her mother, Dil-dār, had gone with Hindāl to Multān, and with her was Ḥamīda-bānū, Akbar's mother to be. Khān-zāda seems to have gone with Humāyūn, for her niece mentions her later as an ambassador from him in Sind to Qandahār. No other writer speaks of this embassy, I think; but most tell of her other, made later from Kābul to Qandahār in the service of peace between Kāmrān and Humāyūn, after the latter had returned from his Persian exile (1545).

Khiẓr is not mentioned as with Humāyūn in the desert wanderings, but he was in Qandahār with 'Askari in 1545. On the occasion of her reunion with Humāyūn in Kābul, in 1545, Gul-badan says that there had been a ‘toil and moil of separation’ lasting five years. The lustrum points to a farewell said at the Jhelam. One thing makes for her having gone with the royal party, and this is her lively account of what befell it; but she is equally lively about Persia; where she certainly did not go. She had excellent opportunity of hearing what went on in Sind because she met her mother again in 1543, after she had come to Kābul from Qandahār. She also met Ḥamida in 1545, and could hear from her not only about her wedding, concerning which she has such an excellent passage, but also about her visit to Persia. There was ample and easy opportunity for the two old companions to talk over the past and to refresh their memories when the book was being written in and after 1587 and when they were comfortably installed as the beloved and respected ‘Beneficent Ladies’ of Akbar. Moreover, Gul-badan has a note of acknowledgment to Khwāja Kīsīk for help derived from his writings, as to the early part of the royal wanderings. There is therefore nothing to contradict the probability that she continued under Kāmrān's protection from 1540, the date of her unwilling departure from Āgra, till 1545, when Humāyūn took Kābul.

During the lustrum in which she did not see Humāyūn, his adventures were too many and too remarkable for abbreviation in these pages. Mr. Erskine has told them with evident enjoyment, and Gul-badan supplements his narrative with some material he did not use; it may be interjected here that he had no knowledge of her book. For most of the period of the exile in Sind and Persia, Ḥamīda was a good authority, and more than once Gul-badan has prefaced a statement with ‘Ḥamīda-bānū Begam says.’ She was one in the cruel desert march to Umarkot; it will have been from her that the princess heard that Akbar's birthplace was a beautiful spot where food was very cheap; she was one of the little band which fled from Quetta; she shared the qualified hospitality of the Persian king, and, it should be said, reproduced only a sense of good treatment by him; and she came back to Qandahār with his auxiliary army.

In Kābul Gul-badan did not want for old friends and kinswomen. She had her own home occupations and her children to look after; of these, though she names one only, Sa'ādat-yār, she may have had several; but there is no definite statement as to which of Khiẓr's children were also hers. She was not unkindly treated by Kāmrān, as were the other royal ladies whom he turned out of their usual homes and exploited in purse. Indeed, he wished to regard her as one of his own family and to distinguish between her and her mother; but of this she would not hear.

In 1543 she had again the society of Hindāl who, after losing Qandahār to Kāmrān, came as a prisoner upon parole to Kābul and his mother's house. The movements of Humāyūn were made known from Sind to Kābul with speed and completeness, and the news was acted on to Humāyūn's great detriment. There were domestic reasons why Shāh Ḥusain Arghūn should not be well disposed to Humāyūn, besides the substantial one of the latter's entry and long occupation of his country. Of the more intimate causes of ill-will one was inherited; Bābar had dispossessed the Arghūns from both Kābul and Qandahār, and not only so, but had given in marriage to his foster-brother Qāsim an Arghūn girl, Māh-chūchak, daughter of Muqīm Mīrzā. This was a great offence, because it was a misalliance in Arghūn eyes and because it was enforced and the bride was spoil of battle. The story of her anger and of her rebellion at her fate is delightfully told by Mr. Erskine, and to his pages readers may be safely referred for the sequel of my brief allusion to it.

When Qāsim kūka died, Māh-chūchak married her cousin, Shāh Ḥusain, and she was with him during Humāyūn's miserable stay in Sind.

Another cause of friction lay in the presence of a former wife of Ḥusain with Humāyūn's household. In 1524 Ḥusain had allied himself with Khalīfa's family by marrying his daughter Gul-barg. As the fact adds to the domestic complication, it may be mentioned that at the same time Ḥusain's stepdaughter, Nāhīd, the child of Qāsim and Māh-chūchak, married Khalīfa's son, Muḥibb-'alī. Ḥusain and Gul-barg (Rose-leaf) did not get on well, and she left him after what Mīr Ma'sūm calls two years of wedded life. She then, says the same author, went to India with Jannat-āshyānī (Humāyūn) ‘previous to the fitrat.’ This last word is frequently used of the rout at Chausa in 1539, but the next nearest catastrophe to which it would apply after 1524 is the death of Bābar, because Gul-barg is named by Gul-badan in Humāyūn's household shortly after his accession. She was with him in Sind in 1541 onwards, and so, too, was Sulṭānam,³⁷ who was perhaps her mother, and both were unlikely to make the best of Shāh Ḥusain to Humāyūn.

In 1545 Kābul heard that Humāyūn was on his way back from Persia with the Shāh's army behind him. A first result of this was to bring the little Akbar within reach of Khānzāda and to her charge. All the histories tell of his wintry journey from Qandahār taken with Bakhshī-bānū, the one being under three and the other about four. Their coming adds a touch of tenderness to the historic Khānzāda, who paces through the histories sad and wise and trusted. She kissed the baby feet and hands of Akbar, and declared they were the very hands and feet of Bābar, and that he was like him altogether. Her first marriage with Shaibānī had been made to save Bābar from captivity or death. She was divorced because suspected of leaning to his side when his interests conflicted with her husband's, and she had been restored to him (1511) when she was about thirty-three years old.³⁸ To the reader's fancy she wears a mourning garb; she is mentioned with deference, and is a dignified figure in the turmoil of her day. Her third marriage,—she was doubly widowed at Merv,—takes an impersonal colour, as an alliance which her age, story and loss of her only son make seem rather one contracted to confer honour and afford her a safe home, than on any ground of personal affection. She bore Mahdī no child; she adopted his sister Sulṭānam at the age of two, and reared her to become the wife of Hindāl.

By March 21st Humāyūn was besieging Qandahār, and he then sent an envoy to Kābul, who would be a welcome guest as teller of the events since Humāyūn had left Quetta in 1543. This was Bairām Khān Bahārlū, and with him went Bāyazīd bīyāt. Bairām saw Akbar, and could take back to Ḥamīda news of his welfare; and also a number of princes who were kept in Kābul under Kāmrān's eye. These were Hindāl, Yādgār-nāṣir, some of the ‘mīrzās,’ Sulaimān, Ḥaram and Ibrāhīm.

Bairām spent six weeks waiting till Kāmrān should choose his course now that he knew his brother was the stronger; and when he left the city, he was accompanied by Khānzāda, charged to mollify Humāyūn and smooth the way for 'Askarī when the latter should submit. She went into Qandahār, but her presence did not bring about the immediate surrender, and the weary siege carried on its burden of suffering. Many of the amīrs of the defence began to slip away; the two Khiẓrs, Hazāra and Cha-ghatāi , dropped themselves over the wall. The first got away to the mountains with adventures which fit a Highland setting; the second sought Humāyūn and obtained forgiveness.

Qandahār was surrendered on September 3rd, and Askarī and his amīrs came out with swords hung round their necks, and some having winding-sheets in their hands. He was forgiven, and a feast with wine and talk and music sped the night away. While 'Askarī was gay with the rest, someone laid before him his own letters to the Biluchī chiefs of whom Gul-badan tells, urging them to capture Humāyūn when he was in flight from Quetta. This was Humāyūn's revenge.

Meantime Kāmrān was in singular isolation in Kābul. He heard of the fall of Qandahār, of the move of the royal army for Kābul, of the death of the travel-worn Khānzāda, and of the escape of some of his princely détenus. He was depressed and irritable. He sent troops out to meet Humāyūn, but there was no fighting, and he fled by way of Ghaznī to Sind. Then came the end of the ‘toil and moil’ of separation, and Gul-badan met her brother again after five years, on November 15th, 1545. For awhile there was peace and festivity in Kābul. Ḥamīda followed the army in the spring; she had now a second child, a girl, born in Persia, and she took possession once more of her first-born. Humāyūn wished to see if Akbar, whom his mother had had to desert at Quetta when he was fourteen months old, would remember her now. He had him taken into a room in which a number of ladies had assembled and seated him on the masnad. The child recognized Ḥamīda, and made his way to her arms. Abū'l-faẓl, who tells the story, gives all the credit of the recognition to the boy; but to those not dazzled by the light in which Akbar lived for his historian, it seems extremely probable that the child had some help from the smile which he had known as one of the first happy things of life.

In the spring, too, Humāyūn set out on a campaign in Badakhshān. He sent word back to the governor of Kābul, Uncle Muḥammad 'Ali, that he was to strangle Yādgārnāṣir, who had been tried and condemned to death for treachery. The khwāja declined the office. ‘How should I kill the mīrzā, I who have never killed a sparrow?’ This uncle (ṭaghāī) seems a mild man for his post. Another executioner was found, and the mīrzā ‘was relieved of the pains of existence.’

Humāyūn took 'Askarī with him as a precautionary measure. Of the ladies, Māh-chūchak went, and in attendance, Bībī Fāṭima, the chief armed woman of his ḥaram and mother of Zuhra, whom Ḥamīda's brother was to marry and murder. Near Khishm Humāyūn fell alarmingly ill and lay unconscious for four days. He had nurses at hand whose excellence is attested by the annals, and it adds life to the scene to know that the long watch over the unconscious man was broken by his opening his eyes just when Māh-chūchak was dropping pomegranate-juice into his mouth. He recovered, but it was a perilous time for him and his supremacy, and had a bad sequel.

News of the illness went to Sind, and Kāmrān, reinforced by his father-in-law, Ḥusain, hurried up and seized Kābul. Winter was at its depth on the passes, and the amīrs with the royal force were anxious to get back to protect their families. They had premonitions that he would take the city again, and many slipped away in small parties and went to Kābul, where they found all their anticipations and dread justified. It does not seem right to stigmatize their leaving Humāyūn as traitorous; they had their own people to save, and this might be done by slight show of submission to Kāmrān. No one can consider Humāyūn a man who had claim to fidelity when the lives and honour of wives and children were in the balance. Indeed, to have left Kābul under the charge of Muḥammad 'Alī was to court disaster, and to make reasonable a good deal of independence of action in those whose unarmed people he could not protect.

Every fear of the amīrs was justified. On his northward march Kāmrān passed through Ghaznī, where Zahīd Beg was governor. He it was who when offered a Bengal appointment in 1538, had asked Humāyūn if he could not find another place to kill him in. He had not waited for a reply, but had left Bengal, and helped Hindāl to rebel in Āgra. Kāmrān now answered his question in Ghaznī, and after this murder hurried off towards Kābul. ‘It was morning, and the Kābulīs were off their guard, and grass-cutters and water-carriers were going in and out as usual. Mīrzā Kāmrān went in with all these common people.’ So speaks the princess. The gentle-hearted governor was at the ḥamām, and was brought before Kāmrān, without time given to dress, and there and then sabred. The list of other cruelties and murders is too terrible reading for these pages, and the ensuing siege was full of barbarous acts. Humāyūn crossed the passes as soon as it was practicable, and sat down to take the city. When Kāmrān saw at length that he could not hold it, he escaped through a hole fashioned in the wall, got through the trenches and away to the mountains. Some say Hindāl let him pass the royal lines; others that Ḥājī Muḥammad Khān kūka overtook him later (so destitute that he was being carried by a man), and that Kāmrān appealed to their milk-brotherhood and was allowed to go free. He then joined his hereditary foes, the Uzbegs.

In 1548 Humāyūn entered upon a campaign in Badakh-shān which yielded interesting personal matters, such as this rivulet of the great stream of affairs can convey. He left Kābul on June 12th, and Ḥamīda bore him company with Akbar as far as Gul-bihār. As governor this time a soldier, and a man enraged against Kāmrān, was left in charge of Kābul. The campaign culminated in the capture of Tāliqān, which was made over on August 17th by Kāmrān, who was allowed to go to the refuge of all whose presence was undesired at home, Makka. Piety had no part in Kāmrān's intention to betake himself to the holy city, and when he had heard, with incredulous ears, that Humāyūn was meting out mercy without justice to the revolted amīrs he had captured, he took heart and himself asked forgiveness. It is almost incredible, and would be quite so if one did not know Humāyūn, that he was received with kettle-drums, trumpets, tears and pardon. Certainly Humāyūn never deprived himself of the luxury of tears and the loose rein on his feelings. So wonderful was the following scene that Mr. Erskine's words shall tell it: ‘When Kāmrān approached the Emperor, who was sitting in state in the pavilion of public audience, he took a whip from the girdle of Mu'nim Khān, who stood by, and passing it round his neck, presented himself as a criminal. “Alas, alas!” exclaimed the Emperor, “there is no need of this; throw it away.” The mīrzā made three obeisances, according to the usual etiquette of the Court, after which the Emperor gave him the formal embrace and commanded him to be seated. Kāmrān began to make excuses for his past conduct and to express his regret. “What is past is past,” said the Emperor. “Thus far we have conformed to ceremony; let us now meet as brothers.” They then rose and clasped each other to their breasts in the most affectionate manner, and both burst into tears, sobbing aloud, so as to affect all present. Humāyūn, on resuming his seat, desired his brother to sit next to him on the left, the place of honour, adding kindly in Tūrkī, the language of the family, “Sit close to me.” A cup of sherbet was brought, of which the Emperor, having drunk one half, handed it to his brother, who drank the other. A grand entertainment followed, at which the four brothers (also Sulaimān), who now met for the first time after a long separation, sat on the same carpet and dined, or, to use the words of the historian, ate salt together. The festival was prolonged for two days in the midst of universal rejoicing. As Kāmrān, from the rapidity and hurried nature of his return, had left his tents behind him on the road, the Emperor ordered a set to be pitched close to his own, and, at his desire, consented to 'Askarī's going to stay with him.’

For this historic feast Gul-badan has provided a hors d'œuvre in shape of a story of improper conduct in Sulaimān which, if it expressed derision, as her vague wording does not forbid to be read, was fully justified by both what had been and what was to come. It is a very funny little tale, and readers are commended to it.

To tears and professions were added lands and freedom. Kāmrān received Kūlāb, where Ḥaram Begam's father had once ruled for Bābar and Humāyūn. He was now dead, and his son, Chakr 'Alī, was left with Kāmrān there. The mīrza was not pleased with his fief. ‘What!’ he exclaimed to the bearer of the deed of grant, ‘have I not been king of Kābul and Badakhshān? Kūlāb is a mere district of Badakhshān. How can I serve in it?’ The bearer observed that he had heard Kāmrān was wise, and begged permission to remind him that the wonder was he had received anything at all. 'Askarī, too, was given a fief, and then, leaving them neighbours and at large, Humāyūn went back to Kābul in October, 1548.

A campaign was planned for 1549 against the Uzbegs and Balkh. This was done despite marked instability in the royal following. Instability or, in a plainer word, desertion, was an accident to which Humāyūn was peculiarly liable. One cause of it is more interesting than the common one of personal gain, because it is rooted in theological bias. Humāyūn's coquetry with Shiism in Persia is one of the most entertaining of the episodes of his sojourn there, and it had consequences in arousing distrust of him, which cropped up from time to time. Bābar himself had lost ground because of his tolerance to variety of faith. But to this, both in the father and still more in the son, were added, as causes of desertion, the flux and reflux of weak government which forbid men to know who will keep the upper hand and have power to oppress.

To return to the Balkh campaign: spring was waited for and there was delay for men. Spring came, and the minds of the ladies turned to thoughts of excursions out of town. They remarked more than once to Humāyūn that the riwāj would be coming up in the hills. This is a plant of subacid flavour which some say is like sorrel and some like rhubarb. It was, at least, a plant that people made excursions to eat, much as others go blackberrying. To these hints for change, the royal reply was that the army was going out; that it would pass by the Koh-idāman (which is renowned for its riwāj); and that the ladies should go too. Gul-badan must not be deprived of her story of the picnic, which illuminates the domestic ways of the court. The ladies went so far as to see the waterfall at Farza, and perhaps even to Istālif, twenty miles north of Kābul, and then returned.

There had been bad omens for the start and there followed plenty of bad news from the front to fix attention on them. Kāmrān broke his promise to come to Humāyūn's help. Gul-chihra's second husband, an Uzbeg prince, ran away when he came to know that the army was directed against his people. There was an extraordinary retreat without an enemy, and of which the cause seems to have been fear that, as Kāmrān was not there, he was oppressing Kābul. Humāyūn was left almost alone, and the Uzbegs attacked and killed many fugitives. His horse was wounded and the whole affair was a fiasco. After all, too, when Kābul was reached, there had been no sign of Kāmrān.

It was the expected that Kāmrān should not keep his word, but perhaps the unexpected was behind his conduct on the occasion of the Balkh campaign. Sulaimān and Ibrāhīm were with Humāyūn, and their presence might well have kept him away, for Gul-badan tells of an incident in which the three men had part and which did not make them good company for one another. It is a bit of scandal to which Ḥaram adds salt and vitality. It is repeated here because some little points do not quite stand clear in the begam's wording. While Kāmrān was in Kūlāb—i.e., his last holding,—someone, who from her name of Tarkhān Begam must have been a woman of good birth, advised him to make love to Ḥaram Begam. Good, she said, would come of it. So Kāmrān sent a go-between with a letter and a kerchief to Ḥaram, who, furiously angry, at once summoned husband and son from wherever they were away from home, and told them of the advances made to her. She railed at Sulaimān, saying that it was clear he was thought a coward, and further observed that Kāmrān feared neither her nor her son. Much was packed in the pronoun here; there was ground to fear the energetic and resolute woman who had the army of Badakhshān at her disposal. She was a forceful person and had the go-between torn to pieces. Kāmrān was audacious, and his advances look the more so that Ḥaram's sister was his wife; but they may have been made rather to the charms of her army than to those of its commandante.

The events of 1550 sum up in Jauhar's words: ‘Mīrzā Kāmrān wandered about the country with bad intentions.’ In his course he surprised Humāyūn in the Qibchāq defile, and an engagement took place which was attended by great loss of life. It was witnessed by Kāmrān's wives and daughters from a commanding height. Bāyazīd mentions that the ladies wore turbans (dastār-bastī), a detail which may have been suggested by the great heat of the weather. Why the women were on the scene is perhaps explained by a similar record in the Memoirs which concerns a wife of Sulṭān Ḥusain Bāyqrā. Shahr-bānū, a daughter of Sulṭān Abū-sa'īd Mīrzā, was, with Ḥusain's other wives, present at a battle between her husband and her brother, Maḥmūd Mīrzā. She did not, as the other ladies did, leave her litter and mount a horse, so as to be ready for flight if necessary, but trusting to her brother, in the case of her husband's defeat, remained comfortably in her litter while the fight went on. This dispassionate composure so much offended Ḥusain that he divorced her. Perhaps Kāmrān's family, too, had prepared for whatever was to be their fate by protecting themselves against the sun and by being ready to mount.

In this encounter Humāyūn was badly wounded. Gul-badan was able to hear the details of the misadventure, because Khiẓr Khwāja was with her brother and, it may be said, fighting against his own, Yasīn-daulat. Khiẓr and Mīr Sayyid Bīrka Tīrmīzī helped to hold the wounded man up on an ambling pony when he could not sit his horse, and so they led him out of the fray, sustaining his courage as they went by tales of other princes who had come through plights as bad. The wound was on the head, and was like one of Bābar's in that it was given through a covering turban and this was uninjured. The pain was great and caused faintness. Humāyūn took off his quilted coat and gave it to a servant. The man finding its weight an encumbrance, left it lying; it was taken to Kāmrān, who posted off with it to Kābul, showed it as evidence of death, and once more took possession of the unfortunate city.

Jauhar has quaint stories of the destitution in which Humāyūn now was, with his camp equipage lost and deprived of all necessaries. He was helped along through the night, cold and weakened, and in the morning was placed in safety by the arrival of a body of reliable troopers under Ḥāji Muḥammad kūka. He warmed himself in the sun, washed his wound, said his prayer kneeling on a scarlet stool, and borrowed a coat from a servant to replace his own, which was blood-stained. Then came an old woman of the place and offered him a pair of silk trousers, that he might discard his blood-stained ones. He accepted, while saying they were not fit for a man's wear, and remitted her taxes for life. This was drawing well in anticipation of the time when his account in those regions would stand to his credit.

It is said that while he sat with his face still to the qibla one of his followers, Sultān Muḥammad qarāwāl, performed again for him the rite his father had observed, and expressed his willingness to die for him. Humāyūn spoke reassuring words and comforted his faithful sacrifice.

For nearly three months Kābul believed Humāyūn dead. These words cover much feeling, sad and joyful; but there is no one to tell the truth and say whether it was thought by some to offer better hope of peace that Humāyūn should be dead. There was always a large following of powerful officers ready to join Kāmrān, and one cannot suppose their changes in allegiance mere folly and fickleness. But no courtly author has told Kāmrān's side of the whole matter, nor his view of his own position.

With Kābul Akbar came again into his uncle's hands. He was kept safe through all the vicissitudes of his father's career, and was well cared for both by Kāmrān and by 'Askarī. It has been said that on one occasion Kāmrān exposed him on the battlements of Kābul to his father's guns, and this charge finds support from our princess. She however, it may be observed, makes no mention of the act attributed by some writers to Māham anaga, of interposing her own body to shield the child; indeed, she never once mentions this latterly influential woman. But this incident notwithstanding, it must be admitted that the boy was well treated. 'Askarī's wife, who took charge of him after his capture at Quetta, is said to have been most kind to him. He was entrusted by Kāmrān to Khānzāda, itself an act of surety and kindness. Again and again he fell into his uncle's hands when Kāmrān was exasperated by foiled attempts to keep Kābul, and yet he survived. Kāmrān had a son; it would have surprised no one to learn that, as complement to his effort to oust Humāyūn from his higher place, he had killed Akbar to give his own son more chance. In this there is what fixes attention in the same way that it is fixed by Gul-badan's record of Kāmrān's anxiety to obtain from the elder ladies of his house sanction to have the khuṭba read in his name. It was in his power to have himself proclaimed ruler in Kābul, but he discussed his wish to be so proclaimed with the other members of the royal family before he did it, and the discussion was prolonged, and referred from Dil-dār to the greatest of the ladies, Khānzāda. In both these points there is something which, if better known, might mitigate the sweeping judgment usually passed upon Kāmrān as altogether wrong in all his doings.

Humāyūn spent some time in Ander-āb while his wound was healing and his army gathering, and here Ḥaram comes again upon the scene. Where Sulaimān and Ibrāhīm were, is not quite clear, but it was to Ḥaram a message went asking her for the army of Badakhshān. It was to come as quickly as possible, and fully equipped. It took the energetic woman only a few days to put some thousands of men in the field. It was she, says our princess, who did it all, took thought, and overlooked everything. Then she led the men to ‘the pass,’—amongst so many possible, one cannot fix on which,—and having done her work, went home. It seems probable that Sulaimān and Ibrāhīm were already with Humāyūn, and that Ḥaram despatched a supplementary force. The battle in which it was to engage was that important fight at Ushtur-grām which Humāyūn tried hard to prevent by previous mediation, and which was forced on by Kāmrān's chief officer, Qarācha Khān.

There was much previous discussion as to terms of peace, but Kāmrān and Qarācha would have nothing less than Kābul. A second embassy offered alliance of the ‘unique pearl of the khilāfat,’ Akbar, with the mīrzā's ‘dear daughter’ (who may be 'Āyisha), and that Kābul should be theirs; and suggested that Humāyūn and Kāmrān should join forces and again attack Hindūstān. All came to nothing, because Qarācha cried, and enforced his cry, ‘Our heads or Kābul.’ The battle that followed was a complete success for the royal arms, and to add to its good results, Akbar, of whose safety there had been doubt, was brought to Humāyūn's camp. His father vowed charitable gifts for his restoration, and also that he would never part from him again.

A pleasant chance befell Humāyūn on the stricken field, for when he had claimed, as his share of booty, two driverless camels, he found in their loads his own books which he had lost at the Qibchāq defile. Many would be MSS. of the Persian poets; Bābar knew these well and often quotes the Gulistān; and Humāyūn was too much of a dilettante and verse-lover not to have made himself familiar with their round.

Happily the tale of the doings of Kāmrān is drawing to a close. He made a night attack, by which Hindāl lost his life, on the royal forces on November 20th, 1551; sued for help in vain from Sālim Shāh, the Emperor of Hindūstān; from Adam Ghakkar, and was surrendered by him to Humāyūn; was blinded by the insistence of the amīrs on August 17, 1553, and allowed to go to Makka. He was accompanied, as all the writers tell, by his Arghūn wife Māh-chūchak, and by her equal in compassion, a servant of Humāyūn, Chilma Beg. He made the ḥaj four times and he died on October 5th, 1557. Māh-chūchak survived him seven months. She only of his wives is commemorated as accompanying him to Makka, but I see no reason why others may not also be accepted as equally faithful. Her father opposed her going, and she roundly upheld her view of her duty and has been taken into the texture of history, but her co-wives may have gone unopposed and unpraised. How interesting Kāmrān might have made a book of Memoirs in which he set down his life from his own point of view, his motives, ambitions, opinions of right and wrong, and above all, if he had spoken his inner mind about the religious duties he was enabled to perform before death, through his defeat and mutilation! We do not know all the truth about him; certain crimes, of murder and of treachery after promise given, could never be palliated, but in the matter of possession of Kābul there may be much brought forward which would place him rather in the position of the defender of rights than their assailant. He had no courtly chronicler, and has borne the blame of much that could plausibly be traced back to Humāyūn's own defects and their outcome of opportunity.

To end the story of the faithful brothers;—'Askarī too received leave to go to Makka from Badakshān in 1551; he died between that city and Damascus in 1558. Both he and Kāmrān thus lived long enough to see their house triumph again in India and their weary thwartings of its elder branch set at naught by the firmer hands of Akbar's chiefs. Of 'Askarī one clear characteristic only comes out: he was true to the blood-tie with his mother's son and own senior, Kāmrān.

A little return must now be made, in order to bring up the tale of home events to the date of those military. In 1551 the first marriage of the younger generation was arranged by the betrothal of Bakhshi-bānū to Ibrāhīm, son of Ḥaram. The Badakhshī trio had certainly deserved well of Humāyūn and, while doing the best they could to strengthen their own position, had given him efficient help. It is good to tell all that is known of Ḥaram. She seems to have had several daughters who played a part in public events as seals of alliance. When Humāyūn had passed a short time of repose in Kābul after his victory of Ushtur-grām, he sent to Ḥaram to ask Shāhzāda Khānam, one of these girls, in marriage for himself. His envoys were two persons whom Ḥaram did not consider worthy of their office. They were members of the royal household, and trusted members too, for one was Khwāja Jalālu-d-dīn Maḥmūd, mīr sāmān,⁵⁰ who, on Akbar's accession, was made commander of 2,500; and the other was Bībī Fāṭima, whom we know as having helped to nurse Humāyūn in his illness of 1546.

Ḥaram, the dominant partner in the command of Badakhshān, mother of a girl in whose veins was reputed to flow the blood of Alexander and of Tīmūr, daughter of a tribal chief, and conscious of intrinsic claim to deference, inquired of the two lowly messengers why no begam or lady (āghācha) had come to prefer the royal request. She must have known that Humāyūn could not mean to affront her; he had just given his daughter to her son and had testified gratitude for help in substantial ways to Sulaimān at the same time. She allowed herself to be mollified on condition that he himself should come to fetch his bride. The wedding does not seem to have taken place and the alliance was handed on to the next generation, in which, besides Ibrāhīm's, there was a betrothal of Muḥammad Hakīm to a daughter of Ḥaram.

While speaking of Ḥaram and the alliances of her family with the royal house, there may be named a highhanded act about another quasi-royal marriage. One of Kāmrān's wives was Muhtarīma Khānam Chaghatāi, and on his death Sulaimān wished to marry her. Of her as co-wife, Ḥaram would not hear, and contrived to make her a daughter-in-law by marrying her to Ibrāhīm.

The death of Hindāl in the night attack of Kāmrān, on November 20th, 1551, was a heavy blow to Gul-badan. She writes of it with feeling, and casts light on the question of rank in the affections of a Musalmān wife. She asks why her son or her husband was not killed rather than her brother. Perhaps she spoke out of feeling born of the fact that no dead father's son can be replaced, and from the deeps of family affection. Dutiful and admirable as were many of the wives of this time, the tie between the husband and a wife can never be so close as it is where the husband's affection is never a divisible factor in the household. Gul-badan shows that Musalmānī affection centred on those of the same blood.

The royal ladies must have felt it hard when, after having mourned Humāyūn through Kāmrān for nearly three months, Hindāl was killed. This happened near Khiẓr Khwāja's fief of Jui-shāhī, which explains why the body was sent there for burial and entrusted to the khwāja. It was removed later to Kābul and laid at Bābar's feet. Hindāl was thirty-two years old, and left one daughter, Ruqaiya, who became the first wife of Akbar and survived him, a childless woman, to the age of eighty-four.

Unfortunately for her readers, our begam's book ends abruptly (just after she has mentioned the blinding of Kāmrān,) in the only MS. of which we have knowledge, i.e., that belonging to the British Museum. The missing pages are a real loss. The narrative breaks off some three years before Akbar's accession, and for the future the best authority on our topics is silent. There is no occurrence of her own name in the histories until she goes to India in the first year of Akbar. Much of supreme importance happened to the royal family in the interval, and this makes regret the keener for the defective MS.

Set free from the burden of his brothers, Humāyūn determined, in 1554, to try his fortune again in Hindūstān. He left Kābul on November 15th,—a date so near that of Bābar's start in 1525 that it looks as if both obeyed the same omen of the heavens,—and with Akbar dropped comfortably down the river from Jalālābād to Peshāwar. The course of his advance beyond the Indus can be followed in Mr. Erskine's pages, and need not be repeated here. He was proclaimed Emperor in Dihlī on July 23rd, 1555.

A little-known episode of the time is the visit to India and the court of Sīdī 'Alī Reis, a Turkish admiral of Sulaimān the Great, who by the exigencies of war and weather found himself obliged to travel with a few officers and fifty sailors from Sūrat to Lāhōr and thence across all the wide intervening lands to Turkey.⁵² He was welcomed by Musalmāns for his master's sake, and he was offered appointments in India, all of which he refused. He was received with great honour by Shāh Ḥusain Arghūn, of whom he says that he had then reigned forty years, and had become so invalided during the last five that he could not sit his horse and used only boats for travel. Elsewhere it is said of Shāh Ḥusain that he was subject to fever of such kind that he could live only on the river, and that he used to spend his time in going up and down from one extremity to the other of his territory in search of ease and health. Probably this is a detail of the admiral's remark. He heard of Māh-chūchak (wife of Ḥusain), whom he calls Ḥaji Begam, as prisoner of 'Īsā Tarkhān, and of her return to Ḥusain. He heard, too, something which is not supported by other writers, namely, that she poisoned Ḥusain, and that he died in consequence ten days after she rejoined him. The improbability of this story is shown by the fact that later on she conveyed Ḥusain's body to Makka for interment, an act which would be incredible if the accusation of murder were true. Much that is interesting is told of the journey to the first place where Sīdī 'Ali's route brought him into contact with Humāyūn's people, i.e., Lāhōr. He arrived early in August, shortly after the Restoration (July 23rd), and there awaited royal orders, because the governor would not let him go on until the Emperor had seen him. When one tries to picture one's self without telegrams or newspapers, one judges that a kindly-disposed amīr would endeavour to forward everyone who could tell a tale for the entertainment of the court. Humāyūn sent for the admiral, and had him received, in the first half of October,⁵³ outside Dihlī by Bairām Khān-i-khānān, other great amīrs, 1,000 men, and 400 elephants. He dined with the Khān-i-khānān, and was then introduced to the presence.

As was natural, the Emperor wished to keep his guest at court permanently, if possible, and if not this, then long enough to ‘calculate solar and lunar eclipses, their degree of latitude and exact date, and to help the court astrologers to study the sun's course and the points of the equator.’ What fastened interest on the Ottoman was that he learned to write verses in Chaghatāi Tūrkī so well that Humāyūn called him a second 'Alī Shīr Nawaī. He had a turn for chronograms, too, and at his first audience presented one of the taking of Dihlī, and made others subsequently which were admired. He was a clever man, and his literary aptitudes suited his royal host and the tone of the entourage. But he had other acquirements than those which ring well the change of words and obtained him his sobriquet of ‘book-man,’ and these others he used to bring about an agreement between the Emperor and his own former host, Sulṭān Maḥmūd Bhakkarī. An official paper was drawn up, to which Humāyūn, literally, set his fist, for he dipped his clenched hand in saffron and laid it on the deed. Maḥmud was much pleased, and both he and his vizier wrote their thanks to the mediator. This incident, and others too, gave occasion for other Tūrkī ghazels and higher praise. Sīdī 'Alī was constantly in the royal circle, and there were contests in verse-making and dilettante amusements which reveal the true and newly-risen Huma once more at ease in untranquillized India. The traveller had not much to coax court favour with in the way of gifts, and this plumed his poetic flights; when he was wearied by his detention, he carried two ghazels to the royal seal-bearer and let them plead for his departure. They were heard, and he got ‘leave to go,’ with gifts and passport.

His affairs were all in order for his start when there happened the fatal accident which ended Humāyūn's life. That Humāyūn should die violently was in keeping with the violent changes of his career; and that he met his death in a building of Shīr Shāh was a singular chance. His last hours of activity were filled by pleasant occupations; old friends had been seen who had just come back from Makka and would bring him news of both pilgrim brothers; letters had been read from home in Kābul; he had gone up to the roof of the Shīr Mandal, which he used as his library, and had shown himself to the crowd assembled below; then he had interested himself in the rising of Venus, with the object of fixing a propitious hour for a reception,—perhaps to include the farewell of the Turkish guest.

The Shīr Mandal is a two-storied building with flat roof in the middle of which rises a small cupola which looks like a shade from the sun. The roof is reached by two discontinuous, steep, and narrow flights of high and shallow granite steps, which are enclosed in walls and the upper one of which emerges through the roof. The Emperor on that Friday evening of January 24th, 1556, had started down the upper flight and was on its second step, when the mu'aẕẕin raised the cry for prayer from the neighbouring mosque. Sīdī 'Ali says, as though it were some individual habit of Humāyūn, that the latter had the custom of kneeling whenever he heard the cry; other writers say that he tried to seat himself. His foot became entangled, some say in his mantle (postīn), his staff slid along the smooth step, and he fell to the bottom of the flight with severe injuries to head and arm. It is professed that a letter went after the fall from him to Akbar, but this may be a part of the well-meaning deception in which the dangerous nature of the injuries was shrouded; it would seem more probable from the admiral's account of the episode, which is silent as to any recovery of consciousness, that the injuries to the head were too severe to allow of restoration to sense. Three days later Humāyūn died, on January 27th, and in the forty-eighth year of his age.

‘We come from God, and to Him we return,’ and ‘There is no guard against fate,’ are the quoted comments of the Turkish admiral. He counselled that the death should be concealed until Akbar's return to Dihlī, and brought forward experience drawn from his own country's similar circumstances. This was done and various fictions were composed. A man personated the dead Emperor in public audience, and there were rejoicings over his recovery from the fall. Sīdī 'Alī took leave of the grandees, and conveyed the false news of Humāyūn's restoration to health in a friendly way along his route. By the time he reached Lāhōr he found that Akbar had been proclaimed, and his name read in the Friday prayers. Here, as before, the traveller had to wait for royal orders, because the governor had, or invented, useful orders for the crisis, that no one should pass to Kābul. Then he was sent to the presence in Kilānūr, where Akbar honoured his father's passport and let the harassed and home - sick man continue his journey, with money for expenses and a strong escort to Kābul.

Before bidding him good-bye on his still lengthy journey, it may be said that he and his four escorting begs and his sailors marched to Peshāwar through the night to escape that Adam Ghakkar who had made over Kāmrān to Humāyūn; that they saw two rhinoceroses, an event which makes one wonder whether there still remained a part of the ancient lake of the plain of Peshāwar to serve as habitat for the huge and now vanished beasts; and that they crossed the many-memoried Khaibar.

In Kābul the admiral saw Humāyūn's two sons, Muḥammad Hakīm and Farrukh-fāl, who were born in the same month of 1553, one being the child of Māh-chūchak and the other of Khānish āghā Khwārizmī. This statement is a surprise, because Bāyazīd says that Farrukh died within a few days of birth. The admiral's information suggests an error in Bāyazīd's MS.

Sīdī 'Alī found Kābul beautiful and speaks of its snowy girdle, its gardens and its running water. He traced pleasure and merriment and feasting everywhere, and even instituted comparison between it and Paradise to the disadvantage of the latter. But he had no time for ‘frivolities,’ and thought only of hurrying home. He saw Mu'nim Khān in the city, and being told by him that he could not cross the passes, observed that men had overcome mountains, and under the care of a local guide whose home was on the road, accomplished the feat with labour and safely. He took the road to Tāliqān and there saw our well-known friends, Sulaimān and Ibrāhīm, but he is silent as to Ḥaram. Here, too, he wrote and offered his ghazel, and was both welcomed and speeded. In Tāliqān we must leave him who has been a welcome new figure amongst familiar actors.

Protected by the capable men who upheld Akbar, the royal ladies had not again to flee before foes or to suffer violent change of fortune. Humāyūn had planned their journey from Kābul to India. Akbar more than once in his first year of rule had to cancel the orders he had given to effect it. Three military affairs disturbed the plan,—the suppression of the revolt of Abū'l-ma'ālī, the operations against Sikandar Afghān, and the encounter with Hīmū at Pānīpat. At length amīrs were named to escort the ladies from Kābul. The officers set out, but on their march received orders to act first against Sulaimān Mīrzā, who, on hearing of Humāyūn's death, had come over from Badakhshān to besiege Kābul. This was the first of a series of his attempts on the city, to which he laid fanciful claim as head of the house of Tīmūr after Humāyūn. The approach of the imperial troops broke up his siege, and his claim having been accommodated by reading his name once in the khuṭba at Kābul, he went home and left the ladies free to start.

They made their journey in time to arrive during the first quarter of 1557 near where lay the royal camp, at Mānkot, in the western Sewāliks. The Emperor came a stage from it to meet them, and was ‘much comforted by the reunion.’ With Ḥamīda-bānū Begam, to whom, as Empress-mother, the chief place must be assigned, were Gul-badan, Gul-chihra, Ḥājī, and Salīma Begams. There was also a large company of officers' wives.

Perhaps the ladies remained near the camp until it broke up and went to Lāhōr. It left that city on its march for Dihlī on December 7th, 1557; at Jalindhar it halted, and here, with pomp and amidst general interest, Bairām Khān-i-khānān married Salīma Sulṭān Begam, a granddaughter of Bābar. She was a half-niece of Humāyūn, and she had with Akbar cousinship of the ‘four-anna’ degree. Bābar was their common ancestor, and their differing grandmothers diluted the cousinly relation.

This alliance had been arranged by Humāyūn, and the use of sipurdan by Abū'l-faẓl when writing of it, shows that what was now celebrated was a marriage, and not a betrothal. This point is mentioned here because some writers fix Salīma's age at this time as five, an estimate which is not supported by known facts of her life. The bride was probably a reward for the surpassing services done by Bairām for Humāyūn, the newest being those of the Restoration. Bairām was a man to whom seems due the largesse of the hand of a king's daughter; he out-topped his contemporaries by his full stature in capacity, culture, faithfulness, and character. Salīma,⁵⁸ though much his junior, was in other respects a fit wife for him. She was an educated woman; ranks amongst verse-makers so completely as to have a pen-name (takhallas), and stands out gently, by birth, character, and attainments.

Khiẓr Khwāja Khān had gone to Hindūstān with Humāyūn in 1554, and early in 1556 had been appointed by Akbar to the government of Lāhōr. He was left to carry on operations against Sikandar Afghān when Akbar was called away by Hīmū's movements, and he was defeated. The few words said about him give the impression that he was not a good soldier, and he is never again named in responsible command. The slight things recorded of him point to subsequent comfortable existence at court as the ‘husband of the Emperor's aunt, Gul-badan Begam.’ Once he made a gift of horses to Akbar; in 1563 he helped to nurse Akbar when the latter was wounded in Dihlī; and there is no record of his death. He was raised to high military rank, and at some time was amīru-l-umara', but the Āīn-i-akbarī does not place him in its list of manṣabdārs. He stands twelfth in the general list of the Ṭabaqāt, and amongst the chiefs of 5,000.

From her coming to India in 1557 to the time of her pilgrimage in 1574, our princess is not mentioned by the historians. The interval held much of deep interest to her and to others of her generation whose lives were slipping away under the safeguarding of Akbar. Some survivors of an older day, witnesses of Bairām's fidelity to Humāyūn, must have felt his downfall keenly. Ḥamīda can hardly have been ignorant of the intrigue which brought this about, because she was related to the chief actors in it,— Māham anaga, Adham Khān, and Shihābu-d-dīn Aḥmad Nishāpūrī. The last was governor of Dihlī, where she lived, and part of the scheme to separate Akbar from Bairām took him to Dihlī to see her, and thus under the eye of Shihāb. Ḥamīda must have had clear in memory the truly valid services done for her husband by Bairām during the Persian exile. The plot had its nucleus in a sayyid circle and in families religious by inheritance, and it was carried out at the point of the tongue. Muḥammad Bāqī Khān kūka, the anaga's elder son, does not appear as taking part in it. He served the Emperor till 1584, rose to be a chief of 3,000, and of his character nothing is known. His younger brother, Adham, although put to death in 1562, had become chief of 5,000. All that is said of him is bad, and he, like his mother, was fluent in detraction and did all in his power to poison the mind of Akbar against the worthiest of his amīrs.

Many comments have been made upon Māham anaga, both by the Persian writers and by their European commentators. Abū'l-faẓl calls her a cupola of chastity, and it is now possible to wipe from her reputation the stain suggested by Professor Blochmann when writing of the parentage of Adham. She was wife of Nadīm Khān kūka, a faithful servant of Humāyūn. This fragment of useful information was brought to light by Mr. Beveridge, who found it in a MS. of Colonel Hanna, which may yield other valuable matter on quasi-domestic points. Māham anaga may be granted the praise she deserves as a nurse who earned the affection of Akbar to the end of her life; she is entitled to such praise as belongs to a mother who screens a son's every fault and pushes his fortunes with all her influence. She must take the dispraise of not pushing her elder son's as she did Adham's. Bāyazīd bīyāt speaks of her as kind to him, and tells little stories which show her the centre of small affairs. I have not discerned in her any sign of talent. Whatever influence Akbar's affection gave her would be strengthened by her connection with his mother, and perhaps, too, with other women who were descended from Aḥmad Jāmī. Amongst these was Ḥājī Begam, Humāyūn's widow and a person much regarded by the Emperor.

In the year following Bairām's death, Adham Khān, who, says the Ṭabaqāt, held a place higher than the other courtiers because he was his mother's son, was on duty in Mālwa against Bāz Bahādur Sūr. Incidents resulted which emphasize regret that for such as the actors in them Bairām had had to make way. Māham anaga was de facto prime minister; Mu'nim Khān had been made Khān-i-khānān , and it was looked for by his friend the anaga that he should become prime minister de jure. Bāz Bahādur was defeated and fled from Sārangpūr. Aping the Hindūs, he had ordered his servants to kill the women of his household in the event of his defeat. Several had been so killed, many had been wounded, when the sacrifice was interrupted by the imperialists under Adham. Badāyunī says that there followed slaughter by Adham and his colleague, Pīr Muḥammad Khān, of terrible extent, and his own eyes saw that these two regarded God's creation in mankind as leeks, cucumbers, and radishes,—a quaint turn of words which covers awful butchery. When remonstrated with in the name of the law, the murderers asked what was to be done with so many prisoners.

If the order for the death of the women of Bāz Bahādur's household had issued from a Rājpūt heart, there would have been no need for executioners while he was in flight. The victims were, however, not Rājpūtnīs, and they suffered only to gratify the vanity of a Moslim. Amongst those wounded was Rūp-matī, a dancing-girl renowned throughout Hindūstān for beauty, singing, and poetic gifts. Her name seems that of a Hindū. Her wounds, inflicted by Bāz Bahādur's order, were severe and she wished to die. Adham let her know that, if she would care for herself, he would send her to her master when she could travel. She took his promise as true, had her wounds dressed and recovered. When she claimed fulfilment of Adham's word, she was told to consider herself as his slave. He entered her room, raised her veil, and saw her dead by her own act.

Perhaps the point of deepest social degradation in this story is that Rūp-matī was, by men's decree, born to sin without blame, and yet she died because she loved one man. Her heart was single, and yet she was only the most charming, clever and beautiful of a crowd of dancing-girls, purchased slaves, to whom no man's loyalty and no mercy were thought due.

Adham Khān took much booty from Bāz Bahādur, and he disregarded the rule which required the choicest part to be sent to the Emperor; he also comported himself more like an independent ruler than a king's lieutenant. This angered Akbar, and he hurried off to Sārangpūr, outdistanced a messenger of Māham anaga whom she had sent with warnings, and took Adham by surprise. She herself came in next day and counselled surrender of the spoil. This and other matters having been adjusted, the Emperor started for his capital. No sooner was he gone than Adham, with his mother's connivance, regained possession of two of the most coveted of the captive women. News of this went after Akbar, who ordered them to be returned to the royal camp. When they came again within her power, the anaga had them murdered, so that they might not tell the tale of their abduction.

Having spent so many years under the influence of Māham anaga, it is to the credit of Akbar's humanity and mental force that there are not more than the recorded blots on his scutcheon; at nineteen he rebelled against his nurse, when she had set his feet on the primrose path to ruin of person and empire. He did not punish the murder of the captive girls, but he soon manifested his intention to depose his nurse and her son from power. Instead of appointing their friend Mu'nim prime minister, he summoned his foster-father, Shamsu-d-dīn Aḥmad Ghaznavī and gave him the post. Shamsu-d-dīn was an unlettered man, but he was staunch and had sons who were true to Jī-Jī anaga's nursling.

The next episode in which Māham anaga and her son appear, was one to shake the home fabric to its foundations, for Adham murdered Shamsu-d-dīn, bursting in upon him as he sat in business audience and unsuspicious. It was done on the night of May 16th, 1562. The incident is well known, how the murderer rushed to the ḥaram door and on the appearance of Akbar began to palliate his crime, but was struck down by a blow of the royal fist and then killed by royal order.⁶²

It was the Emperor who told Māham anaga of her son's death: ‘Māmā! we have killed Adham,’ are the words put into his mouth by Bāyazīd. She fell ill from anger and grief; this blow shattered her heart's idol and her ambition for him and herself. Badāyunī says that she died after having presented the food of the fortieth day of mourning, and this points to her belief that the souls of the dead take final departure from earth on that day and after partaking of the food of their choice which the care of relations sets for them. Mother and son were buried in one spot, and Akbar placed his shoulder under his nurse's bier in sign of his sentiment to her.

Quite stirring news for discussion through some years, amongst the elder ladies of the royal family, would be the conduct of Māh-chūchak Begam in Kābul. She was the last recorded wife of Humāyūn, and was married in 1546, after the coming of Ḥamīda from Qandahār to Kābul. She was not a woman of birth,—one gathers a general impression that few royal wives married late in life were so,—and her title of begam was probably owed to her having borne a son, Muḥammad Hakīm. In 1554 Humāyūn had left her three-years-old boy as nominal governor of Kābul under charge of Mu'nim Khān, and in 1556 Akbar had confirmed the appointment. When Mu'nim went to court in 1561, his son Ghanī became his locum tenens, but Ghanī had neither ‘suavity nor sense,’ and the begam shut him out of Kābul, one morning when he had gone to walk in the melon gardens. He went to India, and she took up the guidance of her boy's affairs. She chose three men to help her; two soon came by their deaths at her dictation, and the third became supreme. Akbar, and no doubt the ladies also, heard of these doings, and despatched Mu'nim Khān with men to put things straight. Māh-chūchak met Mu'nim at Jalālābād, utterly defeated him, and he fled to court. She then killed the last adviser of her trio and took another, whom she may have married, named Ḥaidar Qāsim Kohbur. These proceedings surprise one in Māh-chūchak, and bring her story down to the first half of 1564, when Abū'l-ma'ālī appears upon her stage.

We cannot enter here into the previous history of Abū'l-ma'ālī,—his rebellions, murders, imprisonment, pilgrimage, and reinvigorated return to wickedness. He now came to Kābul fresh from two assassinations in Hindūstān, a fugitive, and indited a letter to the ruling begam, with profession of affection and devotion to the memory of Humāyūn. She welcomed him, gave him her little daughter Fakhru-n-nisā' in marriage, and let him take the lead. Before long he stabbed Māh-chūchak with his own hand, murdered Ḥaidar Qāsim, and stirred revolt against himself which led to woeful slaughter within the walls of Kābul. Word of all this went from Muḥammad Hakīm to Sulaimān and Ḥaram, with a prayer for help. Ḥaram approving and accompanying, the army of Badakh-shān marched over the passes, met Abū'l-ma'ālī in the Ghurband valley, captured him, and sent him bound to the prince, who had him strangled. Both he and Adham Khān had justified Bairām's distrust, which had prompted him to wish their death early in Akbar's reign.

A little story of Ḥaram may be inserted here, somewhat after date. She had not been always on perfect terms with Sulaimān. Not only, a little earlier, had there been the discussion between them of his wish to take Muhtarīma to wife, which Ḥaram had frustrated by marrying the khanām to Sulaimān's son instead of to himself, but she had been angered extremely by the murder of one of her brothers by her husband and her son. She took the resolution of deserting Sulaimān and went over to Kābul, where then Mu'nim Khān was governor, and she had meant to carry on her complaints to Akbar. Mu'nim, however, who had been begged to mediate by Sulaimān, gave her good advice and pacified her, so that at last she consented to return to Badakhshān. He rode out to bid her farewell; she bade her camel kneel and dismounted; he got off his horse, and there was exchange of friendly greeting. She told him she regarded him as a brother and that for his sake she would never bring the army of Badakhshān against Kābul. It came several times later and with her approval, but Ḥaram could swear and break even ‘awful oaths.’ Bāyazīd bīyāt accompanied her to the Ghurband and was charmed by her suavity and agreeableness.

On the death of Abū'l-ma'ālī, Sulaimān sent home for a daughter and married her to Muḥammad Hakīm, partitioned out some of the lands of Kābul to his own people, and went home to Qila'-i-ẓafar. Irritation against the interlopers led to their expulsion by the Kābulīs, and this brought the Badakhshī forces again to Kābul, in 1564. Muḥammad Hakīm hurried to the Indus and complained to his big brother and Sulaimān was made to retreat.

In 1566 he and Ḥaram and their girls were again before the coveted Kābul, and on this occasion Ḥaram tried to supplement their failing military action by treachery. She got Sulaimān to lay an ambush for Mu-ḥammad Hakīm, whom, with ‘awful oaths’ of amity, she had persuaded to have a meeting with her under profession of desire to adopt him now that her son Ibrāhīm was dead. The end of this affair was, in net result to the Badakh-shīs, nothing; Ḥaram went home and Sulaimān followed. With them went the unfailing daughters, of whom Ḥaram seems to have had many, or who were betrothed and not ‘entrusted,’ so many recorded times. They had been near capture by the Kābulīs in the Four-walled Garden, but the commandant of the city recalled his men and let the girls go free, because he did not think it seemly to capture women.

This is not the place to follow Sulaimān's interesting fortunes to their close, under Akbar's protection, by death in Lāhōr in 1589. For our purpose, it is enough to say that he held Badakhshān so long as Ḥaram's watchful eye was on him, and lost it at her death. It was Muhtarīma's son, Shāh-rukh, his own grandson, who turned him out of his beloved Badakhshān, and in this, too, there may be Ḥaram's hand. Muhtarīma would not be likely to teach her boy dutiful conduct to Ḥaram or to Ḥaram's husband, for the two women were foes, and Ḥaram had tried to separate Muhtarīma from her son, and to expel her from Badakhshān to her parental home in Kāshghar. If Ḥaram had lived, her pride would have found content in two alliances of her grandson with daughters of the royal blood, —one a child of Muḥammad Hakīm, and the other of Akbar himself.

The ill-behaviour of Ḥamīda-bānū's brother, Khwāja Mu'aẓẓam, must have been a frequent annoyance to the inner circle of the elder ladies at court. From boyhood he had been fantastic and mischievous, and perhaps carried always the germ of the madness which overtook his last years. Bairām, the sensible, had exiled him, then had given him some countenance; on Bairām's fall he had received a fief, and, so far, had been favoured. But Akbar did not like him, and the murders he had committed were sufficient to warrant dislike. He was a true parvenu, assertive and relying on his sister to excuse his faults. Ḥamīda had been conscious before her marriage that her lowly birth was a point against her wedding with Humāyūn. The disparity in her case, as in other misalliances of the time, had raised unworthy people to power. Now, in 1564, Bībī Fāṭima lamented to Akbar that Khwāja Mu'aẓẓam had threatened to kill his wife Zuhra, who was her daughter. The Emperor consequently sent the khwāja word that he was coming to his house, and followed the message closely. As he entered, the khwāja stabbed Zuhra and then flung his knife, like a challenge, amongst the royal followers. Abū'l-faẓl says that for punishment the murderer was flung into the river, but ‘would not drown.’ The more sensible Niẓāmu-d-dīn Aḥmad says he was beaten and then soused in the river. He died insane, in prison, at Guālīār. All the shortcomings and crimes of the man notwithstanding, Ḥamīda must have cherished some warmth of feeling for the tricksy boy who had lifted suspicion from her in the matter of the stolen rubies of the Persian episode.

In 1571 another old acquaintance comes to the front in the person of Nāhīd Begam, in whom our princess must have maintained interest for the sake of her father Qāsim, Bābar's foster-brother. Nāhīd, as has been said earlier, was the daughter of Qāsim and of Māh-chūchak Arghūn, who must not be confounded with Kāmrān's wife of the same name, one common amongst the Arghūn women of the time. She had married Muḥibb-'alī, son of Niẓāmu-d-dīn 'Alī Khalīfa Barlās, and who had risen to high military rank but now lived remote from soldiering and in reposeful retirement. Nāhīd's mother was now in her (third) widowhood for 'Īsā Tarkhān Arghūn, and she was not well regarded by her last husband's son, Muḥammad Bāqī Tarkhān Arghūn, the ruler of Tatta. Nāhīd, in 1571, went to see her mother, and perhaps conveyed to Bāqī the impression that her visit was something more than filial. He put Māh-chūchak in prison, and so behaved to Nāhīd that she hurried off to court and made bitter complaint of her own wrongs and of the rudeness shown to the royal attendants who had been with her in Sind. She told Akbar, too, that she had talked with Sulṭan Maḥmud Bhakkarī, that old retainer of Shāh Ḥusain who had kept the island-fort against Humāyūn in the forties, and for whom Sīdī 'Alī Reis had negotiated terms in 1555. Maḥmūd had suggested an attack on Tatta, and, supported by him, Nāhīd pleaded for help from Akbar to act against Bāqī. She was very keen about her plan and persuaded the Emperor to give men and money.

Muḥibb-'alī was disturbed from his repose, and put at the head of the force. With him went Nāhīd and also a wife named Sāmīa and her son, Mujāhīd. For Nāhīd's ends the long war that followed was infructuous. An amusing episode of it was that Sāmīa, when things did not go as she wished, went into rebellion against Akbar, and actually held an entrenchment against the royal amīrs a day and a night. In the end, Muḥibb-'alī obtained a comfortable town appointment and nothing more is heard of the ladies. Probably they too accommodated themselves to the tolerant and forgiving atmosphere of Akbar's court.

Niẓāmu-d-dīn Aḥmad is somewhat more sober of diction than his fellow-penmen and so, when he says that the Gujrāt campaign of 1572 caused the royal ladies joy enough to last their lives, whole-hearted delight is pictured. This was the campaign which made beautiful Sīkrī the City of Victory (Fatḥ-pūr). Round one incident of the war womanly interest,—and surely compassion also,—will have centred. The veil of historic silence lifts for a brief moment, and shows Gul-rukh, Kāmrān's daughter, in flight with her son.

Gul-badan's long span of unchronicled life was probably spent in the peaceful occupation of a wife and mother, with variety from books, verse-making, festivities, and outside news. She must have found much to exercise her lively mind in Hindūstān. That she went about with the royal camp is shown by the record of the place assigned to her tent in the encampments. It was pitched next to Ḥamīda's, well within the great enclosure, and not far from the Emperor's own. Since she was a woman, she must have found food for observation in the doings and position of her sex under the conditions of their life in Hindūstān. How did satī look to her? What did she think of the jūhar? Both these Hindū customs were far different from those of her traditions in similar crises. She came of a tribe which boasts of the fidelity of its wives to the marriage tie. All the women of her house must have heard of the defiant act of Aīs-daulat, Bābar's grandmother, who had ordered her maids to stab a man to whom her captor had given her, and who then, for sole excuse, had observed that she was the wife of Yūnas Khān. Gul-badan had also in her own family history plenty of examples of the fate of captured girls, for many of her kinswomen had married foes of their tribe; and many too had become contented wives, well treated, and remaining in their foreign homes apparently without constraint.⁶⁸

What Tīmūrid women saw amongst the Hindūs reveals another type of virtue and another standard of wedded life. Our princess must have heard something on the topic through her father's experience when she was a child. Wifehood and motherhood now gave her better insight into the problems which underlie social relations. She would hear that Rājpūtnīs died joyfully rather than be captured; that outmatched Rājpūts killed wives and children and went to certain death themselves,—a holocaust to honour. The early years of Akbar furnished plenty of such records.

How, one would like to know, did the Musalmānī regard the willing death by fire of the Hindū widow, in that exaltation which lifts thought above pain and terror and is admirable, whether in the martyr for faith or for wifely duty? Unfortunately, the barriers of language and habit must have kept Akbar's Rājpūt wives from charming the Musalmānī ladies by recital of the legends of their race. These Hindūs can never have been welcome inmates of the palace to any of the Moslims; but, pagan as they were thought, their conduct as wives must have insinuated the thin edge of conviction that to no one form of faith is committed the nurture of the sense of duty.

One common thought Gul-badan and the rest could have shared with the Hindū ladies,—that of the duty of pilgrimage and of respect for holy places. When next history concerns itself with our begam, it is to tell of her setting out, in 1575, for Makka. The Emperor had been unwilling to part with her, and it may be, even, had delayed with the thought of accompanying her. His heart was now much set upon making the ḥaj, but he did no more than walk a short distance with a caravan from Āgra, dressed in the seamless wrapper of the Arabian ceremonies. Though debarred from leaving Hindūstān himself, he helped many others to fulfil this primary duty of their faith, and opened wide his purse for their expenses. Each year he named a leader of the caravan, and provided him with gifts and ample funds. Sulṭān Khwāja, Gul-badan's cicerone, took, amongst other presents, 12,000 dresses of honour. He did not bring her home again; this duty fell to Khwāja Yaḥyā (John). What circumstance extorted royal consent to Gul-badan's absence is not recorded; her advancing age,—she was past fifty,—and her dislike of the laxity in opinion and practice in matters of the Faith would add warmth to her request for leave to go.

Abū'l-faẓl has preserved the names of the chief ladies of the pilgrim party, but many others went with Gul-badan Begam, and for all the royal purse bore the cost. She was the lady of highest birth, and was probably a widow; next came Salīma Sulṭān Begam, widow of Bairām and wife of Akbar. It was not usual for a wife to make the pilgrimage, but Muḥammadan law stipulates that permission shall be granted to such wives as strongly desire to do so, and Salīma's seems a case in point. Next comes a woman whose presence reveals pleasant things. She was Sulṭānam, widow of Akbar's uncle, 'Askarī, and of her it is recorded in Akbar's babyhood that she cared for him when captured, with tender affection. It is probable that she had spent many years under the care and at the cost of the Emperor. Then come two step-nieces of Gul-badan, daughters of Kāmrān,—Ḥājī and Gul-'iẕār Begams. I do not know which child of his is veiled under the title of Ḥājī. She seems to be making her second ḥaj, and may well have gone on her first when her father was in Arabia. To these two the pilgrimage would have humanly pious significance, as a visitation to their father's tomb and to that of Māh-chūchak Arghūn, whom all his children must have held in reverence. Next comes a grand-daughter of Gul-badan herself, named Um-kūlṯum (Mother of Plumpness), presumably after the daughter of her Prophet. Whether she was the child of Sa'ādat-yār is not said, nor whether the last name on the list, Salīma Khānam, is that of a child of Gul-badan, as well as of Khiẓr Khwāja Khān. Here some of the inconveniences of polygamy show themselves to the seeker after family facts.

An old associate of our princess accompanied her in the person of Gul-nār āghācha, who had been of Bābar's household and was, I think, one of the two Circassians sent as a present to him by Shāh Ṭaḥmāsp in 1526. She was now well on her way through life and considerably older than Gul-badan Begam. Another of the party had also been of Bābar's household, Bībī Sarū-qad, or Sarū-i-sahī (Straight Cypress). She had been, too, in Humāyūn's service and later had married, with full nisbat, Mu'nim Khān-i-khānān. She was a widow, had been a singer and reciter, and was a ‘reliable woman.’ Like her in accomplishments were Bībī Safīya and Shāham āghā, both formerly of Humāyūn's household. Of the first and of Bībī Sarū-qad we have the happy little record that they sang in the moonlight on the road to Laghmān in 1549.

Fatḥpūr-sīkrī seems to have been the rallying-point of the caravan and October 15th, 1575, the day of departure from it. It started earlier than was usual, perhaps because the ladies could not travel fast. Caravans generally left Āgra in the tenth month—this left in the seventh—of the Muḥammadan year. Akbar's second boy, Murād, was told off to escort the ladies to the coast. Sālim met them one stage out to give last greetings. At Gul-badan's request, Murād was excused from his long task of escort to Sūrat, and he went back to Āgra. One smiles to find that the princes were five and four years old. The real charge of the caravan was with several amīrs, one being Muḥammad Bāqī Khān kūka, and another Rūmī Khān of Aleppo, who may have been Bābar's artillery officer.

It is a real loss that there is no record of the journey from our begam's pen. It was to be adventurous; even perilous; and it was of great interest whether as sightseeing travel or pious duty. Sūrat was the port of embarkation, but there are no details of the road taken to reach it. Father Rudolf Acquaviva passed between the same two terminal points in 1580, but the military movements of the interval may well have allowed him to travel where the ladies could not go. When they were first in Sūrat, it had been a royal possession for two years only, and even when the Father took the fairly direct route from it to Fatḥpūrsīkrī, the Rājpūt peasantry was in arms against their new lord. The ladies were probably handed on from one garrisoned place to another as the immediate circumstances of conquest dictated. The main body of their ḥaj joined them by a tedious and weary route, first escorted through Goganda by the army which was on active service, and then passing on to Aḥmadābād, and, perhaps by water, to Sūrat.

The governor of the port, who was to have a good deal of trouble with this caravan, was Qulij Khān Andijānī, a sobriquet of pleasant sound in our begam's ears. He had inherited Tīmūrid service from many generations, and his father had been a grandee of Sulṭān Ḥusain Bāyqrā.

‘There was peace with the isles of the Franks,’ but it took the ladies a year to get to sea. The Akbar-nāma attributes some part of the delay to a foolish panic about the Firingīs which, after the ladies had embarked in their hired Turkish transport, the Salīmī, seized the other pilgrims who were to sail in the royal ship, the Ilāhī. The real ground appears to have been want of a pass. The Portuguese were then masters of the Indian waters, and no ship might dare to put to sea without toll paid and pass obtained. Alarm about the Portuguese was natural, for there were stories that the very pass was sometimes a letter of Bellerophon enjoining capture and death. Abū'l-faẓl says that, although the ladies embarked, they were unwilling to put out and desert their fellow-pilgrims. This may be mere broidery, or the one ship may have had a pass and the other not. Perhaps, too, as theirs was a hired transport, it was also one privileged to sail free. However this may be, Badāyunī makes the difficulty clear by saying that Khwāja Sulṭān's ships lay idle from want of the pass. He also, it may be added, quotes a legal opinion that at this time it was not lawful to make the ḥaj from India because, of the two practicable routes, one lay through the Shiah country of 'Irāq, and the other obliged a pass which bore the idolatrous stamp of the heads of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus Christ (‘on whom be peace’).

The mīr ḥaj sent word to the Emperor of his plight, who at once despatched orders to Qulij Khān, in Īdar, to go to Sūrat and arrange the difficulty. Qulij took with him a Cambayan, who was presumably a man versed in seafaring business,—hurried to Sūrat and overcame the difficulty.

It took the ladies a year to get to sea; they sailed on October 17th, 1576. Their port of debarkation is not mentioned; some pilgrims sailed by the Arabian, some by the Persian Gulf. They spent three and a half years in Arabia, and were able to make the ḥaj four times.

Some day perhaps a pious and enlightened Musalmān will set down the inner meaning he attaches to the rites of the pilgrimage. How interesting it would have been if our princess had told us what it was in her heart that carried her through the laborious duties of piety she accomplished during her long stay in her holy land! She might have given us an essential principle by which to interpret the religious meaning which devout women attach to the rites commanded on the pilgrimage.

The visitation duties are set down in Hughes' ‘Dictionary of Islām,’ where even their brief recital is attractive and adds to the wish of gauging the sentiment of believers in their efficacy. The acts prescribed are exhausting, not only to the body but also, one thinks, to the mind, because the very conception of the pilgrimage as a Divine ordinance keeps brain and heart tense, as all obedience does which sets the human will parallel to the Divine.

The mere recapitulation of the prescribed ceremonies is impressive: The halt six miles from the city to put on the seamless wrapper (iḥrām); the chanting of the pilgrim song; the prayer of intention and of supplication for grace to make the visitation duly; the contemplation, touch, and salutation of the mystic black stone; the sevenfold encompassment of the ka'ba, towards which from distant homes has been directed the prayer of the bygone years; the ascent of the Mount of Purity (Ṣafā), and prayer and confession of faith upon it; the race seven times repeated from its summit to that of the Mount of Marwa; the common worship in the Great Mosque, and the sermon preached to the assemblage of common believers; the various pilgrimages and prayers of the eighth and ninth days; and on the tenth the extraordinary pelting of devils, which is symbolized by the patriarchal rite of the stoning of the pillars of Mina. Later in the same day occurs the final act of the ḥaj, an animal sacrifice. Whether the ladies could pay a substitute to perform this is not said.

During these ten busy days the seamless wrapper is worn; after the sacrifice it is laid aside, and attention may be paid to the neglected toilette. The pilgrim stays three days longer in Makka—days of the ‘drying of the blood of sacrifice,’ ‘three well-earned days of rest after the peripatetic performance of the last four.’ Still, all is not finished; there should be more circuits of the ka'ba, another stoning at Mina, and a draught drunk from the sacred well. Our princess would certainly do everything which was due, and probably would go to Medina, and she would also make visitation to the tombs of many pious persons buried in the desirable soil of Arabia.

In 1579 Khwāja Yaḥyā was mīr ḥaj, a friend of Badāyunī, and the charitable man to whom Ḥusain the Patcher (tukriya) was indebted for decent burial. He was commissioned to escort the ladies home, and also to bring back curiosities and Arab servants,⁷⁴ who may perhaps have been wanted for the Arab saraī, established near the mausoleum of Humāyūn, outside Dihlī.

The return journey was both adventurous and perilous. They were shipwrecked off Aden, and had to stay, some say seven, others twelve, months in that desolate spot, far less habitable then than now, with condensed water, a tide from the Suez Canal, occasional rain, and the British rāj. The governor did not behave well, and quitted the path of good manners, misconduct for which he was punished by his master, Sulṭān Murād of Turkey. One pleasant incident broke the gloom of the long delay. On a day of April, 1580, the rock-bound travellers saw a ship coming up from the south with the wind, and, wishing to know whose it was, sent a boat out to make inquiry. By a pleasant chance Bāyazīd^74a bīyāt with his wife and children were on board, and he shortened sail, though the wind was favourable, and gave and took news. Bāyazīd says that the persons who sent out the boat to him were Gul-badan Begam, Gul-'iẕār Begam, and Khwāja Yaḥyā. Perhaps he was instrumental in getting them ships for return to India.

I do not know when the ladies succeeded in leaving Ạden, nor when they landed in Sūrat. Here they again waited long, and this delay is attributed partly to the rains and partly to the royal absence in Kābul. It was March, 1582, when they reached Fatḥpūr-sīkrī.

On the northward journey they visited the shrines of the Chishtī saints in Ajmīr, and there met Prince Sālim. Day after day there came an amīr with greetings from the Emperor, until he met the caravan at Khānwa. The night of reunion was kept awake by ‘questions and entrancing stories; gifts were shown, and happiness brimmed over.’ One item of home news would cloud the meeting: Bega Begam had died just too soon to welcome her old friends.

Arrived in Fatḥpūr-sīkrī, Gul-badan Begam would find much to ruffle her orthodoxy; for Father Rodolf Acquaviva was installed there and was giving Prince Murād lessons in the Christian faith. She would hear of the reverence shown by her nephew for the sacred things of an alien faith, and of his liking for the society of the pious and learned guest. Ḥamīda-bānū is named by the Father as protesting, with other ladies of the ḥaram, against the royal countenance of Christianity, and assuredly Gul-badan would swell the chorus of complaint, in which, too, Hindū wives would join the Moslim lamentation.⁷⁵ When the Father was leaving Fatḥpūr-sīkrī, he accepted only so much money as would pay his expenses back to Goa, but he asked a favour from Ḥamīda-bānū Begam. She had amongst her household slaves a Russian of Moscow and his Polish wife, with their two children. These four the Father begged to take with him to Goa. ‘The begam, who was no friend to the Firingīs, was most unwilling to give up the slaves; but the Emperor would refuse nothing to the Father,’ and the family was carried off to freedom.

The next thing known of our princess is that she wrote her Humāyūn-nāma. The book is its sole witness, for no one speaks of it. It is not literature, but a simple setting down of what she knew or had heard, for the help of the Akbar-nāma . This was not her only composition, for she followed the fashion of her day and wrote verses. Mīr Mahdī Shīrāzī has preserved in his Taẕkiratu-l-khwātīn two lines of hers, in which her thought seems to be, ‘No love, no fruit of life.’

“Har parī ki au bā 'ashaq khud yār nīst,
Tū yaqīn mīdān ki hech az 'umr bar-khur-dār nīst.”

Nine copies were made of Bāyazīd's Humāyūn-nāma, which was written in obedience to the royal command obeyed by Gul-badan Begam and also by Jauhar the Ewer-bearer. Of these two went to the Emperor's library; three to the princes Sālim, Murād, and Danyal; one to our begam; two to Abū'l-faẓl; and one perhaps was kept by the author. This allotment brings out the little point that Gul-badan collected books. Badāyunī has a curious passage about himself which also discloses something ‘bookish’ of Salīma: ‘On account of the book Khirad-afza, which had disappeared from the library, and concerning Salīma Sulṭān Begam's study of which the Emperor reminded me, an order was issued that my allowance should be stopped, and that they should demand the book of me.’ He adds that Abū'l-faẓl did not lay his refutation before the Emperor, and he does not clear up the awkward doubt as to what he had done with Salīma's desired book.

The remaining records of Gul-badan Begam's life are few and scanty. When she was seventy, her name is mentioned with that of Muḥammad-yār, a son of her daughter, who left the court in disgrace; again, she and Salīma join in intercession to Akbar for Prince Sālim; again, with Ḥamīda, she receives royal gifts of money and jewels. Her charities were large, and it is said of her that she added day unto day in the endeavour to please God, and this by succouring the poor and needy. When she was eighty years old, and in February, 1603, her departure was heralded by a few days of fever. Ḥamīda was with her to the end, and it may be that Ruqaiya, Hindāl's daughter, would also watch her last hours. As she lay with closed eyes, Ḥamīda-bānū spoke to her by the long-used name of affection, ‘Jiu!’ (elder sister). There was no response. Then, ‘Gul-badan!’ The dying woman unclosed her eyes, quoted the verse, ‘I die,—may you live!’ and passed away.

Akbar helped to carry her bier some distance, and for her soul's repose made lavish gifts and did good works. He will have joined in the silent prayer for her soul before committal of her body to the earth, and if no son were there, he, as a near kinsman, may have answered the Imām's injunction to resignation: ‘It is the will of God.’

So ends the long life of a good and clever woman, affectionate and dutiful in her home life, and brought so near us by her sincerity of speech and by her truth of feeling that she becomes a friend even across the bars of time and creed and death.