The Memoirs of Bābur 936.5.3

936.5.3

What would sufficiently explain the absence of mention by Bābur of the parentage of Gul-rukh and Dil-dār is that his record of the years within which the two Begīms were married is not now with the _Bābur-nāma_. Presumably it has been lost, whether in diary or narrative form, in the _lacuna_ of 914-25 AH. (1508-19 AD.). Gul-rukh appears to have belonged to the family of Begchīk Mughūls described by Ḥaidar Mīrzā[2747]; her brothers are styled Mīrzā; she was of good but not royal birth. Dil-dār's case is less simple. Nothing in her daughter Gul-badan's book suggests that she and her children were other than of the highest rank; numerous details and shades of expression show their ease of equality with royal personages. It is consistent with Gul-badan's method of enumerating her father's wives that she should not state her own mother's descent; she states it of none of her "mothers". There is this interest in trying to trace Dil-dār's parentage, that she may have been the third daughter of Sl. Maḥmūd Mīrzā and Pasha Begīm, and a daughter of hers may have been the mother of Salīma Sulṯān Begīm who was given in marriage by Humāyūn to Bairām Khān, later was married by Akbar, and was a woman of charm and literary accomplishments. Later historians, Abū'l-faẓl amongst their number, say that Salīma's mother was a daughter of Bābur's wife Sālḥa Sulṯān Begīm, and vary that daughter's name as Gul-rang-rukh-barg or -`iẕār (the last form being an equivalent of _chihra_, face).