The History of Humāyūn (Gulbadan Begam) 4.5
The History of Humāyūn (A. S. Beveridge) 4.5
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4.5.1546
Humayun spent some time in Ander-ab while his wound was healing and his army gathering, and here Haram comes again upon the scene. Where Sulaiman and Ibrahim were, is not quite clear, but it was to Haram a message went asking her for the army of Badakhshan. 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 Sulaiman and Ibrahim were already with Humayun, and that Haram despatched a supplementary force. The battle in which it was to engage was that important fight at Ushtur-gram which Humayun tried hard to prevent by previous mediation, and which was forced on by Kamran’s chief officer, Qaracha Khan. There was much previous discussion as to terms of peace, but Kamran and Qaracha would have nothing less than Kabul. A second embassy offered alliance of the ‘unique pearl of the Caliphat,’ Akbar, with the mirza’s ‘dear daughter’ (who may be 'Ayisha), and that Kabul should be theirs; and suggested that Humayun and Kamran should join forces and again attack Hindustan. All came to nothing, because Qaracha cried, and enforced his cry, ‘Our heads or Kabul.’ 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 Humayun’s camp. His father vowed charitable gifts for his restoration, and also that he would never part from him again.
A pleasant chance befell Humayun 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 Qibchaq defile. Many would be MSS. of the Persian poets; Babar knew these well and often quotes the Gulistan; and Humayun was too much of a dilettante and verse-lover not to have made himself familiar with their sound.
Happily the tale of the doings of Kamran is drawing to a close. He made a night attack, by which Hindal lost his life, on the royal forces on November 20th, 1551; sued for help in vain from Salim Shah, the Emperor of Hindustan; from Adam Ghakkar, and was surrendered by him to Humayun; was blinded by the insistence of the came on August 17 1551, and allowed to go to Makka. He accompanied, as all the writers tell, by his Arghun wife Mah-chuchak, and by her equal in compassion, a servant of Humayun, Chihma Beg. He made the Hajj four times and he died on October 5th, 1557. Mah-chuchak survived him seven months. She only of his wives is commemorated 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 loudly 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 Kamran 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 Kabul 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 Humayun's own defects and their outcome of opportunity.
To end the story of the faithful brothers, — 'Askari too received leave to go to Makka from Badakhshan in 1551; he died between that city and Damascus in 1558. Both he and Kamran 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 'Askari one clear characteristic only comes out: he was true to the blood-tie with his mother's son and own senior, Kamran.
A little return must now be made, in order to bring up the tale of home events to the date of these military. In 1551 the first marriage of the younger generation was arranged by the betrothal of Bakhshi-banu to Ibrahim, son of Haram. 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 Haram. 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 Haram to ask Shāhzāda Khānam, one of these girls, in marriage for himself. His envoys were two persons whom Haram 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 Mahmūd, mīr sāmān, who, on Akbar’s accession, was made commander of 2,500, and the other was Bībī Fātima, whom we know as having helped to nurse Humāyūn in his illness of 1546.
4.5.1555
Haram, 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 (aghācha) 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 Muhammad Hakīm to a daughter of Haram.
While speaking of Haram and the alliances of her family with the royal house, there may be named a high-handed act about another quasi-royal marriage. One of Kamran’s wives was Muhtarima Khanam Chaghatat, and on his death Sulaiman wished to marry her. Of her as co-wife, Haram would not hear, and contrived to make her a daughter-in-law by marrying her to Ibrahim.
The death of Hindal in the night attack of Kamran, 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 Musalman 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 Musalman affection centred on those of the same blood.
The royal ladies must have felt it hard when, after having mourned Humayun through Kamran for nearly three months, Hindal was killed. This happened near Khizr Khwaja’s fief of Jui-shahi, which explains why the body was sent there for burial and entrusted to the khwaja. It was removed later to Kabul and laid at Babar’s feet. Hindal 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 Kamran,) 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, Humayun determined, in 1554, to try his fortune again in Hindustan. He left Kabul on November 15th, — a date so near that of Babar’s start in 1526 that it looks as if both obeyed the same omen of the heavens, — and with Akbar dropped comfortably down the river from Jalalabad to Peshawar. 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 Dihli on July 23rd, 1555.