The History of Humāyūn (Gulbadan Begam) 4.5.1555

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.