Gulbadan Begam, Princess Rosebody, was the youngest daughter of Babur, the first Mughal Emperor of India. Her memoirs provide a unique document of history, the story of a sixteenth century Mughal royal family as seen through the loyal but keen eyes of a lady with a remarkable ability to remember and recount the smallest details of her eventful life. She describes battles, escapes, nomadic wanderings, life in the haram, her pilgrimage to Mecca and many other scenes in a way which marvelously conveys the atmosphere of period and place. Her book, the Humayun-nama, together with two other official chronicles of the time, the Babur-nama and the Akbar-nama, from the basis of Rumer Godden’s enchanting account of the lifetime of Gulbadan Begam – a lifetime which spanned the reigns of three emperors, her father Babur’s, her brother Humayun’s and her nephew Akbar’s. The account begins with the Rose Princess’s earliest memory of seeing her father ride off with his army from Kabul to conquer Hindustan, and ends with her death. She was in her eighties, and the Emperor Akbar himself helped to carry her bier. Beautiful Indian and Persian miniature paintings add a vivid commentary to this book.
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