Gulbadan begum: Gulbadan Banu Begum wrote the first

Gulbadan Banu Begum wrote the first female-authored account of life at the Mughal Court, the Humayun-nama. Although best classed as historiography, it is a genre-crossing the usual historiographic memoir. Gulbadan was asked by Akbar to pen down her memories of her father Babur and her brother Humayun, it was an effort to help the court historian Abul Fazl to compile the official history. In the interior of the solid Mughal fort was the stately harem where Mughal princess and poet Gulbadan Begum had relocated after a 3,000-mile-long pilgrimage to Mecca. Gulbadan Begum was a Mughal princess and the daughter of Emperor Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire. On an autumn day in 1576, a Mughal princess led a cohort of royal women on an unprecedented voyage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It was the first time in Mughal India that a woman had...