Vagabond Princess

“In Vagabond Princess, Ruby Lal coaxes the remarkable Gulbadan out from the shadows of history.”—Sara Wheeler, Wall Street Journal

“A highly appetizing and exhaustively researched biography. . . . Lal does this with aplomb, marshalling the excerpts and ‘close reading’ the paintings for a triumph of historical reconstruction.”—John Keay, Times Literary Supplement

Longlisted for the 2024 Cundill Prize, sponsored by McGill University

Finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize in Biography, sponsored by the University of Edinburgh

“An astonishing work by one of the most exciting historians writing today. Vagabond Princess is more than just a brilliant page-turner of a biography, narrating in vivid detail a story few people know. It is a passionate and compelling argument to place the extraordinary Gulbadan among the pantheon of great adventurers like Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. I loved this book.”—Reza Aslan, author of Zealot and An American Martyr in Persia

“Vagabond Princess is a deeply feminist text interrogating the making of archives, obsessed with imagining the spirit of freedom and love of learning in certain Mughal women, with a stunning buildup of the concept-metaphor of mujawir as ‘vagabond.’ A splendid teaching text, but also a reading text for sheer instructive pleasure; as we follow the epistemological performance of the making of the book with the book itself.”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of Other Asias

“In Vagabond Princess, Ruby Lal brilliantly illuminates the remarkable life and talent of Princess Gulbadan Begum, daughter of Emperor Babur and historian of her own times. Lost and forgotten for many centuries, Gulbadan and her work live again through Lal’s magisterial account of the sixteenth-century Mughal court.”—Amanda Foreman, author of The Duchess

“A work of meticulous scholarship and brilliant storytelling, Vagabond Princess is both an epic historical tale and a compelling personal account of one of the most interesting women to have lived during the Mughal Empire.”—Daniel H. Weiss, Homewood Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and president emeritus of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Meticulous archival research combines with a strikingly imaginative evocation of the world inhabited by Mughal women in Ruby Lal’s writing. Whether set against the dust and grit of imperial caravans, salt-lashed sea voyages, or the manicured precision of Mughal gardens, her vagabond princess, Gulbadan, surprises us at every turn. A superb achievement.”—Nandini Das, author of Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire