Adventures of Princess Gulbadan: (Re)Discovering Women’s Narratives in South Asian History

Join historian and best-selling author Ruby Lal for a discussion of her newest book, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan. She will be joined in conversation by journalist Aparita Bhandari to probe women’s stories and feminine experience in the history of South Asia and beyond. Lal is the first scholar to study Princess Gulbadan’s memoir, the only woman historian of the Mughal empire. The Princess's exquisite writing gives us incredible insight into the daily life of the court in war, in movement, and in settlement- including Gulbadan's own adventures.  This illustrated talk and conversation will bring to life the subject of movement and freedom, feminist practice of history, and Lal's experience in uncovering the audacious life of Gulbadan, tied to one of the greatest adventures in the world.   

This program is generously supported by the Dan Mishra South Asia Initiative.    

Los Angeles Times Finalist and Emory University Professor of South Asian Studies, Ruby Lal is the author, most recently, of Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press, February 2024). Selected as one of the most anticipated 2024 non-fiction books by Ms. Magazine, and by History Today, Vagabond Princess has been lauded by the BBC, The Hindu, The Literary Magazine, The Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and numerous other national and international journals, magazines and newspapers in the USA, UK and India. 

Ruby’s previous biography Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (NY: W. W. Norton, 2018, 2020) won the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography and was a Finalist in History for the LA Times Book Prize. Among the top ten pick of the Time Magazine, EMPRESS received extensive press in The Telegraph, the Prospect Magazine, The New Yorker, the Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, and The Indian Express. 

Her remix of Empress for young adults, Tiger-Slayer is forthcoming in Spring 2025 (W. W. Norton, NY). 

Ruby is as well the author of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World and Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness. These books won much acclaim in international journals and magazines, The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. 

Ruby has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden, and as Public Humanities Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. She has written numerous essays and literary pieces in the USA and India and speaks regularly at national and international conferences, on radio and podcasts, in book clubs, literary festivals and ecumenical and literary retreats. 

Aparita Bhandari is an arts and life reporter in Toronto. She has been published in Canadian media including CBC, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus magazine. Her areas of interest and expertise lie in the intersections of gender, culture and ethnicity. She is the producer and co-host of the Hindi language podcast, KhabardaarPodcast.com.