Hamida Banu Begum

• 1. Introduction

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  Hamida Banu Begum was fourteen years old and living in the household of a Mughal prince when the emperor of India decided he wanted to marry her. She refused. For forty days, Humayun pursued her, and for forty days she held her ground. When she finally relented, she reportedly said that she would only marry a man whose collar her hand could reach, not one whose skirt it could not. That single line, recorded in a memoir written by her closest friend, tells you everything about who Hamida Banu Begum was: a woman with a very clear sense of her own worth, living in one of the most turbulent courts in the world.

  She would go on to give birth to Akbar, one of the greatest emperors the Mughal dynasty ever produced. She would cross deserts and flee armies, travel to Persia and back, and outlive her husband by nearly half a century. She would hold a title that compared her to the Virgin Mary and be carried across rivers in a palanquin by her own emperor son. How she got from that banquet in Alwar to burial in Humayun's Tomb in Agra is a story of survival, loyalty, and quiet but persistent power.

• 2. Roots and Resistance

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  Hamida was born around 1527 into a family of Persian descent that had long been settled in Sindh. Her father, Shaikh Ali Akbar Jami, was a Shia pir, a religious preceptor, and he served in that capacity to Hindal Mirza, the youngest son of the first Mughal emperor, Babur. Ali Akbar Jami also went by the name Mian Baba Dost, and he claimed descent from Ahmad Jami Zinda-fil, a lineage of considerable spiritual prestige.

  That family connection placed Hamida inside Hindal Mirza's circle, and it is there that the complicated web of her early life forms. When Humayun's envoys came to negotiate a marriage, both Hamida and Hindal fought against it. Gulbadan Begum, Hindal's own sister and Hamida's close friend, noted in her memoir the Humayun-nama that Hamida was a constant presence in Hindal's palace during this period. The circumstantial evidence pointing to a romantic attachment between Hamida and Hindal has been noted by historians, though the record stops short of certainty.

  What the record does confirm is that Hamida resisted the emperor himself for forty days, and only agreed to the marriage at the insistence of Dildar Begum, Hindal's mother and Humayun's own stepmother. The wedding took place on a Monday in September 1541, at mid-day, at Patr, known as Paat, in the Dadu District of Sindh. Humayun chose the date himself using his astrolabe; he was a devoted astrologer. The town of Paat happened to be the same place where Hamida was born, and the same town where her own parents, Ali Akbar Jami and Mah Afroze Begum, had been married years before.

• 3. Flight Through the Desert

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  Humayun was already a fugitive when he married Hamida. The armies of Sher Shah Suri had driven him from Delhi, and Suri held ambitions of restoring Afghan rule over the city. For Hamida, life as an empress meant life on the move, often through dangerous terrain.

  A year after their wedding, the couple reached Umerkot after a grueling desert crossing. Umerkot was ruled by a Hindu Sodha Rajput, Rana Prasad, who gave them asylum. Two months after arriving at that small desert town, on the 15th of October 1542, Hamida gave birth to the future Emperor Akbar. The date in the Hijri calendar was the fourth day of Rajab, 949 AH. The name Akbar had come to Humayun in a dream he had at Lahore, and the full name given to the child was Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar.

  The family did not rest long. By the following December, Hamida and her newborn were in camp at Jun, after ten or twelve days of travel. In 1543, a journey from Sindh toward Qandahar turned dangerous when Humayun was forced into hasty flight from a place called Shal-mastan, crossing what the sources describe as a desert and waterless waste. On that leg, Hamida left her infant son behind to accompany Humayun to Persia.

  In Persia, the couple visited the shrine of Hamida's own ancestor, Ahmad-e Jami, and also the Shiite shrine at Ardabil in Iran, the ancestral site of the Safavid dynasty. That pilgrimage carried a political dimension: the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I would eventually give Humayun an army to reclaim his throne. In 1544, at a camp at Sabzawar, some ninety-three miles south of Herat, Hamida gave birth to two daughters who died on the return journey from Persia. She did not see her son Akbar again until the 15th of November 1545, the tenth day of Ramadan, 952 AH, and the moment of the young child recognizing his mother among a group of women was later illustrated in the Akbarnama, Akbar's own biography.

• 4. Power at the Mughal Court

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  Sher Shah Suri died in May 1545, and his son Islam Shah succeeded him before dying in turn in 1554, breaking apart the Suri dynasty's hold on Delhi. When Humayun set out for India in November 1554 to reclaim his empire, Hamida stayed behind in Kabul. He took Delhi in 1555 and seemed finally secure, but in 1556 he died after falling down the steps of his library at Purana Qila in Delhi. He was forty-seven years old, and his heir, Akbar, was thirteen.

  Hamida joined Akbar from Kabul only in his second year of reign, 1557 CE. Once she arrived, she remained a force in imperial politics. During the reign of Akbar, Mughal court culture allowed senior women of the household to intervene on behalf of those who had fallen from favor, and Hamida used this role actively. The most notable instance came in 1560, when Akbar came of age and moved to oust his powerful minister Bairam Khan. Hamida intervened in that political moment directly.

  She also took up the case of her own grandson, Prince Salim, when Salim revolted against his father Akbar. Salim had plotted the killing of Akbar's favorite minister, Abu'l-Fazl, yet a reconciliation between father and son followed, in part because of Hamida's intervention. In her later years, she also raised her granddaughter, Shahzada Khanam. The English traveler Thomas Coryat recorded that Akbar himself carried his mother's palanquin across a river during one of her journeys from Lahore to Agra, a gesture that the court would have read as public tribute.

• 5. Legacy and Remembrance

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  Akbar gave his mother the title Mariam Makani, a Persian phrase meaning dwelling with Mary, signaling that he regarded her as an epitome of innocence. She also held the title of Padshah Begum during his reign, the highest formal designation available to an imperial woman. Court chronicles produced under Akbar and later under her grandson Jahangir refer to her as Hazrat, a term of deep reverence.

  The primary written records of her life come from three sources. Gulbadan Begum, who was Hindal's sister and Humayun's sister, wrote the Humayun-nama, the earliest and most personal account. The Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari, both produced during Akbar's reign, extend the record into her later decades.

  She died on the 29th of August 1604, the nineteenth day of Shahriyar, 1013 AH, in Agra. She was buried at Humayun's Tomb, joining her husband in the monument he had built. Her death came just a year before Akbar's own death, and nearly fifty years after Humayun's. When Akbar shaved his head and chin in mourning, he had done it only once before in his life: at the death of his foster-mother, Jiji Anga. The weight of that comparison is something the court would not have missed. Hamida Banu Begum had been present at the founding of Akbar's life, at Umerkot in 1542, and she was still there, still shaping the dynasty, six decades later.

• 6. Portrayals in Film and Television

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  Hamida Banu Begum has drawn the attention of Indian filmmakers and television producers across multiple generations. The actress Nargis portrayed her in the 1945 Indian epic film Humayun, placing the character on screen within living memory of her story's popular currency.

  In 2008, director Ashutosh Gowariker cast Poonam Sinha in the role for the epic film Jodhaa Akbar. From the 18th of June 2013, the television channel Zee TV began airing a series called Jodha Akbar, with Chhaya Phadkar playing Hamida Banu Begum as a main character alongside lead actors Rajat Tokas and Paridhi Sharma. Rishina Kandhari took on the role in the 2017 Indian television series Akbar Rakht Se Takht Ka Safar. Across these productions, the figure of a woman who refused an emperor for forty days has continued to find new audiences, keeping alive the detail that her own words, preserved in a sixteenth-century memoir, make the most vivid argument for who she was.