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

Ruby Lal

Date

Saturday, May 3, 2025 15:00

Registration Date

Friday, Feb 21, 2025 10:00

Location

Level B1,
Eaton Theatre

Admission

Talks - Public: Free Talks - Teacher: Free

Audience

Adults

About

Free with RSVP
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.    

Speakers

Ruby Lal
Ruby Lal

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

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.

Headshot of Deepali Dewan
Deepali Dewan

Deepali Dewan is the Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor (status-only) in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, is affiliated with the Centre for South Asian Studies, and is a Senior Associate Fellow at Massey College. She is the co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal Trans Asian Photography. Her research spans issues of colonial, modern and contemporary visual culture, including  topics such as art education, decorative arts and historiography.

Details

Light refreshment to follow. Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan will be available for sales and signing following the Theatre presentation.