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NORTH AMERICAN Newsline APRIL 05, 2024 | The Indian Eye 34

faculty since 1998. the Tang Family Professor in the Department of Industri-
al Engineering and Operations Research,. He is currently the Senior Vice
Dean for Research and Academic Programs, leading educational programs,
and large-scale interdisciplinary research at the school.

women on a pilgrimage across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Af-
ter her return, at Akbar’s invitation, she wrote a chronicle in prose. “It was
meant to be a source for the first official history of the Empire that Akbar
commissioned,” Lal said, adding that the princess “was committed to record-
ing women’s points of view, the places where they lived, what they thought,
said and did.”
Lal initially came across Gulbadan while writing her doctoral thesis at
the University of Oxford, while attending as the recipient of the Inlaks Shiv-
dasani Foundation Scholarship. “I first encountered the fabulous Gulbadan
Begum in 1996 via Beveridge’s English translation,” she writes in her TIME
essay.

Iyengar has played central roles at DSI since its founding. He was To read more about Indian diaspora and Global Indians, log on to and follow
Associate Director for Research from 2017-19 and helped launch our website www.TheIndianEYE.com

the Institute’s PhD concentration, seed fund program, and post-
doc program. His own research has brought significant advances
to the study of information, control, and optimization, and his
current work addresses a broad range of domains, including cel-

lular signaling, labor platforms, power networks, supply chains,
and causal inference.

He received a B.Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute
of Technology in 1993 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford
University in 1998. He is a member of Columbia’s Data Science Institute.

RUBY LAL

Historian’s new Book ‘Vagabond

Princess’ creating ripples

cclaimed feminist historian and Emory University professor Ruby Lal
has come up with her new book ‘Vagabond Princess: The Great Ad-
Aventures of Gulbadan’. The book talks about Princess Gulbadan, the
daughter of Emperor Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, and the
aunt of Emperor Akbar. Considered the sole woman historian of the Mughal
Empire, Gulbadan also led a group of women on the first collective female
hajj.
Gulbadan was about 8 years old at the time of her father’s death in 1530
and was brought up by her older half-brother Humayun. When she was 17,
she got married to her cousin Khizr Khwaja Khan. She spent her middle
years in a walled harem established by her nephew Akbar to showcase his
authority as the Great Emperor.
According to Lal, Gulbadan “lived a forceful, itinerant life surrounded
by formidable women.” After traveling to Kabul, Agra, and Lahore, in her
youth, she came to live behind the red sandstone walls of her nephew Akbar
the Great’s harem. “At age 52, she defied her nephew to lead a group of 11

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