From the Zenana to the battle zone

In Ruby Lal’s recently published Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan , there is a startling anecdote that challenges received wisdom about the supposedly domestic lives of queens in the Mughal harems.

In 1617, Emperor Jahangir set out on a hunting expedition with his wife Nur Jahan by his side. Four tigers were spotted and driven into an enclosure by scouts beating drums. The empress, seated in a howdah atop an elephant, fired six shots — and bagged all four tigers. Lal writes in the book: “In sheer delight, the emperor scattered coins over Nur Jahan. Impromptu, a poet recited this couplet: ‘Though Nur Jahan be in form a woman/ In the ranks of men, she’s a tiger-slayer’.”

Now that is a story seldom heard.

On her own terms: Autonomous Muslim woman leaders are thought to be few and far between but recent feminist historiography reveals otherwise

Ira Mukhoty, author of Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire, agrees. “Despite making up 50 per cent of the population, women make up only 0.5 per cent of recorded history, and this is such a terrible loss. It reinforces the notion that women’s lives are less valuable, their contributions less remarkable, and their ambitions more fragile than men’s and it is something that we must seek to redress wherever we can,” she says in an email interview. She contends that 75 per cent of the books on history are authored by men, and the subject matter is almost always men. “If that continues unchallenged, then it is only the voices of the patriarchy that are heard,” she argues.

Such invisibilisation has been a norm in patriarchal societies, where women’s rights and voices were historically repressed. However, there were exceptions. There are always exceptions.

The face of historiography is changing around the world. Accomplished women scholars and writers are taking up the cause of feminist history, balancing the narrative one book at a time.

Chasing the outliers

Every era has had its share of extraordinary women, who challenged the rules set by men. That subsequent male rulers and historians, spurred by insecurity and entitlement, erased or downplayed their role in history is another matter.

In the larger cultural narrative, the queen or the princess was reduced to the delicate, distressed flower that needed rescuing, and who would then be eternally grateful to her saviour by bearing his children and keeping his home. Women who weren’t chaste maidens and mothers were painted as vamps or witches.

When a rare male writer deigned to create the occasional female hero, either in mythology or pop culture, she was cast in the mould of men’s sexual fantasies. Think Kali, think Draupadi, think Amazons, think Catwoman. But note that most of these heroines occur, even if as afterthoughts, in non-Islamic parts of the world. This is no coincidence, since the lives and tales of women in Muslim societies have been more cloistered than others.

In popular Islamic culture, most ‘heroines’ are validated by being related, in some way, to the Prophet Muhammed, such as his youngest wife, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, his daughter Fatima, or his granddaughter Zaynab. They were all known for their fierce faith and leadership of the Islamic communities in the early years after the Prophet’s passing.

Sometimes they may be scholars such as Umm Al-Darda, famous jurist and Islamic scholar from the 7th-century CE, or Lubna of Cordoba, a slave girl of Spanish origin who rose to become one of the most important figures in the Umayyad palace in Cordoba in 10th-century CE, thanks to her acumen in mathematical sciences.

Autonomous Muslim women leaders are few and far between. Or so the notion has been.

Her time in the spotlight

Leslie Pierce’s 1993 book The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire first offered a deep analysis of the correlation between sexual and sovereign power. Similarly, Anne F Broadbridge’s recent Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire examines the participation of historic women in politics, war and daily life.

The machinations of the courts and royal bedrooms of 16th and 17th century Turkey and Mongolia are mirrored in their counterparts in Hindustan. In evaluating political action in the context of household networks, these books demonstrate that female power was a logical, indeed an intended consequence of political structures.

Modern chroniclers of Mughal history are out to do the same. Whether scholarly or fictional, these books are serving to change commonly held notions about the lives led by women behind the high walls of royal or aristocratic harems.

Lal’s Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (July 2018) is a recent addition to this string of incredible books that turns the trope of shy Muslim women on its head. We find the long-missing counterpart of Rani Lakshmibai in Nur Jahan, who was equally, if not more, intelligent, astute and courageous. Lal, who is an acclaimed historian of Mughal India, offers a profoundly in-depth view of the queen’s universe.

Cast as an intrepid heroine, Nur Jahan is seen to rise by the sheer force of her personality to rule Hindustan alongside her husband, the emperor Jehangir. She is much more than a wife who is dearly loved by her husband; she is also a judicious stateswoman, an impeccable markswoman, a powerful queen and, most important, a woman who knows and speaks her mind.

Nur Jahan, like Sita, crossed the Lakshman Rekha of her father-in-law’s zenana rules to earn the awe and ire of men.

Lal’s Empress follows Mukhoty’s remarkable book Daughters of the Sun , which chronicles the lives of remarkable Mughal princesses and queens. A former student of the natural sciences, Mukhoty’s interest in feminist history originated from wanting better role models and heroines for her daughters than what mainstream literature offered.

“I found that a lot of the women from myth and history in our popular iconography were bland, homogenised versions of a certain Brahmanical ideal of womanhood. There was no individuality, no vulnerability, no space for a nuanced portrayal of the different ways of being a heroic Indian woman,” she says.

Her first book, Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History included a mix of figures such as Amrapali, Meerabai, Lakshmibai and Hazrat Mahal, making them real and accessible to the reader.

Mukhoty continues in the same vein in Daughters of the Sun , bringing to life lesser-known women such as Khanzada Begum, Maham Anaga and Jahanaara Begum. The book features eye-opening accounts of Khanzada Begum’s sacrifice for her brother Babur, and her imperial rise; the fierce loyalty of Maham Anaga, Akbar’s wet nurse; and Jahanaara’s poetry, largesse and popularity during her father Shah Jahan’s time. These ferocious, ambitious and accomplished women have been, unsurprisingly, painted as crafty, first by colonial historians, and later by their Indian counterparts following the Orientalist narrative.

Writing herself into the centre

Their depictions notwithstanding, the precedent set by these Mughal heroines inspires subsequent generations of Muslim noblewomen, such as the Begums of Bhopal in the 19th-century. Indira Iyengar’s book The Bourbons and Begums of Bhopal (April 2018) chronicles the lesser-known story of three generations of women who ruled the princely state of Bhopal.

The author, now 77, spent 10 years unearthing this forgotten piece of history, where women took on the mantle of ruler in tumultuous times. As a descendant of the Bourbon nobles, Iyengar’s rendition is as much a private history as it is a public one.

Supported by the loyal Bourbons of French origin — an expatriate aristocratic family in the service of royals since Akbar’s time — three remarkable rulers, Qudsiya Begum, Sikandar Begum, and Shahjahan Begum, played a significant role in shaping the state’s destiny. Surrounded by aggressive Hindu princely states such as Nagpur and Gwalior, these women joined hands with the British for the sake of protection and peace. They safeguarded their kingdom and ably lead its people through many crises such as civil unrest and sieges by neighbouring fiefdoms.

“The Begums of Bhopal were wily warriors. Even as far back as the 18th-century, they dressed up in men’s clothes and instructed other womenfolk to do the same during war. Dressed up and with their weapons drawn, they would stand on the parapets of forts, fooling their adversaries about their numbers,” says Iyengar over the phone.

It is interesting to note how Sikandar Begum clashed with Rani Lakshmibai, the ruler of Jhansi, during the 1857 Mutiny, with Lakshmibai pressuring the Begum to go against the British, but to no avail. Divided by their loyalties, they were yet similar in their love for their land. The Sepoy Mutiny or The First War of Independence, as it is now called, also forms the backdrop for another recent work of historical fiction — The Mulberry Courtesan by Sikeena Karmali. It is yet another work that presents the potential of feminine power in Mughal courts, albeit through a fictional character.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen

These books, researched thoroughly and narrated compassionately, offer rich insights into the daily lives and manners of royal and noble Muslim women. They go beyond the commonly perceived dichotomy of the purdanasheen princess (hidden away and chaste) and the seductive mujrewaali (courtesan), just like the devi and daayan axis, and bring alive these forgotten women as living and breathing characters, who were as vulnerable as they were invincible.

Far from the derogatory depiction of a harems as places of orgy and sin, they are portrayed here as elaborate ecosystems with their own power structures, relationship matrices and economies. As sisters, wives, aunts, mothers, wet nurses, and regents, these women played crucial roles in determining the fate of emperors and the empire itself.

In Nur Jahan’s issuing of coins and royal orders, in Jahanaara’s authoring of Sufi treatises and commissioning of architectural wonders, or in Qudsiya Begum’s rejection of the purdah to take charge of her kingdom after her husband’s untimely death are examples of extraordinary courage and wisdom. They are often called defiant in a world controlled by men, but we know that they simply were natural leaders who charted their own destinies.

This spate of recent feminist histories is not just a literary trend cashing in on some kind of reversal of the white knight complex.

If life and literature are mirrors to each other, this may just be the time for a pralaya — the destruction of the old world order, to make way for a new one. #MeToo and #TimesUp may just be the beginning of this end.

The time is right to mend our histories and make our futures.

To bring the women out of the shadows and acknowledge them as decision makers, nation builders and equal partners in the narrative of our collective cultures.

Urmi Chanda-Vaz is a writer and researcher who engages with Indian cultural history through her consultancy, Culture Express

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