Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire

299 Pages·2018·6.69 MB·English

by  Ira Mukhoty

Also by Ira Mukhoty

Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India

First published in India in 2018
by Aleph Book Company
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New Delhi 110 002

Copyright © Ira Mukhoty 2018
Pages 249 to 250 (Image Credits) are an extension of the copyright page All rights reserved.

The author has asserted her moral rights.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her,
which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are in no way liable for the same.

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ISBN: 978-93-86021-12-0

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TO the memory of my parents,
Gobind and Nicolle Mukhoty

CONTENTS

Introduction

Peripatetic Queens from Persia to Hindustan

1494–1569

The Timurids, the Uzbeks and Khanzada’s Sacrifice
Hindustan and the Coming of the Begums and the Khanums
Khanzada Begum and the Mystic Feast
Rout at the Battle of Chausa and the Afghan Menace
Dildar Begum and a Marriage Proposal
Hamida Banu and the Persian Escapade
Bega Begum and Humayun’s Tomb

Disappeared Wives and Imperial Splendour

1556–1631

Maham Anaga and the River of Milk
Disappeared Wives and the Mystery of Jahangir’s Mother
Gulbadan and the Mughal Hajj
Salima Sultan Begum and the Prodigal Son
Maryam-uz-Zamani, the Rahimi and the Perfidious Portuguese
Noor Jahan, an English Ambassador and the Politics of Colour
Mumtaz Mahal and a Love Supreme

Ambitious Siblings and a Shahzaadi’s Dream

1631–1721

Shahzaadi
That Timurid Girl
A New City for the Peacock Throne
Letters between a Brother and a Sister
Sibling Rivalries

Roshanara Begum and a Dangerous Brother
The Woman in the Tower and the Last Padshah Begum

Epilogue: The Sun Sets on the Mughal Empire

Acknowledgements

Image Credits

Notes and References

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

India was ruled for over 200 years by the Gurkani, a clan that established an
empire of such magnificence, size and wealth, that it became a byword for glory
around the world. But the name by which the Gurkani became rightly famous
was an aberration. The dynasty was a nomadic Timurid one, as the founder,
Babur, proudly traced his lineage directly to the Turkic conqueror Amir Timur
(also known as Tamerlane), who established an empire in the fourteenth century
quite as glorious as Chinghiz Khan’s. Babur referred to himself, and to his
lineage, as Gurkani, from the Persianized Mongol word for guregen, or son-in-
law, since some of the Timurids, including Amir Timur himself, had married
Chingizid women, to add to their legitimacy. But Babur himself, and all of his
descendants, male and female, were intensely proud of their Timurid lineage,
very consciously evoking the Timurid charisma in various ways. Indeed, Babur
thoroughly loathed his Mongol cousins, the Uzbeks, considering them brutish
and uncivilized, and would have been horrified to know that his dynasty would
become synonymous with an Anglicized form of Mongols—the Mughals of
India.

It was while researching my first book, Heroines, that I realized the casual

negligence with which we regard our history in India and the sometimes benign
largesse with which we assimilate inaccuracy and fallacy as received wisdom.
But the naming of things is important. It shapes the way in which we view
ourselves and the place we occupy in the world. To name a thing is to magic it
into being, to give it substance and weight. When the Europeans gave the name
‘Mughals’ to Babur’s dynasty, they were negligently assuming a shared Mongol
inheritance for all Central Asian conquerors. One of the women I studied for my
collection of essays in Heroines was Jahanara Begum, among the most
accomplished women of the Mughal empire. I discovered the exact depth of my
ignorance at that point—an ignorance that was also inadvertently tainted with
prejudice.

The misnomer of the dynasty is only the very beginning of an enormous

amount of almost whimsical misinformation that surrounds the history of the
Mughals. The empire of the great Mughals—from Babur’s invasion at Panipat in
1526 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707—coincides exactly with the arrival and
settling of the Europeans in India for trade and more, the elucidation of that
history and the way in which we view it even today is marked by the way in

which those early Europeans experienced and interpreted Mughal rule. The
Europeans kept meticulous records of all their transactions with the Mughal
court. They wrote detailed accounts in their letters to their holding companies
and they wrote memoirs and travelogues. Jesuit missionaries arrived at the same
time and they too wrote extensively of their experiences and travels. On the
other hand, from the Indian point of view, it was considered indelicate, indeed
outright rude, to write about royal Muslim women who were expected to
maintain a decorous purdah. The Europeans, not held back by any such need for
decorum, were instead fascinated by the notion of the private space of the
Mughal women and indulged in some truly fervid leaps of imagination when
trying to conjure up that forbidden world—the Mughal harem.

An Englishman travelling to Mecca in the seventeenth century admitted that

the first question a traveller returning from the East was faced with was ‘what
are the women like?’ And yet, when European men interacted with the Mughal
court, they found themselves distanced from the affairs of women at several
levels: as men, European men, they were both physically and culturally
separated from the world of women. The purdah of the zenana meant that the
women and the household that they inhabited were prohibited to them. François
Bernier, a seventeenth-century French physician and meticulous observer of
Shahjahanabad, admitted that though he yearned to visit the zenana, ‘who is the
traveller that can describe from ocular observation the interior of the building?’
Moreover, since they usually did not speak Persian or Turki, Europeans could
only comprehend this beguiling world through an interpreter. The nuances of
culture and comportment were therefore often inaccessible to them. They could
not understand the reason for a Mughal woman’s influence and power,
attributing it to an emperor’s weakness, or worse, to incest. The resulting
chimera creation, the ‘Oriental harem’, was therefore a lurid and sometimes
fantastical mix of bazaar gossip, stray gleanings of fact and sexual fantasy. The
most frequent portrayal of this ‘harem’, as it was consumed eagerly by a curious
audience in Europe that was beginning to be fascinated by the ‘exotic East’, was
that of a cruel, despotic and endlessly lascivious emperor surrounded by
thousands of nubile young women competing for his attention and pining away
in sexual frustration. Not only was this image eagerly adopted by Western
audiences, it also trickled down into the Indian consciousness through the
colonial experience and the European narrative of Indian history. Thus, to this
day, there is a perception that Mughal women operated within a fixed zone of
influence, the domestic harem, an immutable cloistered space in which they led

restricted and unfulfilled lives, from which they could seldom escape, and to
which only the emperor had access. As I discovered while doing my research on
the women of the great Mughals, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact,
the zenana was an industrious, carefully calibrated and orchestrated world. The
wanton world of the Europeans’ imagination in which the women ruthlessly
schemed against one another and wasted the hours of their days in frustrated
languor was just that, a fantasy. The zenana was instead a busy, well-ordered
place where each woman knew her place and her worth. It was a place where
accomplished, educated women were prized; well-spoken, articulate and
cultured women most likely to advance. There were intrigues, and jealousies,
certainly, for how would there not be when hundreds and sometimes thousands
of people lived together? But the overwhelming nature of the zenana was one of
warm support and companionship, a complex, nuanced world of female
complicity and understanding, one in which excellence was valued and women
learned all the skills required to run a city, for there were no men within.

A much truer picture of a zenana was described by an Englishwoman, Mrs

Meer Hassan Ali, who married an Indian man and lived for twelve years in a
Muslim nobleman’s household in the nineteenth century. ‘A lady here,’ wrote
Mrs Meer Hassan, referring to an Indian zenana, ‘would be the most unhappy
creature existing, unless surrounded by a multitude of attendants suitable to her
rank in life.’ Moreover, ‘they cannot imagine anything so stupid as my
preference to a quiet study, rather than the constant bustle of a well-filled
zenana… The ladies’ society is by no means insipid or without interest’, she
further writes of the zenana. ‘They are naturally gifted with good sense and
politeness, fond of conversation, shrewd in their remarks and their language is
both correct and refined.’ She writes of the ‘cheerful meeting of friends, the
distribution of presents to dependents and remembrances to the poor; all is life
and joy, cheerful bustle and amusement’, and it is difficult to imagine a world
more far removed from the claustrophobic, sexually charged harem of popular
imagination. John Fryer, a physician with the East India Company (EIC),
accidentally spied a zenana when the curtain separating him from his patients
fell. He was surprised to find the women ‘not altogether unemployed, there lying
pared mangoes, and other fruits for confection and achars, or pickles; some
samplers of good housewifery in needleworks; and no indecent decorum
managing their cloistered way of living’. And so John Fryer found the women
busy making achaars and doing embroidery, and he was amazed, for it was its
very mundanity and industry that he found puzzling. The mystery, really, is how

this pervasive notion of the ‘harem’ came to have such a tenacious hold on the
modern Indian imagination.

The explanation usually given for the general dearth of information about

Indian women is multi-layered: women were usually uneducated, so they did not
transmit written histories; India, in general, tended not to emphasize written
histories, preferring the oral tradition; moreover, physical evidence is fragile in
India, subject to the tempestuous weather, eroded by time and the negligence of
historians. But in the case of the Mughals, none of this holds true. The women
were all, right from the beginning, some of the most educated of their age.
Timurid girls were given the same rigorous education, in mathematics, history,
physics, poetry, astronomy etc., as boys because the Timurids placed a very high
value on calligraphy, writing and erudition. The Mughals were also memory-
keepers par excellence of all Indian kings. They wrote memoirs and appointed
court historians in enthusiastic numbers. As for the physical evidence of Mughal
ambition and glory, India is fairly studded with examples of their vision, in
sandstone and in marble.

The information is available, therefore, though it is often oblique,

obfuscated or hidden in plain sight. This book is an attempt to recreate the
dynamic, changing world of the women of the Mughal empire, from the time
that Babur chanced upon the ‘al-Hind’ to the beginning of the eighteenth century
which marked the end of Aurangzeb’s reign—a period of almost 200 years. I
have examined the lives and influence of some fifteen women who left their
mark on India and whose lives impacted, to a greater or lesser degree, the
luminous destinies of these Mughal padshahs. In the case of the earlier Mughals,
it was the older matriarchs who were most influential, aunts and mothers like
Aisan Daulat Begum, Khanzada Begum, Dildar Begum, Gulbadan Begum, Bega
Begum and Maham Begum. When Akbar became padshah at only thirteen years
of age, a group of ‘milk mothers’ or foster-mothers, became powerful, including
Jiji Anaga and Maham Anaga. Then, as the padshahs settled into their growing
empire, their wives gained in influence and so there was Harkha Bai, Salima
Sultan Begum and, much more famously, Noor Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal.
Finally, as the empire became truly luminescent, unmarried daughters became
powerful and there is the astounding legacy of Jahanara Begum and Roshanara
Begum. Under the last of the great Mughals, Aurangzeb, there are the waning
stars of his daughters Zeb-un-Nisa Begum and Zeenat-un-Nisa Begum.

The ambition of the Mughals of India, from the time of Babur himself, was

to found an empire worthy of their glorious ancestors. Hindustan, for them, was

never a plunderous foray. It was a homeland to be created and claimed, at a time
when anything less than blistering confidence meant instant death. And so, to
bolster their claims, they carefully nurtured the old Perso-Chigizid symbology of
the sun. In the genealogy created by Abu’l-Fazl for Akbar, the Mughals traced
their lineage through Timur and Chinghiz Khan to Princess Alanquwa of
Mughalistan who was impregnated by the divine light of the sun. The imagery of
this powerful radiance was burnished by each successive emperor and used to
stake their claims and mitigate their status as recent parvenus. In the interludes
between battles, for example, Humayun liked to portray himself as the solar
emperor in the centre of an elaborately constructed cosmic heaven. But
Hindustan was a diverse land with its own venerable legacy of sun worship.
There was the Parsi fire-worship and the Hindu veneration of the sun god. And
so, Akbar, in an affable, chimeric adoption of all these symbols, became ‘His
Majesty the Sun’, who recited the 1,001 names of the sun and worshipped at the
fire altar. Jahangir, who took the regnal name ‘Light of the Faith’, was often
depicted with a divine solar light shining around his head like a nimbus. Shah
Jahan took the enigmatic title Sahib-e-Qiran (Lord of the Auspicious
Conjunction), thereby stating clearly his aim of lighting the ‘Timurid Lamp’. But
it was not only the Mughal emperors who so assiduously courted the divine
glory of the sun. Many of the Mughal women—wives, daughters and mothers—
all carefully placed themselves within the warm orbit of the sun. In some cases,
the women consciously evoked the symbol of the sun, as when Mehr-un-Nisa
Begum took the title Noor Jahan, or Light of the World and when Mumtaz
Mahal came to be known as the ‘Sun of Modesty’. But in many cases, it was the
old Timurid ideal that the women aspired to. When Jahanara wrote her Sufi
treatises and discovered a Shining Truth, it was the Timurid Lamp, once again,
that shone through her. In their roles as ambassadors, peacekeepers, rulers in
absentia and even as guardians of memory, it was the Timurid-Chingizid ideal
that these Mughal women were claiming. They were equally invested in the
fabric of myth-making and empire-building as the emperors, and were proud and
ardent daughters of the sun.

The term I use for the space reserved for women is zenana, which is more

Indian in its origin than harem, the term the Europeans used to speak of a general
‘oriental’ secluded space, whether they were referring to the Ottomans in Central
Asia or the Mughals of India. When the Central Asian semi-nomadic warlord
Babur rode into Hindustan, he did not only bring his warriors with him. He
brought his ‘haraman’ or household, which included elderly matrons, young

wives, children, servants, widowed relatives, divorced sisters and unmarried
royal relatives. The women of the haraman lived in tents and spent most of their
life on horseback, riding with the men and travelling great distances. These early
Mughals, Babur and Humayun, had enormous respect for the matriarchs of the
clan, their mothers and grandmothers, whose advice often helped keep warring
brothers together and empires intact. One of the earliest women to travel into
Hindustan on horseback was Khanzada, Babur’s elder sister. Babur, and then his
son Humayun, revered Khanzada because of the sacrifice she was required to
make early in her life, when she was left behind with the Uzbek warlord
Shaybani Khan, to secure Babur’s safety. The Mughals were tenacious in their
gratitude towards the matriarchs of their clan, who were robust, physically
inured to hardship, and willing to suffer their menfolk’s privations alongside
them. They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their
contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual
chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy.

In this early haraman, there was no fixed, cloistered space which was

designated only for the women, as the very concept of home and homeland was
still being formed. As the scholar Ruby Lal, in her ground-breaking work
Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, has shown, there was no
clear separation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space at all for these early Mughals.
The women created a home on the move—travelling while pregnant, delivering
babies, arranging marriages and parlaying with errant sons and brothers. When
Khanzada left on her arduous, lonely mission from Kandahar across the icy
passes as ambassador to Kamran Mirza’s court at Kabul at the very advanced
age of sixty-five, it is also the ‘harem’ that she represented. She carried with her
the harem’s ardent desire for reconciliation while also performing her duty as the
padshah’s ambassador. Maham Begum, Dildar Begum and Gulrukh Begum,
Babur’s principal wives, along with Gulnar Agacha and Nargul Agacha, Babur’s
concubines, bore Babur’s children even as they were constantly on the move,
harried by enemies. They helped to create a sense of a settled Timurid homeland
even when, in the early years, this was just a mirage. Later on, when the thirteen-
year-old Akbar was first declared Padshah Ghazi, he had to send for the haraman
from Kabul so that his grizzled warriors, veterans of Central Asian wars, were
persuaded to remain beside him and fight for Hindustan.

The resources to piece together a life of the Mughal women are available

but they are sometimes unaccountably ignored. An extraordinary document
exists, discovered and translated from Persian into English in the early twentieth