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

by Ira Mukhoty

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.

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 writing this history of the Mughal women, I have tried consciously to swing the narrative arc away from the Eurocentric vision we often encounter in Mughal histories. Since the Europeans wrote so much about the Mughals, works which are readily available, moreover, in English, it is naturally easy to fall into the seductive game of reading Mughal history from a European point of view.

His Mongol cousins he abhors and considers brutish savages and would have been aghast to know that the Persianized word for Mongols was what his dynasty would be wrongly called—the Mughals. Babur’s people always refer to themselves as Gurkani, the Persianized form of guregen, ‘son-in-law’, which was one of the titles of Amir Timur.

‘Do not be troubled about my son,’ Maham tells Babur through her own tears. ‘You are a king; what griefs have you? You have other sons. I sorrow because I have only this one.’

Akbar is a turbulent, boisterous adolescent, physically brave and endlessly distracted. Unlike his studious father, fascinated by the occult, Akbar can never be made to sit and study, preferring by far the company of his racing pigeons, dogs, horses and companions in arms. He never will learn to read and will remain effectively illiterate, the only Mughal padshah to be so, possibly due to his hyperactive nature exacerbated by extreme dyslexia.

The raja, anticipating his death in battle, has appointed two trusted men, Bhoj Kaith and Miyan Bhikari Rumi to supervise the jauhar of the women of the house. ‘It is the custom of Indian rajas under such circumstances’, the appalled Mughal general is told, ‘to collect wood, cotton, grass, ghee and such like into one place, and to bring the women and burn them, willing or unwilling’. The two attendants have a further, more macabre, role for those women who find themselves unable to confront the monstrous flames. ‘Whoever out of feebleness of soul was backward (to sacrifice herself) was, in accordance with their custom, put to death by the Bhoj aforesaid.’ And so the chastity of the women is preserved, either by fire or by sword, and all the women burn.

This ceremony, a Hindu tradition introduced by Humayun, is carried out twice a year for the padshah’s birthday. For his solar ceremony, the padshah is weighed against twelve articles: gold, quicksilver, silk, perfume, copper, mercury, drugs, ghee, rice-milk, seven kinds of grains, and salt. These articles are then distributed amongst the poor. The time of the weighing ceremony is precisely calculated by astrologers and as the padshah sits on the scales, the elderly men who hold up the scales recite prayers for him.