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

by Ira Mukhoty

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.

To name a thing is to magic it into being, to give it substance and weight.

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.

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.

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.

The honour of Mughal men was not as irretrievably bound to the sexual chastity of their women.

The reader may be surprised also at how little I deal with the ‘love life’ of these Mughal women. What usually fascinates a modern reader is a twentieth-century construct—the idea of romantic love.

Babur, most articulate of emperors on all possible subjects, is strangely laconic and matter-of-fact when speaking of his wives. Indeed, he writes with more passion about an erotic longing for a young man than about any of his wives.

And yet life goes on, even in this unlikeliest of households, and in 1500, when Babur is seventeen, he marries for the first time. The bride is Ayisha Sultan Begum and Babur admits with painful honesty that ‘although my affection for her was not lacking, since it was my first marriage and I was bashful, I went to her only once every ten, fifteen or twenty days’.

This enemy, in mercilessly evicting Babur and his family forever from their beloved homeland of Samarkand, will create a hopeless nostalgia

The Mughals of Hindustan would, in time, become the most roaming of dynasties anywhere in the world. They will travel constantly and change their capital cities on a whim. They will build great cities on the memory of a dream, just to abandon them immediately, and the most long-lived of them, Aurangzeb, will spend decades in self-imposed exile in a distant corner of his empire.

The details she is able to write about of the life the royal couple are leading in Persia are known to her through Hamida. It is from Hamida herself that Gulbadan hears of the adventures they go through in Persia and it is often forgotten that we have the remarkable presence of a sixteenth-century Muslim woman’s voice, vibrant, textured and alive with observations unique to that woman and to that time.

And yet, for all his personal misgivings, Akbar’s zenana becomes increasingly guarded and the fine-grained lives of the earlier Mughal women fade as the individuality of Akbar’s wives is scuffed out to present a smooth, impossibly lustrous surface.

Noor Jahan owed her meteoric rise to power to her status as the wife of the padshah. From the time that Jahangir dies, her powerful charisma vanishes, like dew on the misty mornings in her flower gardens at Agra.

But the journey to the building of the Taj Mahal is not straightforward. It involves monstrous egos, a flawless aesthetic vision, profligacy and also, fragile as the bulbul’s song, love.

The Abyssinian eunuchs are particularly fearsome, their muscles rippling beneath their dark skin like a promise.

Jahanara, having spent years organizing her brothers’ marriages and taking on the responsibilities of the imperial household, admits to feeling ‘trapped and lost’ in this gilded cage. ‘I am twenty-seven years old,’ writes Jahanara, with a sense of malaise at all the empty years, ‘and I did not want to lose more time.’

The fourteenth-century ancestor of the Mughals of Hindustan, Timur, is one of those men who, like his idol Chinghiz Khan, quite literally shaped the demographics of the human race and altered the trajectory of history.

But despite the bewildering exuberance of Muhammad Shah Rangeela’s court, night approaches for the Mughal empire.

The British would consistently undermine Muslim influence while promoting Hindu culture, thereby nonchalantly creating fault lines that fracture India to this day.

More insidious was the loss of memory-keeping, of all the ways in which a culture remembers its past and its glory. Manuscripts were burned, libraries despoiled, Urdu and Persian abandoned, and a fortune in artefacts and exquisite objects stolen and removed to Britain. Today most Indian treasures—miniatures, jewellery, statues, gems, books and manuscripts—lie in museums abroad. The disenfranchisement is many-layered and it is deadly. As we forget our languages and can no longer put into context the events and achievements of the past, we grow forgetful and confused.

The memory of the Mughals of Hindustan became somewhat shameful, an unwanted reminder of a past that a new India had outgrown.

In the 5,000 years of Indian history there have been almost countless dynasties of rulers. Each dynasty, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Muslim, has contributed to the great tapestry that is India. The Mughals are closest to us in time and most accessible through the great churning of cultures through which they created some of the most exquisite, syncretic art and an ineffable tehzeeb, or way of being. Though we may not always be aware of it, the influence of these Daughters of the Sun remains in our music, in the food we eat, in the clothes we wear, in an aesthetic vision that colours so much of North Indian art. More changes will come, doubtless, as our pale blue dot swings on its axis through endless space. In reclaiming the past, and the lives of these Mughal women so scalded by beauty, we enrich our present with knowledge and grace so that we may temper our tomorrows.