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
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