Contemporary Authors

• Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2005
• Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2013
• Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan W.W. Norton and Co. (New York, NY), 2018

1. Coming of age in nineteenth-century India : the girl-child and the art of playfulness LCCN 2012023652 Type of material Book Personal name Lal, Ruby. Main title Coming of age in nineteenth-century India : the girl-child and the art of playfulness / Ruby Lal. Published/Created Cambridge, [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2013. Description xvii, 229 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781107030244 (hardback) Links Cover image http://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/30244/cover/9781107030244.jpg CALL NUMBER HQ1742 .L346 2013 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HQ1742 .L346 2013 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms + "In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the coming of age of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century continued to be agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skilfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, which are elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household and rooftop"-- Provided by publisher. Contents Machine generated contents note: 1. Texts, spaces, histories; 2. The woman of the forest; 3. The woman of the school; 4. The woman of the household; 5. The woman of the rooftops. 2. Domesticity and power in the early Mughal world LCCN 2006273143 Type of material Book Personal name Lal, Ruby. Main title Domesticity and power in the early Mughal world / Ruby Lal. Published/Created New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005. Description xv, 241 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780521850223 (hardback) 0521850223 (hardback) 0521615348 (pbk.) Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0632/2006273143-d.html\ Publisher: In a fascinating and innovative study, Ruby Lal explores domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century. Challenging traditional, orientalist interpretations of the haram that have portrayed a domestic world of seclusion and sexual exploitation, the author reveals a complex society where noble men and women negotiated their everyday life and public-political affairs in the 'inner' chambers as well as the 'outer' courts. Using Ottoman and Safavid histories as a counterpoint, she demonstrates the richness, ambiguity and particularity of the Mughal haram, which was pivotal in the transition to institutionalisation and imperial excellence. Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0632/2006273143-t.html Contents: 1. Introduction; 2. A genealogy of the Mughal haram; 3. The question of the archive: the challenge of a princess's memoir; 4. The making of Mughal court society; 5. Where was the haram in a peripatetic world?; 6. Settled, sacred, and all-powerful: the new regime under Akbar; 7. Settled, sacred, and 'incarcerated': the imperial haram; 8. Conclusion. Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0733/2006273143-b.html\ Author: Ruby Lal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on issues of gender relations in Islamic societies in the pre-colonial world. CALL NUMBER DS461 .L3443 2005 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER DS461 .L3443 2005 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Empress : the astonishing reign of Nur Jahan LCCN 2018003419 Type of material Book Personal name Lal, Ruby, author. Main title Empress : the astonishing reign of Nur Jahan / Ruby Lal. Published/Produced New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. Projected pub date 1807 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393239348 (hardcover) Mughal paintings : art and stories : the Cleveland Museum of Art / Sonya Rhie Quintanilla ; with the assistance of Dominique DeLuca ; essays by Mohsen Ashtiany, Marcus Fraser, Catherine Glynn, Ruby Lal, Pedro Moura Carvalho, Sonya Rhie Quintanilla. Published/Produced Cleveland, OH : The Cleveland Museum of Art ; London : in association with D Giles Limited, 2016. Introduction : Painting, patronage, and propaganda in Mughal India / Marcus Fraser -- Rustam / Mohsen Ashtiany -- Joseph, Moses, and Elijah / Catherine Glynn -- Christ and his life as literary and visual references to Akbar and Jahangir / Pedro Moura Carvalho -- The Mughals of India / Sonya Rhie Quintanilla with Marcus Fraser -- From the inside out / Ruby Lal -- Catalogue of Mughal and Deccan paintings from the Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim collection.

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• The Indian Express - https://indianexpress.com/article/research/nur-jahan-is-the-history-of-india-historian-ruby-lal-on-her-new-book-5255411/

  Home Research ‘Nur Jahan is the history of India’: Historian Ruby Lal on her new book
  ‘Nur Jahan is the history of India’: Historian Ruby Lal on her new book
  In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Lal spoke about the incredible achievements of Nur Jahan. Remnants of imperial orders issued by her, coins minted in her name, paintings that paid ode to her sovereignty and bravery are all evidence of the enormously powerful figure she was.
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  Written by Adrija Roychowdhury | New Delhi | Updated: July 11, 2018 8:01:29 pm
  Nur Jahan, Ruby Lal, new book on Nur Jahan, Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan, history of Nur Jahan, Jahangir, Mughal history, Indian history, India news, Indian Express
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  Left- Cover of the book ‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’ (wwnorton.com) Right- Historian Ruby Lal (personal website of Ruby Lal)
  For four centuries, from when she was at the centre of one of the largest empires of the world, Nur Jahan, the twentieth and supposedly the most loved wife of Mughal emperor Jahangir, has been a household name in the Subcontinent. Though she was not officially the ruler of Mughal India, Nur Jahan has been noted by historians to be the real power behind the throne. A politically astute and charismatic figure, she ruled Mughal India as a co-sovereign of Jahangir and is known to have been more decisive and influential than he ever was. Historian Ruby Lal in her latest book, ‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’, dives deep into the intriguing world of the only woman to have helmed the Mughal empire. Tracing her life in great detail, Lal attempts to rip apart narratives of romance and exoticism that surround the image of Nur Jahan and focus upon what made a Muslim woman living in seventeenth-century India, one of the most authoritarian figures in Indian history.

  In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Lal spoke about the incredible achievements of Nur Jahan. “People say she always sat right next to Jehangir in the court and that if some cases or decisions came up and if she agreed with him, she would pat him on the back and he would say yes to that decision,” says Lal who is Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Remnants of imperial orders issued by her, coins minted in her name, paintings that paid ode to her sovereignty and bravery are all evidence of the enormously powerful figure she was. Charting the life history of Nur Jahan, and placing her in the background of the pluralistic cultural space that Mughal India was, Lal puts together an evocative biographical account of the queen.

  Here are excerpts from the interview with Lal.

  Popular perception of Nur Jahan is somehow constricted to the romantic relationship she shared with Jahangir. Why is that the case?
  There is a very long history of the erasure of Nur Jahan’s power that I chart in the book. As she traveled through the length and breadth of the country with Jahangir – issuing imperial orders, hunting a killer tiger near Mathura, discussing the expansion of the empire- she rose to being the co-sovereign. This does not mean that in her own time people did not raise eyebrows. In 1622, her stepson and Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan had risen in revolt. The catalyst for his revolt was the moment when Nur Jahan arranged a match for her daughter from her first marriage, Ladli; she chose the youngest prince, Shahriyar for her. About that time, Shah Jahan went into rebellion against Jahangir. And its is very clear that he felt threatened; he knew about the power of Nur Jahan. In fact, Shah Jahan and Nur Jahan had been closely aligned. The year 1622 is when certain chroniclers begin to write about the chaos that Nur Jahan Begum had raked up between the father and son.

  Nur Jahan, Ruby Lal, new book on Nur Jahan, Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan, history of Nur Jahan, Jahangir, Mughal history, Indian history, India news, Indian Express “There is a very long history of the erasure of Nur Jahan’s power that I chart in the book,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)
  So the early criticism appears to begin around this time. The other major moment of critique of Nur’s power was when they were on their way to Kashmir and Mahabat Khan (who went on to capture Jahangir later in 1626) goes on the journey with them to a certain distance and according to one of the chroniclers he says to Jahangir that a man who was governed by a woman is likely to suffer from unforseen results. In 1626, she, completely visible, goes to save Jahangir (sitting upon an elephant on a roaring river), commanding all men including her brother Asaf Khan. She stratergises and eventually saves the emperor. After this, we begin to come across a word called Fitna, in the records.

  Fitna is a very loaded term in Islamic history. It is used for the first time during the Shia-Sunni split for civil strife. It was also used against Ayesha, Prophet Muhammad’s favourite wife, when she went on a battle against Ali who was eventually the leader of the Shias. Over time, the word came to be used against women’s visibility, their sexuality and so on. Following 1626, this is one word that is used repeatedly against nur – that is to say that her power produced chaos.

  Later, in the Shahjahanama, we find that at one point that the chronicler lists her power as a “problem”: the Shahjahanama reverts to the male inheritance of power and completely undoes her co-sovereignty with Jahangir.

  Then there were also visitors to India like Thomas Roe, the ambassador of James I of England who follows Nur and Jahangir through the camps in Gujarat and Malwa. He calls her the Goddess of heathen impiety.

  In the 19th century orientalist renditions of the romance of Nur and Jahangir become very important in the histories of the time; later, the colonial renditions highlight and forward such stories. Nur Jahan becomes classic oriental queen. Thus, a long-standing history of the erasure of the power of an astonishing emperess. It is certain that the erasure of Nur’s power travels into modern times and we only hear about her romance with Jahangir, not about her work as co-sovereign of the empire.

  Jahangir is often compared with Akbar and criticised for being an uncompetitive, flamboyant king, who spent much of his time in drinking and merrymaking. But the fact that it was during the reign of Jahangir that a woman became so powerful, what does it say about his attitude towards women?
  You are right, this is how Jahangir has come to be imagined. There are a range of scholars who for sometime now have been rethinking Jahangir’s reign, his philosophical and artistic engagements. My book foregrounds the ways in which Jahangir seeks to go differently from how Akbar articulated his sovereignty. If you look at the reigns of Babur and Humayun, there was no stone harem: the kings were nomadic and forever on the move. During Akbar the Great, for the first time in Mughal history, the imperial harem is built in stone in Fatehpur Sikhri. For the first time in the Ain-e-Akbari, women are declared as ‘pardeh-giyan’ which means “the veiled ones.”

  Nur Jahan, Ruby Lal, new book on Nur Jahan, Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan, history of Nur Jahan, Jahangir, Mughal history, Indian history, India news, Indian Express “My book foregrounds the ways in which Jahangir seeks to go differently from how Akbar articulated his sovereignty,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)
  But what Jahangir does is that he goes back to the ethics of Babur. He was constantly wandering, he was constantly moving. The ethics of a peripatetic life and movement, which contributed to the co-sovereignty of Nur Jahan. Nur Jahan is the biggest example of Jahangir’s attitude towards women. An 18th-century chronicler that advances the Jahangirnama to the end of Jahangir’s death had suggested that the emperor had once claimed that he had given the sovereignty to Nur Jahan Begum and that he was quite content with his wine and meat. It’s an allegorical statement: and one indicates his admiration of Nur, something that he chronicles in his own memoir

  Would Nur Jahan be this powerful had she not been married to Jahangir or had she not been part of the Mughal empire?
  I think, Nur Jahan, looking at her whole life history and context, would have expressed her power differently in other circumstances. Her life history shows her dynamism and boldness. Of course, as I have been saying, and detail in the book that the plural landscape of Hindustan was very important- in that that it fostered experimentation and all sorts of ways of being (alongside war other challenges of co-existence of multi-confessional identities). We should also remember that she comes from an important Persian family background, deeply invested in poetry, arts, calligraphy. Then her own initiative must be highlighted: there were other women in the harem – and indeed Nur walks in the tracks of these women’s power – but no one becomes a co-sovereign. That speaks something about her boldness, her endeavours and of course her ambition.

  Islamic societies are often noted to be more regressive compared to others in their treatment of women. In your book do you try to subvert this notion?
  I Am trying to suggest that Nur Jahan is the history of India. She was a Shia married to a Sunni Muslim who was also half Hindu Rajput. Further, Nur Jahan is the only woman ruler among the great Mughals of India (there are technical signs of being a sovereign and informal signs, both of which I detail in the book). That is the history of India. As far as Islam is concerned, people should know that there were incredible and powerful women in Islamic history all the way through. We have Ayesha, Raziya, we have Nur Jahan Begum, we have any number of powerful women. It is also the multicultural world. In the modern world, we tend to think in terms of fixed identities. People in early modern times were much more open. Jahangir was engaging with Siddichandra, a Jain monk. Nur Jahan used to tease him about the pleasures of the flesh. What does this tell you? It tells you about an open engagement. It tells you about how experimental Islam is, how mixed Islam is, how vibrant Muslim women are and how Islam is so deeply attached to India.

  'Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan' has been published by W.W.Norton in the United States earlier this month and will be published by Penguin Books in India soon.

• Ruby Lal - http://rubylal.com/about-ruby/

  Ruby Lal
  Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She holds a D.Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, UK, and an M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi, India. She has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in History and Anthropology, and served as Associate Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her fields of study include feminist history and theory, and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the precolonial and colonial world. Her first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005) won much acclaim, including numerous reviews in major international journals and magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) was reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. Her creative non-fiction work, a narrative history of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan is just published, EMPRESS: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (W.W. Norton, NY, 2018). Her published work is widely cited, and she is frequently invited to speak at academic and non-academic settings. Her short stories have appeared in Indian Literature and in The Little Magazine. She is revising her short-story collection, Rubble and Other Stories.

• Christian Science Monitor - https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2018/0627/Ruby-Lal-author-of-Empress-discusses-the-amazing-life-and-reign-of-Nur-Jahan

  Ruby Lal, author of 'Empress,' discusses the amazing life and reign of Nur Jahan
  Lal explores the powerful Indian empress who was much more than a romantic icon.

  June 27, 2018

  By Randy Dotinga
  If you grew up in South Asia, the lush 17th-century romance of a captivating young widow and a Moghul emperor is likely as familiar to you as Romeo & Juliet are in the West.

  They meet, and she wows the ruler of tens of millions of people with her beauty, wit, and fearlessness. Wise and savvy, she becomes his beloved 20th wife and goes on to live an extraordinary life. She writes poetry, designs gardens and buildings, and even saves a village by hunting down and killing four dangerous tigers with six shots.

  That's as far as the legend and the history books tend to go. But there's much more to the story, as historian Ruby Lal reveals in her fascinating new book Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan.

  While some historians dismiss the idea that Nur Jahan was anything but a royal consort, Lal contends that she served as co-sovereign with her husband while living in a harem. In a culture of male dominance, Lal writes, "a new kind of power was on display."

  "The basic facts," Lal said in a Monitor interview, "are pretty astounding. To put it plainly, she was the one woman we can count among the great rulers of India."

  What do you know about Asian literature?
  Q: Could you talk a bit about the Moghul empire, whose name inspired the word "mogul"?

  The Moghuls were descendants of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane [a conquerer also known as also known as Timur and Amir Timur].

  This was a pre-nation time, when the borders and territories that are the hallmark of modern nations do not exist. The area that we're talking about encompasses many different parts of Central Asia, places like Afghanistan, Iran, and India.

  Q: What drew you to Nur Jahan, a Shiite Muslim from an immigrant Iranian family who marries a Sunni Muslim who is half-Hindu?

  This is a woman who was clearly bold, independent, and very inventive in challenging the norm in quite extraordinary ways.

  For me as a historian of India, the empress is not an add-on. <>. Once you know about people like her, you turn your head and see things differently. You see a place of creative, living, dynamic, influential women.

  Q: How did you approach writing about her?

  It's a delicate balance when it comes to writing about history and legend.

  There is a vivacious public imagination about this story. People talk about extraordinary she was, how beautiful she was, and how she fell in love in 1611.

  I didn't undo the legends. But I distilled them, thinking through her sovereignty, what was it that made her a sovereign.

  She was powerful, she issued coins, she issued imperial orders. What I wanted to do was read these orders and look at those coins very closely: What was the meaning of the signature she adopted, what was the vision of imperial order?

  Q. One of the most touching things you write about is how your storyteller mother told you about the legend of Nur Jahan when you were a child growing up in a Hindu household in India. Nur Jahan was Muslim, but that didn't seem to matter, right?

  That's what drives most of my writing – the plural heritage of India. It's a world in which a mother could celebrate Hindu, Muslim and Christian figures, celebrate all of them.

  The world that I write about, that I grew up in, still exists: On the streets and corners of India, there are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jesuits, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, people speaking more than 300 dialects. They co-exist.

  Q: If you could meet Nur Jahan, what would you ask her?

  I would compliment her more than ask her anything, and say, "I'm amazed that you did it."

  This is what I've written about: the unexpected ways in which women use their creativity against all odds, against a very constraining environment.

  Q: What could be more confining than a harem?

  Exactly.

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  Q: What are you working on now?

  My next book will be about Gulbadan Begum, a daughter of [founding Moghul emperor] Babur who dared to lead an all-women's journey to Mecca after the first harem was established. I'll explore a scandal hat had to do with her, shall we say, unorthodox activities.

• Emory - http://mesas.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/lal.html

  Ruby Lal
  Ruby Lal

  Professor of South Asian Studies
  Office: S-316 Callaway Center
  Phone: 404.727.0801
  Email: rlal2@emory.edu
  Curriculum Vitae

  Personal Website
  Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She holds a D.Phil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, UK, and an M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi, India. She has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in History and Anthropology, and served as Associate Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her fields of study include feminist history and theory, and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the precolonial and colonial world. Her first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005) won much acclaim, including numerous reviews in major international journals and magazines, such as The New York Review of Books, The Economic and Political Weekly, Revue Historique, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) was reviewed extensively in academic journals and magazines with wider intellectual concerns. Her current, creative non-fiction work is a narrative history of Mughal Empress Nur Jahan, EMPRESS: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan (W.W. Norton, NY, forthcoming 2018). Her published work is widely cited, and she is frequently invited to speak at academic and non-academic settings. Her short stories have appeared in Indian Literature and in The Little Magazine. She is revising her short-story collection, Rubble and Other Stories.

  Link to book info - EMPRESS: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan

  Link to article - St. Bonaventure University [Mary Devereux Lecturer, 2018. AT]

  Link to article - July 2013, Khabar Magazine [author interview - AT]

  Link to lecture - Brown University [2013 - AT]

  Link to lecture - Young India Fellowship

  Link to article - MESAS newsletter 2015

  Link to lecture - Middlebury College [2015 - AT]

  Link to lecture - Hong Kong Baptist University [2017 - AT]

• Khabar (print magazine) - http://www.khabar.com/magazine/

  Girija Sankar, July, 2013

  Ruby Lal, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University.

  Ruby Lal was born in Dehradun, grew up in Uttar Pradesh, went to college in New Delhi, and moved to the U.K. for her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. She later taught at Johns Hopkins University for several years before moving to Emory University’s South Asian Studies program in the mid-2000s. She has authored two books, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India and Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, and a collection of short stories. Her newest book, Nur Jahan, Uncrowned Empress, will be released next year.

  When you decided that you would be attending graduate school for research in your field of study, what was the reaction in your circles?
  Well, in our kinds of circles [academics, writers, journalists], people value education a lot. I’d won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford, so it was a celebratory moment for my family. I come from a family of three sisters [who] had been treated beautifully by our parents. People think of Indians and then think of arranged marriages, but marriage was never a question in our family. It was a lot about career and what we wanted to do. People might see this as an exception, but there are many such exceptions in India.

  What motivated you to study South Asian/Indian history?
  It all began with this whole quest of standing in solidarity with minorities, with women, with Muslims. That has been the concern of the entire body of my book. I’ve written two books and plenty of articles on that. The focus has been on solidarity with minority groups—it has motivated me for a long time.

  At a more general level, I’ve been very drawn to the rich, contradictory, diverse, and tolerant traditions of India. That’s what got me into it. My first book was on the Mughals. One of the things I noticed before my book came out, I realized that there was a huge gap in the study of the Mughals, which was that there was not one book on gender relations. If there was anything written about women, it was about harems. But as to what was the history of harems, what did women do, etc., none of this was there. So, that’s why I got into this work.

  Was this the career path that you had always had in mind? Or did certain experiences guide your decision to choose this field of study and scholarship?
  Right from school onwards, my best teachers were history teachers. Then there was much storytelling at home. My grandparents were partition migrants into India. And so, lot of stories. My mother would read to us every night. But when I was getting my master’s [at Delhi University], I saw two things—one was this secular position of standing in solidarity with minorities, particularly the Muslim minorities in India. But the woman question was becoming huge at that time. And still is a very big question for India. So those were the things that influenced me.

  What do you think motivates scholars like you to research India?
  <> of India. It’s an absolutely incredible world with many different sensibilities, and pluralistic religious traditions and different mind sets. To give you an example, I’m writing my next book on Nur Jahan—she was an empress of Mughal India. In that time, she is a Shia woman, married to a Sunni Muslim king. It’s a very male world and she’s not from royalty. So, what produces a woman like that in the first quarter of the 17th century? You have to go back in time to think about women and leadership. So that’s just a quick example of the number of things that drive people like me.

  If you had one take-away message for Khabar’s readership, what would that be?
  Since I’ve been talking so much about plurality and diversity, I would like to say that we need to <> this diversity. In fact, this is the kind of <>. So <>. That makes for a more tolerant world, really.

• Cambridge University Press website - http://www.cambridge.org/

  Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness Paperback – March 5, 2015
  In this engaging and eloquent history, Ruby Lal traces the becoming of nineteenth-century Indian women through a critique of narratives of linear transition from girlhood to womanhood. In the north Indian patriarchal environment, women's lives were dominated by the expectations of the male universal, articulated most clearly in household chores and domestic duties. The author argues that girls and women in the early nineteenth century experienced freedoms, eroticism, adventurousness and playfulness, even within restrictive circumstances. Although women in the colonial world of the later nineteenth century continued to be agential figures, their activities came to be constrained by more firmly entrenched domestic norms. Lal skillfully marks the subtle and complex alterations in the multifaceted female subject in a variety of nineteenth-century discourses, which are elaborated in four different sites - forest, school, household, and rooftop.

  Editorial Reviews from Amazon.com

  "Learned, experimental, and engagingly ambitious, Lal's book is a must-read for scholars of gender and sexuality in South Asia."
  Anjali Arondekar, The Journal of Asian Studies

  "Lal's excavation of an archive of largely unknown or untranslated texts, and her provocative analysis of them, makes this book well worth reading for those interested in the period and issues she discusses, in India or beyond."
  Ruth P. Feingold, Journal of British Studies

  "The "art of playfulness" as a central trope in literary analysis and an emphasis on the cherished nature of women's experiences is a noteworthy exercise in any scholarship ... Lal's invitation to think about "fragments of contest and play (within the patriarchal, within the familial) that allow other possibilities, other figures and other histories to emerge" is much welcomed and poses alternate questions for the reading of literature, gender and history in south Asia."
  Asiya Alam, Economic and Political Weekly

  "Lal's book is a distinct advance in the historiography of 'new patriarchy' and the making of modern Indian womanhood. By foregrounding women's agency and creativity, she makes a definite contribution to the understanding of the female world hitherto unnoticed. Her women figures appear not as mute docile objects of reform but as lively persons creatively using spaces to subvert the constraining norms. The theme of playfulness gives a refreshing quality to her work."
  Shadab Bano, Studies in History

  "As an ambitious project, interrogating the marginalized figure of the girl-child through imaginative concepts rupturing historical chronology, [this book] will certainly enrich the repertoire of women's history and stimulate further research."
  Swapna M. Banerjee, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Lal, Ruby: EMPRESS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2018):
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Full Text:
Lal, Ruby EMPRESS Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 7, 3 ISBN: 978-0-393-23934-8
Lal (South Asian History/Emory Univ.; Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and
the Art of Playfulness, 2013, etc.) shines a light on Nur Jahan (1577-1645), who ruled as co-sovereign in
the Mughal court, taking her husband's place without actually usurping him.
Before she ascended, her husband, Jahangir, had fallen victim to overindulgence in drink and opium, and
she slowly assumed duties with his full support. Jahangir was mercurial, ill-tempered, but he loved the signs
of royal power. His traveling procession consisted of hundreds of tents draped in velvet and brocade, an
audience hall of more than 70 rooms with 1,000 carpets, a harem, and stables. He inherited none of his
father's empire-building drive, but he was a patron of the arts, hunter, naturalist, mystic, and book lover. He
loved statistics and traveled mainly to make measurements of flora and fauna and catalog the characteristics
of his country. He saw his wife as highly intelligent, talented, and politically savvy, which was due in large
part to an aristocratic upbringing in her Persian parents' household. Rather than serving as a quiet counselor
and smoothing relations between the emperor and his sons, Nur took direct action. She was an
accomplished adviser, hunter, diplomat, and aesthete. She designed her parents' tomb in Agra, anticipating
the Taj Mahal, which was built by her stepson, Shah Jahan. Agra was also home to her designs for her and
Jahangir's tombs and her famous Light Scattering Garden. The author's descriptions of Agra are superb, and
her detailed explanations of Nur's upbringing reflect her long study, deep understanding, and modern take
on a little-explored subject. When the emperor was kidnapped by his son's ally, it was Nur who led an army
to attempt his rescue. She must be held as one of history's great independent, powerful women.
A page-turning, eye-opening biography that shatters our impressions of India as established by the British
Raj.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lal, Ruby: EMPRESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23f27633.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571006
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1532652230909 2/3
Not just a pretty face; Mughal history
The Economist.
428.9101 (July 21, 2018): p68(US).
COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
THAT India's Mughal emperors could be devoted to their queens is no surprise. The Taj Mahal, their most
famous monument, was a homage to the memory of Mumtaz Mahal, the emperor Shah Jahan's mostmourned
wife. Less well-known is that Mumtaz's aunt (and Shah Jahan's stepmother), Nur Jahan, was, for
16 years from 1611, in effect India's co-ruler.
In fact, according to Ruby Lal's biography, she became "prime minister as well as empress". Uniquely for a
Mughal woman, her name featured on coins. Not until Indira Gandhi became prime minister in 1966 would
India again be ruled by a woman. (Queen Victoria was rather hands-off.)
Not that Nur Jahan has been forgotten. Hers is a household name in South Asia, and her story has been told
in at least eight films, several plays and many historical romances. But she is famous for having won the
heart of her husband, the emperor Jahangir, with her beauty, and for using her charm to promote her own
interests and her allies'. She came to be seen, in Ms Lal's words, as "a gold-digger and schemer", the
"besotted" Jahangir as a "drunk, stoned and oversexed despot".
This cartoonish version is not total fantasy. Nur was Jahangir's 20th and last wife (by his own count; other
estimates number his harem in the hundreds). He was indeed a heavy drinker--possibly never fully sober, by
one report--and a user of opium. But Ms Lal's meticulous book seeks to show that history has been unfair to
Nur Jahan, a woman of many talents and remarkable force of character.
She designed gorgeous gardens and the tomb that became the model for the Taj Mahal itself. She was a
great tiger huntress and brilliant shot (a classic portrait shows her tamping down the gunpowder in a
musket). She was an accomplished soldier, planning the operation that rescued her husband from a
kidnapping. And she was a skilled exponent of the ruthless power politics of the Mughal court, where it was
a tradition for princes to rebel against emperor-fathers, and to take no prisoners.
Nur Jahan's accomplishments have been belittled for two reasons. One is that history is written by its
victors, and she lost a power struggle on Jahangir's death--to Shah Jahan. To erase her from history, he may
even have tried to withdraw the coins that bore her name. Certainly, his official chronicles overlooked her
achievements and blamed her for the turmoil that marked the last years of Jahangir's reign.
The second reason is that she was a woman, and as such, according to a guide to conduct popular among the
Mughal aristocracy, "it were best…not to come into existence, but, being born, she had better be
married or be buried." When Jahangir's great-aunt wanted to make the haj, his six-year-old brother was told
to escort her: even a little boy was man enough to look after the empire's most senior women.
The great-aunt seems to have bridled, and the boy was left behind. And Nur Jahan's life shows women
could soar beyond the harem. Still, both popular myth and serious historiography have conspired to
diminish her to a demeaning stereotype, worsened in some Western accounts by Orientalist condescension.
In filling in the details of Nur Jahan's life, Ms Lal has not only written a revisionist feminist biography; she
has also provided a vivid picture of the Mughal court, with its luxuries, beauties, intrigues and horrors.
Moreover, at a time when India's Hindu-nationalist government chooses to emphasise one strain in the
7/26/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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country's history, she offers a reminder of the diversity of Indian tradition. Nur Jahan was a Shia Muslim,
but "married a Sunni king who had a Hindu mother and both Hindu and Muslim wives and concubines."
Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan.
By Ruby Lal.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Not just a pretty face; Mughal history." The Economist, 21 July 2018, p. 68(US). General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547000425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c3403ffb.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547000425

"Lal, Ruby: EMPRESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571006/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 26 July 2018. "Not just a pretty face; Mughal history." The Economist, 21 July 2018, p. 68(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547000425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 26 July 2018.

• India Post
  http://www.indiapost.com/ruby-lal-resurrects-an-empress-in-nur-jahan/
  Word count: 646

  Ruby Lal resurrects an empress in ‘Nur Jahan’
  Ruby Lal resurrects an empress in ‘Nur Jahan’
  March 21
  07:21
  2018
  Print This Article
  Share it With Friends
  by India Post News Weekly

  Nur Jahan The Book

  Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire. Her legend still lives, but her story was lost—until now when Ruby Lal, professor of South Asian history, revives the captivating story of a forgotten Persian ruler in Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
  In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and favorite wife of Emperor Jahangir, who ruled the vast Mughal Empire. An astute politician as well as a devoted partner, she issued imperial orders and even coins of the realm bore her name. When Jahangir was imprisoned by a rebellious nobleman, the Empress led troops into battle and ultimately rescued him.
  The only woman to acquire the stature of empress in her male-dominated world, Nur was also a talented dress designer and innovative architect whose work inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. Nur’s confident assertion of talent and power is revelatory; it far exceeded the authority of her female contemporaries in Renaissance Europe, including Elizabeth I. Here, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.
  Ruby Lal is professor of South Asian history at Emory University. She is the author of Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness and Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World.

  Surendra Ullal adds:

  When it came to hunting, she was a master shot. As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond.
  While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state.
  Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing<< this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue>>, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.
  Deepa Mehta, filmmaker and screen writer in her review observed“ What an extraordinary and detailed account of a remarkable woman―amazing! A very impressive, thorough, poetic, humane work.” And the author of The World Made by Women Amanda Foreman says, “This is an outstanding book, not only incredibly important but also a fabulous piece of writing. Here, India’s greatest empress is reborn in all her fascinating glory in a luminescent account of her life and times. Ruby Lal has written a classic―one of the best biographies to come out this year and certainly the best ever of Nur Jahan.”(Hardcover: 320 pages. Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; .Language: English $27.95. )

  Tina Watson

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• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3268#m40733
  Word count: 564

  Book Review
  Review: Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
  Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan by Ruby Lal (W.W. Norton, $27.95 hardcover, 336p., 9780393239348, July 3, 2018)

  Ruby Lal's biography, Empress, sheds new light on Nur Jahan, who, in the early 17th century, became the only female co-sovereign in the history of the Mughal Empire. According to Lal (Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India), "It would be another 350 years, when Indira Gandhi became India's first female prime minister, before another woman ascended to such heights in Indian statecraft."

  Nur Jahan is a well-known figure in South Asia, the subject of "at least eight movies, several plays, an opera, and numerous historical romances." As a result, much of the book involves separating popular legends of Nur from the real-life person. For example, Lal recounts a charming story purporting to describe the moment when Nur met her future husband Jahangir that ends with the future emperor losing "not only his rare pigeons, but his heart as well." While recognizing the appeal of these stories and legends, Lal seeks to humanize the empress and focus less on the royal romance than her achievements as a ruler.

  Nur Jahan's family fled Persia eventually to take up a prominent position in the Mughal court, a Muslim dynasty that ruled "much of Hindu-majority India for more than three hundred years." Before marrying Jahangir, however, she first married the prominent military officer Ali Quli and had a daughter. Quli became a casualty of the maelstrom concerning succession, and Nur was sent to the imperial harem, a hotbed of political intrigue. She quickly became Jahangir's favorite wife. From his surviving writings, it's not difficult to see why. According to Lal, Jahangir "paints an admiring portrait of Nur Jahan as a sensitive companion, superb caregiver, accomplished adviser, hunter, diplomat, and aesthete."

  Many contemporaneous or even recent accounts of Nur's life argue that her unprecedented ascent was partly due to the emperor's weaknesses. While Jahangir was not a perfect emperor--his appetite for alcohol was substantial--Lal argues that those accounts undervalue Nur's notable strengths. One of her more striking skills was her expert marksmanship, which she famously used to kill a tiger that had been terrorizing villagers. A remarkable portrait shows her wearing masculine clothing and holding a musket.

  As a co-sovereign, Nur issued currency, designed buildings, issued "important orders under her own signature" and protected peasants from "harassment and overtaxation." In a particularly cinematic episode, Nur also led rescue attempts that saved her husband after he was kidnapped.

  Empress succeeds in its mission to impress upon the reader the remarkable character and achievements of Nur Jahan. Nur eventually lost power after Jahangir's death, but her ability to navigate treacherous Mughal politics for so long and come out alive is its own accomplishment. According to Lal, Nur has been unfairly blamed for the civil strife that accompanied the latter part of her rule with Jahangir and given little of the credit she deserves. Empress remedies these slanders and oversights while telling an engrossing tale of female power. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.

  Shelf Talker: Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan recounts the life of Nur Jahan, who, in the early 17th century, rose to become the only female co-sovereign of the Mughal Empire.

• Reviews in History
  https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/603
  Word count: 2460

  Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal WorldPrinter-friendly versionPDF version

  Book:
  Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
  Ruby Lal
  Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN: 9780521850223; 260pp.; Price: £45.00
  Reviewer:
  Dr Karuna Sharma
  International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden
  Citation:
  Dr Karuna Sharma, review of Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, (review no. 603)
  https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/603
  Date accessed: 27 July, 2018
  The issues and themes concerning the state and its rulers have until quite recently dominated the historiography of Mughal India. While some scholars argue for the centralized character of the Mughal state, others have pointed out its contested and negotiated nature. More recent scholars have come up with studies that underline the fluidity of the state. Ruby Lal’s Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World is one of the two major works on the contestations and negotiations inherent in the functioning of the Mughal state (1). This supposedly unconventional subject, the domestic world of the Mughals, is predisposed to question the politics of history writing (which had hitherto been centred on politics and trade), and this book marks a first attempt to understand gender relations at the Mughal court.

  Lal revisits the Mughals, and their domestic world in particular, provides a detailed genealogy of the rulers, and takes to task colonial caricatures. The author refers to early travellers’ emperor-centric accounts, which referred to women only marginally. For them, the harem was worth exploring and examining but they ended up giving, at times, misleading—even fantastic—accounts of it. The efforts to understand the oriental culture and society during the colonial period resulted in a concoction of information from, what Lal calls, ‘fluid and self-contradictory travellers’ accounts’. This had an impact on the understanding of the domestic world of the Mughals as the numerous incidents that the early writers had keenly observed were interpreted as symbolic of perversion. Intrepidly, Lal’s book provides an alternative to the sensuous, voyeuristic Mughal harem marquee, reproducing instead the vibrant and contested nature of the harem/domestic of the Mughals. Such a portrayal of the royal domestic space, akin to the research of Leslie Peirce in the context of the Ottoman harem (2), challenges the common notion that gender segregation indicates limited and restricted involvement on the part of royal women. Instead, Lal demonstrates that the decisions of the Mughal emperor, and thereby the policy of the Mughal state, were formed by the politics and complexities of the royal household.

  This study of the royal household falls into that genre of feminist writing that envisages the household as an institution in which gender relations are structured, enforced, and, possibly, contested. Underlining the fluidity of the domestic arrangements of the Mughals, this book builds upon the role that the royal Mughal household, especially the females, had in the making of the Mughal state structure. This approach problematizes and broadens the polarized character of the public-private model, and the book takes us through the various meanings attached to the concept of the ‘public-private domain’, especially in the non-western world. By taking up issues such as the intersection of the political interests of women and men, the book emphasizes the superfluity of such distinctions, and contends for the dynamism and contestation of the Mughal harem.

  Domesticity and Power, which covers the period from the sixteenth century to the early-seventeenth century, is divided into six chapters, besides an introduction and a conclusion, that underscore the differences in the domestic world of the peripatetic period of Babur and Humayun from that of Akbar’s centralized administration. The book focuses on a re-reading of contemporary historical literature in the light of the new set of questions it poses. The oft-repeated inadequacy of the sources in matters related to women and domestic life has been challenged, and information culled from Gulbadan begum’s Ahval-i Humayun Badshah has been critically analysed. Gulbadan’s account of Babur and Humayun’s reigns was part of a programme commissioned by Akbar, and was to become the official source for the chronicling of his rule. Through Ahval, which gives an account of the nascent Mughal monarchy, Domesticity and Power shows how the harem metamorphosed over a period of time into a bounded space which could be understood as a family. The record of routine events (like the king’s visits to the royal women, preparation of marriages, and distribution of gifts) in the Ahval, is, for Lal, a repertoire of the processes involved in the making of ‘hierarchical relationships, building alliances and reinforcing kinship solidarities’. Lal examines how royal life evolved through a period of struggle, how the Mughal monarchy was made, and the role royal women played in Mughal politico-cultural thought. Making good use of Persian terminology, Lal shows how the domestic/harem, and the relations between different communities within it, evolved over time: from kin and intimate relationships to an awe-inspiring monarchy whose women/harem was to be much more secluded. This is a necessary step to reaching an understanding of the political power, and consequent social relations, of the Mughal world.

  The book describes the reign of three successive Mughal rulers. The first is Babur, whose reign was fraught with incessant conflict among his cousins which necessitated direct deliberations with his fellow men. Lal finds in this a homo-social domestic environment, in which emotions played an important role. The second ruler is Humayun. Even though the court was still peripatetic during his reign, and although he faced outside rivals, he developed a tighter royal entourage in which hierarchies were more clearly defined than before, and where there was greater formality—to the extent that ‘elaborate rituals of comportment’ were being written down. Babur had invoked his ancestral connections to legitimize his rule. Humayun also invoked his exalted pedigree, but he preferred to enforce his power by demanding a strict adherence to the code of conduct. This led in turn to the ‘beginning of settlement of his court, its increased organization, of peoples, of relationships, of roles’. There were certain stringent regulations which governed the conduct of close associates (pp. 96–99), and Lal attempts to show the debates and tensions in the lives of the people at court which mirrored the intersection of private and public-political affairs.

  Turning the pages over, we come across women-specific information. One finds themes such as marriage, motherhood, and wifehood, through which Lal locates the harem in the peripatetic world of the Mughals. Babur never discussed the harem as an institutionalized entity (which was, of course, only a later development); and among other things the harem meant, simply, ‘women’. By Humayun’s time, the word was being used more frequently, but it still referred to the imperial women, the haraman-i padshah. As for their contribution, the royal women had a due place in the construction of the monarchy. They were not only the carriers of the new dynasty, but they also socialized new members. This created the opportunity for women’s agency in the production and circulation of power. The intersection of the interests of men and women undermines any conception of a separate and independent domestic sphere. Amidst the multifaceted and intimate community which encompassed the domestic world the Mughals, Lal’s account relives various episodes and stories to reveal the hierarchical and emotional relationships within the harem, which were respected by the kings, and how women played a crucial role, such as in brokering peace, as one may find many entanglements in the making of monarchy. Thus Lal considers the deliberations over marriages, Humayun-Hamideh Banu’s, and bases upon them a narrative of the making of Mughal political norms, traditions, protocols, and the agency women enjoyed (concerning their own marriage). Thus instead of being a segregated domain, the domestic/harem of the Mughals was open to negotiations and challenges from within.

  In contrast to his predecessors, Akbar’s presence and charisma were not dependent on an exalted ancestry, as he was divinely ordained; God granted him kingship. The leader of religion and realm, Akbar needed to exhibit an extraordinary magnificence and distinctiveness. He tried to consolidate his power first by disciplining his own body, including his sexual behaviour, so that one finds hetero-social and masculine sexual ethical comportments; secondly, by carefully constructing, and separating, spaces for different activities and rituals; and, thirdly, through a network of marriages which was a necessary adjunct of imperial power and control. If he were to be an awe-inspiring monarch, his harem had to be quite unique too. It now became an institutionalized body, which, according to Lal, had its genesis in the formation of royalty itself. At this time, the word harem began to be used to refer not only to the women themselves, but also to the spaces they occupied and their service-class. It is now, too, that one begins to find a neatly compartmentalized space. Various invocations, analysed in the book, convey the sense that Akbar and his dwellings were in close proximity to the Prophet and the holy sites associated with him. Under such circumstances, the places associated with Akbar, largely his harem, drew respect and, thereby, seclusion. The construction of a new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, that spatially organized the various people and structures within it, was one of the ways to create quarters manifesting the power of the monarchy. In this scheme, the women came to occupy demarcated spaces (p. 165). Further, the invisibility of women was achieved, Lal argues, through the complete obliteration of the names of the mothers of the future heirs. The mothers were crucial to the empire, but unnamed in the annals. By making the private apartments more sacred and, therefore, invisible to those outside the immediate family, the monarchy created for itself an aura of being beyond the reach of its subjects. In this scheme the domestic world is more subjugated, as Akbar’s persona encompassed both spiritual and temporal powers. Lal in various ways tries to show how in reality the domestic world of Akbar betrayed such a characterization. Instead she discusses diverse ways by which women gained a central role at various junctures, such as intercessions or the provision of counsel. Thus even though the Mughal order was much more formalized and the domestic more secluded, Lal brings out the women’s role in the contestation of those sovereign ideals—a contestation that was part of Mughal political traditions. Besides the intimate community, Lal is aware of the importance of Akbar’s foster community, thus there is also a detailed description of this community. As this promoted relationships with individuals who were not kinsmen, it took to a higher level the politics of marriage making; such a promotion of foster-relations did have an impact on the socio-political relations of the actors concerned.

  One episode that has triggered the author’s anxiety is the decision of Gulbadan begum to lead the hajj party in 1578. The author has mapped onto this venture the desires and agency of the imperial women; something which helps to accentuate the fact that these women remained visible, despite the fact that they now resided in secluded places. Hajj was undeniably more than a spiritual journey on the part of the women. It fostered an Islamic image of the empire, which was one reason why it had been fully supported by the settled and consolidated government of Akbar. It was an exceptional enterprise of, and for, the royal women, who had a more or less secluded life, and it consequently slams the door on the notion of a domestic world of the Mughals (p. 213).

  The conclusion sums up the findings of each chapter, including the introduction, providing a picture of the development of domestic life that follows the growth and formation of the Mughal Empire. An attempt has also been made to compare Mughal women with Ottoman and Safavid women (p. 216). All three empires inherited Central Asian political traditions, but adopted different techniques to consolidate of their rule. Each experimented with different domestic arrangements, social hierarchies, rituals, and symbols. These experiments involved the creation of the harem. The rule of hasekis (the sultan’s favourite concubine) or the walide sultan in the Ottoman Empire, or the naturalness of royal women’s political authority in Safavid Iran have no parallels among the Mughals (p. 223). In the Mughal context, it was only the uncommonly determined and talented women who gained political importance. It was this experimentation and negotiation that give the Mughal harem a unique character. That is why the author is tormented by the omission of the names of the mothers of the Mughal heirs from contemporary chronicles; equally, Nur Jahan’s marriage to Jahangir does not get a mention in his autobiography. These absences are ascribed to the patriarchal nature of the sources (p. 225). The ‘final thoughts’ call for a rethinking of the ways in which Islamic societies were formed and configured at a particular historical juncture.

  Through this lively description of women’s role in the making of the empire, its traditions, and grandeur, the Mughal social and domestic world becomes a part of the historical discourse. The book also embodies some provocative thoughts. The hajj episode, for example, emphasizes, among others things, the agency and autonomy of the women who undertook the journey. More than simply claiming women’s agency in this enterprise, however, one could also notice its recognizable importance to the political economy of the day, where the ‘actors in women’ were performing their delineated roles. In such a big venture as the hajj, an admixture of trading and political enterprises cannot be ruled out. As the succeeding centuries would show, the ships bound to Mecca were loaded with merchandise for the vendors of that city. Thus, it may be that the hajj venture of Gulbadan was part of this exchange nexus. Although not within the thematic purview of this book, a peep into the local harem, that is the Rajput antahpura, would have added to the understanding of the evolution of the Mughal harem and the members constituting it. Could it be that the obliteration of a mother’s name was the result of indigenous traditions, in which the requirements of respect hampered the so-called public pronouncement of the names of women! Written lucidly, <> where gender relations can be tapped.

  Notes
  The other being F. Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge, 2004). Back to (1)
  L. P. Peirce, Imperial Harem-Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1993). Back to (2)
  May 2007

• New York Review of Books
  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/11/22/the-most-magnificent-muslims/
  Word count: 4364

  The Most Magnificent Muslims
  William Dalrymple NOVEMBER 22, 2007 ISSUE
  Goa and the Great Mughal
  edited by Jorge Flores and Nuno Vassallo e Silva
  Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation/London: Scala, 240 pp., $60.00
  Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
  by Ruby Lal
  Cambridge University Press,241 pp., $29.99 (paper)
  The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra
  by Ebba Koch, with drawings byRichard André Barraud
  Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., $75.00
  On October 15, 1542, a baby was born to a fugitive prince and his fifteen-year-old wife in the Sindhi desert town of Umarkot. The prince had been driven from his throne in Delhi, and fleeing westward through the wastes of Rajasthan toward Persia, he survived by eating horsemeat boiled in the helmets of his last bodyguards. Nothing about the circumstances of the birth looked promising, yet the horoscope cast for the child by his father was auspicious in every detail—and rightly so, as it turned out.

  For the child born in the desert was the future Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542–1605), the greatest ruler of his remarkable dynasty, who in time not only restored the lands lost by his father, the Emperor Humayun (1508– 1556), but laid the foundations for what would grow to be the greatest and most populous of all Muslim empires. At their peak, the Mughals ruled over some 100 million subjects—five times the number ruled by their Ottoman rivals, and many times that ruled by their immediate westerly neighbors, the Safavids of Isfahan in Iran.

  In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the great bustling Mughal cities are revealed to Adam after the Fall as future wonders of God’s creation. To a man of Milton’s generation, this was no understatement, for Lahore dwarfed any city in the West: “The city is second to none, either in Asia or in Europe,” thought the Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate,

  with regard to size, population, and wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who foregather there from all over Asia…. There is no art or craft useful to human life which is not practised there…. The citadel alone…has a circumference of nearly three miles.1

  From the ramparts of that citadel—the Lahore fort—Akbar ruled over most of India, all of what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh, and much of Afghanistan. For their impoverished contemporaries in the West, the Mughals became symbols of luxury and might—attributes with which the word “mogul” is still loaded.

  But if the Mughals represented Islamic rule at its most magnificent, they also defined Islam at its most open-minded, tolerant, and syncretic. Unlike the Ottomans or the Safavids, who ruled largely Muslim polities, the Mughal Empire was effectively built in partnership with India’s Hindu majority, and succeeded as much through diplomacy as by brute force: Akbar in particular was a true humanist who strove for the reconciliation of his Hindu and Muslim subjects, and managed to unite them in the service of a coherent multireligious state.

  As emperor, Akbar promoted Hindus at all levels of his administration, married a Rajput princess, and entrusted his army to his former Hindu opponent, Raja Man Singh of Jaipur. He ended the jizya tax levied only on non-Muslims, ordered the translation of the Sanskrit classics into Persian, codified minority rights, and filled his court with Hindu and Muslim artists and intellectuals. Akbar personally adopted many Hindu and yogic practices, and even became a vegetarian, criticizing meat-eaters for having converted “their inner sides, where reside the mysteries of Divinity, into a burial ground of animals.”2 So great an impression did all this make on his Hindu subjects that in some of the Bardic traditions of Rajasthan, Akbar came to be equated with the Hindu divinity Lord Ram.

  More remarkable still to a modern world lazily used to thinking of Islam and Christianity as sworn and eternal enemies, both Akbar and his son Jahangir (1569–1627) were enthusiastic devotees of Jesus and his mother Mary, something they did not see as being in the least at variance with their Muslim faith. The main gate of the principal mosque at Akbar’s capital of Fatehpur Sikri still bears the following inscription:

  Jesus, Son of Mary (on whom be peace) said: The World is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day, may hope for eternity; but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen.

  Recent scholarship on the Mughals has also emphasized another, no less surprising aspect of their court, and one that again goes against all the usual preconceptions of Muslim rule. For contrary to all stereotypes, it seems that Mughal women were better educated and had a far more central part in court and diplomatic life than has previously been recognized. Women in Iran and the Arab world were always more confined and less able to act in the public sphere than in India, where notions of purdah and ideas about the seclusion of women were always less central to notions of male honor. As a result, Muslim women in India have always been more prominent in politics than their sisters in the Middle East.3

  Three books have recently been published which in very different ways all emphasize the degree to which the rule of the Mughals resists all our received ideas of what a Muslim empire should be like. Goa and the Great Mughal, a collection of essays accompanying a recent exhibition in Lisbon, shows the surprisingly close spiritual, artistic, and intellectual relationship that existed between the Mughals and the Portuguese, especially the Jesuits. Ruby Lal’s new book on Mughal women, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, describes a female world quite at odds with the usual image of harem life as a place of orgiastic sexual pleasure for men, and of harsh and exploitative confinement for women; while Ebba Koch’s new study, The Complete Taj Mahal, gives an authoritative account of the origins, methods of construction, and complex symbolism of the greatest masterpiece of Mughal architecture, one which was built by an emperor in memory of his beloved wife—something that in itself defies the usual image of the place of women in Muslim society.

  In 1580 the Emperor Akbar invited to his court near Agra a party of Portuguese Jesuit priests from Goa. According to one account, their arrival caused a sensation:

  On entering the city they became the cynosure of all eyes on account of their strange attire. Everyone stopped and stared in great surprise and perplexity, wondering who these strange-looking, unarmed men might be, with their long black robes, their curious caps, their shaven faces, and their tonsured heads.

  Soon, however, it was the turn of the Portuguese to be surprised. The Emperor allowed them to set up a chapel in his palace, where they exhibited two paintings of the Madonna and Child before an excited crowd. To the astonishment of the Jesuits, Akbar prostrated himself before the images of Jesus. Akbar took a particular interest in Jesus’ function as messiah and questioned the Jesuits closely about the Last Judgment and whether Christ would be the judge. Akbar also showed his appreciation of his guests by listening to madrigals and putting on Portuguese garb—“a scarlet cloak with gold fastenings…[and he] ordered his sons also to don the same dress, together with Portuguese hats.”

  The Jesuits were soon persuaded to take part in the religious discussions held at the court, debating with holy men from all of India’s different religions, each of whom was invited to make the case for his particular understanding of the metaphysical. The presence of the Jesuits at the Mughal court, and the dialogue they engaged in, is the subject of several fascinating essays in Goa and the Great Mughal. Perhaps the most striking is by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, a remarkable young Canadian art historian4 who writes that in the history of the misunderstandings and misrepresentations in encounters of Muslims and Christians, Akbar’s court was a “brilliant exception”:

  In an atmosphere comparable to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Platonic Academy in Florence a century earlier, these enlightened [Mughal] rulers invited scholars and priests from around the world to their court, hosting them in their palaces and fielding weekly interfaith debates into the small hours of the morning. Operating in a spirit of experimentation, creativity and receptiveness, the emperors and their distinguished guests engaged in cultural dialogues of the highest intellectual calibre, expounding in the texts and traditions of faiths as varied as Judaism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism, and occasionally finding similarities and connections between them…. Although it should be stressed that the Jesuits and the Muslim mullahs rarely agreed on the key tenets of their faiths, the emperors themselves openly tried to bridge the gap between the two religions and bring their teachings into harmony. In the history of Muslim– Christian relations, few encounters were as tolerant or as culturally rewarding.

  Goa and the Great Mughal also demonstrates very well the degree to which Portuguese embassies radically changed the course of Mughal art, a subject well covered in excellent essays by two of the leading scholars on Mughal painting, Milo Beach and Amina Okada. Akbar had always been fond of painting, an art much patronized by his father Humayun, who believed that artists “were the delight of all the world.” Early in his reign, Akbar had made it clear that he had no use for ultra-orthodox Muslim opinion that objected to depiction of the human form. “There are many that hate painting,” he wrote,

  but such men I dislike. It appears to me as if a painter had a quite peculiar means of recognizing God; for a painter in sketching anything that has life, and in devising its limbs, one after the other, must come to feel that he cannot bestow individuality upon his work, and is thus forced to think of God, the giver of life.5

  Akbar soon gave an ambitious commission to his court painters to produce an illustrated version of the great oral epic the Hamzanama. Before this project, the Mughal miniature painting atelier contained only two artists, both of whom his father Humayun had lured to India from Persia. By commissioning no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations—the largest single commission in Mughal history—the atelier was forced to train more than a hundred Indian artists in the Persian miniature style; many of them were apparently Hindu painters from the newly conquered province of Gujarat. The resulting volumes took more than fifteen years to produce and effectively gave birth to an independent Mughal miniature tradition.6

  In the illustrations, one can see the two worlds of the Mughals—India and the Persianate world of Timurid Central Asia—coming together. Some of the illustrations are purely Persian in style: flat linear forms remarkable for their precise geometric perfection. Other pages are wholly Indian in spirit: the palate is brighter and the colors more saturated, and there is a love of the natural world that is very Indian. In some of the most interesting images, the two styles can clearly be seen merging for the first time.

  It was not long before the European Christian images brought to the court by the Portuguese also began to make their influence shown. This was especially so when Akbar sent a return embassy to the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1575, including “many clever craftsmen…in order that…rare crafts be imported” into India. Akbar ordered the craftsmen to make copies of Portuguese reliquaries and altar retables, but in particular he got his painters to reproduce engravings of religious subjects in the Portuguese Bibles and Books of Hours. In this way, not only did Mughal painters learn about perspective and landscape painting from the European images brought to the court, they also learned the art of portraiture—something quite new in Indian art. “His Majesty himself sat for his likeness,” wrote Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s friend and biographer, “and also ordered to have likenesses taken of all the grandees of the realm. An immense album was thus formed—those who have passed away received a new life, and those who are still alive have immortality promised to them.”

  Subsequent Portuguese embassies to Akbar’s court reported with surprise that the gospel books given to the Mughals had led to murals of Christ, his mother, and the Christian saints being painted not only on the walls of the palace but also on Mughal tombs. “[The Emperor] has painted images of Christ Our Lord and Our Lady in various places in the Palace,” wrote one Jesuit father, “and there are so many saints that…you would say that it was more like the palace of a Christian king than a Moorish one.” By the end of Akbar’s reign, a mural of the Nativity filled a wall of the imperial sleeping chamber. Such enthusiasm for Catholic devotional images naturally disturbed not only the more orthodox members of Akbar’s ulema, or learned religious authorities, but also the English Protestant envoys to the court, notably the East India Company’s Thomas Kerridge, who wrote with irritation about the popularity of “those prattling, juggling Jesuits.”

  Akbar’s son Jahangir, however, continued the tradition, competing with his father to collect Christian images, and keeping large framed pictures of Jesus and the Madonna in his sleeping chamber, “which one day he exhibited at his window to prove that this was so.” He also owned a “carved image of our Saviour on the cross”—a particular surprise since the Koran maintains that Christ was returned to God alive and not crucified.

  In 1578 a party of ten royal pilgrims left Akbar’s new capital of Fatehpur Sikri heading westward to the Sufi shrine of Ajmer. They then cut south through the province of Gujarat where they boarded a ship for the Hejaz and Mecca.

  The party stayed away on the hajj for three and a half years, before heading back to a magnificent welcome: as the returning pilgrims neared the capital, a succession of princes were sent out to escort them on the last leg of the journey, and once Akbar himself joined the cortege “there were hospitalities, and that night they remained awake engaged in pleasing discourses.” According to Father Monserrate, on arrival back at Fatehpur Sikri “the king had the street-pavements covered with silken shawls…scattering largesse to the crowds.”

  What was most unexpected about this group of pilgrims was that they were all women of the royal harem. For Ruby Lal, the young Indian historian whose study of the domestic life of the Mughals is likely to rewrite completely the social history of the period, the pilgrimage is a perfect symbol of the way the life of Mughal women has been comprehensively misrepresented. She argues throughout her Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World that writing on Mughal women has been entirely centered on their perceived confinement, their powerless indolence, and above all their sexuality. The first lurid accounts by seventeenth-century European travelers told of cucumbers and radishes being banned from the harem for fear of their misuse for purposes other than nourishment. Most speculation about harem women in Mughal times has centered on what one previous Indian historian described as

  sex orgies…the harem was not meant for the old and ailing. It was meant to be an abode of the young and beautiful, an arbour of pleasure.

  Lal argues that this sexualized image of Mughal women’s lives is unhistorical and misleading. Far from being merely ornamental objects of desire, the women of the Mughal harem actually had a central part in the court and diplomatic life of the day. When the Emperor Akbar left Agra to pursue a rebel, for example, he left his formidable mother, Hamideh Banu, in charge of the capital and the empire—the same woman who many years earlier had, as a fourteen-year-old, initially refused the hand of the Emperor Humayun, declaring, “Oh, yes I shall marry someone; but he shall be a man whose collar my hand can touch, and not one to whose skirt it does not reach.” Throughout the chronicles of Akbar’s reign, the comings and goings of Hamideh Banu Begum to her son’s camps and campaigns are minutely chronicled and she was clearly an assertive and influential figure.

  Lal’s book is full of equally strong-minded senior matriarchs: Isan Dawlat Begum, grandmother of the first Mughal, Babur, who was known, according to her grandson, for “her strategy and tactics”; and Khanzadeh Begum, renowned in the chronicles of the time for the great “sacrifice” she made by marrying Shiybani Khan Uzbek, in order to bring about peace between the Mughals and the Uzbeks. Lal also shows how emperors would frequently get senior and respected women of the harem to act as advisers and envoys to their brothers and cousins, to settle disputes, or to offer counsel and advice. There are frequent references to elderly begums speaking their mind to their children: when Prince Hindal rose in rebellion against his brother Humayun, his mother Dildar Begum received him in blue mourning clothes. When he asked why, she replied, “I am wearing mourning for you; you are young [nineteen] and have, from the instigation of irreflecting sedition-mongers, lost the true way; you have girded your loins for your own destruction.” Prince Hindal quickly sued for peace.

  Moreover, Mughal women also tended to be richer and to possess far greater powers of patronage than their secluded counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world: half the most important monuments in Shah Jahan’s Mughal Delhi were built by the women, especially the Emperor’s favorite daughter Jahanara, who constructed several mansions, a garden, a bathhouse, and a palatial caravanserai; she also laid out the city’s principal avenue, Chandni Chowk.7 Mughal princesses were also notably well educated, and were taught at home by elderly male scholars or “educated matrons”; the curriculum included ethics, mathematics, economics, physics, logic, history, medicine, theology, law, poetry, and astronomy.8 As a result there were many cases of princesses who became celebrated writers and poets: Gulbadan, the sister of Humayun, wrote her brother’s biography, The Humayun Nama, while her great-great-great-niece Jahanara wrote a biography of the Indian Sufi Mu’in ud-Din Chisti, as well as several volumes of poetry.

  <>. The founder of the dynasty, Babur, was a semi-nomadic Central Asian warlord who wrote one the most fascinating diaries by a great ruler.9 In its pages, he opens his soul with a candid frankness and lack of inhibition similar to Pepys, comparing the fruits and animals of India and Afghanistan with as much inquisitiveness as he records his impressions of the differing pleasures of opium and wine, and of loving men or marrying women. Typical is his unembarrassed description of falling in love with an adolescent boy from an Afghan bazaar:

  Before this I had never felt desire for anyone…. In the throes of love…I wandered bareheaded and barefoot around the lanes and streets and through the gardens and orchards, paying no attention to acquaintances or strangers, oblivious to self and others.

  The passage shows that for Babur and his generation, as for so many males in traditional Persian court culture, romance meant not harem girls but “beardless boys.” By the time of his grandson Akbar, however, not only had Babur’s peripatetic world given way to a stable and settled court, but homosexuality had come to be regarded with distaste and looked on as transgressive and morally repulsive.10

  Yet even in the court of Akbar, heterosexual athletics do not seem to have been a particular feature of harem life. The emperor certainly had a huge number of wives—over three hundred according to one contemporary estimate—but they were married for diplomatic reasons, and Akbar regarded sexual restraint as the ideal to be aimed at; indeed he had, as Father Monserrate explicitly noted, “a hatred of debauchery and adultery.”11 Both the subsequent emperors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, were notably uxorious, so there is a strong case to be made for the Great Mughals in many ways representing the very opposite of the usual stereotype of the sensual, dissolute, and depraved Muslim ruler that figures so constantly in Western imaginings of the Oriental courts.

  One measure of the prominence of Mughal women is that it was a Mughal princess who inspired the building of what is certainly the most famous monument raised by the dynasty: the Taj Mahal. The mausoleum was built in white marble in memory of Mumtaz Mahal, “the Chosen One of the Palace,” Shah Jahan’s favorite wife, as a memorial to their marriage. In the words of the court historian Muhammad Amin Qazwini:

  The intimacy, deep affection, attention and favor which His Majesty had for the Cradle of Excellence [another title of Mumtaz] exceeded by a thousand times what he felt for any other. And always that Lady of the Age was the companion, close confidante, associate and intimate friend of that successful ruler, in hardship and comfort, joy and grief, when travelling or in residence…. The mutual affection and harmony between the two had reached a degree never seen between a husband and wife among the sultans and rulers, or among the ordinary people.

  As Ebba Koch explains in her new book, The Complete Taj Mahal, the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal was designed to be a model and symbol on earth of the heavenly mansion prepared for the Emperor’s wife in paradise. It was also very deliberately designed to be a monument of political propaganda, celebrating the power and glory, genius and good taste of Shah Jahan and his dynasty. Qazwini wrote:

  The eye of the Age has seen nothing like it under the nine vaults of the enamel blue sky, and the ear of Time has heard of nothing like it in any past age…it will be a masterpiece for ages to come increasing the amazement of all humanity…until the day of resurrection.

  Professor Koch is generally recognized as the leading expert on Mughal architecture, and The Complete Taj Mahal is her masterpiece, the result of both a careful combing through primary Persian sources and the first full architectural survey of the building in two generations. In the course of this she found and studied a web of masons’ marks that enabled her to work out the exact methods used to build the mausoleum, and the role of the different groups of skilled craftsmen that Shah Jahan lured to Agra to work on his masterpiece.

  The book is beautifully illustrated and written with great clarity, free of academic jargon. Perhaps its most exciting revelation is the reconstruction it provides of the entire architectural setting of the Taj, in which Koch demonstrates that Agra was centered around the landscape of the Jumna riverbank; people moved by boat between a succession of riverside palaces and “sweet-smelling gardens with sweet blossoms,” spanning both banks of the river.

  Tracking down the last remains of many of these palaces in the slums of the modern city—now one of the most unlovely in northern India and the center of a vicious leather and shoemaking mafia—Koch brings back to life Agra when it was the capital at the very peak of Mughal rule. As the Mughal chronicler Abdul Aziz put it, the city was “a wonder of the age—as much a centre of the arteries of trade both by land and water as a meeting-place of saints, sages and scholars from all Asia…a veritable lodestar for artistic workmanship, literary talent and spiritual worth.”

  Nevertheless, for all that Shah Jahan’s rule marked the high point of the Mughal Empire, the reign also contained the seeds of its destruction. Just as the Taj contains many fewer signs of Hindu influence than the architecture produced by the Emperor’s grandfather Akbar, so there was a markedly less pluralistic and tolerant spirit abroad in the court, and a revival of the power of the ulema, a tendency that was exacerbated in 1658 with the seizure of power by Shah Jahan’s rigidly fundamentalist son, Aurangzeb.

  Aurangzeb’s rule was harsh and repressive, and made a clean break with the liberal attitude toward the Hindu majority of his subjects pioneered by Akbar. The ulema were given a free hand to impose Sharia law. Prostitution was banned, as was wine, hashish, and the playing of music. Many Hindu temples across the country were destroyed or converted into mosques, and the Emperor reimposed the jizya tax on Hindus that had been abolished by Akbar; he also executed Teg Bahadur, the ninth of the gurus of the Sikhs.

  The religious wounds Aurangzeb opened in India have never entirely healed; at the time they literally tore the country in two. Unable to trust anyone, Aurangzeb marched to and fro across the empire, viciously putting down the successive rebellions of his Hindu subjects. On his death in 1707, the empire fragmented. Built on tolerance, mutual respect, and an alliance with the Hindus, especially with the warrior Rajputs, who formed the core of the Mughal war machine, the breakdown of that alliance and the Mughal retreat into bigotry shattered their state and lost them the backbone of their army. That collapse left a vacuum that was eventually filled by a very different empire, that of the British. In time, only the magnificent monuments of the Mughals remained to witness what could be achieved in the successful merging of South Asia’s two great streams of civilization.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-23934-8
  Word count: 234

  Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
  Ruby Lal. Norton, $27.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-393-23934-8

  In this feminist biography of a strong and independent Muslim woman who, over the intervening centuries, has been reduced to a caricature of wifely devotion in the popular imagination, Lal makes clear her subject’s relevance. Lal, a history professor at Emory, goes far beyond the fables to demonstrate that Nur Jahan was a force to be reckoned with: she ruled jointly as co-sovereign of the Mughal Empire with her husband, the emperor Jahangir, from their marriage in 1611 and was recognized by foreign and domestic observers as the true power in the realm. The women of the royal household, including Jahangir’s 19 other wives, spent most of their lives sequestered, but “the harem offered women surprising opportunities—wide horizons behind high walls.” Jahangir was an aesthete who concerned himself primarily with “the grand ritual acts of ideal Mughal kingship,” such as “offering his subjects glimpses of his semi-divine person from the imperial balcony.” Meanwhile, it was Nur Jahan who commissioned palaces and gardens, issued royal edicts and minted currency, and even defended the realm from usurpers, “sitting atop a war elephant and armed with a musket.” Closely researched and vividly written, this telling finds <>. (July)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 04/16/2018
  Release date: 07/01/2018

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