Accomplishments and allure of the greatest Mughal queen
Most history books give us one-dimensional portrayals of Nur Jahan, as the wife of Jahangir. In Ruby Lal’s new biography, we see Nur as the ‘Queen of Queens’ who was central to Mughal history.
these amazing women when we got overly mischievous. On weekends, my father, a civil engineer, often listened from the sidelines, hidden behind his newspapers.
One afternoon, my mother and I were sitting on the floor playing gaind-gitta. Similar to the American game of jacks, gaind-gitta involves bouncing a small ball with one hand and moving five dice into prescribed arrangements with the other hand while the ball is in the air—creating, for example, a cave with the left hand and placing one die at a time in it with the right as the ball danced up. A game of fine balance, gaind-gitta required close concentration. Still, at some point, I grew bored. “I want a story,” I said to my mother. I can’t remember whether we finished the game, but she did tell me a story, one I hadn’t heard before, about Nur Jahan, wife of the 17th-century Mughal emperor Jahangir.
My mother called her Maharani, Queen of Queens in Hindi. Though some of the details of that day’s story are hazy, what stuck with me was that while Nur ruled the empire alongside her husband, dispensing justice and masterminding daring rescues, she also wrote poetry and designed clothing, gardens, and buildings. Still vivid are the glint in my mother’s eye as she spoke, and the spark ignited in me by Nur’s accomplishments and allure. She felt more real to me than other heroines my mother spoke about. I turned to my father, seemingly immersed in his reading, but eavesdropping on my mother’s story. “I am Nur Jahan.” I declared. “You are Jahangir!” He laughed and on many occasions repeated my words to others.
At some point, that fascination with Nur’s story translated into my love for the history of the Mughal world—for Mughal women, to be precise. In time I became a feminist historian. After I’d published two books that examined duty, aspiration, and degrees of freedom among women in premodern and early modern India, both of which challenged conventional notions of what constitutes historical evidence of women’s lives, I was invited to write a biography of Nur Jahan.
Hers is a household name in South Asia. Nur Jahan has been the subject of at least eight movies, several plays, an opera, and numerous historical romances in Hindi, Urdu (the national language of Pakistan), Punjabi (spoken in both India and Pakistan), English, and other languages of the subcontinent. Travel to India or Pakistan today and you’ll find tour guides, custodians of Mughal tombs, and local visitors to these sites who delight in recounting legends of Nur. As I began researching this book, one of my first tasks was to explore that oral tradition: what exactly the public knows (or thinks it knows) aboutEmpress Nur. I engaged a graduate assistant in Lahore, Pakistan— once part of the Mughal Empire—who asked thirty men and women ranging in age from 20 to 35 what they knew about Empress Nur.
The majority responded enthusiastically with a famous legend about how Nur and Jahangir met. So did a comparable number of Indian tourists, tour guides, and history buffs I interviewed myself in Agra and Delhi. Every retelling of the tale was similar to the version published by the 19th-century Urdu writer and critic Maulana Muhammad Husain Azad:
“In the prime of his youth, Mughal Emperor Jahangir [then, Prince Salim] strolled into a garden. He had just been to the Meena Bazaar, the renowned market in the capital where royalty and nobility wandered among merchants displaying the curiosities of the world. Jahangir had a pair of invaluable pigeons in his hands. He saw a flower he wanted to pluck, but his hands were not free. Just then a young woman passed by. Asking her to hold on to the pigeons, he turned to pluck the flower. On turning back to the woman, he saw that she had only one pigeon in her hand. He asked about the other. She replied: ‘Your Highness, it has flown away.’ ‘How did that happen?’ the astonished Prince asked. She stretched her hand, loosened her grip and let the second pigeon go. ‘Like this,’ she said. The prince was stunned: he lost not only his rare pigeons, but his heart as well.”
Only two of the young Pakistanis knew that Nur had been a politically powerful queen, and an accomplished poet—and they, too, began with the pigeon story said to have launched a royal romance. Both in Pakistan and India, the people we talked to generally invoked two dates—Nur’s birth in 1577 and her marriage in 1611—and explained their importance in a few lines: “She was born on the road outside Kandahar (in modern-day Afghanistan) as her destitute parents made their way from Iran to India. They abandoned her; then she was restored to them. Jahangir and Nur Jahan met in the Meena Bazaar. He fell in love with her. They married.” Popular works about the empress focus on this imperial love story, and Nur’s birth on the road is the favorite opening scene of films, plays, and novels. Most of them revel in her use of feminine Empress.
Empress wiles to gain influence in the harem and the court, and nearly all of them end, as did the interviewees’ responses, with Nur’s marriage. Though modern South Asians embrace the legends of Nur with affection, gusto, and pride, the emphasis on her romance with Jahangir truncates her biography in a way that diminishes her. In the popular imagination, Nur’s story seems to stop at the very moment when her life’s best work began.
At some point, that fascination with Nur’s story translated into my love for the history of the Mughal world—for Mughal women, to be precise.
Extracted with permission from ‘Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan’, by Ruby Lal, published by Penguin Viking