The Mughal Aviary: Women's Writings in Pre-Modern India

This volume delves into the literary lives of four Muslim women in early modern India. Three of these, Gulbadan-Begun (1523-1603), the youngest daughter of Emperor Babur, Jahanara (1614-81), the eldest daughter of Emperor Shahjahan; and Zeb-un-Nissa (1638-1702), the eldest daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb belonged to royalty. Thus, they were inhabitants of the Mughal zenana, an enigmatic liminal space of qualified autonomy and complex equations of gender politics. Amidst such...
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This volume delves into the literary lives of four Muslim women in early modern India. Three of these, Gulbadan-Begun (1523-1603), the youngest daughter of Emperor Babur, Jahanara (1614-81), the eldest daughter of Emperor Shahjahan; and Zeb-un-Nissa (1638-1702), the eldest daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb belonged to royalty. Thus, they were inhabitants of the Mughal zenana, an enigmatic liminal space of qualified autonomy and complex equations of gender politics. Amidst such constructions, Gulbadan Begum's Humayun-Nama (biography of her half brother Humayun, reflecting on the lives of Babur's wives and daughters), Jahanara's royal diaries Jahanara, Princess of Princesses, India 1627 (an insider's view of the rule of Shahjahan), and Zeb-un-Nissa's free-spirited writings that landed her in Aurangzeb's prison, are discursive literary outputs from a position of gendered subalternity. While the romantic lives of these women never much surfaced under rigid conventions, their indomitable understanding of the 'home-world' antinomy determinedly emerges from their works. This monograph explores the political imagination of these Mughal women that was constructed through statist interactions of their royal fathers and brothers, and how such knowledge percolated through the relatively cloistered communal life of the zenana. The fourthe woman, Habba Khatoon (1554-1609), famously known as 'Nightingale of Kashmir', offers an interesting counterpoint to her royal peers. A common woman who married into royalty (Yusuf Shah Chak, the ruler of Kashmir), her happiness was short-lived with her husband being treacherously exiled. Khatoon's verse, which voices the pangs of separation, was that of an ascetic who allegedly roamed the valley; and is purported to have introduced the 'lol' (lyric) into Kashmir poetry. Across genres and social positions of the writers, this volume intends to cast hitherto unfocused light on the emergent literary sensibilities shown by Muslim women in early modern India.