by SARAH DURN
From musket-wielding empress Nur Jahan to writer Gulbadan Begum, meet the influential women of the early-modern Muslim empire.
In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history.
It was a cool fall day in 1619 when the empress and emperor of India set out from Agra. Their itinerant court, 150,000 people and 10,000 elephants strong, marched toward the Himalayan foothills. But, as servants began to pitch the elaborate imperial tents, a group of local hunters begged for help—a man-eating tiger stalked their home. The emperor, Jahangir, had vowed to give up hunting and could provide no help. But the empress, Nur Jahan, a famed markswoman, stepped in. On October 23, 1619, armed with an exquisite firearm and seated atop an elephant, the empress searched for any sign of the tiger in the dense forest. When the powerful cat emerged, Nur’s elephant tried to flee, jostling the empress’s litter. She lined up the shot and pulled the trigger. The tiger fell. One shot was all she needed to kill the beast.
“A woman shooting publicly was rare; a woman shooting with such expertise was unheard-of,” writes historian Ruby Lal of Emory University, author of Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. But Nur Jahan’s skill with a gun wasn’t the only reason the empress stood out. For more than a decade, Nur Jahan co-ruled India alongside her husband, the fourth Mughal emperor. Though Nur Jahan was the only woman to rise to the status of co-sovereign, many other contemporary elite Mughal women rose to prominence and exercised political power in the Muslim empire that ruled much of India between the 16th and 19th centuries. Even though Jahangir’s father, the emperor Akbar, created the first imperial harem, women who were not empresses held sway from behind its walls.
Atlas Obscura talked with Lal about the power of these elite women, the many misconceptions of the imperial harem, and Nur Jahan’s incredible hunting skills.
What was life like for Mughal noblewomen?
In the early days of the dynasty, people were migratory. Mughal women were very much part of the movement of tented living, participating in deliberations of strategy. Women, as they got older, served as counselors, advisors, and peacemakers.
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