Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History by Ira Mukhoty

Author:Ira Mukhoty [Mukhoty, Ira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-02T23:00:00+00:00

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Jahanara first appears to us in historical records in 1631 when she is seventeen years old and her mother, Mumtaz Mahal, is dying. Shah Jahan has only been emperor for three years and the royal family has left the splendour of the court of Agra and is camped in a small town, Burhanpur, in the Deccan. Mumtaz Mahal is giving birth to her fourteenth child, but this time there is a complication. Desperate with anxiety and fear, the young princess starts distributing gems to the poor, hoping for divine help. After enduring a long and painful labour, Mumtaz Mahal dies giving birth to a girl, Gauhar Ara Begum.

Shah Jahan is inconsolable at the death of his beloved wife and his grief is lavish. He goes into mourning for two years, during which time his hair and beard turn grey. ‘The pleasures of worldly rule and kingship which were mine with her by my side,’ he writes, ‘have now become burdens and increasingly sources of grief.’ With the death of her mother Jahanara becomes, at seventeen, the first lady of the empire and head of the imperial harem. She will never marry and there will be scandalous, bazaar gossip of incest and lovers, which Italian and French adventurers will comment on with scurrilous delight.

Shah Jahan and his court returned to Agra and, for the next ten years of her life, Jahanara assumed her position as Begum Sahiba, head of the royal household. The royal residence in Agra was a monumental red sandstone fort, a walled city by the Yamuna River. Within the walls of the fort were palaces of white marble and mahals with lattice screens, water tanks, reception halls, buttresses and cupolas and with gemstone inlay work. In Agra, Jahanara was made ‘keeper of the imperial seal’ and ‘from that day on the duty of affixing the great seal to the imperial edicts devolved upon her.’ This was an honour never before conferred upon any imperial woman. She now had to supervise the social and financial upkeep of the harem, which was a city unto itself with hundreds of inhabitants—Afghan, Turk, Persian, Muslim and Hindu women—possibly a few thousand by the time of Shah Jahan. According to the traveller François Bernier, the women ‘were guarded by innumerable old crones and beardless eunuchs.’ There was a cacophony of languages, which the British wife of a Muslim nobleman who lived in India in the early-nineteenth century described thus: ‘The buzz of human voices, the happy playfulness of the children, the chaste singing of the domenies fill up the animated picture.’

The princesses of the house, and the wives of the king, would have received sizable allowances, all of which had to be accounted for. Jahanara’s quarters were close to Shah Jahan’s, a sign of the enormous faith he had in her abilities. She lived close to the centre of power, in a palace with spacious rooms ‘decorated with murals of flying angels, and [in which] the marble or tiled floors were covered with valuable carpets.

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