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Before you listen to this episode of the Seen and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pullia Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kottaswane, two really
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good friends of mine, kick ass podcast in Hindi, it's amazing.
#
Open any standard book of history and it will seem that the history of humanity is a history
#
Through most of our existence is the men who get written about and you could argue that
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this is only to be expected, we have always been a species ruled by the patriarchy and
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it's the men who have gone and invaded kingdoms and founded dynasties and set up religions
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and slaughtered millions.
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You might argue that women haven't had a role to play because they have been confined
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to their homes, so what history is there to write?
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It's just that the domains that women have operated in and the way they have operated
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have been invisible to the male gaze and as most history has been written by men, it would
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seem that most history has also been made by men.
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This however is only half the story.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a brilliant historian, Ira Mukhoti and we'll be talking about her book,
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Daughters of the Sun, Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire, which was an
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eye-opening read for me, demolishing all my notions of what women of the Mughal era would
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have been like with their opulence and their harems and their subservience to all-powerful
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On the contrary, I discovered a complex world in which women were major players, jostling
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for power, shaping major events and many in ways that would be invisible to foreign historians
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or even male historians from India.
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Ira's previous book, Heroines, was also about powerful women either forgotten or reshaped
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But it's Daughters of the Sun and its remarkable Mughal women that we'll be focusing on today
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after a quick commercial break.
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Hey, I want to thank Intel for supporting the Scene and the Unseen.
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vpro, because stability is everything.
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Ira, welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me here.
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Ira, tell me a little bit about yourself.
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How did you sort of, where did you study, what did you do, how did you get to where
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So, I'm a little bit of an accidental writer of history, because I'm not an historian.
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I'm actually a scientist by training, all those many years ago.
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And it was just something that, you know, I did because in those days, when you were
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a capable student, you were kind of, and you were all right in the sciences, you were pushed
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And literature, which I was also interested in, was not considered a suitable or serious
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So I did sciences, I did it for quite a while.
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And then it just so happened that nothing in it really interested me as a career to
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And then, as is the case, I think for many women, especially, and especially of my generation,
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things took maybe a backseat and other things take over your life, you know, family responsibilities
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and just other things that you have to do.
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And I didn't work for a while.
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And then when my children were born, and they were slowly growing up, I had this idea of
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getting back to literature, because I had always really loved writing.
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So I wrote a manuscript, which was on mythology.
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And I approached a publisher who was at that time more interested in writing history.
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So though he liked my writing a lot, he suggested that I write a book on history.
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And that is completely how it happened, completely accidentally.
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And I found out that it was something that I enjoyed doing.
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And strangely enough, it's something in which I can use both my skills, my scientific background,
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because it requires a lot of research, being extremely thorough with things like sources
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and understanding primary material, and as well as my writing skills and my fondness
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So the writing of history or narrative history became something that I was very lucky enough
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to find that I could combine the skills that I had and do something which was so amazingly
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And did you also read history at this time?
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At the time of starting to write, do you mean?
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Yeah, I mean, did you read history for leisure also?
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I wasn't reading history for leisure per se before I started writing about it, though
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I was reading around it.
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I suppose what happened is that as you grow up in life, as you go through various changes
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and various phases of your life, you get interested in various things.
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So initially, perhaps I would view things as a young woman, and then as a young woman
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out in the world, and then maybe as a young Asian woman.
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And then things change, and I saw things as a parent, and then as a parent of young girls.
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And so at each stage of my life, I was interested in different readings.
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And so one of the things that I started to get interested in, before history even, was
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the way in which we have been colonized in our imagination, in the way we view the world,
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in our memories even, to the extent where many of my memories, like the way I grew up
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reading things like Enid Blyton, my memories and my nostalgia were for things that I had
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no physical experience of.
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So whether it was for soft summer sunshine, or cucumber sandwiches, or Wordsworth's poetry,
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which I could quote, but I couldn't quote me or Ghalib, you know.
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So these were things that started bothering me, and things that I started thinking about.
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I read Pankaj Mishra, Roy Moxton, The Theft of India, various things around these issues.
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And that was something which was in my background as I started to think about writing about
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And who are the sort of thinkers who have been a big influence on you?
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Like one question I sometimes ask my guest is, if they can name books which change the
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way they look at the world.
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And not necessarily specific books, but even thinkers or you know.
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Well, I would say there has been a threefold sort of influence on me.
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So on the one hand, there are, as I was saying, the writers who have pointed out the colonization
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So people like Pankaj Mishra and many others, you know, even Naipaul, the way he talks about
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identity and the way he talks about Indian-ness, you know, outside India, rootlessness.
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These are all things, people who have had an influence on me.
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And then the second sort of phase of influence has been the women writers, the women who
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So whether it's Iravati Karve and Yuganta, you know, I found her essays startling about
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the way in which she writes about the women of the Mahabharat.
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And one writer who has been extremely influential for me has been Dr. Ruby Lal, who is, she
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defines herself as a feminist historian.
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She's a professor and a writer of history, she's written about Nur Jahan, but her most
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groundbreaking book was about the early Mughal harem, domesticity and power.
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And so she, for the first time I came across a woman scholar who was writing about the
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way in which the harem existed in a completely different way in which I had thought about
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So her writing for me was extremely important.
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And it was, I have based a lot of my writing on what she has already discovered.
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And there's also, you know, people like Jivamanda Adichie at a different level, the way she
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talks about the importance of a single narrative, how that can be so harmful for us if we see
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the world and, you know, our past and our present through only one filter.
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So these are some of the people.
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And then on the very third and last aspect, which was, you know, useful for me, is stylistic.
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Now, we often don't talk about that very much because I suppose writing of history,
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the material itself is so interesting that people, you know, mostly ask me about the
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But stylistically speaking, people who've been influential are people like Hilary Mantel,
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even though she writes fiction, history, you know, fictionalized history.
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But still, her style is so arresting that when I read Wolf Hall and her trilogy, I thought
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this is the way I want to write history for India as well.
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I want people to feel like they have been caught by the scruff of the neck and thrown
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into that century, whichever century I'm writing about, and to feel the reality of
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it, the geographical reality, the noises, the smells, everything in three dimension.
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So these are some of the influences that have shaped my writing.
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And one of the things I've sort of realized in the last few years, thanks partly to writers
#
like you, is that so much of history has been captive to and colonized by the male gaze,
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which is, you know, the history of humanity has been treated as a history of men who are
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going out and doing big things, they're invading kingdoms, and they're setting up dynasties
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And also they've been looked at, most of this history has been written by male historians,
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and that's a perspective you see, and the women are largely invisible.
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And is that something which sort of influenced, because you were already thinking about these
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issues, like you mentioned, is that something that influenced what you chose your subject
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to be when you actually started writing history?
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Yes, definitely, you know, I read a statistic which said that 99.5% of the written history
#
that we see around us, starting from 5000 BC onwards, you know, whatever there is, the
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sculptures, the writing, the calligraphy, everything, 99.5% deals with men, and 0.5%
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tells the stories of women.
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So that statistic sort of stopped me in my tracks, it was a very startling statistic.
#
And when I stopped to think about what I knew about women's history, I think that's very
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So it definitely, starting from the fact that I have two, as I said, two daughters, I wanted
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them to see the world around them in a less biased way.
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That history need not necessarily be about the fighting of battles, about the conquest
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of territories, and there are many, many other aspects that form a civilization, maybe so-called
#
soft power, you know, the music, the creation of music, the creation of art, architecture,
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politics, behind the scenes, who controls things, sexual politics, these are all things
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that contribute to a culture.
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And very often women are absolutely instrumental in that aspect of it.
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So for 100%, this was something that I thought that whatever I write, even if it's the history
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of a man, or, you know, whichever aspect I'm going to cover, I'm going to bring in all
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the women involved, because they really tend to be written out of the stories of men, which
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in history ends up being the story of men told by men.
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And how difficult is it then to start researching into that kind of history?
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Because most history is written by male historians who tend to, you know, whitewash the women
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or recast them in acceptable ways.
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And so, I mean, this is really a dual question, in the sense, as someone who's not a trained
#
historian, how, what is it like to do history?
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How did you learn that?
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And also then going beyond that, what do you do about this essential limitation that you
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are broadening the gaze by which you're looking at history, but your sources don't have that
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To answer the first part of your question, I think the way you can teach yourself history
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is go to the primary sources, you know, that's the most important aspect of writing history.
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And there is a lot of primary sources, even, of course, much less where women are concerned.
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So I always make an effort to find the women's voices.
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So for example, in my first book, I've written the story of Amrapali, who was a Buddhist
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nun at the time of the Buddha, sixth century BCE.
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And you would think, okay, there's nothing written about women in the sixth century BCE,
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but luckily there is, because she lived at the time of the Buddha, and the Buddhist monks
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were one of the first great writers of history, you know, and they wrote everything around
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We have the story of the nuns, and their poems, they wrote poetry, and very luckily for us,
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we have the voice of this woman from 2000 years ago, even today, her story, her longings,
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her desires, the way she talks about the evanescence of her beauty, how it has faded.
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And this is so poignant to us even today.
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So there are ways women's voices are there.
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It just takes a little bit more effort, a little bit more diligence and searching to
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Like, for example, if we have Lakshmibai, the story of Lakshmibai has been written by
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And you have the Europeans who are writing about her, and they're writing from their
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point of view with their European gaze.
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So they talk about her as being like an Amazon, and immediately there as well, there's a texturing
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of Rani Lakshmibai, which is very different from when a Brahmin writes about her and writes
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about her as this great widow, this great, you know, almost a holy woman, Mother India.
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So you have Mother India on one side, the Amazon woman on the other side.
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You see some men look at the same, very same woman in many different ways.
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And then it is my job to sort of see the intersection of these many gazes and to see where does
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the humanity of this woman lie.
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What made her an Amazon, her fearlessness, her amazing bravery, yes.
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What made her Mother India, the fact that she adopted this child, but also the fact
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that she nurtured her city.
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And for me, that is the crux of this woman, this nurturing aspect of her, that she didn't
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We are always told, you know, Lakshmibai, Khobladi, Madani, you know, that is the line
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But what makes her a heroine for me is the fact that she wanted to live and she wanted
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And she fought very hard for her right to rule her people and for them to be safe under
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She eventually lost and she died in battle.
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But these are the aspects of women's stories that I want to bring up, not necessarily the
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dying in battle, which is at the end of the day, a very male way of showing heroism.
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But there is a different way of being heroic and that is something that I wanted to look
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So those stories are there, that literature is there.
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It takes maybe a different gaze, a different interpretation to get at it.
#
And one of the interesting things you mentioned in heroines, we will talk more about Daughters
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of the Sun today, but I found heroines very interesting and in fact, it actually reminded
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me of Yogantha, which is why I brought it up in our conversation earlier and I mean
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that entirely as a compliment because I think Yogantha is a masterpiece.
#
And one of the interesting things you said at the start of heroines is you spoke about
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how there is this sort of interplay between history and myth and how a lot of women in
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history are recast in convenient ways that are palatable to men, like what you just described
#
about Lakshmi Bai and often they are almost sanitized and they are made to fit into these
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And equally how myths can also, you know, the same sort of interplay works the other
#
I was very fascinated by, you know, the chapter on Draupadi in that because what we find with
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many of our myths is that those myths are shaped to fit social norms.
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So you look at someone like Sita, she is the ideal Hindu woman in terms of being pativrata,
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being devoted to her husband, virtuous and so on and so forth.
#
But Draupadi is like this incredibly feisty character who just goes against everything
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you would think of as, you know, the ideal Hindu Nari.
#
And I mean, why do you think Draupadi was even conceived and imagined?
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Draupadi is one of my all time favorite characters, I have to say, because she is in a way the
#
antithesis of Sita, you know, what I love about her is her fierce erudition and outspokenness
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You know, anger is something that we don't see encouraged in Indian women.
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You know, Indian women are encouraged to be quieter, to keep their anger internalized
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and in a way Sita, I feel, internalized her feelings, her anger and she combusts in a
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You know, she dies, she commits suicide and Draupadi doesn't do that.
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She externalizes her anger.
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In fact, she carries it on her own body by keeping her hair loose for those 12 years
#
in exile, you know, and said, I will not tie up my hair till it is drenched in blood, in
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I find these, this is a very powerful thing that she has said, which is why I start my
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book with Draupadi, because I want today's women to remember this for their daughters
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You know, we call our daughters Sita, we never call them Draupadi.
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You know, I really want to challenge that and say, let's go back.
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So people have imagined this woman all these thousands of years ago.
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As you say, why did this happen and how did it happen?
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How did it happen that she was allowed to say these things, right?
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She even challenges Yudhishthira, oftentimes she calls him less than a man, almost a eunuch
#
for not standing up for her, not for not fighting for her.
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She says some very damaging things for, you know, as a queen to her husband.
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But she's allowed to say this.
#
So what is it in our time in the past that women were given this voice, this agency,
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and in fact, such a powerful woman who is, they say the cause of the war itself and who
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brings about, you know, the end of that era.
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What is it that allowed this woman to be the way she is?
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That society accepted her and loved her in her own time as this woman.
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But if you know, when I explain it in my chapter, through the years, through the centuries,
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she has been sanitized progressively so that in the end, finally, she is almost a Sita
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If you look at, you know, the actors who are playing her today on television, they are
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the same fair skinned, you know, Pativratta women are clearly upper caste Brahminical,
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you know, part of the patriarchy, very much in, you know, part of the system.
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So why has that happened?
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Why are we today almost more regressive and having to make our women conform to certain
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standards to shut down their anger, to stamp down their voices?
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What is it that in us as a society that so many thousands of years ago, this woman was
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allowed to be angry, to be fierce and to question the men in her life, whereas today she has
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been sanitized to such an extent that she is almost, you know, indistinguishable.
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Often when I talk about heroines, I show a slide which shows the eight women as they
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are portrayed in popular culture today, and there's hardly any difference between them.
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They're all the same, very fair skinned with their, you know, full jewelry.
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The jewelry is a symbol in Indian society of marriage status, which means that your
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sexuality is allowed only within the sanctified arena of marriage, you know, and the aim is
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to procreate, to have children.
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Why is it that all these women must conform to this standard, whereas earlier on in their
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own times, whether it's 2000 years ago, 500 years ago, you know, Mirabai, et cetera, they
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were allowed to have agency.
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They were allowed to have freedom of expression.
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They say, Mirabai too said some very shocking things.
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If we look at her padas today, she says things like this habit that we have, I'm just paraphrasing,
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but this habit that we have of sending young women away to get married and severe all connection
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with their native homes so that there's no support structure for them.
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She says, why do we do this?
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Why do we send young girls so far away?
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Why are they abused by their in-laws?
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Why do we allow this to happen?
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These are such powerful things for women to say.
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And yet, with time, what happened to Mirabai was it was slowly her story was altered so
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that she became this married woman who waited conveniently and quietly, submissively for
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Then once he died, she stepped out of the house as a good widow and she was allowed
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to go and sing her songs, whereas that is probably not what happened.
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She probably left home because she was fed up of being abused by her in-laws and by her
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She left her husband as a married woman and as a single married woman, she was alone on
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the roads accompanied by other singers, other devotees, by men and women.
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So she was in a sexually vulnerable position.
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And yet, she went out and she sang these amazing songs, which I think the single most recognizable
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figure, maybe the female figure, is Mirabai.
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Everybody knows her songs.
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So she tapped into a certain longing in people, unlike anybody else before.
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But yet, today, all these 100, 500 years later, we have made her into this very sanitized
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And if you ask Rajput ladies today, they will say, yes, Mirabai is a wonderful heroine,
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but we will not encourage her behavior in our daughters.
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Again, this difference between what we will allow our daughters today and what the figures
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have stood for in the past.
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So this is something that I want people to think about, that why is it?
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Can we look back upon these women as heroic figures for daughters today, for young women
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Let us challenge this very fair and sanitized vision that we are being offered time and
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again and it's sort of force-fed, these women's images.
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Let us challenge that and look back to what we have in our culture.
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Sometimes I'm told, oh, feminism is a Western construct.
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We have had women who are fiercely feminists, you know, from gargay onwards, who have spoken
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So our society has accepted and fostered this spirit.
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So these are some of the thoughts that I want people to have and to think about.
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That's a great insight.
#
In fact, I have a couple of digressions.
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And you know, what you said about what Mirabai said, why are women sent away to their husbands
#
without anything, blah, blah, reminds me of a recent episode I did with the economic historian
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Chinmay Tumbe, who wrote a book called India Moving on Migration.
#
And one of the points he made, and to my shame, this point had never struck me, is that a
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very large part of migration is simply women getting married and going.
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And we don't think of that.
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We think of migration as men going or families going or whatever, but so much of migration
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is women getting married and going.
#
And the other thought that sort of struck me was I'd also done an episode with Tony
#
Joseph, who's written the book Early Indians.
#
And one of the points he made in that was that they were, you know, a couple of millennia
#
ago, you had competing strands within Hinduism, and they were different and they were competing.
#
And not all of them were this particular fixed strand, which looks at a woman in a particular
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Like we look at Sita today.
#
And it just so happens that one of those strands kind of won out and it was a political victory
#
and that strand then dominated our culture.
#
And all of these women, now this is me speaking, sort of got, you know, recast into it.
#
But the fact is that these strands were there.
#
And, you know, to come to your first point, this whole point about the alienation of women
#
from their native homes, it's something which we have exoticized and wrongly so, you know,
#
this whole bidai genre which has come up, which talks about the saying goodbye to the
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You know, we must not exoticize it.
#
It is a terrible thing to cut off a young woman from her family, from her mother, from
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her natal family, from the support of her brothers, her sisters, everything she has
#
She's thrown into a new place where she's automatically a second citizen because she
#
doesn't know anything about that new household.
#
So this is something that has been, you know, very much praised in folk literature and Mirabai
#
And so it is something very refreshing.
#
When I read that, I said, yes, this is something today I can absolutely understand what she's
#
And I would say the same thing for my daughters.
#
I would not want them to be cut off from their families, you know.
#
So this is an interesting point that women were always, this endogamy has been practiced
#
for so long, sending women upwards and onwards and away from their families, which was in
#
effect in a way almost castrating them because then they have no power to fall back on.
#
So they have to do what they must do in their in-laws' family.
#
And your second point about there being many different strands, and it is a point that
#
I make as well, is that there are very many different ways of being feminine, of being
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a woman and being a heroic woman in India.
#
What does it mean to be a heroic woman?
#
There are many, many different ways of doing that.
#
Every woman in the book that I have written does it in a different way, whether it is
#
through her music, whether it is in a more manly way in quotes on the battlefield, whether
#
it is, you know, leading men in battle, or whether it is just shaping society around
#
her in whatever way she can.
#
These are all heroic ways.
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And these were very accepted ways.
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And there was no one single way.
#
When I came across these, you know, the writings on these women, they were never criticized
#
and told, it would be better for you to be this other way, you know, rather than being
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They were allowed to be that different way.
#
And it is only in more recent times, I think, that we have drawn these strictures around
#
these women and wanted them to be a certain way.
#
And what both your books also demonstrate is that heroism is something that you have
#
to look in the context of each individual and, you know, what are the restraints on
#
And we often tend to think of heroism as just marching out to battle holding a sword, which
#
is why, you know, the point you made earlier about Lakshmi Bhai, you know, that is a typical
#
And heroism amounts to a lot more than that.
#
Let us move on to your second book now.
#
And, you know, where did, given that everything that I had read of Mughal history before this,
#
most of it was centered around these men.
#
And there was this notion that women are just, you know, stuck in their imperial harems or
#
their zananas or whatever, and they are not important characters.
#
What brought you to the notion of writing this book?
#
When did you realize that this material is really rich and someone needs to tell the
#
I think it was, you know, when I wrote heroines, one of the heroines that I write about is
#
And it was, when I found out how much she had done, you know, and her accomplishments,
#
it was a very visceral and personal reaction that I had because I am a Delhi woman, I was
#
Jahannara is a Delhi woman to the extent that she has created great extents of old Delhi.
#
And yet growing up, I was never taught about her.
#
So I had this sort of visceral reaction to this, a sort of anger and a sort of, you know,
#
feeling that enough is enough and what lies behind all these stories that we have not
#
So there was this questioning of the given sort of history that had been taught, Mughal
#
history in very bullet form, you know, in a very dry way and about the men because they
#
have been amazing Mughal men, definitely.
#
But where are the women and why were they written out of the stories?
#
Was there possibly more to them?
#
And that was when I started researching them and I found Ruby Lal's book and where I realized
#
that the very idea of the harem, which to my mind like to yours was something very exotic,
#
was actually something that we had inherited from the European gaze because in parallel
#
there was the Europeans were coming to India at the same time and they wrote extensively
#
about the Mughals because they were fascinated by this culture.
#
So we have all this writing about the Mughals and the harem and they were fascinated by
#
the harem because they had no access to it.
#
And yet they could sense that the women in the harem had power, they had money and they
#
They were fascinated them and horrified them in equal measure because at the same time
#
in Europe, Victoria in Europe and before that women had no power, they were not allowed
#
to control their own money.
#
They were meant to be rather, you know, quiet and hold their opinions to themselves.
#
So this was something very contrary to what the men had experienced in their own country.
#
So they came here with this mixture of abhorrence and excitement and they created this fantasy
#
And it is a fantasy because they had no access to this harem, nor were they physically allowed
#
to enter that space, nor could they speak the language.
#
So there were many layers of obstruction between them and these Mughal women, but that did
#
not stop them from fantasizing, from listening to bazaar gossip, from gleaning bits and pieces
#
of information and bringing out these novels and novellas of exotic life, which became
#
extremely popular back home in Europe and which in a way then percolated down to us
#
still today, where we sort of have in the back of our mind this idea that women in a
#
Mughal harem, all they did was one woman was there in the middle of the room waiting for
#
the pacha all day, she's trying to attract his attention, she's gossiping and bitching
#
about her other co-wives and her whole life is spent in this decadence of, you know, beautifying
#
herself and waiting for the sexual favors of the pacha.
#
And this is an entirely false view, which we can see from Ruby Lal's work and from the
#
other readings that I've done around it.
#
And the Mughal harem, as I've written in my book, was a place of, in fact, it was a place
#
of great solidarity amongst women.
#
Most of the women in a harem were not sexually available to the pacha at all.
#
It was a huge space with people like the pacha sisters, his unmarried cousins, his aunts,
#
his grandmothers, his foster mothers, milk mothers, his milk sisters.
#
There were so many people, they were visitors.
#
And then there was all the retinue around these individual women.
#
These wives brought their retinues with them, so when they came in from a different place,
#
they brought their own cooks, they brought their masseuse, they brought their priest,
#
they brought so many other women, none of whom were sexually available to the pacha.
#
So this idea of all these women being sexually available is something completely false.
#
And on the other hand, these women had productive, interesting lives.
#
They earned a salary, they had jobs, fixed jobs for which they had a salary.
#
So they were carrying out a function, and the ones at the top obviously had an enormous
#
amount of money as the Mughal Empire grew richer, the individual women grew richer as
#
And it's very interesting because if you look at the way the men write about it, like
#
the way I was telling you, the Jesuit missionaries, for example, they had only one idea, which
#
was to proselytize and to convert.
#
So obviously for them, all these women were just in the way of the pacha and trying to
#
lure him into temptation, and they write about them like that.
#
On the other hand, if you look at the writings of women, there are some women who have written
#
about the harem, and they write about it very differently.
#
For example, if you look at Lady Molly Montague, she was the wife of the ambassador to the
#
Ottomans in Turkey in the 18th century.
#
And she writes about them and she says, you know, she had access to the harem obviously
#
as being a woman, and she goes with them to their baths.
#
And she writes about this incident in which she is taken to the baths and the women want
#
to help her remove her clothes.
#
So they remove her clothes, and then all those Turkish ladies step back in horror and they
#
gasp and they say, what are you wearing?
#
Because she was wearing stays.
#
As you know, those are made out of whale bones and they were made to keep women's waist very
#
tiny and narrow so that you could barely breathe.
#
And they told her, you tell us that our husbands are cruel with us, but look how cruel your
#
husband is with you and making you wear these horrible clothes where you cannot even move
#
So it's a very interesting view we have into this harem of how the other women were viewing
#
her and how she was viewing those other women, you know.
#
So she had come with her preconception that these women are all debased and they're degraded.
#
And she writes saying, actually, no, they have this freedom, they don't have to wear
#
She says, who in England controls, which woman controls her own money?
#
When they get married, they hand over their money to their husband.
#
So she was amazed that these women, Muslim women, were able to control.
#
They were financially independent, which was a huge thing.
#
She writes about this to her friends.
#
So there are these many ways where the voices of the women writing about the harem completely
#
contradicts the voices of the men.
#
And so when you put the two together, you get a very different picture of the harem
#
In fact, reading about the harems, it just kind of struck me that, my God, not only is
#
it not the simplistic notion of a harem that I had in my head, but like the term that struck
#
me was political economy.
#
It's so deeply complex, you know, they have money, they have power, they have webs of
#
And it's a question that I often ask the historians on my show, and I'll ask a more, an elongated
#
version of it to you is that the question I ask is that given that we tend to suffer
#
from the hindsight bias and because, you know, everything that has happened seems inevitable.
#
Number one, how do we remove our knowledge of what has already happened to look at a
#
specific event at a current time in a fresh way?
#
And the question is even more complicated for someone like you, who's writing about
#
this period, being that you, one also has all those prior impressions and biases that
#
have come from firstly, the European gaze, which you spoke about, and also even the male
#
local gaze, like you've mentioned that Abu Fazl, for example, wrote very, very differently
#
about the same emperor and the same happenings and someone like Gulbadan did, who is bringing
#
in all those nuances and the rounded picture.
#
So mentally, did you have to take that step back and recast everything and look, how do
#
Yes, that, that's an interesting point.
#
And I think the only way to do that is like, like you said, for Abu Al-Fazl, Abu Al-Fazl,
#
in a way, it does as much harm to the women as the Europeans do, because even though his
#
idea and his motivation was very different, he wanted to create in Akbar the semi-divine
#
king, you know, who was above all reproach.
#
And so his women had to be also above all reproach, and therefore they had to be completely
#
And to be completely chaste, you have to be completely hidden.
#
So he hides them away in this elaborate framework, and he says they are all, he gives them titles
#
and they all chaste, whether they are newborn babies or whether they are old ladies, everybody
#
is the same, they're all chaste, you know, and they have no individuality, they're completely
#
So in a way, he does as much disservice to us today trying to find out about women as
#
But luckily, as always happens in history, you know, you cannot control things, no matter
#
how hard or how much money you have at your disposal.
#
And luckily for us, there's somebody like Badawni, who wrote an illicit biography of
#
Akbar, who was very critical, who was an extremely erudite and learned man himself, but he was
#
just critical of Akbar's religious policies.
#
That's the only thing he held against Akbar.
#
And so he wrote this illicit biography of Akbar.
#
And through his words, inadvertently, we find out so much about the women because he blames
#
the Hindu wives of Akbar for all these terrible changes that he's seeing in his beloved Muslim
#
And he says, you know, Akbar is like this today, he's worshipping the sun, he's wearing
#
a tilak, he's wearing a rakhi, these terrible customs, he's brought dogs into the place,
#
you know, he's horrified.
#
And he clearly says it is because from his early age, he has been in the company of lousy
#
Hindus, Brahmins and Hindu women, his wives.
#
So we have here in black and white and writing, we see the influence of people like Harkabai,
#
the Rajput woman that Akbar married.
#
So it is very interesting for me, because I am setting out to find this connection.
#
Now, perhaps if somebody had not set out to look for this, you would just slip over it
#
and you'd be like, okay, there's nothing on the women.
#
But because I am always looking out for any reference, which ties in the women to influence,
#
which ties in the women to the way the men thought and what the men did.
#
So that is how I'm able to pick out these things, I think, because I'm looking at it
#
in a way from my own filter.
#
So then I have Badawni, then I have Gulbadan, luckily, as you know, I was telling you earlier,
#
we could so easily have lost Gulbadan's voice, because Akbar when he was, when the empire
#
was finally settled, and he said, okay, now I must create a history for myself, because
#
that was how Mughal emperors, you know, sort of created legitimacy for themselves.
#
He asked Abul Fazal to write a biography, but wonderfully for us, he also asked the
#
people who had firsthand knowledge of Humayun and Babur to write about their memories.
#
So he asked Johar, the water carrier for Humayun, he asked other people and he asked his aunt
#
for whom he had a great deal of respect.
#
And Gulbadan wrote a wonderful biography.
#
And she is of course Babur's daughter, Humayun's sister.
#
She's experienced all that.
#
She came to India at the age of six with Babur.
#
She was with Humayun through all his travails, you know, when he was thrown out of India
#
She was with him in Kabul for all those years.
#
She was with him back when he came to India.
#
She was here when he finally died.
#
She was in India when Akbar became Pacha.
#
And then for the rest of her very long life, she saw Akbar become a king, establish himself
#
and establish the Mughal Empire.
#
So an extraordinary woman who lived through three different Pachas.
#
So we have a wonderful firsthand account of what all this peripatetic journey, what this
#
adventure, what this adventure of forming the Mughal Empire in India with these Timurid
#
people, what it was like.
#
We have through her eyes and we could easily have lost that because there was one copy
#
And immediately after she had written it, it was lost.
#
Nobody else, no further biographer later in time ever referred to this book.
#
So it disappeared from even our memory.
#
Then sometime in the 19th century, an Englishman with the East India Company was buying up
#
manuscripts like you do in the local Kabaddi Bazaar.
#
You go and you buy whatever old objects you like.
#
So he had a collection of a thousand manuscripts, some worthless, some interesting.
#
When he died, his widow went back to England and she had all these manuscripts.
#
She needed to raise money.
#
She sold them to the British Library.
#
The British Library early in the 20th century had some of these translated into English
#
by Beveridge and she discovered that one of these manuscripts was actually the biography
#
of Barbara's daughter herself, Gulbadan's biography.
#
So that's how 500 years later it came back into India, into our public consciousness
#
and we realized that we have this firsthand account.
#
But so you see, it takes a little bit of putting all these stories together to get an idea
#
of what I want to talk about, which is what the women were up to.
#
In wildlife sheer luck, it also strikes me that there must be so much else that was lost.
#
I think, and this is only half of the book, Gulbadan's biography.
#
It was broken into two, torn into two pieces and we only have the first section.
#
So I'm always thinking, wow, who knows in which Kabaddi Bazaar, there may be the second
#
section somewhere lying around the second half of Humayun's life and that's still undiscovered.
#
Maybe it's there somewhere.
#
Maybe one of the listeners of the show will go to the nearest Kabaddi Bazaar and find
#
Please tag us if you do find it.
#
Let's look now at the start of your book Daughters of the Sun and the start of the Mughal dynasty
#
Of course, as you point out that Babur would have been very upset that it was called the
#
Because obviously it's a hug back to the Mongol part of his legacy and he was more proud of
#
the Timurid side of it.
#
And you had spoken earlier about, you know, peripatetic early Mughals, but what really
#
struck me was that it's not just the men who are peripatetic wherever they go.
#
You know, this Haraman, is that the correct pronunciation?
#
This wherever they go, this Haraman is traveling with them, which is this retinue of women.
#
And these are not retinue of necessarily wives or mistresses or whatever.
#
These are aunts, grandmothers, these are serious people who are making serious decisions.
#
And one of the really interesting characters, his father, of course, died when he was 13,
#
And you point out about how a lot of his guidance in terms of politics and strategy and all
#
that came from his grandmother, Ehsan Dholat Begum.
#
And she also has a very interesting story from her youth, which reveals a lot of character.
#
Yes, there's just one episode that describes Babur is very scathing when he writes about
#
You know, he writes about how he drank too much and he was overweight because of that.
#
You know, so he writes with a pretty jaundiced view about his father, but never about the
#
He writes only with respect and love about the women in his life, whether it is his mother,
#
his grandmother, his elder sister Khanzada, these three women who were extremely influential
#
And he writes about Ehsan Dholat Begum that at one point when she was a much younger woman,
#
she was traveling with her husband.
#
And at some point in some conflict, she was captured by a chieftain and the chieftain
#
was very happy and he said, I'm going to offer you to one of my amirs and that is your fate.
#
And so she is like, okay, she pretends to be very happy with the decision.
#
And she says, fine, no problem.
#
And she gets ready to receive this amir at night.
#
But actually what happens is that when the amir enters her quarters, she has posted her
#
women around the door and they pounce upon him, they catch him and they throw him out
#
of the window and he breaks his neck and he dies.
#
And so the next morning the chieftain comes to her and says, what have you done?
#
And she says, I am already married and I have a husband.
#
And if this is the way you treat honorable women, then do with me as you will.
#
And the man is so impressed that obviously he sends her back to her husband with honor.
#
So these are the sort of, you know, brave, resolute women that Babur luckily has around
#
him to show them the way when he is only a 13 year old boy really, you know, trying to
#
find his way in the world surrounded by his bloodthirsty uncles who would kill him in
#
an instant for the throne themselves.
#
And it is because he has his mother and his grandmother and Khandada Begum around him
#
that he survives at all, you know, nevermind becomes the founder of the Mughal Empire.
#
And he writes about this and he writes eloquently about Khandada Begum, how much he owes to
#
her because when he is surrounded by Shabani Khan Uzbek, who is his great foe in Kabul
#
in Samarkand, sorry, Shabani Khan makes an offer to Babur and he says, I will let you
#
go with your land, you can go with your life and your small retinue, but you leave your
#
sister with me and you know, relieve her as my captive.
#
And Babur is forced to do that and it is a shameful thing for him to do because it shows
#
that he has no power and he has to leave Khandada Begum.
#
But Khandada Begum herself is never blamed or any way demeaned for having to become the
#
She lives there for 10 years after Shabani Khan Uzbek eventually divorces her because
#
he gets fed up of how much she keeps talking about her own family, which I find really
#
evocative and amazing, which means even in confinement, even as a prisoner of the Lord's
#
enemy, she must have kept on talking about Babur and the Timurids, you know.
#
So he gets fed up of her and he gives her to a more lowly person as that person's wife.
#
So you can imagine how it must have been very humiliating for Khandada Begum, but she never
#
loses her spirit and after 10 years when Shabani Khan Uzbek is defeated, she is sent
#
back to Babur and Babur is delighted to have her back and he makes her Paatshah Begum,
#
which is the most respected woman of the harem and all his descendants equally respect her
#
and she is never in any way demeaned or made to feel guilty for the fact that she was the
#
wife of two other men before she came to Babur's court, which I found so refreshing when we
#
think about her exact contemporaries, the Rajputs, you know, who put so much worth on
#
a woman's sexual chastity that they would prefer them to commit sati and johar at the
#
time of facing an enemy rather than, you know, to take a chance on what might happen to their
#
So their sexual chastity is placed above everything else, above them being mothers, about them
#
being human beings, about them being wives.
#
It is about being sexually chaste, so it is the control of a woman's sexuality, which
#
is so important, whereas the Timurids are very pragmatic about the fact that they are
#
constantly traveling, they are constantly warring, therefore their women are sometimes
#
Indeed, when they are brought back, they are always honored.
#
So this was something that I thought people might not know about and that it's worth talking
#
This took me by surprise and also took me by surprise what Khanzada was, that then she
#
And you contrast that with the stigma on widow remarriage in India, where once you are widowed,
#
if you don't emulate yourself, you basically wear white and you're pretty much done.
#
The Timurids regularly encouraged remarriage and many of the women we find were remarried.
#
And Akbar even talks about it clearly and says, you know, I don't understand why amongst
#
the Hindus, a woman, when she is widowed, she is not allowed to go to another man.
#
He said, I don't understand this.
#
And I don't understand that a man finds virtue in making his wife die when he dies.
#
So he was actually puzzled by this, you know, he could not understand this whole concept
#
And he said, especially if the woman is young when she gets widowed, and if she has perhaps
#
not even lain with her husband, you know, because he died so young, she is absolutely
#
And in any case, she is never to be forced.
#
So, you know, he even he sent ministers out into his empire to make sure that no woman
#
know how much that happened on the ground.
#
But they were to check every case of sati and make sure that if the woman was determined
#
only then would she be allowed to commit sati and no one was to force her.
#
So he was very puzzled.
#
So clearly, this was a deeply entrenched aspect of the Timurids or the Mughals, that there
#
was no shame in remarrying if you are widowed.
#
It was not your fault, unlike the Hindus who thought it is your fate if you are widowed.
#
That means that it is something you have, you know, perhaps some crime or punishment
#
for some past life misdeed.
#
And therefore you must you lose your husband and you must die.
#
They felt they didn't see things in the same way at all.
#
So a woman's chastity was not valued above everything else, above her abilities, above
#
her capacity to form a new relationship.
#
So I found that very interesting right from the time of Khanzada.
#
So that means 500 years ago, you know, from the time of Babur itself, there was no undue
#
importance laid on a woman's honor being related to her chastity.
#
And you know, we often sort of in our popular conception of those times today, we think
#
of them as invading barbarians who came into our very evolved culture and all of that and
#
But here it strikes to me and even, you know, a lot of what else is in your book also points
#
out that they were actually fairly enlightened in many ways towards their women.
#
Not as much as we would like today, of course, but no, but even so, for those times, I find
#
that it was quite refreshingly honest the way they view the women that we always think
#
of them in Parda, there was a very light, very porous Parda, in fact, you know, we forget
#
that they are descendants of Timur and that is whom they claim as their forefather.
#
And if we look at Timur's court, for example, there's the writings of the Spanish ambassador,
#
I think, Ray Gonzalez, who writes about his encounters at the Timur court.
#
He goes there as an ambassador.
#
He is received very well.
#
He attends all these parties and he writes about Timur's wife and he can, the fact that
#
he writes about her physically, he describes her, that means he can see her and her veil
#
is very, very light so she can be easily seen by all the men who are sitting there.
#
He describes her complexion, her hair, everything, so she is clearly visible.
#
She comes and sits between them.
#
There are men with her, there are women with her, it is a mixed gathering and she drinks
#
and her friends, the women all drink and in fact, he writes that they drink sometimes
#
So you see, this is a very different idea of what we think Haram may have been like
#
here is a mixed company, they're singing and dancing, he says, for days.
#
So this is something very different that Timur's, of course, they were conquerors also and I'm
#
not going to gloss over that, but they were also great builders of city.
#
They were great admirers of culture, of poetry, of language, of literature.
#
Babur wrote his own biography, as you know, a very entertaining biography.
#
So there are these other aspects.
#
They were not at all just this marauding entity that we have been made to believe that they
#
They brought with them a lot of other influences which remain with us, too, which is very much
#
I think it is in the molecule of every, at least, North Indian today, whether it is the
#
food, the clothes, the language, the etiquette, the adab that we have, it is all Timurid and
#
it has filtered down through us because these were things that were valued in that time.
#
You know, when they came here, they brought this, all the minor courts as they integrated
#
wanted to absorb this culture and they did, whether it was the Rajasthani courts, you
#
know, Jaisalmer, all these courts, they took part of this culture and they made it uniquely
#
Indian in that genius way that we have.
#
But the root of it is Timurid and it survived because it was buoyant and it was vibrant
#
and it was something worth keeping.
#
What also kind of struck me, you know, while reading about Babur's adventures, like, you
#
know, after he lost Samarkand, he was sort of traveling for a long time and then he finally
#
goes to Kabul and he stays in Kabul for 20 years and then he, you know, goes to Hindustan
#
where for the first time he really, a lot of the women just stay behind and it kind
#
of struck me that in all of this constant travel, the sense of rootedness that he gets
#
is from these women who, you know, and they're not just wives and mistresses, they're aunts
#
and his mother and all of, was his mother part of it?
#
And at one point you said that is where the sense of home comes from for these constant
#
travelers and then he goes to Agra and, you know, when he finally wins his battle against
#
Lodi and he is sacking Agra and he sends so many jewels and riches and all of that which
#
you've described in detail, specifically for the women back to Kabul.
#
And one of the sort of threads running through the stories of Babur Humayun and all the way
#
to Akbar is the love and reverence they have for these women.
#
Yes, and in fact this list that you're talking about of jewels and clothes and dancing girls
#
and all this that he sends back is only listed by Gulbadan.
#
No other biographer writes about this.
#
So this again, if we didn't have a woman's voice, so we would not see this aspect of
#
their culture of how they showed appreciation of how, you know, wealth was distributed.
#
So she writes in great detail about who was given what.
#
So yes, they revere these women.
#
These women are very important to them because they are, you know, carriers of their culture.
#
They are carriers of their language, of the stories they tell each other, of the stories
#
they will tell the children so that the children know where they come from, who these Timurids
#
So they are very, very essential to the creation of a Timurid legacy in India.
#
And one of the very first thing where the Babur after Panipat, he says, my generals,
#
even though these are war, you know, battle hardened great men who are used to all kinds
#
of tribulations in the heat of Hindustan, they were like, OK, we have won this battle
#
Now we are heading back to Kabul.
#
So he realizes what's happening and he calls for the women because he knows that it is
#
the women which will anchor the men to a country.
#
It is not even the idea of future grandeur.
#
It is the women because they bring with them a way of life.
#
And it is this way of life that can only be transmitted to them.
#
The men are too busy doing their battles and their interactions with aggrandizing their
#
It is the women who bring their culture.
#
Akbar does the same thing when he becomes king so young and he starts to found his empire.
#
One of the first things at that point, Humayun died so early that he hadn't yet called for
#
his harem to come from Kabul.
#
So one of the first thing after he wins a few battles, Akbar similarly, almost identically
#
to Babur, realizes that his men will not stay, carry on like this, because they are feeling
#
a little bit orphaned in India now.
#
And they are attacked by all kinds of people who are trying to make their own claims for
#
And they are ready to leave.
#
And he does the same thing.
#
He calls for the women.
#
And he writes and he says, these women are required to have the men stay and for the
#
men to feel that this is a place that they can call home, that this is a place that one
#
day can be theirs and can be part of their life.
#
So it's very interesting and right till the later stages, the women are some of the last
#
to speak the Turkish language.
#
And obviously, your language is so much part of your identity.
#
So Gulbadan and Hamida Banu, all these women who spoke Turkish, as they die out, we slowly
#
see that Turkish completely loses its hold over these, over the men, over the pacha.
#
And they say, Jahangir, I think says proudly, I can speak a few lines of Turkish.
#
But clearly, by then, it is only a sort of a flourish.
#
But it is not their mother tongue anymore.
#
It is the women who carry language and who carry that sort of the culture of memories
#
I mean, home is where the women are.
#
And it also kind of strikes me while reading this book that, you know, looking back, we
#
So you can, you know, we look as the Mughals, okay, they've been here for so many hundred
#
years and blah, blah, blah.
#
But if you think about them at the time, they've just landed up in this strange land.
#
They don't speak that language, they have no roots there.
#
Everyone is a foreigner and therefore suspicious.
#
And we think of the Mughal dynasty as a given and it's such a strong, solid monolithic thing.
#
But after Humayun loses to Sher Shah Suri, and he's just being chased all over the place,
#
you have absolutely, I mean, at that moment, he has absolutely no idea how he's going to
#
And in fact, at that time, it seems like, you know, the Mughals are only perhaps, you
#
know, an aberration of a few years, a few decades, maybe, you know, with Babur and that
#
is all that they will ever be.
#
Because the Sher Shah Suri is a very talented man and it looks like, you know, he will prosper.
#
But so it is true that these women, I think without their presence, one almost feels that
#
perhaps the men would have also lost hope at some point, you know, and maybe not found
#
it worth their while, because so many of their generals were ready to leave at many times,
#
you know, of the empire.
#
And it is only after Akbar, really, that Akbar begins to feel like a truly Hindustani king.
#
You know, he spends so much time with the locals from a very young age.
#
He has this great ability to communicate with people of all classes and he spends a lot
#
of time with all his animal keepers and he learns the language very quickly.
#
And it is with Akbar that we really feel that these kings are here to stay and they are
#
Hindustani kings now, you know, and that they have brought in this culture.
#
But Akbar often puts on this Timurid culture for show, to impress an ambassador or to impress
#
some other visiting Timurid.
#
But it is not who he is.
#
He feels comfortable in the culture of the country and, you know, in the people that
#
surround him who are now Hindustani.
#
The most fascinating character in your book I found was Gulbadan herself and you write
#
about how, you know, she saw Babur writing the Babu Nama and then perhaps that's how
#
she got inspired to write it.
#
And it strikes me that it is only through Gulbadan.
#
In fact, you're right, I'll quote you, it is quote, it is through Gulbadan's account
#
and only hers that we can see Babur as a loving father, a tempestuous family man and a devoted
#
And how different is her portrayal of those times from other, you know, contemporary accounts
#
Well, it's completely different, you know, because especially when men are writing about
#
somebody like Babur, then they will focus on his battles, on his charisma, certainly,
#
you know, his magnetic ability to interact with other men because he had this much less
#
of men that he was very comfortable with.
#
So those men wrote about those gatherings of men, you know, where they drank all night
#
and, you know, sang songs and tried out different mixtures of drugs and so on.
#
So we have Babur, the amazing strategist, because he was a wonderful strategist and
#
you know how many battles he won, the battle of Panipat, how it was, he won it amazingly
#
So we see only that side of it, which is wonderful, but it is one side of it.
#
With Gulbadan, we see how much he loves his family, how he prefers one wife over another,
#
his first wife, his main wife, he calls her by her name, which I find very moving because
#
by the time of Akbar, you can no longer pronounce a woman's name.
#
And so therefore a certain part of their identity is lost, a name is so important, isn't it,
#
the way in which you are called.
#
If you're only called by a title, that somehow it is meant to aggrandize you, but on a human
#
level it reduces you because you no longer have your own separate identity.
#
But Babur calls her Maham Begum.
#
So he always calls her by her name and Gulbadan writes that, oh, he calls out to Maham.
#
And when she's coming from Kabul after an absence of I think a year and a half, he pushes
#
aside his attendant, he pushes aside his horse and goes running.
#
So this image of this amazing conqueror, but he's running to meet his wife whom he hasn't
#
met for one and a half years.
#
And he takes Gulbadan in his arms also, six-year-old daughter whom he hasn't seen.
#
And he makes her eat, there's this wonderful feast which is prepared.
#
So yes, it is through Gulbadan that we see a different aspect of this man, so that he's
#
not just one-dimensional.
#
We see him more as a complete human being.
#
So the accounts of women, in no way do they denigrate a man.
#
On the contrary, they give a more complex and nuanced understanding of the men too.
#
So to understand women's history, to talk about them, to explore them, is also to increase
#
our understanding of the men too.
#
It's not that it's in any way making them less manly.
#
Another of the interesting aspects of it, and this again goes back to the whole political
#
economy angle of these harems, so to say, is how all of these women, especially the
#
senior women like Khanzada and Dildar Begum, are playing this part in almost ruffling feathers,
#
bringing sons together, making peace between brothers.
#
Khanzada goes on a number of missions and in fact dies on one of those so-called diplomatic
#
missions to bring brothers together.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
So in fact, one of the missions that she sent on, Humayun had to fight with all of his brothers
#
at one point or another, three of his brothers, and the most resolute of his brothers against
#
him was Kamran, who never came around to him.
#
So Kamran never came around to his side and things were pretty hairy for him at some times
#
because he was being chased by the Afghans, by the Lodhis, by the local chieftains, the
#
Rajput chieftains, and he can't even count on his own brothers.
#
So in desperation, at one point you would think, okay, who is he going to send to Pali
#
Maybe it is some, you know, grizzled warrior, maybe some, you know, old man who holds a
#
No, he sends this elderly lady, Khanzada Begum, who is, you know, who doesn't have independent
#
It's not that she has a famous husband or famous son, you know, as you know, she was
#
twice widowed and then married to somebody not terribly consequential, but she has this
#
standing of her own because they respect her so much, you know, because she is a timid,
#
who is clearly very intelligent, they all look up to her, she is sensible.
#
And she is this woman who is sent on a very dangerous mission across icy passes and mountains
#
and you know, she could have died at any moment.
#
And she goes to Kamran and she tells him, do what Babur would have wanted you to do.
#
So she stands in lieu of Babur, the founder himself, and says, remember what Babur would
#
have wanted you to do, that Humayun is like your Paatshah, now he's like your elder brother,
#
he's like your king, you must obey him.
#
Now the fact that Kamran doesn't really do that is neither here nor there because he
#
was intent on getting the throne for himself, but he listens to her with respect, you know,
#
and then he keeps her with him and says, you stay with me because you are symbolically
#
But the fact that she is sent on these missions shows that when all else fails, when there's
#
nothing left, they still believe in the power of somebody like Khanzada, on the power that
#
she has through her charisma of being a Timurid woman, you know, independent of any man really.
#
And I find that really just startling and amazing.
#
And just a moral authority she carries.
#
Does it strike you sometimes when you're studying history or writing history, how important
#
and consequential happenstance can become like not just for example, the happenstance
#
of that we happen to find the only biography of Gulbadan, but even happenstance in history.
#
For example, you write about how Humayun falls in love with this young girl called Hamidah
#
Banu Begum, and she's really not interested.
#
And one of his foster mothers, Dildar Begum, is then playing its part, trying to get her
#
to convince and saying, what better than, you know, marrying a king and he's not really
#
a king at the moment, he's a fugitive, he's kind of running around with this small retinue
#
when she's like, you know, trying to politely turn it down and it's all very interesting.
#
But it actually happens and, you know, and from there, even when they are sort of going
#
back to the present day Afghanistan side and he gets news that another of his brothers
#
might kill him and Humayun and Hamidah go off and they leave little baby Akbar with
#
wet nurses and somehow he survives all of that.
#
And if these things don't happen, we don't have Akbar, we don't have, I mean, the history
#
of the subcontinent is completely different.
#
Of course, if you read, again, if you read Abu al-Fazl and the male biographers, then
#
you will be told that this is all predetermined and this was meant to be and it is because
#
Akbar is a semi-divine king and it is all in the stars.
#
You know, so they go back to astrology and they say that the stars were aligned in just
#
such a manner that this would happen.
#
But of course, we know that it is, as you say, happenstance and it is, for two, it is
#
incidents like this, you know.
#
And in fact, the fact that Hamidah Banu went with Humayun for two years, they were in Persia.
#
And you know, they were almost like itinerant backpackers because they had nothing much
#
You know, they had 40 total, their retinue when they went, left India was 40.
#
So that's not a very impressive cavalcade, you know, when you're coming as the Pacha
#
And of course, they are received in Persia and they are treated as kings and queens.
#
But the fact is that they spend most of those two years just sightseeing and they visit
#
all these wonderful, because Humayun is an interesting character himself and he visits
#
all these interesting, you know, sights and all this amazing architecture, Persia is an
#
amazing place at that time, one of the, you know, cauldrons of culture really in the world.
#
And so they see all this amazing sight and Hamidah Banu with him, they see carpets, they
#
see architecture, they eat food, which is amazing also, you know, they talk about charbats
#
cooled with ice water and you know, this amazing white linen and white bread which is made
#
And one wonders when they come back two years later, how much Hamidah Banu brings with her
#
because she has seen all this, she has eaten all this, she has experienced all this.
#
So when Gulbadan writes that a new fashion of making tents or of arranging quarters was
#
introduced, then you think, okay, maybe Hamidah Banu Begum introduced certain Persian ways
#
into Hindustan and that is the way through which it came.
#
It's not just Humayun, it's not just the Persian immigrants who then followed.
#
It is Hamidah Banu herself.
#
And in fact, one of the questions I bring up is the whole question of who built Humayun's
#
For something which became such an important mausoleum, the mausoleum of the, you know,
#
the Mughals themselves, it was very little written about in its own time.
#
I think people were too busy establishing the empire, Akbar was very young at that time,
#
he was still fighting for the throne when Humayun died and Humayun's tomb was only begun
#
several years after his death, much later.
#
And Akbar then moved to Agra and then Fatehpur Sikri and that became the focus of his attention.
#
So Humayun's tomb in Delhi was not much written about.
#
So there's quite a lot of question mark about who built Humayun's tomb, you know.
#
And contemporary writers say that it was his widow.
#
So his widow being Begabegum, who's also another very interesting woman.
#
And I wonder if the very shape of Humayun's tomb, it shows so much Persian influence.
#
Perhaps some of it comes from the fact that Begabegum would have talked to Hamidah Banu
#
Begum, her co-wife, who she was very friendly with.
#
They had a very good relationship according to how Gulbuddin writes about it.
#
They may have compared notes.
#
She may have talked about the mausoleums that she visited in her two years in Persia.
#
And some of them, of course, this is all far-fetched and this is again, you know, wondering.
#
But it's a wondering which is worth doing, that perhaps they talked about it, she talked
#
And then along with the Persian architect, there was a Persian architect.
#
This wonderful tomb was built and Begabegum then looked after it for the rest of her life.
#
And yet certain people now, certain scholars will say that Akbar built it.
#
I think what the question is, is who determines ownership?
#
How do you determine ownership of a thing, a monument?
#
Akbar must have supplied most of the money.
#
He was the emperor and he had a lot of money, certainly.
#
But isn't it also the person who has loved it, who has loved it into being, who has brought
#
in some of the ideas, who spent the rest of her life looking after it and who has devoted
#
So in my chapter on that, I say, let us not take away ownership.
#
People in that time said Begabegum built Humayun's tomb, you see.
#
So let us not take it away so easily because these examples are not lying thick on the
#
ground of women doing things.
#
So we must hang on to each instance that we have and fight for it.
#
And it's very tempting for male historians to just imagine that if anything great exists
#
like a great monument, it's obviously a man.
#
And one of the concrete things which did come from Persia is, of course, the whole art of
#
the Mughal miniature really originated there because they, you know, they got painters
#
back from there and they were completely enthralled by the work that happened there and that cultural
#
influence came from there.
#
We'll take a quick commercial break and when we come back, we move on to the second period
#
of the great Mughal era.
#
Hey everybody, welcome to another awesome week on the IVM Podcast Network.
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On the scene and the on-scene, Namit is joined by Aira Mukoti, author and historian.
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They focus on women of the Mughal era and discover a complex world where women are major
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players jostling for power.
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On Advertising is Dead, Varun Tagirala is joined by an old friend and head of agency
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partnerships and creative services at Google India, Aditya Swamy.
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They talk about the evolving marketer in today's time.
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On Football Shootball, hosts Gaurav Karthik and Siva round up the weekend's fixtures,
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most notably Liverpool vs Tottenham.
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On Golgappa with Tripti Kamkar, Tripti is joined by Mandar Bhide, a stand-up comic who
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talks to her about the business or content and some fun experiences doing shows.
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Speaking of shows, on Mr. And Mrs. Binge Watch, Janice and Anirudh talk about HBO's new teen
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drama series, Euphoria.
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And on the Geek Food Podcast, we have a treat for the Breaking Bad fans.
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Join hosts Jishnu and Tejas as they discuss El Camino, a Breaking Bad movie.
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Simplified is back again with part 4 of their 150th episode.
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In this episode, they talk about the implications of Brexit and the transformation of Dubai.
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Speaking of other countries, on Postcards From Nowhere, Utsav talks about his trip to
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Turkey with his friends and how you can curate your travel to make them the most fun and
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On our Kannada Podcast, Thalle Harade, Satya Sankaran joins Pawan Srinath to talk about
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how non-motorized transport needs new thinking, behaviour, policy, infrastructure, action
#
On The Origin of Things, Chuck narrates an interesting story about a Brazilian company
#
that struggled its way through World War II and the Great Depression.
#
You say that, you know, when you look at the women in this period, it can sort of be divided
#
into three phases, that with the early Mughals, you have the older matriarchs who are really
#
powerful people like Khanzada and I guess Ildar Begum and so on.
#
And Akbar onwards, the focus shifts first to foster mothers, I guess, in that immediate
#
period where he's settling down, and then to wives.
#
And then with the later Mughals, it shifts to like unmarried daughters.
#
And is it sort of just happenstance or are there deeper reasons behind this kind of a
#
shift and the kind of women who are becoming dominant?
#
Well, I think initially the matriarchs were important because they were the one carrying
#
So they were the ones who had the moral authority, they were the ones who had that clout, they
#
were the ones who had that influence, you know, and respect.
#
The younger women were not at that point that needed, you know, you needed the older women
#
who had that authority with them, which the younger women didn't have.
#
And therefore, the Babur and Humayun were particularly respectful of these older women.
#
All the Mughals were right down the line.
#
But the ones who had that visibility, let us say, are the older women, because I think
#
they, at a time of very great uncertainty, of vulnerability of the empire, they are the
#
ones who brought, you know, that sort of counterpart and that weight and that culture with them.
#
Then Akbar in his early years, because as we know, he was abandoned as a baby.
#
And I think probably that is one reason for those few years before his parents came back.
#
But the entire time of 10 years in Kabul, he was surrounded by his foster families.
#
And I think that possibly shaped him very deeply.
#
He may have somewhere felt that whereas his parents had abandoned him, his foster families
#
stood by him, protected him physically from his uncle Kamran, who was always a slightly
#
volatile character from Askari, and from all the dangers around a child, a baby, you know.
#
So I have a feeling that these years shaped him so that he had this love, this affection,
#
and this gratitude to his foster families throughout his life, so that his foster brothers
#
could get away almost with murder and he forgave them, like Aziz Koka could say all kinds of
#
cheeky and disrespectful things to him in the open court.
#
And Akbar would mostly laugh it off or shrug it off, you know, make light of it.
#
In fact, he very memorably said that there is a river of milk between us.
#
Such a beautiful phrase.
#
And so, you know, he was very, very grateful, I think, to his foster families and his foster
#
And the one who was most ambitious, let us say, was Mahamanga.
#
There were others that he loved perhaps more, like Gigianga, Aziz Koka's mother.
#
But she was not ambitious in that sense, you know.
#
She was always there with Akbar, but I do not find any records of her, you know, doing
#
anything of her own in terms of architecture or, you know, commissioning anything.
#
She was an ambitious woman.
#
She was a talented woman.
#
But he was again very volatile, Adham Khan.
#
And Mahamanga, so therefore, at the time of the early years of Akbar when he has not yet
#
come into his own, when he is in the force of nature that we later know him to be, Mahamanga
#
is very, very powerful.
#
And it is written that she practically ran the empire for those two years until Adham
#
Khan oversteps the boundaries and therefore Mahamanga also falls.
#
So we have that short period of time in which they are the foster mothers.
#
And it is short, but it is not inconsequential because she carries out many orders.
#
And she builds one of the first great mosques, Mughal mosques of Delhi, which is today completely
#
It is called Manazil, Madrasa and mosque complex, which is opposite Old Fort.
#
And today it is in ruins, sadly.
#
But it is a wonderful testament of a non-royal Mughal woman.
#
And it is clearly written, there's a, you know, writing on it in Persian saying that
#
this has been commissioned by Mahamanga.
#
So she's put her name to it.
#
So you see her ambition, you see her desire for her name to continue in posterity.
#
And so after these short years, once the matriarchs die out, they stay out for quite a long time.
#
There's Hamidah Banu and Gulbadan, Begha Begham dies first, but there's Gulbadan and there's
#
They continue because Hamidah Banu was so young when she got married and she had Akbar.
#
She died only a couple of years before her son, you see.
#
So almost his entire life, he had these matriarchs who remained very powerful and visible despite
#
Abu Al-Fazl's attempt to make them invisible, you know.
#
So Gulbadan goes on this wonderful all-women's hajj, which is a remarkable thing for a 16th
#
century Muslim woman to do.
#
And she spends a full seven years before she comes back to Fatehpur Sikhi.
#
So one imagines the kind of adventure that she goes through and how much she must have
#
enjoyed herself to have stayed away from this opulent court at this time.
#
And you'll strive even when they came back, she didn't go directly from the shore to this,
#
you know, she's stopping everywhere and really chilling with her retinue.
#
You would think if she really wanted to get back, she'd rush back home, but she first
#
goes to Ajmer to see the dargah, you know, she does all the other minor pilgrimages.
#
So she's clearly having the time of her life, you know.
#
And what a pity that she hasn't written about that.
#
So yes, so there are these, these matriarchs remain influential almost till the end of
#
So we don't hear a great deal about the other women at this time.
#
It is only after he passes away that one hears more about the power of his mother, Harkabai,
#
the Rajput princess of Amir, who is, of course, in popular literature misrepresented as Jodhabai
#
That is completely untrue.
#
She was not from Jodhpur, she was from Amir, which became Jaipur later on.
#
So it is only after Akbar passes away that you see that Harkabai is a very powerful financially
#
She has her own trading ships.
#
She's very interested in trade.
#
And in fact, it even brings her up against the Portuguese who are real menace and whom
#
And so did all the women.
#
In fact, the harem was very anti the Jesuit missionaries.
#
They found them a nefarious and toxic influence, and they hated, obviously, the things that
#
they said against both the Muslims and the Hindus.
#
In that way, they were quite democratic.
#
They would criticize both the Hindus and the Muslims.
#
So both Harkabai and her retinue of Rajput women hated them, and so did the Muslim ladies.
#
They were like, who are these men telling us how to live our life?
#
So it is only after Akbar dies that you see the power of Harkabai.
#
So she trades, and she has interactions with the Portuguese, and she has even a proxy fight
#
But she's a powerful woman.
#
We only see that later on for that short period of time until she passes away.
#
And then the wives come into their own with Nur Jahan, of course, famously.
#
And it is later in the time of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb that the daughters become more powerful.
#
And I think it's because the daughters now are carrying that bloodline.
#
They are the Timurid women, because the wives are local wives now.
#
They are Hindustani wives, non-Timurid wives.
#
So they do not carry that charisma of the Timurids, which is necessary to perpetuate
#
So it is the daughters who take on that role.
#
Jahanara Begum is a Timurid woman, and she claims that legacy very forcefully.
#
And I found that is what attracted me to her.
#
Just like the men did, in fact, almost more than the men did.
#
She said, I am a Timurid woman.
#
I will build these buildings.
#
She built so many structures in old Delhi.
#
She had a Sufi journey.
#
She wrote about that in her biography.
#
And she does all this claiming that she is blessed and is perpetuating the Timurid lamp,
#
the knowledge of the Timurids.
#
So that is very important.
#
It is because of her bloodline that she is able to claim this sort of descendants and
#
So that's why the daughters then become important, as does Roshanara.
#
One of the Europeans, I forget Bernier, somebody wrote acutely but cruelly that she is also
#
very beautiful, but less beautiful than Jahanara.
#
She is also talented, but less than Jahanara.
#
So she was always second best.
#
But these women were powerful.
#
They were incredibly wealthy.
#
All the Europeans who wanted to trade at court had to parlay with them and had to interact
#
And they ignored them at their own peril.
#
And I think one of them, Thomas Rowe, first thought that he would do without Jahanara
#
and Roshanara and it worked out very badly and he had to scramble later on to make up
#
So these women, Nur Jahan, Jahanara and Roshanara were very, very influential later on.
#
One of the things that struck me about Akbar's times, in fact, two of the fundamental shifts
#
that happened, and one was sort of a cultural shift in the sense that he was marrying a
#
lot of Rajput women in alliances and so on.
#
And that had an influence.
#
I think in just one context, you write, quote, in just a few years, this Rajasani style will
#
irrevocably influence Mughal court dress and etiquette, tight jackets and tunics and diaphanous
#
materials elaborately printed will replace the more pragmatic flowing cabas of the Mughal
#
But it's not not just in dress and in every possible way it had an influence on the court.
#
It had an influence, which was, I think, both ways, more than we acknowledged.
#
The Rajputs obviously adopted a great deal from the Mughals, from their culture.
#
The miniature paintings went to the minor courts of Rajasthan and they flourished.
#
When Akbar commissioned the Razam Namaz, which was a translation of the Mahabharat, this
#
extraordinary document which required Brahmin priests sitting together with Persian theologians
#
and writers and translators and all this amazing intellectual work going on so that the Mahabharat,
#
this amazing Sanskrit script was translated into Persian.
#
When the Rajputs saw this, they also commissioned one that we will be no less and they commissioned
#
one which had twice the number of paintings that the Mughals had.
#
So you see, they were very much influenced as well and they took all these elements back
#
to their court, whether it was in architecture, the paintings, and of course the Mughals were
#
completely altered by the interaction with the Rajputs, definitely in art, in architecture.
#
You can see in Fatehpur Sikri, this mixing of styles, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Timurid,
#
of course, it was very much because of Rajasthan.
#
But the interesting thing that I have also talked about, and I'm talking about more in
#
my next book, is the way they were influenced in terms of the women's life and the Pardha
#
We normally tend to assume that the Pardha came with the Mughals, that they brought it
#
with them from Central Asia into India.
#
And I'm wondering if it is not more a sort of two-way thing, that when they came in,
#
they seemed to have, as I said, a very porous Pardha indeed.
#
Many of the women were visible, they had a very light Pardha, they were on horseback,
#
they traveled everywhere, they talked to the men openly, you know, they interacted with
#
them in mixed gatherings.
#
But this Pardha that happened, happened more at Akbar's time.
#
And we know that Rajasthani Rajput society at this time had a Pardha system, which was
#
extremely intransigent.
#
And their women were very much cloistered, in fact, the higher up in the echelon they
#
were, the higher were the walls physically of the, you know, of the Zanana, so that even
#
Their Pardha was so restrictive that they were meant to cover their heads even in front
#
So their mothers-in-law, for many years, a young bride could not cover, uncover her face.
#
Whereas the Mughals never had any such thing, they interacted freely with other women.
#
So I'm wondering whether this is not also something which the Rajput brought with them,
#
which became something that Akbar then thought would be good to emulate, because these are
#
high-class Rajput men who are introducing this system.
#
Therefore, it is something that he, as a Mughal emperor, should also bring into his harem,
#
you know, as part of India.
#
And perhaps a two-way thing, perhaps the Rajasthani then saw how the empire was forming, how the
#
court was becoming more ossified and more stratified, how the harem was becoming tighter,
#
the Zanana walls higher, and they brought even more restriction to their women, so that
#
by the end of it, both societies have their women tightly cloistered and invisible in
#
So yes, the interaction with Rajasthan, with the Rajput culture, is something which I think
#
has become so organic that it would be difficult to say where the Mughal starts and where the
#
And what you also pointed out in your book, the second big shift, perhaps, is that now
#
the Zanana becomes something sort of separate, where Akbar starts spending more and more
#
time with men, whether they're, you know, theologicians or artists or whatever.
#
And the Zanana becomes a separate thing, and it raises a management problem.
#
Again, to quote from your book, you write, quote, the very large number of women now
#
in Akbar Zanana has brought up a very vexatious question, even for a great statesman such
#
This troublesome question is, though it is only through order that the world becomes
#
a meadow of truth and reality, this order, yearningly aspired to by Abu al-Fazl for Akbar,
#
is hard to maintain in the raucous community of women, children, staff, relatives, guards,
#
tutors, and assorted entourage that Akbar Zanana has become.
#
How does he handle this?
#
Well, first, we have to consider what Abu al-Fazl is saying.
#
Abu al-Fazl states that Akbar has 5,000 women in his Zanana.
#
Now, anybody who has visited Fatehpur Sikri will know that this is a gross exaggeration.
#
You would be absolutely like sardines in a can if there were 5,000 women in what were
#
pretty modest, you know, quarters, if you're talking about a sum like 5,000.
#
He says 5,000 to aggrandize Akbar.
#
He says 5,000 to show how mighty Akbar is, that he can provide for and protect 5,000
#
women, that he requires 5,000 women around him in his harem, in his Zanana.
#
So it is a gross exaggeration.
#
The Europeans talk about 300 women.
#
Even there, we're not talking about 300 wives at all, you know.
#
So there's always this assumption that these 5,000 women are sexually available to Akbar.
#
It's complete nonsense.
#
You know, if you do the calculations, Akbar would have done nothing but spend time with
#
If he had 5,000 women, how would he have founded this amazing empire, you know.
#
So firstly, one has to look at what Abul Fazal is saying.
#
But even considering the fact that there were not 5,000 women, there were a lot of women
#
because now all these Rajasthani ladies brought their retinues with them.
#
And this is one thing that the Rajputs did is that when they sent out their daughters,
#
they didn't just send them alone to their in-laws.
#
They send them completely accompanied because they did not trust the food, you know, what
#
they would get in their in-law family.
#
So they brought in all the infrastructure with them.
#
And these were all, whether they were priests, whether they were masoos, whether they were
#
teachers, whether they were pandits, they were all women.
#
Interesting to know the women were carrying on all these roles.
#
So this structure that Abul Fazal tries to create as being extremely ordered must have
#
been something which was quite rambunctious and out of control in a way if he has to keep
#
saying that it was a very chaste place and a very ordered place.
#
But the fact is that it was managed.
#
It was like a city in miniature.
#
It was like a government in miniature.
#
You had somebody taking notes, somebody who took accounts, somebody who showed those accounts
#
to the Pacha, who presented to the Pacha all the requirements of the women.
#
The women would also make requests every day for charity for poor women that they would
#
Those requests were made before the emperor every afternoon.
#
So there was this very complicated and intrinsic bureaucracy and life.
#
It was going on in the Zenana, which was not at all the one that Abul Fazal was hoping
#
It was something that we have forgotten because of the sanitized way that he talks about it.
#
But it was a very lively place.
#
It was a place where a great deal of power was exercised by the women and where they
#
managed in many ways to escape this veil in one way or the other, despite the attempt
#
by Abul Fazal to keep them constrained.
#
In fact, at one point you write after Gulbadan comes back from the hajj, you write, stop
#
quote, the Zenana at Fatehpur Sikri that Gulbadan returns to in 1582 is very different from
#
the Haraman of a wandering with Humayun.
#
The great tainted mobile cities have disappeared, replaced by the sandstone and marble walls
#
and palaces of Akbar's Zenana.
#
But what is happening here, interestingly, is that even though these women are largely
#
been kept separate and the whole management has changed, that the matriarchs that remain
#
are still very influential in politics and in political manners matters, for example,
#
how they help Salim, whom we later know as Jahangir, come to power.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
So it's interesting that though on the one hand we are told by many writers and many
#
Europeans that this was a place of gossip and intrigue and backbiting and, you know,
#
jealousy among the women.
#
I find that actually they were very united in their cause, these women.
#
And when they supported a prince, it was usually everyone together.
#
When they tried to, you know, get somebody thrown out of court or, you know, out of favor,
#
Whether it was the Jesuit missionaries who eventually had to go and they attribute their
#
fall to the fact that the wives and women of Akbar were against them.
#
So they were very powerful and they seemed very united in their cause.
#
And Salim was a great example of that.
#
He was a complicated prince who had a complicated relationship with a very powerful father.
#
So this father-son dynamic was something which was difficult to navigate for him, you know.
#
And I think he often relied on the support of the women.
#
And at one point, I think in open court, I think it was Salima Sultan Begum from behind
#
She says, you know, Pacha, we have something to say to you.
#
And if you don't come to us, we will come to you.
#
So I found that really funny.
#
I was like, this is a threat.
#
They're saying that they're going to come out in open court and create a scene if he
#
doesn't come to them and listen to their woes or whatever a fumaish they want to make.
#
So and he goes, so they were very united in their cause.
#
And when they supported a prince, princes really relied on this support to get further
#
and to get, you know, gain of cause for whatever they wanted to achieve.
#
And in the case of Salim, in fact, you know, his estrangement was so severe that when Akbar
#
sent Abu al-Fazl, he got Abu al-Fazl beheaded, which would not have made some of the women
#
so unhappy, I imagine, by the histories that he eventually wrote.
#
But then Salima Sultan Begum steps in and she helps the father and the son come together.
#
And then eventually there's an rapprochement despite the one beheaded friend of Akbar.
#
And it is, of course, they wrote that we can only imagine Akbar's great disarray and distress
#
at the death of his great friend.
#
So to have brought about this rapprochement when Salim has crossed such a line and committed
#
such a grave error shows the influence of the women that they were despite that.
#
And Salima Sultan Begum is sent out to do this job, which is interesting because on
#
her own, Akbar marries her, but it almost seems to be a marriage of convenience.
#
They have no children together and she's older to Akbar, so maybe he views her more as an
#
But so despite the fact that she has no son of her own, no independent status of her own,
#
she has this respect and she is sent to bring Salim back to influence Salim also because
#
he's also of a mind to just create trouble and to create his own court and to challenge
#
So she talks to him and she brings gifts from his father and says, look, this elephant I'm
#
bringing from your father.
#
That means he means well, he's not out to harm you.
#
And she brings him to court.
#
And finally, there is a rapprochement between the two.
#
And Akbar does forgive Salim for this heinous crime.
#
And besides all the remarkable women in your story, there's also a remarkable ship, which,
#
of course, is Rahimi, which is Harkabai ship or Mariam Uzumani, as she was known.
#
And I found this whole episode with Mariam Uzumani and Rahimi and what happens to Rahimi
#
very fascinating because this is again one of those happenstances that it kind of almost
#
causes a decline in the fortunes of Portuguese colonialism.
#
This is a fascinating episode.
#
And Rahimi, of course, is described in this sentence that I found just lovely, which was
#
described it as a Hindu Queen's Muslim ship carrying hutch pilgrims in Christian waters
#
patrolled by the Portuguese armada, Stopco.
#
Well, you know, it's amazing.
#
And it just shows the polyphony and, you know, the multiplicity of the court at this time
#
So as I said, Akbar, after Akbar passed away, we see more visibly that Harkabai is a very
#
And she has a ship in her own name who sails under her colors, the Rahimi.
#
And so this is a hud ship.
#
But the hud ships at the same time also conducted trade, you know, between the, there was a
#
lot of trade in the Indian Ocean between India and the Middle East and further still from
#
And it was the Portuguese who started controlling this and they introduced piracy and rapacity.
#
And you know, they were pretty brutal in their dealings with the Indian ships.
#
So they were lured by everybody.
#
Everybody was agreed that the Portuguese, we need to find a way to get them out of Indian
#
waters because they only create trouble.
#
And they also, since the hutch pilgrims have been carried, they used to also look for any
#
chance to trouble the pilgrims, you know, and to torture them if they could.
#
So Harkabai has this ship called the Rahimi and the Portuguese have introduced this system
#
because they do control the waters because of superior naval power.
#
And they've brought this system of the Kartaz, which is a pass that you have to have obtained
#
from the Portuguese authority to have your ship sail.
#
Now the Mughals hate this because the Kartaz has a picture of the Holy Mary.
#
And they really hate the fact that they're pilgrims, they're going to Mecca, having to
#
carry this pass with, you know, Christian symbols on it.
#
So it is in many ways, you know, a flexing of muscles and showing strength and who must
#
And so Harkabai detests the fact that she has to, you know, kowtow to them and obtain
#
this pass, but they do.
#
And despite that, the ship is seized.
#
And Harkabai is really furious at this.
#
And she says, we must stop all trade with the Portuguese if this is the way that they're
#
going to treat our ships.
#
And until this point, really, none of the Mughals had really confronted the Portuguese.
#
The Mughals, their vision was more turned to the land.
#
It was more to the agricultural hinterland where all the money was, where all the produce
#
was, you know, where the great harvests of India were.
#
They were not looking so much outwards towards the seas.
#
It was largely a river navy, you know, so they sailed the rivers, not so much the high
#
They did not really come into confrontation, not that they particularly want to.
#
But when Harkabai made this demand, it effectively, now she never did recover the Rahimi, but
#
it effectively brought to an end the great control that the Portuguese had over the Indian
#
And the English are delighted because they know that if the Portuguese are out and they
#
have been controlling the waters, maybe it is the time of the English finally.
#
And they write with great delight and say the Queen Mother is furious at the Portuguese
#
and this will spell the end.
#
And so happenstance again, as you say, brought about this amazing change in the politics
#
Do you sometimes get tempted just to forget about history, history and write counterfactuals?
#
Let's not even go there.
#
That would also take you back to literature, right, which you said was your first love.
#
The next character I want to talk about is Noor Jahan.
#
And she's really interesting because she's got really humble beginnings.
#
She rises to great wealth, even more than the emperor himself, perhaps, as you point
#
But she has a kind of an anonymous end.
#
So Noor Jahan is a fascinating character, you know, again, pretty poorly served by the
#
Europeans who always implied that she holds the emperor in sexual thrall.
#
So it is a way, a debasement of Jahangir also.
#
And it is, you know, they are showing her as this manipulative sort of Virigo type person,
#
you know, which is doing her a great disservice.
#
As you say, she came as a refugee, her family came as refugees from Persia, and they came
#
to Akbar's court and then they rose slowly through the ranks.
#
They were all very talented, whether it's her father, who was prime minister, her brother
#
who controlled, who was very, very powerful, Noor Jahan herself.
#
Not just powerful, very, very talented people, they did things in all fields.
#
Her mother developed a tower of roses, for example, you know, she just collected the
#
scum after boiling roses and found this amazing fragrance.
#
So they were a talented family.
#
And she achieved a great deal, which Ruby Lal talks with a great deal of authority.
#
So I have not written a great deal on Noor Jahan, but because it is all there in Ruby
#
Lal's amazing book Empress.
#
But what she said, which was of interest to me, is the fact that we have to see what Noor
#
Jahan did and see it in context, because in India, we have, you know, history is taught
#
in a sort of bullet point form.
#
So we are told she shot lions, she minted coins, she did this, that and the other.
#
You learn all these four or five facts and you move on to the next thing.
#
But what you have to realize is put in context who shoots lions, only the pacha.
#
Nobody else is allowed to shoot lions.
#
It is a royal prerogative.
#
The Jharoka Darshan, who sit at the Jharoka and allows themselves to be painted and represented
#
as sitting at the Jharoka.
#
So if you put all these points together that she does, and she does do all these things,
#
and put it in the context of the times, it means, as Ruby Lal has said, that she is co-empress.
#
She shares power equally with Jahangir, who shares that power with her.
#
He is not doing it because he is debased or because he is in the throes of alcohol or
#
He does it because he is happy to share power with a very talented woman at a time when
#
he is poorly, his health is failing, and this woman has the vision and the aesthetic vision
#
to carry his legacy forward, which she does when we look at the tomb that she builds for
#
Itmadu Daula's tomb outside Agra.
#
If you look at that tomb, it is a culmination for me.
#
That's why I have focused more on Itmadu Daula's tomb and less the other aspects which Ruby
#
Lal has covered so well.
#
Itmadu Daula's tomb is the culmination of Noor Jahan's talent.
#
And we look at that building, built years before the Taj Mahal.
#
It is in pure white marble, which had never been done before, and which Shah Jahan did,
#
because he saw Itmadu Daula's tomb.
#
It has got inlay work, which had never been done before, which was later copied in the
#
So it is a trailblazing monument.
#
It is a beautiful, exquisite monument.
#
And if you look at, so she built this for her parents.
#
She's very dedicated to her parents, who are both, as I said, very talented people.
#
When they die, she is heartbroken.
#
And they die within three months of each other, which I also find very moving.
#
The wife dies, and Jahangir writes in his biography that, you know, the poor man, Itmadu
#
I am trying to cheer him up, but I fear for his life.
#
And within three months of his wife's death, he passes away too.
#
He's so, you know, he and his wife are so close.
#
And then Noor Jahan builds this beautiful tomb for them.
#
At the same time, Jahangir is building a tomb for his mother, you know, not long after.
#
Maryam Uzumani's tomb, which you can see today also outside Agra.
#
And it is a thing of very little beauty and very little grace.
#
And it is actually a reconfigured Lodhi biradwari.
#
So he has just taken an existing structure, added two, three things to it, and said, I
#
will bury my mother here.
#
So I talked about this once, you know, at a talk I was giving.
#
And I was saying, I think the lesson to be learned here is that if you are planning to
#
build a mausoleum for yourself, give the task to your daughter, not to your son, you know,
#
because they take more care with things like legacy and memory and, you know, eternal sort
#
Which somewhat applies to more things than just mausoleums.
#
Diagresing slightly, do you, you know, you said you've grown up in Delhi and you're surrounded
#
by all these great historical monuments and buildings and tombs and so on.
#
Do you look at them differently now?
#
That's a very, you know, pertinent point that you've raised.
#
And I do look at them very differently.
#
And it's sad that we don't all do that because we are surrounded by such treasures in Delhi
#
and many, many other, you know, cities.
#
Which we take for granted.
#
Which we take for granted all the time.
#
Not only do we take it for granted, we let them fall to ruin, to disrepair.
#
And there are so many good people trying to work against that and to try, you know, trying
#
to get us more aware of these amazing things that we have in our, just in our life around
#
If you compare with other cities who don't have that, you know, you feel bereft without
#
We take it for granted, but it is such a wonderful thing to have.
#
And now when I look at them, I look at the stones and I see what they have to say.
#
I, you know, I can figure out what influence is there, who came later, what they tried
#
You can see a Mughal building with a bit of a temple statue element in it.
#
You know that some temple must have been broken and this bit was taken because this was the
#
We used materials, whether one way or the other.
#
You found materials lying around, you used it.
#
But if you don't, if you're not told these things and you don't have the eyes to see
#
it, then, you know, it just gets, it gets wasted in a way and it's, it's such a shame.
#
So do you go off into the world?
#
I, so I go for a lot of heritage works.
#
Part of my research, I call it part of my research, though I love it immensely, is going
#
for these walks because we haven't talked a great deal about the research process, but
#
there is the primary sources, there's the written material, but there's also this intangible
#
thing around us, which is these heritage walks, you know, which where these people who are
#
not sometimes historians, but sometimes amateurs and enthusiasts, they are able to create a
#
sense of those times when you go on these walks with them, you know, they'll tell you
#
what music was playing perhaps, you know, or what pond you were supposed to have at
#
this location or whether there was a well there.
#
So you heard the trickling water.
#
So these people are also part of my research, you know, and I get a great deal of knowledge
#
from going on these historical walks.
#
So going on these walks has really opened my eyes to a lot of these monuments that are
#
So much wealth all around.
#
I saw all my Bombay friends who mopped Delhi for the pollution and the people that is there.
#
Let's talk about a character you've written about more than just in this book, which is
#
Jahanara, who's sort of the daughter of Shah Jahan and she's unmarried and you know, she's
#
a Pacha Begum, she's known as Begum Sahab and her history is kind of tragic and almost
#
a counterpoint to her younger sister Roshanara.
#
You know, I'll challenge you on that Amit and say that she, I think it is later people
#
who have inferred that it was tragic, perhaps because she was unmarried, but I wonder if
#
she didn't actually prefer it that way because she was Shah Jahan's favorite daughter, eldest
#
She was 17 when Mumtaz Mahal died and half of Mumtaz Mahal's wealth, which was a substantial
#
amount, half of it went to Jahanara Begum.
#
So you can see the way in the, you know, the matriarchies, you know, carry on this tradition
#
of giving wealth to their daughters.
#
So she has this enormous wealth at the age of 17 already and she only accumulates wealth
#
because she becomes more and more powerful, Shah Jahan gives her villages in her name,
#
he gives her trading ship, all the noblemen keep gifting her jewels and then she becomes
#
an immensely powerful woman, wealthy and powerful and she has a talent and ambition to do something
#
So I wonder if she was married to somebody, it would be an inconsequential man because
#
all who do we have left in the wars of succession, all the uncles have been killed off, the cousins
#
have been killed off, no powerful men remain for her to exist.
#
Who would she have married?
#
What kind of life would she have had?
#
She would have had to bow out of the Mughal court, which her younger sisters did.
#
The ones who married, they bow out of Mughal history, but don't hear about them ever again.
#
I think Jahanara with her ambition was very happy to be the unmarried daughter of the
#
greatest emperor on earth at that time.
#
You must remember that, you know, we put this in context, we must put it in global context.
#
This was the most powerful and financially wealthy empire on earth.
#
So she was basically like Ivanka Trump is today.
#
Oh dear, where have you come from?
#
I shouldn't have said that.
#
So, you know, I don't think she was that unhappy.
#
She had personal tragedies, we know which of us doesn't, her beloved Dara Shikoh, her
#
brother, is of course killed by Aurangzeb.
#
She loses in that sense because she supported Dara Shikoh, so she lost that battle.
#
But she won the war because Aurangzeb, after the death of Shah Jahan, brings her back to
#
court, reinstates her as Pacha Begum.
#
Not only that, he allows her a home outside of the Zanana of the Red Fort.
#
So she has an independent, luxurious lifestyle where she can now create a court of music.
#
So she starts to patronize musicians and poets.
#
So in the end of her life, this is what she has.
#
So I don't think she is such an unhappy woman at the end of the day, after all.
#
But in this activity, in living separately, in building this house of music, she is in
#
a microcosm doing what could have happened if her brother, Dara Shikoh, had actually
#
Well, you know, Dara Shikoh is one of the great what-ifs of history, right?
#
But to be very honest, he was not a very competent ruler.
#
I don't think he would have made a very competent ruler, though we are instinctively drawn to
#
him because of his history, because of his interest in Indian literature and his translating
#
all those documents, and him wanting to understand Indian, Hindustani literature better.
#
So we want the Sufi prince to have been king and to have created something wonderful.
#
But I'm sorry to say that he was a bit of a weakling, a bit of a vain man who had a
#
tendency to listen to the sycophants around him, who believed all that, who had a rather
#
inflated idea of what he could do and could not do it.
#
When push came to shove, he could not fight his brother.
#
He lost every battle against Aurangzeb.
#
So if he had won somehow or the other, I'm not sure the empire would have progressed
#
In fact, you know, the reason they were fighting in the first place is, of course, the Timurid
#
line of succession, where it's not necessarily the eldest son who ascends to the throne,
#
You fight for it and whoever is left standing at the end of it.
#
And I don't know if that's a feature or a bug, because the good part of it is that the
#
able ruler will eventually, in theory, get there.
#
But the bad part of it is that you have all this politics and intrigue and mistrust and
#
But once Aurangzeb comes on the scene, even though he rehabilitates Jahanara and all of
#
that, women start being a little less consequential.
#
Even Jahanara Begum, we hear much less of her.
#
She is Pacha Begum, but I was not able to find very much about her, about what she had
#
accomplished post the death of Shah Jahan, apart from the fact that she arranges for
#
some grand weddings, which was very much a role that the women carried out, grand weddings
#
So she continued that nurturing of the line of the women and looking after the marriages.
#
And as I said, she had a home of culture, of music and poetry.
#
But all the great buildings have now dried up.
#
There's none of this commissioning of amazing grand projects.
#
And Aurangzeb's daughters also, we must also remember that for most of their life, Aurangzeb
#
So it's a very different atmosphere.
#
It is not the court of Delhi, which has been emptied now out of its great musician, its
#
great architects, and then it's, you know, it's great gentlemen, they've all gone away.
#
So it is a very different court.
#
And definitely it is not a court in which the women are much in the limelight.
#
I think I'm not an expert on Aurangzeb, but it is my feeling that later on he has been,
#
he is so suspicious of all those around him because he has been betrayed.
#
This happens all the time.
#
One daughter or the other would support another brother thinking that Aurangzeb will surely
#
He lives to the age of 90, but all along people think, okay, at 50, he will die at 60, he
#
So the daughters support other brothers in their bid for the throne.
#
Aurangzeb finds out about this and imprisons them.
#
So he is shackled by this great suspicion of all those around him.
#
And he doesn't let anybody else shine in the light the way Jahanara did.
#
So in a sense, they're all also in a manner imprisoned by this great opportunity that
#
the Timurid line of succession also is.
#
The women definitely were also because in a way they die out.
#
They aren't Timurid contenders, so they can't marry anymore.
#
And so the women after Aurangzeb, it would be interesting to write The Daughters of the
#
Sun part two, because after that you find a very different sort of woman coming to the
#
There are no longer these Timurid royal women.
#
It is lower caste women who get married, concubines who rise up, because they are no longer any
#
So it goes in a different direction post Aurangzeb, which is also interesting.
#
But yes, the Timurids, that hold that they have over these women actually ended up in
#
a certain way in them dying out.
#
And speaking of those books waiting to be written, do you find that what you are a part
#
of in a small way, which is this changing of this gaze, you know, going away from the traditional
#
gaze, going away from the male gaze, looking at it, looking at history differently, looking
#
at heroism differently, looking at the role that women played in politics and all of it
#
Do you find that you're like one of a handful of voices in the wilderness or the way history
#
is being practiced itself is gradually changing?
#
I hope that it's changing, Amit.
#
It's definitely being practiced differently, at least with narrative history.
#
I find that in the past few years, there have been a slew of books, you know, mine is just
#
one amongst many books, amazing books have been written, whether Parvati Sharma's Jahangir,
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you know, Manu Pillay who's been writing, Rana Safbhi who's been writing, Ruby Lal,
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there are a number of books which are pitched at the lay person.
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So that's a wonderful new thing.
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These are early on, we had, we've always had great history writers, but they've been
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academics and they've been pitched at other academics, you know, so it hasn't filtered
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down to the lay person, to the degree that I find now it seems to be doing, whether at
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the academic and scholarly level, it is also going in a certain direction.
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I hope so with people like Ruby Lal doing the work she's doing.
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I hope so, you know, I hope that the scholars, certainly people like the art historians are
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setting the history world on fire and we haven't talked so much about miniatures, but art history
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is something that I use a lot when I'm researching because, you know, we always think that this
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physical evidence is static, that it's there and you can look at it, but it's always been
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And art historians are at the vanguard of this change because they are looking at these
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same miniatures from say 500 years ago, 400 years ago, and they're reinterpreting them
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in completely new ways, completely novel ways, which is changing then the way somebody like
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I would write about history.
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So for example, there's a miniature from the time of Humayun, which used to be called Humayun
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and His Brothers, just a very general one.
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If you look at it, it looks like a painting of somebody, you know, who has taken a lot
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of hallucinatory drugs because it's full of colors and wild colors and there are lots
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of figures, but art historians, I think it is Dr. Laura Parodi has had a close look at
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this painting, which is of Humayun and somebody who looks like his brother, Hindal, next to
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him and other gentlemen also, but groups of women as well.
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And she has looked at these groups of women and she has individually identified them and
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said that one group of women is clearly Hamidah Bhanu Begum, Gulbadan Begum, I think Begha
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Begum and a fourth sister.
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And another set of women is the milk mothers, perhaps Mahamanga and Jidiyanga.
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So now we are looking at this in a completely different light.
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This is not Humayun and His Brothers.
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This is a place where women were very, very important.
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And they have said this is probably a place associated with fertility rights.
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Therefore, it is probably the circumcision ceremony of Akbar.
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So it is telling us a great deal about what happened during circumcision ceremonies, how
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important the women were, how important fertility rights were, which was something that we had
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not talked about at all before.
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And will completely now change the way that I will write about episodes like this.
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So yes, art historians are definitely pushing those boundaries and are bringing in new ways,
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new interpretations all the time.
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This sounds really fascinating though.
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A young millennial today would think, oh, it's like Facebook tagging.
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You go back to the past and you take a miniature and you tag everybody and you give the location
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So, you know, my listeners keep asking me on social media that you talk to such interesting
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Why don't you get some book recommendations for us because we want to read more on the
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So, you know, for example, art history, what do you recommend people read?
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What are the, or even just history in general, what are the books in the last few years which
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you just thought everybody must read?
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I think for anybody who's interested in gendered history, then Empress, you know, the biography
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of Noor Jahan will change the way you look at Noor Jahan, change, yeah, Rubilal will
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change the way you look at Jahangir, you know.
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So that's an important book.
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I very much enjoyed Rebel Sultans by, you know, Manu.
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What else would I recommend?
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I read some pretty dry stuff, so I don't know if I would recommend it to all your listeners.
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But anything that's coming out of on, you know, any of these coffee table books on the
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art history on miniatures is changing all the time.
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So it's absolutely fascinating even for a lay person to read because A, you have the
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images which sometimes seem dull and repetitive if you just look at it, you know, without
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the knowledge behind it.
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But when you are told certain details, you know, about the miniatures, then you look
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at it completely differently.
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For example, there's a painting which is used constantly called Birth of a Prince.
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It's probably the birth of Salim, the future Jahangir.
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And when you look and I've looked at it many times and I use it in my books, in the middle
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is the mother and all around her are what are timorous looking women and some Rajasthani
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But she herself is dusky, you know, and she's clearly Rajasthani.
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And this is her whereby herself.
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And I think, you know, my God, the makers of Jodha Akbar should have looked at this
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before casting Ashwara, right, because she looks nothing like this, you know.
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So books on art history today are amazing and they will open your eyes to something
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completely novel and a new way of seeing the past.
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I'm going to go to Amazon right after this.
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Can we now ask what are you working on now?
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So now I am still in the Mughal period and I'm writing a history of Akbar, a biography
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And it's very exciting for me because so far I've only seen Akbar really through his women.
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So now I'm seeing Akbar, but with his women alongside him, because I think they're often
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written out of histories of Akbar.
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You know, it has, as we have been discussing this entire time, scholars tend to scrunch
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up the history of Mughal women into one chapter.
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So you have 200 years of existence, changing dynamic existence, scrunched up into one way
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of being as if there is a one way in 200 years, things won't change, you know, as the food
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won't change, etiquette won't change.
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So with Akbar, I'm hoping to show not just his life, but how from his very birth, from
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the time of, you know, his milk mothers, how all these women entered his life, changed
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him, influenced him, how he changed them, like the Rajput women and how Akbar and build
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I hope a more complex and nuanced image of this great bacha.
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I urge you to leave the studio and write the book fast because I cannot wait to read it.
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Thanks so much for coming on the scene.
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Thank you so much, Amit.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore and
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pick up Daughters of the Sun, Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire by Ira Mukhoti.
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You can also pick up her previous book, Heroines.
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You can follow Ira on Twitter at Mukhoti, at M-U-K-H-O-T-Y.
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You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
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The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution, an independent center
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for research and education and public policy.
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You can browse all our past episodes at sceneunseen.in, thinkpragati.com and ivmpodcast.com.
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Thank you for listening.
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We've had guests like Anjali Rehna, Dr. Marcus Rani, Dr. Swati Lodha, Ambhi Parmeswaran,
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