Finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History "A luminous biography." —Rafia Zakaria, Guardian Four centuries ago, a Muslim woman ruled an empire. Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, leading troops into battle, signing imperial orders, and astutely handling matters of the state. Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire. In Empress, Nur Jahan finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

This 2005 book looks at domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century.

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent. Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

Nur Jahan was one of the most powerful and influential women in Indian history. Born on a caravan traveling from Teheran to India, she became the last (eighteenth) wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir and effectively took control of the government as he bowed to the effects of alcohol and opium. Her reign (1611-1627) marked the highpoint of the Mughal empire, in the course of which she made great contributions to the arts, religion, and the nascent trade with Europe. An intriguing, elegantly written account of Nur Jahan's life and times, this book not only revises the legends that portray her as a power-hungry and malicious woman, but also investigates the paths to power available to women in Islam and Hinduism providing a fascinating picture of life inside the mahal (harem).

In 1526, when the nomadic Timurid warrior-scholar Babur rode into Hindustan, his wives, sisters, daughters, aunts and distant female relatives travelled with him. These women would help establish a dynasty and empire that would rule India for the next 200 years and become a byword for opulence and grandeur. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the Mughal empire was one of the largest and richest in the world. The Mughal women-unmarried daughters, eccentric sisters, fiery milk mothers and powerful wives-often worked behind the scenes and from within the zenana, but there were some notable exceptions among them who rode into battle with their men, built stunning monuments, engaged in diplomacy, traded with foreigners and minted coins in their own names. Others wrote biographies and patronised the arts. In Daughters of the Sun, we meet remarkable characters like Khanzada Begum who, at sixty-five, rode on horseback through 750 kilometres of icy passes and unforgiving terrain to parley on behalf of her nephew, Humayun; Gulbadan Begum, who gave us the only document written by a woman of the Mughal royal court, a rare glimpse into the harem, as well as a chronicle of the trials and tribulations of three emperors-Babur, Humayun and Akbar-her father, brother and nephew; Akbar's milk mothers or foster-mothers, Jiji Anaga and Maham Anaga, who shielded and guided the thirteen-year-old emperor until he came of age; Noor Jahan, 'Light of the World', a widow and mother who would become Jahangir's last and favourite wife, acquiring an imperial legacy of her own; and the fabulously wealthy Begum Sahib (Princess of Princesses) Jahanara, Shah Jahan's favourite child, owner of the most lucrative port in medieval India and patron of one of its finest cities, Shahjahanabad. The very first attempt to chronicle the women who played a vital role in building the Mughal empire, Daughters of the Sun is an illuminating and gripping history of a little known aspect of the most magnificent dynasty the world has ever known.

This important study examines the Indo-Muslim attitude towards the Ottomans from the start of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877 until the end of the Caliphate in 1924. The period treated coincides with what is commonly described as the Pan-Islamic Movement; the British reaction to the Pan-Islamic developments is also discussed extensively. No comprehensive study to date has dealt with the nature of the relations between the Ottomans and other Muslims, and therefore this work provides new historical, religious and political perspectives on the modern history of Indian Muslims. In addition to Indian, Pakistani, Ottoman and British archival material, publications such as diaries, memoirs, newspapers and books have been incorporated, including writings in Urdu which are generally inaccessible to most historians studying late nineteenth-century Ottoman history.

1631. The Empress of India – Mumtaz Mahal – has died. Yet, rather than anoint one of his several other wives to take her place as Empress of India, Mughal King Shah Jahan anoints his seventeen-year-old daughter Jahanara as the next Queen of India. Bearing an almost identical resemblance to her mother, Jahanara is the first ever daughter of a sitting Mughal King to be anointed queen. She is reluctant to accept this title, but does so in hopes of averting the storm approaching her family and Mughal India. Her younger siblings harbor extreme personalities – from a liberal multiculturalist (who views religion as an agent of evil) to an orthodox Muslim (who views razing non-Muslim buildings as divine will). Meanwhile, Jahanara struggles to come to terms with her own dark reality: as the daughter of a sitting King, she is forbidden to marry. Thus, while she lives in the shadow of her parents’ unflinching love story, she is devastated by the harsh reality that she is forbidden to share such a romance with another. Mistress of the Throne narrates the powerful story of one of India’s most opulent and turbulent times through the eyes of an unsuspecting character: a Muslim queen. It uses actual historical figures to illuminate the complexity of an era that has often been called “India’s Golden Age”.