With the images they conjure, of heavily guarded spaces where hundreds of beautiful, fecund women coexisted, royal harems continue to exert their power over our imagination. Though outdated, we wonder: what it was like to live inside one? Was it a gilded cage? A life of sexual slavery, or one of comfort and luxury—the medieval equivalent of spa treatments, dress fittings, elaborate meals, partying under the stars…While the social life of a harem was indeed very different from that of ordinary women, as Subhadra Sen Gupta points out in the introduction to her work, Mahal: Power and Pageantry in the Mughal Harem, ‘For all their royal titles these women were the private property of the monarch, just like gold, silver and jewels in the treasury and the horses and elephants in the stables.’ The harem was, in fact, a metaphor for his lifestyle. To court historians such as Abul Fazl, the only thing worth recording about one was its size. Five thousand was his, rather exaggerated, claim about the number of women in Akbar’s harem at Fatehpur Sikri. In short, the bigger the better, reflecting the glory, as well as the sexual prowess, of the royal male.
In the 331 years of Mughal rule, its heyday being from the time of Babur down to Aurangzeb, thousands of women—queens, princesses and concubines—lived out their entire lives in the mahal, as these impenetrable enclosures were called. Despite being educated, accomplished, cultured and spirited, barely a handful of these women are known to us by their names, and just two or three have left a mark more significant than that. Overcoming the genuine lack of personal information about them, Sen Gupta, a seasoned writer on travel and popular history, has used lateral sources such as translations (Humayun-Nama, Babur-Nama), contemporary accounts by Western travellers, including Ralph Fitch, Francois Bernier and Niccolao Manucci, biographies of male and female royalty and the scholarly writings of eminent historians, to create a credible portrait of this enclosed world, bringing the most influential of the unknown begums to life.
What we see is a vibrant, well-run domain that included hundreds of ordinary working women. The rank and file of maids, cooks, tailors, musicians, dancers, astrologers and even female security guards, were overseen by women officers, the mahaldars, who headed different departments. At the apex was the ‘Padshah Begum’, a senior female royal. Besides being a mini empire, the mahal was also a warm family space where several generations, from doughty old matriarchs to the youngest princess and, better still, princelings, coexisted. In addition, it was ‘a sanctuary where women and children were protected from the dangers of war and the perennial battles for the throne’.
Indeed, Babur, the founder of the empire, was one such who was kept in the safety of the harem overseen by his maternal grandmother, Ehsan Daulat Begum, when his father died suddenly, leaving the 11-year-old heir-apparent vulnerable to power-hungry kinsmen.
Unlike Hindu kingdoms, where primogeniture was the norm, the death or even ill-health of a Mughal ruler was the signal for a bloody struggle for the throne—not just between his sons but among all kinsmen. This, as the author reveals, was why the Mughal princesses were seldom married off—to prevent their husbands and sons from adding to the list of contenders. Thus Jahanara, the eldest and favourite child of Shah Jehan, who was only 17 when her mother Mumtaz Mahal died, remained a spinster. Wealthy in her own right, she was a businesswoman—a ship owner—and a philanthropist. Hers is one among the many stories that reveal the power that royal women wielded in the Mughal empire, and how the overall decline of the mahal as an institution was in tandem with that of the empire. A worthwhile read.
Mahal: Power and Pageantry in the Mughal Harem
By: Subhadra Sen Gupta
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 304
Price: Rs 599