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HomeBooks‘The work of history is the work of civilization’ — Prof Ruby Lal on writing feminist history, erasures from history

‘The work of history is the work of civilization’ — Prof Ruby Lal on writing feminist history, erasures from history

South Asian History Professor at Emory University, US, Ruby Lal explains her approach to Mughal history; reading signs of Nur Jahan’s co-sovereignty in memoir, court documents and art history; and why erasures from history textbooks are a problem.

October 02, 2025 / 17:58 IST
Molly Crabapple's illustration of Nur Jahan coming out on the imperial balcony, published in 'Tiger Slayer' - historian Ruby Lal's YA adaptation of her 2018 book 'Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan'.

“The work of history is the work of civilization: What is it that we are going to give to our next generations — what kind of India do we want to bring out for them?” historian Ruby Lal, South Asian history professor at Emory University, says in response to a question about writing history for young adults.

Author of books like ‘Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World’ (2005), ‘Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan’ (2018) and ‘Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan’ (2024), Lal has recently adapted her biography of Mughal empress Nur Jahan for a young-adult audience in ‘Tiger Slayer’.

Illustrated by Molly Crabapple in a style inspired by the Mughal archive, ‘Tiger Slayer’ once again makes the case that Nur Jahan was a co-sovereign with Jahangir. That not only did she sign her name as Nur Jahan Padshah Begum and use coinage with her name on it, she also hunted tigers — a privilege of kings at the time — knew how to load and fire a musket; and appeared on the imperial balcony (illustration above).

Over a Zoom call, Prof Lal explains her approach to writing history; the sources and materials of feminist history; why she’s interested to see the larger world in which women negotiated power (“context is history”); how she uses the “language of art, architecture, poetry, chronicles” in her practice; and the price of erasing some histories from our books. Edited excerpts:

In popular culture, Nur Jahan is often depicted as being a conniving and power-hungry woman with an outsized influence over her husband, the emperor. Was she understood to be powerful even contemporaneously, by the people of her time? Also — and you write this in both ‘Empress’ and its YA version ‘Tiger Slayer’ — she has coinage issued with both her name and the emperor’s name on it, and she is signing imperial orders while her husband is alive. But the moment Jahangir dies — even though he was an alcoholic and a drug-addict — her power diminishes. How do you square this idea of her deriving power rather than actually having it vested in her person?

The question of power is critical. I think we have assumed certain things about power. People live with this idea of how a woman like Nur was possible back then and in India? Both of which are really problematic propositions. The thing about power is that people express power in unexpected places, in unexpected times and in unexpected ways. And that is what we have to understand.

The other thing is this very trope of a drunken, alcoholic emperor, I tried to unsettle that. Yes, he drank a lot — without question. But he also never gave up his throne. Which is why I came up with this concept of co-sovereignty (with both Nur and Jahangir exercising imperial powers, as the sources revealed). There are technical signs of co-sovereignty that jurists agreed with, which you mentioned here, coins, imperial orders, appearance on the balconies, and hunting. Jahangir was a deeply philosophical and moody king, also an unusual man. In addition to the fact that he never gave up his kingship, he elevated Nur.

Finally, I have never negated that it was a feudal world, it was a man's world. So why don’t we turn our eye to the fact that here was a woman who was strategically negotiating that world. But she also builds pretty astute networks. Her father Ghiyas Beg was the Prime Minister — Itmad-ud-Daulah. And then there was a network of absolutely brilliant imperial women that surrounded her: the emperor’s mother, her own mother — Asmat Begum — who emerges in the record of her time. Nur’s own experience in Bengal is interesting.

When the emperor died, Nur had to struggle to keep her authority. So, what’s the problem if a woman loses? It does not take away the 15 years of extraordinary rule that she has had. These are things we have to keep in mind — instead of going to the usual tropes of saying her power was possible because her man made it possible. We need to have a little bit more trust and understanding of how women negotiate power.

Speaking of women negotiating power, in another book — ‘Vagabond Princess’, the story of Gulbadan — you write about women recording their own histories. Did your research on Gulbadan help you figure out a lot of what was happening during this time, including in Nur Jahan’s life? Did studying one deepen your understanding of the other?

Yes, it’s a deepening of the historical layer — that is also a feminist practice.

I began my career with Gulbadan. I was a student in Delhi University, doing my MPhil. And unlike my cohort who studied what we call modern history in India, I was drawn to the early modern world, partly because I was very taken by the non-Nation State. What the world was like before the struggles around the formation of the nation state in India? What fascinated me particularly was the immense movement and migration, and how that contributed to the making of courtly states at that time.

The more I read — and I read formidable, great works from India by economic historians, agrarian historians, some early social history — (the more I felt) there was a huge lacuna: there was no feminist consciousness in this history. Women were there — smatterings of women here and there — but how they were intermeshed in this world, what was this world like, that’s what drew me in.

So I began applying for scholarships abroad and during one of my wanderings in Old Delhi, I came across a Low Price Publication Series book, the ‘Ahwal-e-Humayun Badshah’, which a Victorian scholar, Annette Beveridge, had translated. Even in the English translation, I was bowled over. That was my first encounter with Gulbadan.

Then I went to England and, of course, read it in Persian at The British Library. And that led to my first book, the academic history: ‘Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World’, where I tried to understand what was then an orientalized and stereotyped idea of the harem — this kind of lavish and yet sexualised space. I tried to show how the “private” had a history. The first harem was built by Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri. And up until then it was a very itinerant world. And that was the world of Gulbadan.

Four books down, I came to ‘Vagabond Princess’. This is my most recent biography. When I was on the road with ‘Empress’, people asked me (about a scene where) in which baby Nur arrived in Fatehpur-Sikri just as Gulbadan was going to the Hajj . That’s the scene that people got caught on and started asking me about Gulbadan.

In Nur Jahan’s case, it’s her co-sovereignty that was at stake for me. In Gulbadan’s case, her manuscript breaks off at folio 83, and I was really intrigued as to why. I found Ottoman imperial orders in the National Archives in Turkey that the Sultan of Turkey had issued against her, when she went on Hajj, basically ordering her eviction. And I won’t say more except that the relationship possibly of the breakage of the book has to do with that moment.

What kinds of travels did you have to undertake to find your sources? Was there anything that caught your imagination and that you absolutely had to follow, even across international borders?

I have travelled through western India and of course Bengal. For me, following the rivers, following how the river changes its course, the change in geography, its flora and fauna, say, between north India of the Indo-Gangetic belt to the more spiky, lush senses of growth in west India to the tropical climate of Bengal are crucial to the history I write. I began to think things like what were they wearing? How does it change? How does the diet change? Pluralism really mattered in the writing of all of these books, and indeed my doing Mughal history: what was the force of Hindu, Jain and other thoughts in the Mughal world? The Vaishnavite movement that is so immense in Bengal, right?

I wrote ‘Vagabond Princess’ during COVID. I was on a fellowship in Sweden at that time. International borders were shut, so a lot of Gulbadan’s journeys were articulated through the archive; archives of the time when she was in western Arabia. People have assumptions from the 19th century of what the Hajj looks like, but it was totally different. I was very interested to see what that was like in the 16th century — the land, rivers, water, animal life, all this really brings it to life, as the people themselves were travelling. Otherwise, how would you animate history? Ships leaving from Surat in the 16th century, the presence of the Portuguese, all this fascinated me.

Much of this stayed in the young adult version of ‘Empress’ — ‘Tiger Slayer’.

Were there any special considerations you had in mind while adapting ‘Empress’ for young adults in ‘Tiger Slayer’? In the introduction to ‘Tiger Slayer’, you write about telling some of these stories to your nieces…

I think a lot about these issues. The public is very deeply invested in the conversation of history. And I mean different layers of public: journalists, artists, students, activists. As a public historian, I see my work extending at different levels.

The work of history is the work of civilization. What is it that we are going to give to our next generations — what kind of India do we want to bring out for them? How deep (do we want to go towards explaining) how it was made to work? How did people negotiate the beauty, grandeur, of this great civilization that we call India? How did people live? How did they negotiate their belonging?

The second part of your question is about the form of the young-adult book. I take these things very seriously. I read a lot of young-adult literature for about three or four years before I thought that I wanted to do this. And there are some phenomenal writers who I admire a great deal. There is a black writer here in America called Jason Reynolds who has written a lot on anti-racism. He was one of my models in thinking this work.

The young-adult genre doesn’t mean a watered-down history. The demand is that you write the same history, but what is going to be the form? How respectful are you going to be to the young readers? How are you going to make this history interesting for them? And I became more convinced that I wanted to do it because my illustrator and friend Molly Crabapple came on board with me. She is a brilliant artist, trained in the surrealist form but she has been very passionate about the Mughal form for a long time. I shared Mughal art archives with her. Her paintings have a distinctiveness of the “modern Mughal,” if you will, but they are very deeply based on archival traditions. We were clear right from the start that the paintings were not going to be just inserts, but that we were going to produce a conversation between art and word. I think we have been able to do that. And I think she has played with a new form, she has learnt a new form and her questions have led me to understand history in very new ways. So we have kind of played together, we have created together.

Since we are talking about history for young adults, do you have a comment on the changes in history textbooks in recent years?

Yes, I have been following a lot of what has been going on. Obviously, this is the work I do. As I said earlier on, history is a very serious form for creating citizens. I think it has to be shared in its fullness, in its deepness and in all its contests. Erasure of history will produce truncated citizens. That's what I feel. And yet I think that very powerful work on history and history thinking has been going on in India for a very, very long time. I am very much part of that thinking of history.

What does writing a feminist history entail? What kinds of historical sources do you use in your practice?

It is a great question and very much at the heart of everything that I do. Here’s the thing: I am not driven by labels, but I think there are certain practices that are really quite critical, quite vital to how we think, to how we write and how we really approach history.

This question of feminist history doesn’t simply mean that I am just  going to bring women to life — that, in feminist thought, we call first-wave feminism. We are riding on the waves of previous work, but in some senses, the practices and ways of thinking are going further, as they should do.

So feminist historical practice... I will sum it up in one sentence, is to look where we habitually don’t look. And what do I mean by that? I mean, what is our approach to sources? How are we thinking about the worlds we write about, specifically what is the feminine experience?

When I wrote ‘Empress: the Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan’, the biography of Nur Jahan, I came to it as a Mughal historian. Nur Jahan was a household name. But we knew her, and we didn't know her. People said, “Oh, she was very powerful, she was beautiful.” But what did that mean? Who was this person, this human? What does her reign, what does her sovereignty mean?

The title of the book — ‘The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan’ — is really quite significant and it comes out of this feminist practice that I am talking about. I was not interested in a tepid “Life and Times” kind of story; I really wanted to install her as a co-sovereign, which is who she was.

And so this links with what I have called, over a long period of time, the question of the archive. Feminist historians have been asked this: Where are the sources? How are you going to do this? My whole career began on that question. The issue is not piecing together, the issue is not supplementing or adding. It’s trying to turn history upside down.

I'll give you one example. People (scholars) said to me, “Oh, but Jahangir does not say very much about Nur in his Jahangir Nama.” But when I went to the Persian version of it, the Jahangir Nama had at least 30 entries on her hunting. And so I began to think: why is he constantly talking about hunting? I tried to understand what holding a weaponmeant, who hunted. I went into the art of the world: how did they hold the gun? What did the gun look like? It turns out hunting was an informal sign of sovereignty. Only kings, in those days, hunted.

So here is Jahangir, writing in the stream-of-consciousness style. He is not going to say, “Hey Ruby, you know, this is what hunting means.” This is for us in modern times to figure out, what is the import of this thing called hunting?

The court documents — not just Jahangir’s memoir — the pay master historian, and other courtiers and observers, all of these people spoke about Nur’s coming out on the imperial balconies. The image is in my first book and then Molly Crabapple also drew her emerging on the imperial balcony (in ‘Tiger Slayer’). She signed imperial orders with her name: Nur Jahan, Padshah Begum. It's an amazing amalgamation of her name and an allusion to being a Padshah, right? She was signing all these orders in the protection of peasants, her own treasurer.

I claim the instinctive as hugely consequential to my work; looking at things that people tend to ignore. And so accumulation of these traces, in some senses, really changes the whole perspective. And again, I can say a lot more about this — there's architecture, there's painting — but it’s not just going to these (sources). It’s actually spending years altogether learning the iconography with art historians. What is the iconography in Abul Hassan’s famous (painting) ‘Nur Jahan holding the musket’? She is not just holding the musket, she is loading the musket, which suggests technical knowhow. So these kinds of things.

This brings me to my disagreement with some of the public historians writing in India, shooting little tweets here and there pointing to a beautiful painting. “Oh look, the mother of such and such has a manuscript.” These sources are deep and consequential and there are histories around them. So the historical practice demands not only how we approach the archive, but also the languages of the archive. Again, by languages I mean Persian, Hindavi, yes that, but also the language of art, architecture, poetry, chronicles.

And the final thing I will say on my practice is that people say, oh, there’s this context, right? I think context is not a backdrop. Context is history. It brings to life the flesh and blood of this person and the set of relationships (they built). So I think in some ways, without theorizing it deeply, this sums up something of the very beautiful question you have asked me here, which as I said, it’s my life’s quest.

One last question: what are you working on next?

I am now writing a deep history of the reign of Shah Jahan, Mumtaz and the Taj. And  eventually a big book on the Mughal Empire. That is the plan.

Chanpreet Khurana
Chanpreet Khurana Features and weekend editor, Moneycontrol
first published: Oct 2, 2025 05:56 pm

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