I enquire into the life of Mughal princess Jahanara (d. 1681), particularly the relationship between her experience surrounding marital sexuality and her patronage of Sufi architecture, ritual, and literature. I part from existing Mughal historiography in two ways. First: the liberal tendency of analyzing religious participation only from the lens of politics: it is as if the historical subject would believe in a religious tradition primarily because it served imperial purposes. Second: a relentless applauding of Mughal royal females who exercised power in ways similar to elite males. This scholarship boasts of these female lives with such labels as “rebellious” and “transgressive”, sometimes appreciating these females’ articulations as “masculine modes of female subjectivity”. This thinking distracts us from alternative responses, those different from a quest for parity, to patriarchal oppressions.
I employ the lens of temporality, a less used means in the scholarship on the religious histories of South Asia. I borrow from the scholarship on queer time, which, more recently through studies of hijras and devadasis (Saria 2021; Ramberg 2014; see Savci 2021), has demonstrated that queer persons often experience time differently; the trajectory of their lives may not follow the normative linearity of time afforded by coming of age, marriage, reproduction, elderly seniority, and so on – with them experiencing these life events not in the normative sequence or experiencing only some of them. In her own context, too, the trajectory of Jahanara’s life and time was unconventional: marriage and reproduction or sexual activity were forbidden to her, and early in her youth she became a senior member of the royal haram. However, I do not imply or dismiss that Jahanara was a queer figure, a question that I do not address in this study.
Methodologically, I borrow the lens of dialogism from Alan Rice’s commemoration of the bicentenary of the abolition of slave trade: how Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism can be used to “complicate traditional historical narratives” (Rice 2009: 191). Rice reinterprets well-known artifacts – and analyses those less studied – to reconstruct histories of master-slave intimacies, slave protests and transgressions, and the importance of music and poetry for slaves’ subjective expression. This allows Rice to paint a multi-layered picture of slavery. This model reminds us to remember to not forget the multi-faceted nature of Jahanara’s life: that she was a royal princess, a female deeply into Sufism, a patroness of commerce, art and architecture, and the sciences, among others. Dialogizing these aspects help answer: Why did Jahanara construct zenanas in Muslim spaces of worship in Mughal Hindustan? Why did she employ henna in her Sufi practice at the Shahi Masjid?
Jahanara was among the first generation of Mughal princesses who were not allowed to marry (Mukhia 2004: 142). In Mughal zeitgeist, marriage and sexual normativity were closely linked: marriage and reproductive sex were inseparable, permissible sexuality was confined to marital reproduction. In not being allowed to marry, then, Jahanara was expected to adhere to absolute sexual abstinence. This is to say that Jahanara’s experience of time was unlike that for the preceding Mughal princesses who married, remarried, and reproduced. That Jahanara was the object of an unusual frame of time seems to have been acknowledged by the princess herself, in her second Sufi treatise, Risala-i Sahibiya (Treatise of Companionship) (1640-1).
Jahanara, further, at the age of seventeen, from a princess became a senior member of the Mughal haram, bypassing any socio-cultural experience of her youth. After over a decade of such active involvement in the affairs of the world, a world that forbade her marriage and sexuality as well, Jahanara felt exhausted physically and mentally. The princess, however, was to realize that her subsequent spiritual journey (tasawwuf) could make her the subject of time – helping her, for once, take time in her own hands.
In 1637, at Muin ad-Din Chishti’s dargah in Ajmer, Jahanara commissioned the addition of a white marble pillared porch in front of the tomb chamber (Bokhari, Dissertation: 273). Named Begumi Dalan (The Lady’s Porch), it was instituted as a female-only space. It exists till date, and Afshan Bokhari recently observed female worshipers here conforming to Jahanara’s description of her own practice at the dargah, as mentioned in her first work, Munis ul-Arwah (Confidant of the Souls) (1639-40) (Ibid 274).
Scholarship has long acknowledged the potential that Sufi spaces embody for female presence, something that non-Sufi Islamic spaces, such as mosques, may not (Ibid 134-40). It is, then, striking that in 1648 Jahanara completed the construction of the Jami Mosque at Agra, the then Mughal capital. Like at the Ajmer dargah, marble screened rooms in the northern and southern wings of the sanctuary here were reserved for female worshipers. This structure with female presence and practice has also continued till date (Ibid 171-2): on Thursday evenings, female worshipers gather, light incense, make an effigy with flowers around the incense, and recite from the Quran. Next, they say a prayer for the patroness of the mosque, Jahanara. Finally, and crucially for this paper, they each dip their hands in henna and press their soaked palms on the qibla wall of the room.
By pressing her palms over existing imprints on the wall, every female consolidates a corporeal link with all female visitors who pressed their henna-soaked palms on the wall before her. It is not hard to imagine that Jahanara was the first to press her henna-soaked hands on the qibla wall. Should this indeed have been the case, every ceremony links its participants to not only participants of all previous ceremonies but also to Jahanara. And doing so on the qibla wall is to perform the ceremony in a conscious awareness that God and his messenger, Prophet Muhammad, are witnessing.
I conclude by recognizing how a combination of Sufism and princely privilege helped Jahanara effect time through her use of space. Jahanara realized the potential of Sufism, which she employed to deal with the normative understanding of Islam in her time. To do this, Jahanara did not have to rebelliously transgress and risk politico-religious perpetration.
Mughal Princess Jahanara (d.1681) had a curious experience of Islam. Mughal political zeitgeist forbade princesses, her generation onwards, from fulfilling the religious duty of heterosexual marriage. And Sufism, whose practitioners have often flouted the marriage injunction, allowed her to go only so far; she was not granted spiritual succession to Maulana Shah for being a woman. However, Jahanara’s privilege as the princess of the contemporary world’s wealthiest empire helped her deal with this situation creatively: She constructed Agra’s central mosque and a porch at Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah, both of which reserved, and have continued to reserve, spaces for women worshipers. What also continues at the mosque till date is the use of henna, a material with strong connotations of marriage and fecundity in Persianate cultures. In her writings, Jahanara astutely undoes Persian’s gender-neutrality, to assert an emphatic female voice. These, she did by neither transgressing rebelliously nor risking politico-religious perpetration.