Sufism, Temporality, Spatial Specialties: Princess Jahanara as the Object and Subject of Time

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.