"Bhulna mat, tum kiski ho?" – Akbar’s voice echoes, cold and possessive, as he commands Anarkali, reminding her of her place ...

In 2001, four rigorous graduate years into honing my scholarship as a feminist historian of Mughal India, I stepped in to help build the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns ...

“The little history that is reproduced in this volume has few, if any, compeers, in as much as it is the work of a Musalmani, and lights up her world.” Thus wrote Annette Susannah Beveridge in her ...

Gulbadan Begum, author of the Humayun-nama, was the Mughal empire’s only woman historian. A new book looks at her intriguing life. For Ruby Lal, the tale begins when she stumbles upon a rare book in a ...

No space has elicited more lurid Orientalist fantasies than the harem, once found in elite residences across the Islamic world. In practice, most harems (haram in Persian) were unremarkable sites of ...

Safdar Jung, the Persian-born Nawab of Awadh and later Prime Minister of a declining Mughal Empire, shaped one of the most ...