Roshanara Begum: the biggest hater ever to hate

I probably couldn't have fixed her but I would have had a lot of fun trying

            Mughal women are incredibly contradictory. Purdah kept their privacy paramount: very few portraits of them were commissioned, and very few of their writings survive. While the mothers of emperors might gain more independence as they aged,[1] daughters were forbidden to marry and leave the harems of their youth, rarely seen and barely known by contemporary historians or their people. However, the house of Timurid traced itself to the Mongols and their disdain for the impracticality of decorative women.[2] As such, the daughters of emperors were scholars and poets and architects.[3] They participated in trade and organized weddings. In the fratricidal environment of an upcoming succession, a claimant’s staunchest ally was often his sister passing him information from the court or acting as a political go-between. The most famous of these Mughal daughters is Jahanara. A once-in-a-generation intellect, she was adored by all her family, an astute religious scholar and architect, and one of the most beautiful women in the empire. Despite the limited information on her, she has captivated scholars for centuries. But Jahanara was not the only daughter of Shah Jahan. Her sister Roshanara was ignored by Mughal chroniclers such as Masum or reviled by European travellers like Francois Bernier and Niccolo Manucci. Contemporary historians barely mention her. But despite a lack of interest or esteem from the men writing the history of her times, you can find a surprising amount of information about her if you really look.

More is known about Roshanara, Shah Jahan’s third surviving daughter, than her sisters. However, history’s portrait of her is overwhelmingly negative, despite her work as a poet, a religious scholar, and a politician. As a partisan of the unpopular Aurangzeb and a woman, she was doubly subject to rumour. In comparison to Jahanara, she was always deemed crueller, less beautiful, less intelligent, and less pure. Francois Bernier met her briefly and thought her over-grandiose.[28] Niccolo Manucci’s penchant for sensationalism and his support of Jahanara meant he recorded many rumours about her.[29] He claimed she was once caught by her niece with nine youths in her private chambers preparing for an orgy,[30] and that she died ‘swollen out like a hog’ because Aurangzeb poisoned her for her sexual indiscretions.[31] The description of her death matches the symptoms of dropsy,[32] but if she was poisoned it was more likely it was due to her inconvenient political ambitions than her sex life.

Roshanara craved power. She was a genuine ally of her favourite sibling Aurangzeb, warning him of possible assassination attempts their brother Dara Shikoh and father may have organized.[33] Upon his ascension, she was named Padshah Begum, the First Lady of the empire, with her own mansion and an income larger than any of Aurangzeb’s wives or daughters.[34] However, Aurangzeb’s paranoia meant she was not given the level of responsibility Jahanara was by their father,[35] and her attempts to seize more backfired. When Aurangzeb was severely ill early in his reign, Roshanara took his seal and ruled in his place without his consent.[36] She went so far as to attempt installing his youngest son on the throne, dragging out Nawab Bai, the mother of a rival claimant, by the hair when she protested.[37] Upon his recovery, the furious Aurangzeb removed her from the office of Padshah Begum and appointed Jahanara in her place.

She was called hateful, especially to her eldest brother Dara Shikoh. Bernier says she was the one who advocated for his death, and gave a feast to celebrate his execution.[38] Certainly she had cause to be alarmed at his survival; while Aurangzeb was more popular among the Mughal elite, Dara was beloved by the common people, and her faction would never rest easy while he lived.[39] Manucci claims that she and Aurangzeb sent Dara’s severed head to their father and Jahanara.[40] He also says she badly mistreated Dara’s youngest daughter Jahanzeb Banu Begum, until Aurangzeb removed her from Roshanara’s care to Jahanara’s;[41] certainly she was not given any foster children after Jahanzeb, though whether this is because she could not be trusted with children or she had no interest in fostering is unclear.[42]

However, surviving letters concerning her religious life paint a very different picture of Roshanara. Once she realized Aurangzeb would not permit her to have the political influence she desired, she focused on Sufi enlightenment. Choosing the Mujaddidi-Naqshbandi sect, which held an enmity for Dara and would eventually become the sect of Aurangzeb’s children, she selected Saif al-Din as her teacher, who was young and hungry for glory.[43] Contrary to their reputations, Saif al-Din and Roshanara shared a scholarly relationship based on mutual respect, while Jahanara and her own teacher Mulla Shah skirted the bounds of propriety.[44] While the visions Roshanara recounted were not as grandiose as those of Dara Shikoh and Jahanara – who both claimed at various points to have received visions from the Prophet Muhammad himself[45] – she reached a state her older siblings never did when Saif al-Din proclaimed her ready to take on her own pupils in the other women of the harem.[46] Unlike her siblings, she never had the luxury of the emperor financing her religious study; she never even met Saif al-Din in person. Essentially, Roshanara achieved spiritual enlightenment through the mail.[47] After her death, her teacher and Aurangzeb mourned for her. Saif al-Din said she had been so prodigal in her mastery of Sufism that she had been forgiven for her sins on Earth.[48] It remains unclear if her sins were as claimed by Manucci, or if public imagination has done Roshanara a disservice.

The daughters of Shah Jahan lived like no other women in their time or their line. Childhoods following their father from battlefield to battlefield, their brothers held hostage. Coming of age as the most powerful women in the world, while their loved ones died around them. As adults, never allowed to marry or leave, manipulating a war that spanned an empire, and caring for the orphans of the fratricides they enabled. Jahanara may have had the most obvious legacy, but Roshanara had strong impacts on her powerful family. She changed the people who changed the whole empire.

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[1] Anne Walthall, Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, California World History Library 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

[2] Minlib Dallh, “Jahan Ara Begum: A Powerful Princess and a Sufi Devotee of the Mughal Empire,” in Sufi Women and Mystics (Routledge, 2023).

[3] Princess Zeb-un-Nissa, The Diwan of Zeb-Un-Nissa, the First Fifty Ghazals Rendered from the Persian by Magan Lal and Jessie Duncan Westbrook, with an Introduction and Notes., The Wisdom of the East Series (London: J. Murray, 1913).

[4] Fergus Nicoll, Shah Jahan: The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Emperor (London: Haus, 2009), 171.

[28] Michael Herbert Fisher and William Dalrymple, Visions of Mughal India: An Anthology of European Travel Writing (London ; I.B. Tauris, 2007), 134.

[29] Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750 (Albany, UNITED STATES: State University of New York Press, 2021), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docID=6684800, 298.

[30] Syed Mubin Zehra, Sexual and Gender Representations in Mughal India, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2010), 19.

[31] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 190.

[32] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 190.

[33] Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne; the Drama of Mogul India., [1st ed.] (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 200.

[34] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 189.

[35] Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750 (Albany, UNITED STATES: State University of New York Press, 2021), 288.

[36] Hansen, The Peacock Throne, 439.

[37] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 189.

[38] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 188.

[39] Hansen, The Peacock Throne, 376.

[40] Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was, 241.

[41] Hansen, The Peacock Throne, 394.

[42] Sarker, Shah Jahan and His Paradise on Earth, 189.

[43] Muzaffar Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis: Islam and Political Imagination in India, 1500-1750 (Albany, United States: State University of New York Press, 2021), 290.

[44] Minlib Dallh, “Jahan Ara Begum: A Powerful Princess and a Sufi Devotee of the Mughal Empire,” in Sufi Women and Mystics (Routledge, 2023).

[45] Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis, 274.

[46] Alam, The Mughals and the Sufi, 290.

[47] Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis, 299.

[48] Alam, The Mughals and the Sufis, 299.