Empress summary

In 1611 at age 34, Nur married Jahangir and joined his 19 other wives in the royal harem – a separate part of the household reserved for the emperor’s wives and female relatives. Nur immediately made an impact. Over the following decade, she would establish herself as Jahangir’s favorite and a powerful court member in her own right.

Within just two years, Nur was involved in one of the most important Mughal court’s rituals: the weighing of the emperor, a ceremony in which the sovereign’s weight was measured against precious goods like silk and jewelry, which were then donated to charity. Typically, only the harem’s highest-ranking women – primarily close relatives – were invited to participate. Nur, however, didn’t just take part: Jahangir also showered her with personal gifts at the end of the ritual, an almost unheard of practice!

History is full of accounts of rulers who let power go to their heads. Nur’s story, however, doesn’t follow that narrative arc. Her growing prestige and authority weren’t accompanied by outbursts of cruelty or greed. Instead, she became known for being a kind, smart, and brave woman.

Take it from Farid Bhakkari, a chronicler of court life during Jahangir and Nur’s reign and the author of the Dhakhiratul Khawanin – a kind of “who’s who” of influential Mughal figures, completed in 1650. In that portrait of the court’s movers and shakers, Bhakkari tells his readers that Nur gave alms to the poor and helped some 500 orphaned girls better their lot in life by arranging marriages for them. Such was her interest in helping these young women that she even designed a simple and affordable wedding dress style that’s still found in India to this day – the Nur mahali!

Jahangir and the Mughal court expected the emperor’s son, Shah Jahan, to succeed him. Nur had initially enjoyed a friendly relationship with her son-in-law, but over time, their differences hardened into an intense rivalry. So what went wrong?

There were a couple of factors. Shah Jahan was impatient to take his father’s place on the throne and was plotting to make that happen sooner rather than later. Then there was Nur’s niece Arjumand, the woman who would claim Shah Jahan’s heart and for whom he’d later build the Taj Mahal in Agra. Nur realized that her own daughter Ladli would only ever become a secondary wife if the would-be emperor acceded to the throne. When Nur attempted to make one of Jahangir’s other sons the heir apparent, relations between her and Shah Jahan broke down entirely.

That brings us to the end of our story. Nur’s life was a remarkable triumph against the odds: no other woman would ever occupy a similar position in the Mughal Empire. The attempt to write her out of history, a project spearheaded by resentful men, started as soon as Shah Jahan was on the throne. His first acts included removing coins bearing Nur’s image from circulation and erasing all other traces of the empress.

Others followed suit. Take Pieter van den Broecke, a Dutch textile merchant who served in the Dutch East India Company during Nur’s lifetime. Nur had only risen so high, Broecke claimed, because her husband had been such an incompetent ruler – a “fact” the Dutchman attributed to the emperor’s fondness for booze and drugs.