Mariam-uz-Zamani

• 1. Introduction

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  Mariam-uz-Zamani was a Rajput princess who became the longest-serving Hindu empress of the Mughal Empire, holding that rank for forty-three years. Her marriage on the 6th of February 1562 took place not at her family's home but at an imperial military camp in Sambhar, Rajasthan, while Akbar was returning from prayers at the tomb of Moinuddin Chishti. She arrived at court in the full dress of the Rajput nobility: heavy gathered ghagra, a tightly fitting choli, and a shimmering odhani so fine her arms were visible through it, gold earrings swinging, a nose ring catching the light. She would outlive her husband Akbar, survive intrigue and piracy on the high seas, and die in May 1623 immensely rich and powerful. What drove a political marriage into one of the most consequential partnerships in medieval Indian history? How did a princess from Amber become the wealthiest woman of her time and the most daring female merchant the Mughal Empire ever produced? And why, four centuries later, does she remain so widely misunderstood that most people still call her by entirely the wrong name?

• 2. A Name Built from Titles

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  Her birth name has never been established. An 18th-century genealogy of the Kachhwaha clan refers to her as Harkhan Champavati, while other sources offer Harkha Bai, Hira Kunwari, Heer Kunwari, Shahi Begum, and several more, none of them accepted as definitive. Akbar bestowed an honorific Muslim name on her in 1564, two years after their marriage: Wali Nimat Begum, meaning Blessings of God. A grander title came on the birth of their son Salim: Mariam-uz-Zamani, meaning Mary or Compassionate of the Age. That is the name by which contemporary Mughal chronicles identify her, including Jahangir's own autobiography, the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, in which he consistently writes of his mother as Hazrat Mariam-uz-Zamani. She also bore the titles Mallika-e-Muezamma, meaning Exalted Empress, and Mallika-e-Hindustan, meaning Empress of Hindustan. The historian Ira Mukhoty observes that noblewomen of the period were rarely recorded by personal name in official chronicles, identified instead by titles or relationships, because purdah and zenana etiquette actively protected their public identity. Ruby Lal adds that imperial titles like Mariam-uz-Zamani functioned as primary markers of authority, elevating rather than diminishing status. The name most people know her by today, Jodha Bai, does not appear in any contemporary Mughal source. Its earliest known use in connection with Akbar's consort appears in a 19th-century colonialist history by James Tod, and the name almost certainly belongs to a different woman entirely: Jagat Gosain, daughter of Raja Udai Singh of Jodhpur and wife of Emperor Jahangir.

• 3. A Political Marriage, a Genuine Bond

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  Raja Bharmal of Amer came to Akbar not as a suitor but as a man in trouble. He had been facing harassment from Akbar's brother-in-law Sharif-ud-din Mirza, the Hakim of Mewat, and had already surrendered hostages including his own son Jagannath and two nephews to no avail. He approached Akbar for intervention; Akbar agreed to mediate on two conditions: Raja Bharmal's formal submission and the offer of his daughter in marriage. The Akbarnama records how Bharmal introduced his eldest daughter at the imperial pavilion, describing her as one "in whose forehead shone the lights of chastity and intellect." At Akbar's insistence, she was not required to convert to Islam. A small Hindu temple was built within the imperial residence, and Akbar himself participated in the pooja she performed there. She was a devotee of both Lord Shiva and Lord Krishna, and the palace Akbar commissioned for her was decorated with paintings of Lord Krishna, gems, and frescoes. Akbar also commissioned the Nilkanth temple in present-day Mandu district of Madhya Pradesh, dedicated to Lord Shiva, in Islamic architecture. Historian Lal writes that her personality was partly responsible for Akbar's religious neutrality. Badayuni records that Akbar stopped eating beef out of respect for his Hindu wives, abstained from onions and garlic at their influence, and ordered the entire court to stand during the evening prayers of his Hindu wives when they lit the hom in their temples. Her Rajput cultural influence on Mughal court life was so extensive that the historian Harbans Mukhia attributed the fundamental reorganisation of Akbar's imperial harem into a fortress-like institution to her arrival.

• 4. The Amber Family's Rise

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  Her father Raja Bharmal received a military command of 5,000 cavalry units immediately after the marriage, the highest rank a noble could hold in Akbar's court. Of the twenty-seven Rajputs listed among Akbar's mansabdars by Abu'l-Fazl, thirteen were from the Amber clan alone. Her brother Bhagwant Das reached the same 5,000-unit command by 1585 and bore the title Amir-ul-Umra, Chief Noble. His son Man Singh I climbed still higher, becoming the first person in Akbar's reign to command 7,000 forces, a rank so extraordinary that only Akbar's foster brother Mirza Aziz Koka was later elevated to the same level. Akbar referred to Man Singh by the word farzand, meaning son. Mariam-uz-Zamani herself arranged the marriage of Man Singh's sister Man Bai to Prince Salim on the 13th of February 1585. For the ceremony, Akbar personally travelled to Amer and, as a token of respect for her family, carried his daughter-in-law's palanquin on his own shoulders for some distance. The gifts Mariam-uz-Zamani gave to the bride and groom were valued at twelve lakh rupees. Man Bai later became the mother of Akbar's favourite grandson, Khusrau Mirza, and received the prestigious title Shah Begum. When Akbar visited Amer in 1569, he stayed for a month and a half and was showered with gifts; Mariam-uz-Zamani was then four months pregnant with Salim.

• 5. Merchant, Shipbuilder, Entrepreneur

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  Among all the woman traders of the Mughal empire, including Nur Jahan and Jahanara Begum who would follow in her wake, Mariam-uz-Zamani stands as the earliest recorded woman to engage consistently in both inland and overseas trade. She built ships at the Khizri Darwaza on the River Ravi in Lahore that carried pilgrims to and from Mecca, ran an extensive trade in silk and spices across international borders, and oversaw commerce with Gulf countries. She had numerous agents, middlemen, and financial advisers described as mirroring in miniature the Emperor's own finance ministry, and she held the right to issue official edicts called farmans in her own name. The most dramatic evidence of her commercial reach came in the incident with the English trader William Finch. In late 1610 or early 1611, when her ship was being loaded for Mocha, she sent an agent to buy indigo in Bayana, roughly 50 miles southwest of Agra, to carry aboard for sale. Finch, an agent of the East India Company ambassador William Hawkins, arrived and simply outbid her by a small margin. When she heard that an Englishman had undercut her and caused her a significant loss as the ship was about to sail, she complained to Jahangir, who made Hawkins suffer considerable political difficulties at court afterward. By 1612, English Captain Jourdain noted that local merchants refused to load their goods onto ships while Europeans remained in the country, a direct consequence of the indigo dispute. Rajeev Bargoti notes that her interest in indigo trade may have been linked to the fact that her revenue-free land grants lay in the indigo-producing tract around Bayana.

• 6. The Rahimi Affair

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  William Hawkins noted that on the 1st of February 1609, he witnessed a great stir when the Portuguese threatened to seize Mariam-uz-Zamani's ship unless she paid an exorbitant fee for a cartaz, or shipping pass. They initially demanded 1,00,000 mamudies, then reduced the demand to 20,000; the two sides eventually settled on a much smaller payment of 1,000 rialls and some additional money. That confrontation was a prelude to something far worse. In September 1613, the Portuguese seized and burned her greatest pilgrim ship, the Rahimi, despite the fact that the vessel carried a valid Portuguese pass and had violated none of its terms. The ship's cargo was valued at 100,000 pounds, equivalent at the time to half a billion rupees, and the vessel carried approximately 700 passengers who were all taken to Goa. A Portuguese official, Jeronimo de Azevedo, celebrated the capture as worthy prey that gave the Mughals cause for sorrow. Jahangir's response was unprecedented. He ordered his governor Muqarrab Khan to halt all shipping at Surat and lay siege to the Portuguese town of Daman. The Jesuit church in Agra, built under Akbar, was closed, and all allowances to Portuguese priests across Mughal India were suspended. In the words of Findly, the Rahimi incident was the only act of piracy against India which, on record, evoked such a severe and intense response from the Mughal government. The Portuguese eventually agreed to compensate the Mughal government with three lakh rupees for the seized vessel, though the linked demand to expel the English was left unresolved. The diplomatic fallout of the Rahimi seizure became, as one English observer put it, a substantial windfall for England's position in India. Undeterred, Mariam-uz-Zamani ordered the construction of an even larger ship equipped with 62 guns and over 400 musket men, named the Ganj-i-Sawai.

• 7. Patron of Mosques and Step-wells

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  At Lahore, Mariam-uz-Zamani constructed one of the earliest mosques built under Mughal rule, known today as the Begum Shahi Mosque. A Persian inscription on the facade of its northern gate dates its construction to 1023 A.H., corresponding to 1614 A.D., in the early years of Jahangir's reign. Scholars describe its painted decorations as unrivalled in Pakistan and perhaps in India for their delicacy and lively variety, with a harmonious golden tone and an endless variety of geometric, floral, and inscriptional designs. The mosque also contains what is recorded as one of the earliest dated occurrences of a network dome developed from points arranged in concentric circles, and it introduced the five-bay prayer chamber that later became standard in Mughal mosque design, seen in the Wazir Khan Mosque and the Badshahi Mosque. The mosque remained in regular use for over two hundred years until Ranjit Singh converted it into a gunpowder factory. Around 1612, she also commissioned a great step-well and garden in Bayana near Brahambad. Jahangir visited the baoli in around 1619 and recorded in his memoirs that it was a grand building, very well built at an expense of just 20,000 rupees. The English traveller Peter Mundy called it the best step-well of its kind he had seen, praising its beautiful gates, cupolas, arches, galleries, pillars, and rooms. A marble inscription on the gate confirms it was built in the seventh regnal year of Jahangir's reign. She also laid a garden around the tomb of Akbar and was buried in a mausoleum on Tantpur Road in Jyoti Nagar, only a kilometre from his tomb, built between 1623 and 1627 by Jahangir, her upper storey open to the sun and rain like that of her husband.