The name ‘Harkha Bai’ hence is mostly lost in the pages of history, where she would mostly be called ‘Maryam-uz-Zamani’ (Mary of The World) – a title Akbar gave her after she gave birth to their son, Salim.Īfter Akbar died, Salim, who crowned himself as Jahangir, would double the royal stipend of Harkha Bai and give her a cavalry command of 12000 men. Secondly, though the royal womenfolk during Babur and Humayun’s times had power, influence and interests beyond their domestic life, in Akbar’s era they remained shrouded in respectful secrecy.Ībul Fazl, Akbar’s biographer, did not even record their names, only their titles. Harkha Bai, a dominant influence in Jahangir’s court, rose to power after her marriage with Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar.Ī Rajput princess from Amber, she was to change the Mughal empire as the court knew it till that time.įor starters, she was the first empress to not convert to Islam after her royal nuptials. the woman in the centre, who has just given birth, almost certainly Harkha Bai. Harkha Bai: A force to reckon with: ‘Birth of a prince’, probably Salim.
Most of their ‘trade’ was sorted at the great port of Surat, in Gujarat.īut in three action-packed years, they would make a terrible mistake, and so anger a Mughal empress, that Surat would be sealed, their churches across the empire locked, and their Jesuits forbidden from practices their religion. They had conquered Goa by then and ran a few small towns across India. They extorted a sort of ‘hafta’ to let trade ships cross the Arabian Sea without incident, and thus made their wealth through this criminality. Portuguese power came from their ability to dominate the seas around India with their warships. Mukhoty, the author of ‘Daughters of the Sun,’ a biography of Mughal women, added that these foreigners were an inconvenience at best to Mughals. But they were not in the mainstream of the Mughal Empire,” says Ira Mukhoty, speaking to The Better India. “The Portuguese were the biggest force before the Dutch, and the English came to India. But many seem to have forgotten it was the Portuguese who began that evil project, beginning of course, with Vasco De Gama. We all know how the British plundered us. And in those heady days of power and pleasure, it seemed beyond belief that these strange pale-faced foreigners could ever hold sway over the magnificence that was India. And every day, it seemed like, more and more of the firangis would come to the stunning and bejewelled court of Jahangir, Padshah of Hindustan, hoping to curry favours and find a toehold. A golden age for some, it was a time when the world eyed ‘Hindustan’ with envy and desire. The 17th Century was a very different time.
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