New Delhi: Aurangzeb’s legacy is usually told through battles, conquests and religious policy. The women who lived closest to him rarely enter the story. But in Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire: A History Retold, historian Munis D Faruqui argues that one of the most important arenas of Mughal politics lay far from the battlefield—in the emperor’s harem.
Faruqui’s archival reconstruction presents the harem not as a secluded domestic space but as a carefully managed political institution. Every Mughal prince, he writes, aspired to “a cohesive and ordered harem” because “a prince who could not manage his own household surely could not run an empire.”
For Aurangzeb, then still a prince navigating an uncertain political future, keeping the women of his household united was not simply a matter of family life. It was an exercise in statecraft.
The archival record reveals the lengths to which he went. He scheduled twice-daily meetings with senior women, took them on hunts and sightseeing expeditions, including a visit to the Ellora Caves, and maintained relationships through lavish gift-giving. A 1655 record lists presents worth more than Rs 12,500–a jewel-encrusted Quran stand, a silver lamp, an enamelled plate, ivory toothpicks and a headband. Even while writing repeatedly to Shah Jahan and his sister Jahanara about his financial difficulties, Aurangzeb spent freely on the women of his household. These were not simply gestures of affection, Faruqui suggests, but investments in loyalty.
Managing affection also meant managing rivalry. Aurangzeb deliberately housed his senior wives in separate establishments across the empire. At different points, Dilras Banu and Rahmat al-Nisa lived apart in Daulatabad, Aurangabad, Burhanpur, Mathura, Lahore and Shahjahanabad. The arrangement was expensive, but it appears to have worked. Faruqui points out that senior women actively participated in supporting Aurangzeb’s political campaigns and ambitions.
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Invested in politics
Yet theirs was also a surprisingly constrained world. Unlike women in the imperial household or rival princely establishments, Aurangzeb’s wives were not particularly wealthy. They relied largely on stipends, allowances and gifts, leaving behind little architectural, literary or religious patronage before Aurangzeb’s accession. Their limited financial independence, Faruqui suggests, may have only deepened their investment in his political success.
At the centre of this domestic world stood Dilras Banu. Remembered primarily as Aurangzeb’s chief consort, she emerges here as something much more significant: A political intermediary whose influence extended beyond the walls of the harem. As the daughter of the powerful noble Shahnawaz Khan, she linked Aurangzeb to one of the empire’s most influential political networks.
One revealing letter from 1656 captures her importance. Preparing to invade Bijapur, Aurangzeb urged his father-in-law to first meet Dilras Banu in Daulatabad before joining the campaign. Faruqui cannot say with certainty what was discussed, but he argues that politics was “likely at the forefront.” In other words, negotiations central to Aurangzeb’s future may have taken place not in the military camp, but inside the women’s quarters.
The harem could also become a battlefield in its own right. When relations between Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb deteriorated after the prince returned to Agra without permission in 1644, the emperor did more than place his son under house arrest. He separated Aurangzeb from his harem.
Faruqui describes the move as “the clearest signal of the prince’s personal and public emasculation.” It reminded everyone that even a prince’s domestic world remained subject to imperial authority. The historian even raises the intriguing possibility that Shah Jahan may have restricted Aurangzeb from fathering more children during periods of political disfavour, pointing to unexplained gaps in births that coincided with moments of heightened tension between father and son.
Then came the crisis that changed everything. By 1657, rumours of Shah Jahan’s illness had thrown the empire into uncertainty. For the women inside Aurangzeb’s harem, the approaching war of succession promised everything or nothing. Victory would bring wealth, influence and a permanent place at the heart of the Mughal court. Defeat meant the death of husbands and sons, the breakup of the household and a life of obscurity on the margins of the imperial family.
Just as the struggle began, tragedy struck. Dilras Banu died shortly after giving birth to Prince Akbar. Her death was not only a personal loss. Faruqui argues that Aurangzeb lost “a close confidante and a critical intermediary” to the political world represented by her father and his allies. Looking back years later, the emperor himself remembered her with unusual tenderness, saying that he “had loved her to the end of her life and never wounded her feelings.”
Grief also shaped strategy. Unlike his brothers, Aurangzeb left his harem behind in the fortress of Daulatabad as he marched north towards Agra to fight for the Mughal throne. The women who had spent years helping build his political fortunes could do little more than wait and pray for news.
By shifting attention from emperors to households, the book offers a strikingly different portrait of Mughal politics. Aurangzeb’s harem, in Faruqui’s telling, was not simply where the prince lived. It was one of the places where his empire was made.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)