"What do we make of Chand Bibi and the ‘harem’? Orientalist depictions of harems in European colonial accounts often described a world populated by passive, eroticised women who lounged idly awaiting the royal patriarch. This mythology fossilised into ahistorical representations of Muslim women past and present. As Leslie Pierce has shown, the term harem comes from the Arabic root h-r-m, meaning sacred, protected and forbidden, and the royal elite, even as they lived by rules of seclusion, were critical agents of imperial statecraft and the ruling dynasty. Rather than a private sanctuary for the king to retreat from all public political life, the harem, as Taymiya Zaman shows, was the most political space of all; in Zaman’s analysis, Humāyun-Nāmah, which was authored by a Mughal princess, Gulbadan Begum (1523–1603), ‘places the elders of the household as witnesses to the transfer [of power between Mughal emperors Babur and Humayun]’ and ‘the importance of family elders, of whom she is one, is a leitmotif that marks her narrative’. Women’s domains had their own hierarchies, were comprised of committees that discussed state affairs, and functioned as a department of state. Queen mothers and royal eunuchs managed the work of numerous women serving in an official capacity, including superintendents, accountants and armed guards. [...]
According to a seventeenth century account, Chand Bibi formed an all-women government when she took power in Ahmadnagar. The women included:
"Astrologers, narrators of hadith, jurists, memorizers of Quran, scribes, sculptors and painters, physicians and philosophers, impersonators and actors, tailors and seamstresses, goldsmiths, tune modulators, story-tellers, singers, dancers, food tasters, accountants and clerical officers, ministers, military payroll and paymasters, court-reciters as well as petitioners of official documents. All were women, each unparalleled experts in their respective skills."
Chand Bibi might not have formed a petticoat government, but the list is revelatory. It depicts a wide range of occupations held by women.
Besides courtesans, female courtiers (nādima) existed too. One was a woman from Iraq, who invited Ahmadnagar’s sultan to her lodge. As Emma Flatt writes, ‘this female courtier so impressed him with her intellectual abilities, she was summoned to the capital and granted a house and [generous sums of money]. The female courtier eventually returned to Iraq after her long stay in the Deccan’. The episode, like so many in the Deccan, is evidence of immense mobility across the Persianate world—and women’s mobility in particular. Take, for instance, this description of Chand Bibi’s female retinue:
"While riding, Chand Bibi would be accompanied by seven hundred women: elephant drivers, camel-drivers, caravan drivers, perimeter guards, servers, retinue and water attendants, contract officers, revenue collectors, armed spear bearers, water-handlers, and fire-making porters. As for the remaining women: one hundred were accoutered in chain mail armor, one hundred were soldiers in decorated metal armor, one hundred were guards with hunting equipment, and one hundred were archers. About four hundred women in armor and men’s clothes used to be present."
It was not unusual for Chand Bibi’s retinue to include urdubegis, a class of armed women, for they were regularly retained within Indo-Muslim militaries, trained in weapons combat and guarded royal women and male rulers alike. Due to the peripatetic nature of Deccan military and political life, there was in fact far greater mobility of women than has been assumed. Chand Bibi’s courts were constantly on the move, shifting between their primary and secondary capitals. The women’s quarters accompanied armies while they battled against other Deccan Sultanates and the neighbouring Vijayanagar empire. Of the Mughal context, historian Ruby Lal asks, ‘where was the haram in a peripatetic world? Everyday activities were constructed in ways that make it difficult to tie them exclusively to any strict, well-defined domain such as the haram, the family, or private life’. Indeed, ‘the limits of domesticity in the context of royal elites’ peripatetic lives’ are even more in flux in the Deccan—certainly more indefinable than in Akbar’s court.
At the same time, the idea of women riding horses, even those of the royal elite, was frowned upon in Mughal official records even as it was practised. In 1594, Akbar announced, ‘women should not be allowed to ride on horses, unnecessarily’. A year later, as Akbar’s forces attacked Ahmadnagar, Chand Bibi rode her horse, rallying her troops to defend her territory."
— Sarah Waheed, "Whatever Happened to Chand Bibi Sultan? Narratives of a Deccan Warrior Queen"
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