What motivated you to frame Chand Bibi’s story within a longer continuum of Muslim women exercising political, economic, military, and cultural sovereignty? How does her life challenge the traditional views on female power in early modern South Asia?
At first, I was motivated to frame her story within a longer lineage of Muslim women’s sovereignty in the Deccan — of powerful women such as Hayat Bakshi Begum — because of what I already knew based on my Hyderabadi upbringing. In my childhood and youth, I used to go to the Qutb Shahi mausoleum complex for picnics with my family, and was regaled by stories about Chand Bibi, a woman who reigned as queen for a short time and was one of the most influential women in the history of the Deccan. She carried out decades of statecraft, patronage and diplomacy, including negotiating with emperor Aurangzeb. Her tomb is equivalent in size to the tombs of male rulers.
The deeper I delved into Chand Bibi’s life and world, the more I came across powerful Muslim women in the Deccan. Calling a powerful woman “exceptional” can itself become a form of patriarchal erasure because it detaches her from the world of women’s authority that made her possible. Chand Bibi belonged to a long history of Muslim women who governed states, commanded armies, negotiated alliances, directed trade, patronized religious and scholarly institutions, and shaped cultural life. She also arose from a Deccan landscape with an especially rich history of women rulers and military actors. Her own mother, Khunza Humayun, governed Ahmadnagar; before them, Agha Nargis Banu administered the Bahmani Sultanate and accompanied military expeditions. Chand Bibi inherited political precedents, not simply obstacles.
Her life requires us to reconsider what sovereignty looked like. It was not only about sitting upon a throne or minting coins. It could mean protecting dynastic succession, managing factions, corresponding with foreign powers, and commanding loyalty. Moreover, the zenana was not outside politics, but was a central arena of political statecraft.
As I explain in my book, the Deccan may have produced more female rulers than any other region of South Asia. The more useful question, therefore, is not how a Muslim woman exercised authority despite her world. It is, rather, what forms of authority Indo-Islamic and Deccan political cultures made available to elite women, and how figures such as Chand Bibi used them to their advantage.
In the book, you show how Chand Bibi managed to unite disparate regional rulers under one banner despite deep factionalism. What diplomatic and political mechanisms enabled her to build and sustain such an alliance?
Chand Bibi did not eliminate factionalism. She benefited from the factionalism, as much as it became an obstacle to her political power. What she achieved was difficult: she temporarily persuaded deeply divided rulers and commanders to subordinate their private quarrels to a common political danger.
She drew first upon dynastic kinship. She belonged by birth to Ahmadnagar, by marriage to Bijapur, and through extended family to Golconda. Her nephews ruled two of the most powerful Deccan sultanates. She converted those relationships into political obligations through letters, envoys, appeals for troops and the language of protecting the Deccan from imperial annexation.
She also rehabilitated former enemies. Miyan Manjhu had attempted to marginalize her and manipulate the succession, yet by 1595 he formally accepted her command and was sent personally to solicit assistance from Bijapur and Golconda. Abhang Khan and Ikhlas Khan joined the defense, even as they later attempted to secure power for themselves. What Chand Bibi did was transform a factional crisis into a regional cause. At Ahmadnagar, she made her sovereignty visible, appearing upon the bastions of the fort and ahead of the army upon an elephant and beneath the royal banner.
For a brief but crucial period, she managed to unite the Deccan and consolidate power over a region that was territorially comprised one fifth of the subcontinent. More importantly, she later became an important figure for Mughal successor states to politically envision and imagine their own autonomy.
How specifically was Chand Bibi instrumental in orchestrating the defense of Ahmednagar against the siege of the imperial Mughal army, and what made her military resistance so effective?
Chand Bibi was not merely a symbolic figurehead of defense. She coordinated its military, diplomatic, and logistical dimensions. When she learned that Prince Murad’s forces had planted gunpowder mines beneath the fort, she personally directed an all-night countermining operation. Her men disabled two mines before a third exploded, killing defenders and tearing open the eastern wall. At that moment, some soldiers began abandoning their positions. Chand Bibi put on her armour and rushed directly to the breach. Her visibility mattered. The men saw their sovereign sharing their danger, and returned to the fight.
Under her command, the defenders used artillery, matchlocks, arrows, rockets, gunpowder and other combustibles to drive the Mughals back. She then supervised the reconstruction of the shattered wall throughout the night. By dawn, the breach had been raised several feet and fortified with grenades and gunpowder. Like other sovereigns, she distributed honours to sustain morale, monitored dwindling provisions and repeatedly appealed to her allies for relief.
What made her resistance effective was her ability to move between different forms of command. She possessed technical knowledge of fort warfare, the courage to appear physically at the point of greatest danger, the political legitimacy to rally divided factions and the pragmatism to negotiate when continued resistance threatened the survival of the state. She had tremendous diplomatic skills. She compelled Mughal prince Murad to withdraw while preserving Ahmadnagar’s ruler, her own regency and the kingdom’s sovereignty. It was both a military and diplomatic victory. News of her victory reverberated not only across Hindustan, but reached as far as Spain. She corresponded with Portuguese powers, and these letters survive in Portuguese translation. Indeed, her ability to conduct diplomacy with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean world, posed a threat to Mughal imperial diplomatic ambition.
During your field trips and archival research, what was the most surprising or revealing insight you uncovered regarding her confrontation with Mughal forces, or about her life more broadly?
This is a difficult question, because there were so many surprising and revealing moments for me! Many of them came from the landscape itself. In Ahmadnagar, at Bagh-e Rauza, a local heritage preservation archivist led me through a field and, hidden directly opposite the mausoleum of Chand Bibi’s great grandfather and Ahmadnagar founder Ahmad Nizam Shah, was a stony embankment. At its base, a small arched opening descended partially underground; above it lay the remains of an unfinished cenotaph. There was no dome, no inscription and no completed memorial. I was told that the unfinished structure was locally known as Chand Bibi’s tomb. It looked less like the entrance to a grave than the mouth of an underground tunnel.
That encounter was revealing because it brought together all three mysteries surrounding Chand Bibi’s end: murder, disappearance and escape. Architecturally, the opening probably leads to the actual burial chamber beneath the cenotaph. Yet, attribution remains uncertain. Persian sources claim that Chand Bibi’s body was taken to Mashhad, while local tradition associates this unfinished structure with her. Ahmad Nizam Shah’s nearby mausoleum offered another possibility. Like other Shi’a rulers, his body had been temporarily entombed before being transported to holy Shi’a sites. Was this structure similarly intended to receive Chand Bibi’s body before it was taken to Mashhad? Or was it begun after her death and abandoned amid the Mughal conquest? Or did it belong to someone else and become hers through collective memory? The archive does not provide a conclusive answer.
The unfinished tomb was a material expression of Chand Bibi’s historical afterlife. The Mughals eventually defeated Ahmadnagar’s forces, but they did not secure a single, uncontested ending for its queen. Even her grave refuses completion in local memory. She remains suspended between the surface and the underground, between documented death and remembered escape. The unfinished tomb taught me that absence does not always translate into lack of remembrance, but can give rise to many stories that remember a powerful woman. An unfinished structure can preserve questions that a completed monument might not. To find Chand Bibi, I had to look beneath the surface, quite literally, and understand the landscape itself as an archive.
What is the significance of Chand Bibi’s visual association with falcons and horses in contemporary and later portraiture, and what does this tell us about female mobility and sovereign authority in her era?
Chand Bibi’s association with falcons and horses belongs to a visual language of sovereignty. Falconry in the Persianate courtly world was about the discipline of sovereignty, and was taught to young princes so they would learn how to rule. The falconer had to understand temperament, timing, release and return, and to know when to exercise force and when to call it back. Even the Persian word for falcon, shaheen, carries the imprint of sovereignty through its connection to shah (monarch). The symbolism also reaches into Chand Bibi’s dynastic history. Her ancestor Malik Hasan Bahri — bahri meaning a female hawk — rose through the Bahmani court as a falconer, and his son later founded the Ahmadnagar Sultanate. The falcon therefore hovered at the threshold of her dynasty before it became a marker of her power in paintings.
These images make female mobility inseparable from political authority. She does not only possess power through her relationships as a daughter, widow, sister or aunt of kings. She commands it in her own body. In several paintings, a golden halo surrounds Chand Bibi, marking her authority as divinely sanctioned.
Chand Bibi’s falconress image circulated from the Deccan to Rajasthan and Bengal, appearing in Mughal and Rajasthani paintings, East India Company renderings, Marathi lithographs and even playing cards. This iconography occurred as Mughal imperial authority was fragmenting and regional states were asserting their autonomy. Remembering the woman who had resisted Mughal expansion became especially potent in the emerging political world of not only Hyderabad, but many other Mughal successor states.
The portraits are also assertions of Deccan memory and female sovereignty. I extend this visual genealogy to Shaheen Bagh. The connection is not a simple comparison between a warrior queen and modern protesters. It is a longer history of Muslim women becoming politically dangerous because they refuse to disappear. Chand Bibi’s falcon embodied the sovereign art of command; at Shaheen Bagh, ordinary Muslim women transformed a road into a public political world. Like Chand Bibi riding out with the women of the zenana, they crossed the boundary between enclosure and public visibility. The falcon and horse ultimately tell us that female authority in Chand Bibi’s world was not immobile, but announced political power. Chand Bibi’s portraiture remains that of the sovereign falconress, a woman whose sovereignty even in afterlife, refused to stay enclosed.
You highlight how colonial historians misrepresented figures like Chand Bibi — even claiming falsely that she was murdered by Hindus. How does her actual legacy complicate both colonial narratives and modern Indian and Pakistani nationalist accounts?
Chand Bibi’s story rebels against virtually every narrative bequeathed to us today.
British historiography organized Indian history into a glorious Hindu age, a tyrannical Muslim period and, finally, the supposedly redemptive arrival of British rule. Within that framework, even Chand Bibi’s murder could be falsely attributed to “Hindus,” because the British translated conflicts into religious antagonism.
Let’s look at the facts. Chand Bibi’s own dynasty descended from a Brahmin convert to Islam. Maratha chiefs served the Nizam Shahis and other Deccan sultanates. She employed Brahmin officials as trusted messengers to carry diplomatic correspondence. Her nephew Ibrahim Adil Shah II honoured Sarasvati and Ganesh. Conflicts were shaped by dynasty, territory, factions, patronage and political ambition, not by an eternal war between two religious communities.
Chand Bibi’s legacy unsettles modern nationalisms. Indian narratives often marginalize her because she was a Muslim ruler, or absorb her as a singularly “brave and beautiful” Muslim woman without confronting the reality of the Deccan’s political power. Pakistani narratives frequently privilege male dynasties and empires, domesticating Chand Bibi as a bride, veiled lady or dutiful wife while diminishing the ruler who commanded armies. Chand Bibi was Muslim but not Mughal, royal but anti-imperial, and a defender of homeland rather than a builder of empire.
Chand Bibi thus does not fit into any imperial or nationalist narrative, and that is precisely why she is so important.
Why do you think an influential sovereign figure like Chand Bibi has largely faded from public consciousness, and what does the dilapidated condition of memorials in Hyderabad reflect about how we preserve Deccan history today?
This is an important question at a moment when readers are once again debating Mughal emperors like Aurangzeb. It is much easier to remember and narrate empire as the driving force of history, than to see regions of South Asia as the main motors of political life.
Chand Bibi has largely faded from national public consciousness because the Deccan itself has been excluded from the dominant map of early modern South Asian history. We are taught to see the period from Delhi and Agra, through a succession of Mughal emperors and the expansion of their armies. The Deccan therefore enters the story only when northern forces march south—as a frontier awaiting conquest rather than one of the great political and cultural centers of the early modern world. Yet the Deccan Sultanates were wealthy, populous and militarily formidable states covering almost a fifth of the subcontinent in terms of territory, connected to Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds through trade, migration, diplomacy and multilingual cultural production. Chand Bibi governed at the center of that world, travelling between Ahmadnagar and Bijapur and drawing upon relationships that extended into Golconda and Hyderabad. A history organized around imperial conquest remembers the emperor advancing across the map more readily than the woman who resisted him, negotiated with him and forced his army to retreat.
Conventional history has treated male dynastic succession and territorial accumulation as the measures of significance, while women’s authority, which is expressed through regency, diplomacy, and public works, is dismissed as exceptional or relegated to debates about the harem.
As far as I know there is no memorial in Hyderabad. Ultimately, the dilapidated condition of many Indo-Islamic memorials in Hyderabad’s past has to do with the broader prerogatives of abandoning historical preservation for development, urbanization, and Hindu nationalist narratives. Across the region, monuments connected to Indo-Islamic shared pasts stand neglected beside rubbish heaps and impoverished neighbourhoods. The ruin is therefore not merely evidence of poor conservation. It reveals whose pasts we have been trained to recognize as legitimate and worth remembering, and whose histories we have permitted to decay.
