Entering the Zenana: Ephemera and Power in Mughal Architecture

Seated within a richly decorated Mughal garden pavilion, Nur Jahan hosts the emperor Jahangir and his son, the future Shah Jahan. This is the scene captured in Jahangir and Prince Khurram Entertained by Nur Jahan (1640), my central case study. The painting demonstrates the rich potential of Mughal ephemeral architecture to recover the agency of royal Mughal women. However, while we may find traces of Nur Jahan in an archive of Mughal paintings and literary sources, the cohort of laborers in the zenana who supported her endeavors continue to haunt Mughal history. This thesis focuses on ephemeral architecture or the physical and sensorial elements of architecture that change constantly through both human and thingly intervention. I argue that in the ephemeral architecture of the zenana we see the actions of royal Mughal women and the labor force that supported them, both of whom are difficult to recover from court chronicles and later Mughal histories. An expansive approach to architecture alters how we understand power dynamics within these spaces, as by examining who held power over the ephemeral architecture we can track how the politics in these spaces changed over time. Therefore, this thesis explores the double haunting of Mughal architecture, as the experiences of women in these spaces have been obscured by multilayered heteropatriarchal forces. Ultimately, the thesis reclaims the Mughal zenana from its image in popular culture as a site of repression and exploitation to reexamine it as a politically and socially meaningful imperial structure.