Tuesday, December 10, 2019, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EST

RUBY LAL, Professor of South Asian Studies, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies

“Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan”

As feminist historian Ruby Lal was growing up in northern India, her mother told her stories of many exemplary woman from the earliest days of the Mughal Empire, women she wrote of in her first big scholarly book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. In her second such book she wrote of Indian women of the nineteenth century. But in her third, winner of the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Biography (and also named a finalist in History for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), Ruby returned to the earlier time to focus on the especially remarkable story of Nur Jahan, the young widow who became the twentieth and favorite wife of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1611. Nur proved an astute politician (as well as a loving spouse), governing alongside her husband and in his stead as his health failed and his attention wandered from matters of state—the only woman ever recognized as Empress in her male-dominated world. How wonderful that Ruby’s story-telling skills—skills we will enjoy today—are doing Nur justice after all these years.