The Mughal princess who traded an empire for a pseudonym

Health · Published 9 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Zeb-un-Nissa was the favorite daughter of the austere Emperor Aurangzeb. While her father enforced rigid orthodoxy, she mastered philosophy, astronomy, and poetry. She eventually spent twenty years in prison, yet her literary legacy survived as the work of "Makhfi"—the Hidden One.

Born in 1638 as the eldest child of Emperor Aurangzeb and Dilras Banu Begum, Zeb-un-Nissa was a prodigy of the Mughal court. By age seven, she had memorized the Quran, an achievement her father celebrated with a public holiday and a reward of 30,000 gold pieces. Beyond religious studies, she was educated in mathematics, astronomy, and the sciences by the poet Ashraf Mazandarani. She became a scholar of such renown that she maintained a private library surpassing all others of her time, employing scholars to produce literary works and copy manuscripts on her behalf.

Her life was a study in contradictions. She was a patron of the arts who supported widows and sent pilgrims to Mecca, yet she lived under the shadow of her father's increasingly fundamentalist rule. Despite her high status, she remained unmarried, rejecting numerous suitors—including a proposal from the King of Iran—to focus on her intellectual pursuits. She even innovated in fashion, creating the Angya Kurti, a modified garment from Turkestan adapted for Indian conditions. However, her devotion to literature and her correspondence with her brother, who rebelled against their father, eventually led to her downfall.

In 1662, Aurangzeb began to distrust her, leading to her imprisonment in Salimgarh Fort. While some accounts suggest a failed affair with a governor, others argue she was targeted for her 'anathema' interests in music and poetry. She was stripped of her 4 lakh annual pension and wealth, spending her final two decades in captivity. She died in 1702, but her voice endured; her collection of approximately 5,000 verses (or 15,000 in some accounts) was compiled as Diwan-i-Makhfi, preserving the interior life of a woman who chose to remain 'hidden' from the world while her words remained visible.

theme perspective mood reflective difficulty 3 topics [ mughal-history persian-poetry women-in-history

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