A Princess at Work: Historical Knowledge from Inside the Mughal Court

Abstract

This contribution considers a group of texts that have already been widely used as sources to reconstruct the history of events and for research into the legitimation and representation of power during the Mughal period. Here, however, the texts are read as figurative elements of an intellectual process. Can intertextual narratological analysis be used to draw conclusions about the intellectual contexts in which these texts originated? This article examines two historiographical texts that emerged in close temporal and spatial proximity to each other. Through a narratological case study, it examines the extent to which approaches to historiography and the representation of human – and especially female – agency are consistent or divergent in the Humāyūnnāma by Gulbadan Bīgum and the Akbarnāma by Abū l-Faḍl, who used the former text as a source for his project.