A Legacy of Female Power:

Representations of Queen Humayun Shah from the Deccan’s Ahmadnagar Sultanate

Namrata B. Kanchan

Khamseen Graduate Student Presentation Award 2023 Recipient

Synopsis:

This presentation explores the removal of Queen Humayun Shah (d. 1569 CE?) from paintings included in an illustrated copy of the masnavi (narrative poem) Ta‘rif-i Husain Shah created during the 1560s in western India’s Deccan sultanate of Ahmadnagar. In these images—which emerged from the region’s overlapping Indic and Islamicate visual traditions—the queen appears as a silhouette next to her husband, Sultan Husain Nizam Shah (r. 1553–1565). These erased images do not exist in a cultural and geographical vacuum but inhabit the same space as other acts of obliteration and iconoclasm across time and space. In the case of the Turkic-origin Humayun Shah, the act of her figural erasure emerges from the connotation of female autonomy and power represented in the centuries-old Central Asian and Hindu religious visual idioms. In particular, the premodern Turco-Mongol sphere produced a range of images depicting royal married couples which emphasized the queen’s significant contribution to the empire-building project. Thus, Humayun Shah’s image alongside her husband threatened a political foe so powerfully that it resulted in her erasure from the painted page.

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References:

Balabanlilar, Lisa. “Women, the Imperial Household and the State.” In The Oxford Handbook of The Mughal World, ed. Richard Eaton and Ramya Sreenivasan, unpaginated. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Balabanlilar, Lisa. “The Begims of the Mystic Feast: Turco-Mongol Tradition in the Mughal Harem,” Journal of Asian Studies 69/1 (2010): 123–147.

Broadbridge, Anne. Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Chida-Razvi, Mehreen. “Power and Politics of Representation: Picturing Elite Women in Ilkhanid Painting,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 32/4 (2022): 762–791.

De Nicola, Bruno. Women in Mongol Iran: The Khātūns, 1206–1335. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Lal, Ruby. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Mate, Kulkarni et al. Tarif-i Husain Shah, Badshah Dakhan by Aftabi: Original Text, Translation, and Critical Introduction. Pune: Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala, 1987.

Zebrowski, Mark. Deccan Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Citation:

Namrata B. Kanchan, “A Legacy of Female Power: Representations of Queen Humayun Shah from the Deccan’s Ahmadnagar Sultanate,” Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, published 10 January 2024.

Namrata B. Kanchan is the International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Cogut Institute and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2023. Her dissertation examines the genesis of early modern Dakani literature in western India’s Deccan sultanate courts through the study of the region’s manuscripts and material culture. Her fields of interest include Indian vernacular and Persian literature, early modern manuscript culture, book arts, codicology, paleography, and visual and material culture from the fifteenth century to the present. In 2023, she won the Historians of Islamic Art Association’s (HIAA) Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for her paper on calligraphic choices in early modern Dakani manuscripts.