Dedication
Before a single word of fiction....here is what is actually documented:
Jahanara Begum, Mughal princess and daughter of Shah Jahan, is recorded to have had a special liking for one of her slave girls, and during a dance performance when the girl’s clothing caught fire, Jahanara burned herself to save her. This is in the historical record. It was never called love. It was never named. That silence is where this novel lives.
Scholars studying Mughal-era paintings have found that courtly idealization of female intimacy usually involved hierarchical mistress-maid relationships and that British colonial legislation later criminalized these same-sex practices, contributing to their invisibility in history. Miricanvas Which means the danger in this novel doesn’t come from the Mughal court itself it comes from orthodoxy, from the mahaldar who reports everything to the emperor, from the religious establishment that is watching.
While the religious orthodoxy opposed same-sex love relationships, the religious institutions appear to have had little actual control over sexuality in pre-modern Mughal times.
According to the rules of the harem, any object that could be used for sexual pleasure was explicitly forbidden like radishes, cucumbers, intoxicants like bhang, wine, opium and nutmegs were all banned. The prohibition itself is the proof of what was happening behind those walls. My characters exist in a world that bans the cucumber but has no law against love. That tension is everything.
