SACPAN: "The Small Things of History: Archive for Nur Jahan, the Great Mughal" by Dr. Ruby Lal

This lecture was a keynote address as part of the South Asia Conference of the Pacific Northwest (SACPAN) 2018, which was held at UBC from March 2 - 3. Nur Jahan was the only woman ruler in the long dynasty of India’s great Mughals. How did the Empress’s extraordinary strengths, the emperor’s lamentable weaknesses, the twists and turns of 17th-century politics, and the power of their love combine to defy a time and a culture that ought to have made the reign of Nur Jahan impossible? And why is it that this phenomenal figure has been effectively expunged from Mughal histories? Speaker Bio: Dr. Ruby Lal is Professor of South Asian History at Emory University, Atlanta. She holds a D.Phil. in Modern History from the University of Oxford, UK, and an M.Phil in History from the University of Delhi, India. She has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in History and Anthropology, and served as Associate Director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her fields of study include feminist history and theory, and the question of archive as it relates to writing about Islamic societies in the precolonial and colonial world. https://cisar.iar.ubc.ca/events/event...