Interview with Ruby Lal, Author of Tiger Slayer

Nur Jahan redefined sovereignty—slaying tigers, minting coins, and shaping Mughal art—Ruby Lal reclaims her as India’s only female co-sovereign.

on Sep 17, 2025

Interview with Ruby Lal, Author of Tiger Slayer

Frontlist: Nur Jahan is remembered as both a political strategist and a cultural icon—minting her own coins, leading tiger hunts, and shaping Mughal architecture. When you began work on Tiger Slayer, what aspects of her life did you most want to reclaim from the shadows of history?
Ruby: In my previous biography, EMPRESS, The Astonishing reign of Nur Jahan, I launched Nur Jahan, for the first time, as a Mughal co-sovereign. The one woman we can count among the Great Mughal (male) rulers of India. Before EMPRESS was published, Nur’s political strategy and other achievements that you mention were only known in bullet points. Her reign was locked up in a legend of irrational love for a bewitching woman by her besotted (and drunken) husband. We knew her, and yet we know nothing about her, nothing about the plural and dynamic world she lived in, nothing about her qualities of head and heart, her political acumen, her wisdom, her ambition, love. In order to animate a living breathing Empress I showed her marvelous buildings and gardens as statecraft; her social justice in the name of the poor and women and her rescuing her husband from captivity as signs of kingly power. We knew that as a ruling Empress, she signed imperial orders. But how did she sign her imperial orders? Nur Jahan Padshah Begum: a signature that lushly articulates her name and earlier female traditions of being in authority. Tiger Slayer tells the same story, albeit, in a different form, i.e. for young learners. I will add that the form of writing for young adults is demanding. It does not mean a water-down history, but one that has a different tone and narrative choices. The work of history is crucial. So how to share with young people the astonishing power of a seventeenth century woman? What is power?

Frontlist: The book’s very title evokes an image of strength, danger, and mastery. Beyond the literal hunt, what did the tiger symbolize for Nur Jahan—and for you as a historian telling her story?
Ruby: Here’s the thing about hunting: back then, only kings hunted tigers, not ordinary people. It was a sign of being a sovereign. Not only did slaying tigers symbolize the ultimate in kingly boldness; hunting trips allowed emperors to meet locals, gather intelligence and put a stop to local injustices. Nur Jahan did all these things. Poets at the time celebrated her abilities as a slayer of tigers. A famous episode relates how, during one hunt, she killed four tigers with six shots while seated on the back of an elephant. Another story describes how she killed a marauding tiger that was slaughtering people in a village. A famous painting by the expert court painter Abul Hasan tells us everything we need to know about the unique power and prowess of the Mughal empress. Hasan was a great portrait maker, but in this painting, he breaks from his own oeuvre to show Nur in action, loading a musket. Thus, an expert markswoman as well as someone who knew the technical know-how. I had been told that the Emperor didn’t say much about her in his memoir, the Jahangir Nama. But when I turned to this Persian chronicle, I saw that it was full of his mentions of Nur’s lush hunting. It’s for an historian to work through such pointers: in this case, a sign of her power and sovereignty.

Frontlist: Your collaboration with artist Molly Crabapple merges academic history with visual storytelling. How did her illustrations shape or even challenge your narrative choices?
Ruby: Both EMPRESS and TIGER SLAYER are narratively driven histories that sit on serious archival work that includes Persian court chronicles, the rich iconography of art and architecture, poetry – and stories in the public imagination. Molly drew as I wrote the pages, both of us working side by side, if you will. We knew that we didn’t want art simply as beautiful inserts in a book. That too. Our main drive was to have words and images in conversation. I guided Molly continuously on Mughal art sources, and she went from there to create new succulent images. All based on Mughal traditions, but a great deal of recreation while keeping to the Mughal style. She also made pictures for those scenes and figures that don’t exist in the painterly archive. Such as Nur shooting the killer tiger. As Molly had to pay attention to Mughal art traditions, I was looking at Mughal art anew by way of questions she was asking me. Many of my episodes were guided by the force of Molly’s creation.

Frontlist: As a Muslim woman ruling in a deeply patriarchal society, Nur Jahan’s power was unprecedented. Do you see her rise as an anomaly—or as part of a longer, overlooked tradition of female authority in South Asian history?
Ruby: Not only in the Mughal world, but in much of the early modern world, brilliant female figures wielded tremendous influence. Scholars and writers have now written scores of books. In my recent biography, Vagabond Princess, the Great Adventures of Gulbadan, I brought to the center of history a remarkable woman who lived a generation before Empress Nur Jahan. This brave and cerebral Gulbadan was the beloved daughter of Babur, the patriarch of the magnificent Mughals of India, and the first and only woman historian of the Empire. Brilliant female strategists, peacemakers, experts on law and the politics of marriage, and the ethical principles of their dynasties have graced the past. Mughal women continually upheld majesty and grandeur. They ensured that sovereign mores remained in place in the ongoing social-political adjustments. It is on the heels of such power that Nur Jahan articulates her own authority and style. But as co-sovereign, she remains unique. The important thing to remember is that Nur Jahan was not from the royal family and did not inherit the right to rule. A widowed mother, she married the fourth Mughal Emperor at 31, his 20th and last wife – who went on to become a co-sovereign with him. As I said above, the one woman we can count among the Great Mughal (male) rulers of India. That’s a stunning achievement.

Frontlist: Your earlier book, Empress, and now Tiger Slayer, both circle around the figure of Nur Jahan. What changed in your own understanding of her between the two works?
Ruby: Both books chart the sovereignty and distinct rule of Nur along with Jahangir. I was not interested in a tepid “life and times,” genre, but wanted to think what it means to be a ruler? What makes a woman ruler? Ho does she chart tracks of authority? What does her appearance in the balconies look like? Indeed, what does she look like? What kind of human was she, what were her anxieties, concerns, and weaknesses. It’s the people in history and their humanness that interest me.

Frontlist: Much of history has been written through a male gaze. How did you navigate separating fact from centuries of myth, bias, and embellishment when piecing together Nur Jahan’s story?
Ruby: Writing history – and the issue of what is a legitimate source - is a complex endeavor. Let me explain in some details that will give you a sense of what lies behind my writing. Oblivion and erasure are themes that have been at the core of my work since I began my career as an historian. I have explored not only what happened in the past, and why certain figures do not take center stage in Mughal history, but also how women, girls, ordinary people, ambiguous figures (eunuchs, concubines, wet nurses), spaces (harem, gardens, tents), and multiple forms of desire are made deviant, redundant, or obscure in history. The fact is that scholars are largely complicit in how history is designed, presented, made available, and preserved. Who decides what history is? Who decides what counts as a source? Who decides what is memorable and deserving of the name archive? How have the most important Mughal sources been preserved and become available to us? Who writes them, for what purpose? These questions have been at the heart of my historical enterprise.
In my first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, I opened up the process and becoming of the Mughal Empire by giving historical depth to the society of the harem: palace quarters for multi-generation royal and non-royal women, cloistered from the public, but not from intense political and social debate and drama. Romanticized and stereotyped in both colonial and postcolonial writings, the harem warranted further study. I laid out its fundamentals, explained its complex creation, and showed the richly layered lives, tastes, and passions of its denizens. That book was inspired by Gulbadan’s memoir. A senior male colleague at the time asked me: “How are you going to write this history? There are no sources for it.” This echoed a question that generations of feminist scholars have heard. Domesticity and Power garnered praise for disturbing this so-called “lack of sources.” My mode was to turn to those very sources that had been neglected by male historians such as the Princess’s memoir. And to ask questions about history writing: who decides what counts as source, and therefore as “history”? Nevertheless, the “lack” reappeared as I continued my explorations of these feminine worlds, including as I plumbed the history of as public a figure as Nur Jahan, the only woman ruler of Mughal India. There is an abundance of sources on her life and reign. But as I worked on her biography, the question was asked by another distinguished Mughal scholar, again male: “But doesn’t Nur Jahan appear only in representation?” He was puzzled that I could center her story when she didn’t order or write a chronicle herself. There are no sources and Isn’t this representation? Both are underpinned by a fundamental male disbelief in the veracity of feminine experiences and the possibilities of women’s thinking. And an acute denial of women-centered sources. Hence, Gulbadan’s stellar book, or poetry, or art and architecture are relegated to “margins” of history — to mere footnotes in volumes on politics, war, economy, and agrarian histories, all written by men and about men. These objections symbolize the difficulties that all critical oppositional histories — feminist, left-wing, indigenous, and minority — face in confounding and expanding upon received male histories. There is so much more to history than that!

Frontlist: Finally, if your body of work could be summed up in one enduring message about women and history, what would it be?
Ruby: That women’s and people’s power – past and present – is to be seen in unexpected places, in unexpected times, and in surprising ways. SO: look where you don’t habitually look!