Why can we tell stories about Mughal emperors, but not the Muslim queens who resisted them? Why are empires, men and conquests so often the frame for the medieval and early modern past, rather than regency, diplomacy, alliance or survival? Why do our histories begin in the north, when the Deccan – spanning Dakkhani, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Telugu, and Urdu literary worlds – was historically cosmopolitan and tied to the broader Indian ocean world?These questions concern the rut of collective memory. We have inherited pasts that make male emperors appear inevitable, women exceptional and conquest the decisive motor of history. At a moment when readers are once again debating Mughal rulers, it matters to ask who remains outside the frame.We can name Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, and tell stories about them, true or untrue. Historians have expanded that frame by bringing Mughal women like Nur Jahan and Gulbadan Begum into view. This work is vital. But if we stop there, we only see Muslim women’s power tethered to the empire. Sarah Waheed,Chand Bibi: The Lives And Legends Of A Warrior Queen,Published by Vintage Books (June 2026)How many of us know about Agha Nargis Banu, who ruled the Bahmani Sultanate in the 15th century; Khunza Humayun, who arrived from Central Asia and fought alongside Sultan Hussain Nizam Shah; Chand Bibi, who defended Ahmadnagar Fort against Akbar’s armies; Khadija Sultana of Bijapur, who commissioned manuscripts and undertook hajj; or Hayat Bakhshi Begum of Golconda, who negotiated with Aurangzeb?Their absence from popular memory is not accidental. It is the result of history long centered on empire, conquest, and men. My book, Chand Bibi: The Lives And Legends of A Warrior Queen is not a straightforward biography of Chand Bibi, nor an attempt to add one woman to the record. It is a lens into the Deccan. Histories of South Asia’s Muslim dynasties usually begin in Delhi, Agra, Lahore and other imperial centers, while the Deccan appears only after invasion or annexation.What if we begin instead in Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda, Bidar, Daulatabad, and Hyderabad? What if we begin from the Deccan, a multi-lingual, ocean-facing world connected through ports such as Dabhol, where Arab merchants, Gujarati traders, Persian emigres, African military elites, Dakkhani nobles, Marathi chieftains, Telugu poets, Sufi lineages, and Portuguese renegades crossed paths?This is not a smaller history than the Mughal empire. It is the history that the empire teaches us not to see. The Deccan had long resisted being absorbed into an imperial center. The Deccan Sultanates were centers of great intellectual, artistic, and architectural achievements. For over three centuries, the Deccan was one of the great centers of political power of the early modern world. Successive Deccan states, from the Bahmani Sultanate to its successor sultanates and later Hyderabad, governed territories that encompassed nearly one-fifth of the Indian subcontinent, realms comparable to France or Italy. Theirs was a crossroads of Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds and their wealth came from agriculture, textiles, diamond mines, horse trade, and maritime commerce – which is precisely why Mughal emperors from Akbar to Aurangzeb devoted so much to military campaigns there. Chand Bibi’s story reminds us that if we continue to view South Asian history only through the lens of empires based in Delhi, we miss one of the subcontinent’s most dynamic centers of political power and cultural creativity.Who was Chand Bibi?To write about Chand Bibi is to resist three hegemonic rules of history at once: beginning with emperors, treating women’s power as exceptional, and making the Deccan appear only when it enters someone else’s ambition. Chand Bibi’s story is about the art of defying empire. But what she defied was not only the armies that came for Ahmadnagar in the 1590s. Her life also rebels against Mughal-centric histories, British imperial fantasies of passive sexualised Muslim women, Indian nationalist histories that render them marginal, Hindu nationalist narratives that cast Muslim presence as foreign and threatening, and Muslim nationalist histories that remember kings, but not women’s sovereignty.Chand Bibi causes trouble for all of them. She unsettles the Hindu-Muslim binary through which the past is so often narrated. Princess Chand Bibi defends Ahmadnagar 1595. Photo: Wikimedia commons.She was a Muslim queen who resisted a Muslim emperor. She belonged to a Deccan world in which Muslim dynasties fought one another, allied with Hindu powers, employed African, Persian, Turkic, Dakkhani, Maratha, and Telugu elites, and built political cultures that resists communal reduction.Even the language of exception fails her here. Chand Bibi was not exceptional. That is itself a patriarchal rendering of the past. Exceptionalism praises a woman while making her appear singular rather than part of a larger history of women’s power. Chand Bibi belonged to a world in which Muslim women governed, traveled, fought, and ruled.The first Muslim queen of the DeccanAgha Nargis Banu, the first Muslim queen of the Deccan, ruled the Bahmani Sultanate for over a decade. It was her husband Humayun Shah who “placed the entire administration of the kingdom in her charge” in 1461 while on his deathbed. Ministers sought her advice and carried out her instructions. The phrase ‘behind the veil’ obscures a dynamic political structure. From within the royal household, Agha Nargis Banu crafted policy, confirmed officials, restored confiscated property, released prisoners, repaired finances and steadied a sultanate shaken by crises.Her regency was immediately tested by war. When Rajamundhry of Orissa invaded Bahmani territory, she marshalled cavalry across the state. When Mahmud Khalji of Malwa marched into the Deccan and the Bahmani armies suffered defeat, she transferred the government to Firuzabad, secured kin and ministers, and reorganized resistance. From Firuzabad she turned to diplomacy, writing to Mahmud Begada of Gujarat and invoking an old alliance. His support drove Malwa back. But her prestige was decisive.Agha Nargis Banu made and unmade powerful men. She elevated Mahmud Gawan, who ruled the Bahmani Sultanate, and whose fame would overshadow her own. As one historian observed, Gawan “owed entirely” his eminent position to her royal patronage: “It was she who trained him for the part that he played in Deccan politics, and encouraged and promoted him to the highest position in the state.” After his victory at Goa, she honoured him by calling him her brother, “a unique honour.” Mahmud Gawan became one of the great figures of Deccan history because Agha Nargis made his rise possible. In 1472, she died not in seclusion, but in a military camp at Belgaum, where she had accompanied the armies. Upon her death, the Bahmani state she ruled included vast territories reaching from as far as Konkan in the west to Andhra in the east, Berar in the north, and Kanchipuram in the south.Khunza HumayunKhunza Humayun, Chand Bibi’s mother, makes the point powerfully, too. She came from a Turko-Mongol world where it was the norm for elite women to participate in governing councils. Upon the death of Sultan Hussain Nizam Shah, their son Murtaza came to the throne, but real power in Ahmadnagar rested with Khunza Humayun. Even the court historian Taba Taba’i, who explained her authority to stem from Murtaza’s weaknesses, acknowledged that Khunza devoted herself to administering the state and the nobles obeyed her as though she were king. The historical record explains away women’s power as a consequence of male failure, rather than their own political intelligence. When Ahmadnagar was attacked in 1567, Khunza organised a military confederacy and marched to meet Bijapur’s sultan. Ali Adil Shah had underestimated her. Unprepared for the alliances she had assembled, he agreed to a new peace treaty.Her political life ended at the hands of her son. In 1569, Murtaza demanded that his mother withdraw from state affairs. Khunza stormed out of the palace on horseback, armed with a bow, sword, and dagger. She was apprehended, and according to some accounts, eventually died in prison. But she was also locked out of history. In the 16th-century Deccan manuscript Tarif-e Badshah-e Dakkhan, someone smeared paint over Khunza Humayun’s images. Yet, she was not merely the muse of this epic eulogy. She likely commissioned the manuscript herself to legitimise her own power, using image, poetry, and patronage to make her authority visible.Veiled warrior queenChand Bibi was her daughter. Born into the Nizam Shahi world of Ahmadnagar and married into the Adil Shahi world of Bijapur, she moved across Deccan politics as daughter, wife, sister, aunt, regent, and ruler. She was the queen-regent of Bijapur and later Ahmadnagar. In 1594, Akbar reportedly declared that women should not usually ride horses. A year later, Chand Bibi rode at the head of her army and defeated his forces. By 1596, she had brokered a peace with Prince Murad, and even united the Deccan rulers against Mughal forces. Popular memory preserves Chand Bibi as the romantic warrior queen, veiled, armored, sword in hand, facing Akbar’s armies. But Chand Bibi was a military strategist and diplomat. Resistance was not always refusal. Sometimes, it meant negotiation, buying time, holding factions together, and tightening kinship networks into anti-imperial coalitions. Khadija SultanaA century later, Khadija Sultana of Bijapur widened the meaning of sovereignty. She commissioned the Khawarnamah, or Book of the East, recounting the heroic exploits of Imam Ali. She was the first woman to patronize a literary work in Dakkhani and also commissioned works such as Hasht Bihisht and Yousuf Zulaikha. Highly educated and financially powerful, she received revenue from a coastal province that included a Dutch-operated factory in Vengurla.Khadija Sultana went on hajj in 1661 on a Dutch East India Company ship. The journey caused scandal around the question of female seclusion on board. A Dutch observer described her extensive retinue and her ability to dictate letters in several languages. Khadjia Sultana shows how women’s power was forged through literary patronage, pilgrimage, and political networks.Hayat Bakshi Begum Then there is Hayat Bakshi Begum of Golconda, one of the most influential women in Deccan history. Born in 1591, when Chand Bibi was ruling Ahmadnagar, she grew up in a world where Chand Bibi’s valor had become a precedent. Hayat Bakshi Begum became advisor to three successive Qutb Shahi rulers of Hyderabad. Like Chand Bibi, she encountered Mughal power directly. In 1656, she personally negotiated a truce with Aurangzeb on behalf of her son.Like other Muslim queens of the Deccan, she also commissioned public works projects. Masab Tank in Hyderabad was originally a reservoir named after a noble woman, derived from maa-sahiba, meaning mother and master; here it refers to Hayat Bakshi Begum. Like her mother, she too commissioned mosques, serais, and wells. Her tomb in the Qutb Shahi mausoleum is the only woman’s tomb equal to those of male sultans. She also inaugurated the langar at Hussaini Alam Ashur-Khana, a Shi’a institution central to Hyderabad’s Muharram processions to this day.Together, Agha Nargis Banu, Khunza Humayun, Chand Bibi, Khadija Sultana, and Hayat Bakshi Begum, among many others, make it impossible to tell the story of medieval and early modern India as one that belongs to emperors and the Mughal court.To write these Muslim women back into history is to continue resistance, not with armies or embassies, but against historical erasure. History also has its battlefields. The archive is one of them. Ultimately, it was not so much the veil that hid these women from politics, but historical writing that has narrowed the terms of their visibility.Sarah Waheed is a historian.