Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
    Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
    Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan
    Audiobook8 hours

    Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan

    Written by Ruby Lal

    Narrated by Suzanne Toren

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and favorite wife of the Emperor Jahangir, who ruled the vast Mughal Empire. An astute politician as well as a devoted partner, she issued imperial orders; coins of the realm bore her name. When Jahangir was imprisoned by a rebellious nobleman, the Empress led troops into battle and ultimately rescued him.

    The only woman to acquire the stature of empress in her male-dominated world, Nur was also a talented dress designer and innovative architect whose work inspired her stepson's Taj Mahal. Nur's confident assertion of talent and power is revelatory; it far exceeded the authority of her female contemporaries in Renaissance Europe, including Elizabeth I. Here, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateAug 28, 2018
    ISBN9781684412495
    Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan

    Related to Empress

    Related audiobooks

    Asian History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Dr Ruby Lal

      Sep 10, 2020

      Dr Ruby Lal
      4 min read

    • Article

      Epic Reads

      Jun 8, 2020

      Epic Reads
      2 min read

    • Article

      Arabian Nights

      Dec 8, 2022

      Arabian Nights
      1 min read

    • Article

      Kill Or Be Killed: The Charming Cut-throats Of The Wild Frontier

      Jul 27, 2023

      THE PAKISTAN AIRLINES FOKKER FRIENDSHIP, a small turboprop, weaved through the high snow mountains of the Hindu Kush an hour after we left Islamabad. The mountain people were isolated from the rest of the world for several months each winter by heavy

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Bookshelf

      Jul 9, 2019

      In this book, the journalist Angela Saini reveals the recent upsurge of race science in political and academic discourse. She also goes back to the origins of race science, looking at the Victorian move towards categorisation as well as at how some o

      2 min read

    • Article

      Great Queens Of Africa

      May 19, 2022

      Great Queens Of Africa
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Rise And Fall Of A Real-life Flashman

      Jan 15, 2020

      Rebecca Gowers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) ON October 17, 1874, a man was shot dead at point-blank range in a rooming house at the Yellow Jacket Mine near Calistoga, in northern California. A jury later acquitted the killer, Eadweard Muybridge, on

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Witches Of Literature

      May 30, 2023

      Tor Books T. KINGFISHER challenges the idea of the “wicked witch” through the gravewitch in her subversive fairy tale Nettle & Bone. The nameless dust-wife—part witch, part gravedigger—is all too willing to help the novel’s heroine on her quest to ki

      2 min read

    • Article

      Fiction

      Sep 2, 2022

      Fiction
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Disastrous Journeys Of Alexine Tinne

      Mar 16, 2020

      This is a cautionary tale about the assumption that, on any journey, money can buy you out of trouble. Alexine Tinne was a young, pretty, adventurous and enormously wealthy Dutch aristocrat. She was widely travelled, headstrong, the only child of her

      4 min read

    • Article

      Conqueror Of The World

      Apr 22, 2021

      Conqueror Of The World
      8 min read

    • Article

      Magic Of The Finnar

      Jan 31, 2024

      Magic Of The Finnar
      2 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of The Lost “Greek” Tribe Of Alexander The Great

      Jul 28, 2022

      ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVEN years ago, a mysterious Afghan pagan tribe, the Kalash, fled Islamic religious persecution to three secretive valleys in a remote corner of what is now north-western Pakistan. In 1998, when I was visiting Lahore, a Pakist

      14 min read

    • Article

      Ghostly Hunts

      Dec 16, 2021

      Hunting features in many medieval ghost stories, perhaps due to the influence of the ‘Wild Hunt’ of Northern European folklore, where a troop of spirits, often led by a legendary, mythical or historical figure, rampages through an area, presaging doo

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Foulest One Of All

      Nov 11, 2023

      The legend of the Loathly Lady circulated for centuries in medieval Britain, and its central figure is a woman so ugly she is practically monstrous. One of the best iterations of the tale, which survives in multiple different versions, was written so

      5 min read

    • Article

      Netflix's 'Cursed' Turns The Legend Of King Arthur On Its Head. Here's How

      Jul 21, 2020

      This story contains spoilers from the first season of Netflix's "Cursed." The first time Nimue unsheathes the Sword of Power in the series premiere of "Cursed," she is standing atop a large rock trying to fight off a pack of wolves in the rain. As sh

      4 min read

    • Article

      Weirdness Out Of Africa

      Aug 10, 2023

      Africa likes to keep its secrets. Esoteric speculations still swirl like sandstorms around the pyramids. Cryptozoological expeditions investigate rumours of mokele mbembe, a possible living dinosaur in the Congo (FT145:30-32), and Ninki Nanka, (FT208

      7 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Written

      Oct 1, 2019

      American author, pilot and producer, Frank De Felitta, published his best-selling horror novel Audrey Rose in 1975. The book, which sold 2.5 million copies and was adapted into a successful film, tells the story of a man who loses his daughter in a

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Slave Who Braved All For Love

      May 4, 2020

      The Wikipedia entry says it all: ‘Florence Barbara Maria Szász, an orphan who became a slave, explored the Nile and died a lady.’ If Hollywood had been around in the 19th century, her life would have made a blockbuster. Very few people who visited th

      4 min read

    • Article

      Yara And The Witch Queen

      Oct 1, 2019

      I knew the dangers of witchcraft. My parents had told me about the time before I was born, when magic plagued our desert kingdom of Bahati. Untrained witch doctors trying to cure warts ended up paralyzing their patients or turning them into crocodile

      10 min read

    • Article

      Herne: The Hidden Hero

      Mar 11, 2021

      Herne: The Hidden Hero
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Empress

    4/5

    33 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Fantastic piece of history! Works like this are vital to keeping important legacies alive and not buried by Nur Jahan's contemporary political enemies.
    • 5/5
      A story that should be far more widely known. Scholarship and storytelling are drawn together to convey not only what can be known of the woman (far too little in my opinion) as well as the context of her Mughal world. Solid production and reading.
    • 4/5
      I first encountered Nur Jahan, a seventeenth-century Mughal empress, in historical novels, which either portrayed her as a romantic figure or as a female villain who usurped male power. This biography dispels some these myths and presents a more balanced and nuanced woman, albeit still an incredible woman. The author opens this book with a scene drawn from historical sources of Nur Jahan carrying a musket and killing a tiger while her emperor and husband watches at her side. It's a scene which marks Nur Jahan as a powerful woman and one who came close to fully embodying the role of a monarch. Furthermore, Nur Jahan's journey to becoming the powerful wife of a Mughal emperor is fascinating and tied to the story of her family, which remained influential even after her fall from power. The insights offered in this book peaked my curiosity, and I hope to discover more about Nur Jahan and the other woman of her era.