THE LACK OF development of queens and queenship studies as a multidisciplinary field of analysis to supplement and enrich mainstream historical understanding for medieval South Asia has been a major lacuna in our understanding of those societies. Despite the reinstatement of gender as an important tool of analysis in historical studies, studies that focus on the experiences, potentialities, and meanings related to the office of a queen in this particular geographical context are yet to become widespread.

While this may in part be due to a lack of knowledge of the Persian language and the reluctance on the part of scholars of the language to take up such studies, there is another reason for this lacuna as well. The field of queenship studies is confronted with the complex problem of dealing with historical sources that reflect the views, ideas, and concerns of the dominating patriarchal elements. This problem is particularly evident in the study of the present theme, wherein the texts presented to us are “male” texts, written by men and reflecting their worldviews and concerns. There is no woman's voice in these courtly texts and chronicles, in the sense that we have no texts penned by women, or the queens themselves, for the sultanate period between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The Sultanate of Delhi reflected the generally changing nature of Islamic polities in the eastern half of Islamic rule after the decline in power of the Abbasid Caliphate from the tenth and eleventh centuries onwards, to a more secular political institution with overall official allegiance to Islam. We have neither any surviving architectural work commissioned by a queen nor any pictographic depiction of royal women for this period. Thus, in a sense, their histories need necessarily to be extracted in a refracted form from these texts, which speak in distinctly biased voices. This is one of the major aims of queenship studies, with a particular focus on medieval India, which has been relatively neglected till now.