The office they held
None of these women was a sultan. What they held was the regency — an actual office of state, exercised during a minority, with the power to appoint and dismiss ministers, command armies and sign treaties. The Deccan sultanates produced an unusual number of minorities, because they produced an unusual number of assassinations, and the regency was where women entered government.
The pattern was not incidental. All three of the great sultanates ran through minor sultans in a single generation: Ibrahim Adil Shah II came to the Bijapur throne aged nine [3], Bahadur Nizam Shah at Ahmadnagar aged two [6], Abdullah Qutb Shah at Golconda aged fourteen [5]. In each case a woman of the house governed and a faction of nobles tried to take the government from her.
It is worth saying at the outset what the sources are. There is no memoir by any of these women, no chronicle written for them, and — in the one case where a queen commissioned her own manuscript — the pictures of her were deliberately destroyed. Everything below comes from court histories written by men in the service of the nobles who opposed them, or from modern accounts resting on those histories.
Khunza Humayun: the regent her son deposed
The first is the least known and has the most extraordinary single scene in the whole sequence. Khunza Humayun Begum — also recorded as Kurja Sultana, Khanzada Humayun and Khunzah Humayun — "was the regent of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate between 1565 and 1571, during the minority of her son sultan Murtaza Nizam Shah I" [4]. She was the widow of Hussain Nizam Shah I, who had led the Deccan alliance at Talikota and beheaded Rama Raya, and who died on 6 June 1565 [10] — five months after the victory.
She governed for six years, and the record grants her ability while blaming her for the results: "She was described as a distinguished person of ability, talent and virtues" [4], but "Her rule was unpopular because of her military failures and her favoritism of her relations" [4]. Both charges are documented. She could not keep a chief minister — she appointed Qasim Beg Tabrezi, then Maulana Inayatullah, "but they could not come to terms with her, and she finally appointed her three brothers Taj Khan, Ain-ul-Mulk and Itibar Khan to share the office" [4]. And she lost her wars: one against Bijapur "in alliance with Venkatadari of Penukonda and Ibrahim Qutb Shah" — a Vijayanagara commander and the Golconda sultan on the same side, two years after Talikota — and a second with Tufal Khan, "which also ended in defeat" [4].
The first coup against her failed because her son warned her. "Her son's Quran tutor Maulana Husain Tabrezi convinced her son to allow him to hire ruffians to seize and depose her. However, her son changed his mind and alerted his mother, and the conspirators... fled to Alia Adil Shah. She later pardoned them" [4].
The second did not fail, and the scene is worth quoting whole. On an expedition with her son, "Two Nizam Shahi officers convinced her son to send Habsh Khan to inform his mother that 'it was his pleasure that she should no longer engage in public affairs', and that she should retire to purdah like the other princesses. As a response, she mounted a horse and armed herself with a bow and sword and dagger arrest the conspirators. She was however defeated by Habsh Khan, who succeeded in having her arrested" [4]. Ordered into seclusion, she armed herself and rode at the men who had ordered it. "She was imprisoned in the Shivaner Fortress" [4] — Shivneri, where Shivaji would be born sixty years later.
Her son's own record confirms the arrangement without the drama: "During the first six years of his rule, his mother Khunza Humayun controlled the affairs of kingdom" until "repeated military failures against her neighbours... led the Nizam Shahi nobility to eventually help Murtaza take the reins of administration in his own hands" [9].
The erasure
What happened next is the reason this essay exists. Khunza Humayun had commissioned an illustrated chronicle of her husband's reign — the Tarif-i Husain Shahi, "an epic-style poem on the life of Sultan Hussain Nizam Shah I", made "by his widow when she was acting as regent c. 1565–69" [13]. Its twelve illustrations are the earliest surviving Deccani paintings, and they did something Indian court painting almost never did: "Six of the paintings, most unusually for India, show the queen prominently beside her husband, and another a traditional female-centred scene" [13]. A Gale reference work calls it "perhaps... a rare example within Islamic court art of royal female portraiture" [2].
After the coup, they were destroyed. "Most of the portraits of the queen were scratched out or overpainted after her son Murtaza Nizam Shah I rebelled and imprisoned her" [13]. What survives are "Ghostly silhouettes of a female figure sharing Nizam Shah's throne included in five of the manuscript illustrations", read as "abraded images of the sultan's beloved wife, Queen Khanzada Humayun, who lost favor after her husband's death" [2].
Not every image went. One survives showing "A tree blossoms at the touch of Khunza Humayun, the dohada theme" [4] — the old Indian convention in which a flowering tree blooms at a woman's touch. The regent who was told to retire into purdah is preserved in her own manuscript as the woman whose touch makes a tree flower, and as five scraped patches beside a throne.
The Met's survey notes only that the Nizam Shahis' "brief moment of patronage produced an illustrated history, the Tarif-i Husain Shahi, celebrating the king who led the victory over the Hindu Vijayanagar state" [1] — accurate, and silent on who commissioned it and what was done to her afterwards. That silence is the historiographical problem in one sentence.
Chand Bibi at Bijapur: ten years of factional war
Khunza Humayun's daughter was Chand Bibi (1550 – 18 April 1600), born in Ahmadnagar Fort, "versed in many languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Marathi and Kannada", who "played the setar and painting flowers was her hobby" [3]. She was married into Bijapur to Ali Adil Shah I under "an alliance policy" [3] — the same marital diplomacy that had bound the Talikota coalition together.
Her husband was assassinated by a eunuch in 1580, having named his nine-year-old nephew heir [11]. What followed was a decade in which Chand Bibi removed one regent after another. Kamal Khan, a Deccani general, "seized power and became the regent" and "was disrespectful towards Chand Bibi, who felt that he had ambitions to usurp the throne"; she "plotted an attack against Kamal Khan" and he "was captured while fleeing and was beheaded in the fort" [3].
The second regent, Kishvar Khan, imprisoned her at Satara fort "and tried to declare himself the king", and fell when a coalition of three Habshi nobles — Ikhlas Khan, Hamid Khan and Dilavar Khan — marched on Bijapur; he fled to Golconda and "was killed in exile by a relative of Mustafa Khan". "Following this, Chand Bibi acted as the regent for a short time" [3]. The third, Ikhlas Khan, "became the regent, but he was dismissed by Chand Bibi shortly afterwards" [3].
The clearest demonstration of who was actually governing came when Ahmadnagar and Golconda attacked Bijapur together. "The Habshi generals realized that they could not defend the city alone, and tended their resignation to Chand Bibi" — they resigned *to her*, not to the sultan — and "Abu-ul-Hassan, a Shi'a general appointed by Chand Bibi, called for the Maratha forces in Carnatic. The Marathas attacked the invaders' supply lines, forcing the Ahmednagar-Golconda allied army to retreat" [3]. A Nizam Shahi princess, governing Bijapur, hired Maratha cavalry to beat her own birth-kingdom's army.
When Dilavar Khan settled into the regency from 1582 to 1591 and "order was restored in Bijapur kingdom, Chand Bibi returned to Ahmednagar" [3]. Her ward grew into Ibrahim Adil Shah II, the greatest patron the Deccan produced [12].
Ahmadnagar, 1595: the defence
She returned to a kingdom about to disintegrate. Akbar had demanded submission from the Deccan sultanates in 1591 and been evaded; his ambassadors came back in 1593 [3]. In 1595 the sultan of Ahmadnagar was killed in battle against Bijapur, and the succession split the court: the Deccani minister Miyan Manju proclaimed a twelve-year-old cousin, the Habshi nobles opposed him, and "The rising dissent among the nobles prompted Miyan Manju to invite Akbar's son Murad Mirza... to march his army to Ahmadnagar" [3].
He regretted it immediately. "Now, he regretted having invited the Mughals, but it was too late. He requested Chand Bibi to accept the regency" [3]. She took it, released the imprisoned infant claimant and proclaimed him: "Chand Bibi retook the city to oppose the Mughals and released Bahadur, proclaiming him sultan under the name Bahadur Nizam Shah" [6]. He was two years old.
"Akbar's son Murad laid siege to the city on 18 December 1595 while Chand Bibi gained the support of the nobles for Bahadur's rule, including the powerful Bijapuri commander Ikhlas Khan" — the man she had dismissed from the regency at Bijapur years earlier. "Following a failed assault by Murad which was thrown back by Chand Bibi, the Mughal prince chose to agree to a settlement" [6].
The terms were a defeat dressed as a survival: "In return for the kingdom accepting Mughal suzerainty and seceding the province of Berar, Murad withdrew his forces and recognised Bahadur as the ruler of Ahmadnagar. Chand Bibi was appointed regent for Bahadur by the nobles and administered the kingdom in his name" [6]. Berar's own record confirms it from the other end: "It was ceded to Emperor Akbar by Chand Bibi in 1596, who was unable to stand against the imperial forces led by Prince Mirza Murad" [14]. She bought her kingdom four more years with its northern province.
How she died, and how it is told
Chand Bibi's death is one of the accounts the archive treats as a transmission question rather than asserting, and the reason is visible in the sources themselves.
The narrative account is this. In 1599 Akbar sent his son Daniyal against Ahmadnagar. "After the city was besieged for several months, Chand Bibi eventually chose to surrender, on the condition of the lives of the garrison, as well as her and Bahadur being allowed to retire safely to Junnar. Disagreeing with her, one of her advisers, Hamid Khan, announced to the city that the Regent was in league with the Mughals. A frenzied mob subsequently stormed her apartments and murdered her" [6]. The city fell immediately afterwards: "The ensuing confusion among the garrison rendered orderly defence impossible and on 18 August 1600, mines planted by the Mughals were detonated, resulting in the destruction of a large section of the city walls" [6].
Note the shape of the story. A woman negotiating terms is denounced as a traitor by a male subordinate, killed by her own side, and the defence collapses without her — a sequence that simultaneously blames her for treating with the enemy and credits her with being the only thing holding the fort. It may be exactly what happened. It is also precisely the shape a court chronicle would give the fall of a city it needed to explain.
And the dates do not agree. Chand Bibi's own record gives her death as 18 April 1600 [3]; the account of her ward has her murdered in the confusion immediately preceding the fall on 18 August 1600 [6]. Four months separate the two, and they cannot both be right about a death that is said to have caused the collapse of the defence. The archive states the year and not the day.
What is not in doubt is the outcome for the dynasty. "Bahadur himself was captured and sent, along with all the other children of the royal family, to Akbar at Burhanpur", then imprisoned at Gwalior, where he was still held in 1633; "Bahadur's ultimate fate is unknown" [6]. The kingdom Chand Bibi had defended was reconstituted five years later by Malik Ambar around a different prince, and lasted another thirty-six years.
Hayat Bakshi Begum: the Golconda queen mother
Golconda's case is the least dramatic and the most successful. Hayat Bakshi Begum was born in 1591, "the only daughter of Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, who did not have any male heirs" — the sultan who founded Hyderabad and built the Charminar [16]. The consequence was deliberate: "Muhammad Quli is alleged to have brought her up as he would have a son... As she grew older, the sultan let her be educated with the skills needed to be a ruler" [5].
She was a diplomatic asset from childhood — "Hayat Bakshi began receiving marriage proposals from the age of 11, among the most notable being one from the Safavid King, Shah Abbas, for one of his three sons" — and was married instead to her cousin in 1607, keeping the succession inside the house [5]. As queen consort she was already governing in part: her husband "turned to the advice of Hayat Bakshi for several state matters. This gave her a good practice in managing the state affairs" [5].
In 1626 her husband died and "Hayat had her son Abdullah Qutb Shah crowned. The new sultan was fourteen years old, and Hayat ruled as regent for the first few years of his reign" — and "continued to wield considerable influence in the state until her death" forty-one years later [5].
Her hardest negotiation was with Aurangzeb. "In 1656 when Aurangzeb, then viceroy of Deccan, besieged Abdullah Qutb Shah in Golconda he asked for considerable tribute. Hayat Bakshi managed to soften the deal, agreeing with Aurangzeb that Abdullah's daughter would be married off to Mughal prince Muhammad Sultan and the Golconda Sultanate would be ceded to the Mughals after Abdullah's death. In return Aurangzeb significantly lowered the required financial tribute" [5]. She traded the kingdom's future for its present — the same bargain Chand Bibi made with Berar, in a different currency.
The measure of her standing is architectural and unambiguous. She died on 26 February 1667 and was buried among the Qutb Shahi tombs, where the sultans lie in domed mausolea on a raised platform, their tombs distinguished by golden spires [8]. "Her tomb is the only woman's tomb which is equal in size to the tombs of the kings" [5]. A mosque in the complex carries her name.
The ones who are only a sentence
Below the regents are women who appear in the record for one action and then vanish, and the archive should name them rather than let them stay anonymous.
Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur married a Maratha woman named Punji, and their son Ibrahim Adil Shah I inherited as a minor in 1510. When the throne was contested, "there was an attempt to grab the throne, which was effectively thwarted by the timely intervention of his valiant mother fighting for her son's cause in male attire" [15]. That is the entire record of her: a Hindu Maratha woman who put on armour and held the Adil Shahi succession, given one clause in a fort's description.
Chand Bibi's own house produced others whose lives are recorded only as marriages: her sister Bibi Jamila married Ibrahim Quli Qutb Shah of Golconda; her half-sister Bibi Khadija married a sayyid [10]. Each of those marriages was an instrument of the alliance system that produced Talikota, and none of the women is described beyond the fact of it.
And there is Bhagmati, the queen for whom Hyderabad is popularly said to be named — "a queen of Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, in whose honour Hyderabad was supposedly named. The historicity of her existence is debated among scholars" [7]. The archive examines the naming separately, on a claim page whose verdict is *contested*, and this essay does not settle it in either direction. The arguments against her existence are recorded: "no tomb was built over her last remains unlike other leading female figures of the court; no inscription or coin of that period mentions her name", and "contemporary Deccani sources including Qutb Shah himself don't mention of her at all" [7]. The argument for is also recorded: that "her conspicuous absence from Deccani sources were a result of damnatio memoriae" [7].
That last suggestion is worth holding beside the Tarif-i Husain Shahi. The archive has one documented case of a Deccan queen being erased from her own commissioned manuscript by her son. Whether the same happened to Bhagmati is not established and may never be. But the case for treating an absence of evidence as decisive is weaker in a court system where the deliberate removal of a woman from the record is an attested practice rather than a hypothesis.
What the pattern was
Four observations the sources support, stated as observations rather than as a thesis.
First, women entered Deccan government through minorities, and minorities were common because assassination was. Every regency described above followed a sultan's violent or early death.
Second, their authority was real and administrative, not symbolic. Chand Bibi appointed and dismissed regents, appointed a general, hired Maratha cavalry and signed a treaty ceding a province. Khunza Humayun appointed and replaced chief ministers and prosecuted two wars. Hayat Bakshi crowned a sultan and renegotiated a Mughal tribute. These are acts of state.
Third, the opposition they faced was factional rather than doctrinal. The men who moved against Khunza Humayun were nobles who wanted the regency; the men who moved against Chand Bibi at Bijapur were rival regents; the man who denounced her at Ahmadnagar was an adviser who disagreed with a surrender. In none of the accounts read is a woman's authority challenged on religious grounds — the objection is always that somebody else wants the office. The one time seclusion is invoked, it is deployed by conspirators as a tactic, and she answers it with a sword.
Fourth, the record is worst exactly where the power was greatest. Hayat Bakshi, who governed longest and lost least, gets the shortest account and had no chronicle of her own; the one queen who did commission a chronicle had her face scraped out of it. What survives of these women is mostly the testimony of the men who removed them.
Dates in this essay
Chand Bibi's death is given as 18 April 1600 in one source and as immediately before the fall of Ahmadnagar on 18 August 1600 in another. The two cannot both be right, because the second makes her murder the cause of the collapse that produced the first date's siege. The archive states the year, 1600, and not the day. See the openQuestions below: this is one of the archive's standing transmission questions, not a clerical discrepancy.
Khunza Humayun's deposition is dated 1569 in one account and 1571 in another. The painting literature says her portraits were destroyed after Murtaza 'rebelled and imprisoned her in 1569'; her own record describes a *failed* coup in 1569 followed by a successful one, and dates her regency 1565–1571. The archive uses 1565–1571 for the regency and treats 1569 as the failed attempt.
The Berar settlement is dated March 1596 in one source and 23 February 1596 in the archive's own Ahmadnagar essay, which follows a different account of Chand Bibi's terms with Prince Murad. Both fall in the same season; the archive has not established which reflects the treaty date and which the decision.
Bahadur Nizam Shah reigned 6 August 1595 – 18 August 1600, aged two to seven. He was alive and imprisoned at Gwalior as late as 1633; his death date is unknown.
Where authorities disagree about when a state began or ended, the archive follows one rule — a polity is dated from the assumption of sovereign power in its own capital, and to the settlement that extinguished it — and records the alternatives rather than hiding them.
Open questions
Chand Bibi's death is a standing transmission question for this archive and is not asserted here. The received account — denounced as a traitor by an adviser, murdered by her own garrison, the defence collapsing without her — is internally convenient for a chronicle explaining a lost city, and the two dates given for it are four months apart. Whether any contemporary source describes the killing, and which, was not established. Radhey Shyam's The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar and Wolseley Haig's Historic Landmarks of the Deccan are cited by the accounts read and would be the place to start.
Khunza Humayun has no dedicated modern study in anything read here, and her article carries no date of birth or death — she is recorded only as 'fl. 1571'. When and where she died, and whether she was released from Shivneri, is unknown to this essay. She governed a major Deccan kingdom for six years and the archive cannot say when she died.
Whether the erasures in the Tarif-i Husain Shahi can be dated, and whether they were done at Murtaza's order or later, is not established in anything read. The manuscript is in the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, Pune; a technical examination would answer both, and would establish whether the surviving dohada image escaped by accident or by choice.
Hayat Bakshi Begum governed longest and is documented least. The essay's account of her rests largely on one article drawing on a masters thesis and a VR film; the substantial sources it cites — Sherwani's biography of Muhammad Quli, Siddiqi's History of Golcunda, Nayeem — were not read. Her regency's actual duration ('the first few years') is nowhere stated precisely.
Punji, the Maratha mother of Ibrahim Adil Shah I who is said to have defended her son's succession in armour, appears in one clause of one fort description. Her name, her family, whether she converted, and whether the armour story has any source earlier than the nineteenth century are all unexamined. If it holds, she is the earliest of these figures by two generations.
The essay's fourth observation — that these women's authority was contested factionally and not on religious grounds — rests on the absence of such objections in the accounts read, which is weak evidence. A chronicle that objected on doctrinal grounds might simply not be among the tertiary summaries used here. The claim should be tested against the Persian chronicles before it is relied on.
No woman of the Barid Shahi or Imad Shahi houses appears anywhere in the sources read for this essay. Whether Bidar and Berar produced no comparable figures, or produced them and recorded nothing, is unknown — and the two smallest sultanates are also the two whose archives are thinnest generally.