Mughal India, 1658. The empire is fracturing. A school that should not exist is about to fight for its life.
For twelve years, in the innermost quarters of the Red Fort at Shahjahanabad, a woman named Zubayda Khatun has been running a school.
Not the kind of school that the women of the imperial zenana were permitted to attend. Not the reading circles that educated women in the devotional sciences and the Persian literary tradition that constituted the accepted curriculum of female learning. Something more: a school that taught the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, the theory of governance, the science of revenue administration, the history of empires and how they fell. A school whose most advanced students could, and did, produce legal reasoning that a trained male scholar would recognize as genuine scholarship. A school that was, formally, invisible, because the only way it could exist was to not officially exist.
Then Aurangzeb's forces crossed the Yamuna River, and everything changed.
Zubayda's three most advanced students are Rukhsar Jahan, seventeen years old, who has just written the most sophisticated piece of Islamic legal reasoning her teacher has ever read. Amina bint Mahmud, twenty-two, whose mathematical analysis of the Mughal revenue system has produced conclusions that no male scholar at the imperial court has yet reached. And Chandni, fourteen, who arrived at the school eight months ago and who has already identified, with the calm precision of someone who has been thinking about the survival of knowledge since childhood, exactly what needs to be done to preserve twelve years of forbidden learning against whatever is coming.
What is coming is a new emperor whose religious convictions are the strictest in the dynasty's history, a court whose conservative religious establishment is eager for a demonstration of piety, and a political environment in which the space for women's scholarship is narrowing by the day.
What Zubayda and her students have is a seventeen-page argument, a list of documented cases, a history being written in secret by a fourteen-year-old, and the uncertain protection of an empress who was once a Georgian slave and who became the most influential woman in the Mughal world through exactly the kind of intelligence the school was trying to preserve.
Against the background of one of the most dramatic succession crises in South Asian history, drawing on the documented realities of zenana life, Mughal court politics, the tradition of Islamic women's scholarship, and the actual complexity of Aurangzeb's court, Daughters of the Jade Throne is a novel about what women have always known: that when the world decides your knowledge is not permitted, you find a way to keep it alive anyway. You write it down. You teach it. You argue for it before the people who have the power to suppress it, using the very intellectual tools that the tradition told you were not yours to use.
The school survived. The knowledge persisted. The record was kept.
For readers of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami, and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.
