{"product_id":"daughters-of-the-jade-throne-the-untold-rebellion-of-the-harem-scholars-9798198144569","title":"Daughters of the Jade Throne: The Untold Rebellion of the Harem Scholars","description":"\u003cp\u003e • Author(s): Priyantha Selvadurai\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • Publisher Imprint: Independently Published\u003cbr\u003e • BISAC: Asian - Indic\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eMughal India, 1658. The empire is fracturing. A school that should not exist is about to fight for its life.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor twelve years, in the innermost quarters of the Red Fort at Shahjahanabad, a woman named Zubayda Khatun has been running a school.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNot 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen Aurangzeb's forces crossed the Yamuna River, and everything changed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eZubayda'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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAgainst 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, \u003ci\u003eDaughters of the Jade Throne\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe school survived. The knowledge persisted. The record was kept.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFor readers of\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Miniaturist\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003eby Jessie Burton, \u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Moor's Account\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003eby Laila Lalami, and\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003ePachinko\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cb\u003eby Min Jin Lee.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Independently Published","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47890795757719,"sku":"9798198144569","price":1384.0,"currency_code":"INR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/3471\/1191\/files\/9798198144569.webp?v=1781181379","url":"https:\/\/atlanticbooks.com\/products\/daughters-of-the-jade-throne-the-untold-rebellion-of-the-harem-scholars-9798198144569","provider":"Atlantic Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}