Natavan was born on 5 August 1832 in Shusha, a town in present-day Azerbaijan, in Karabakh region, to Mehdigulu Khan (1763–1845) and Badir Jahan Begüm (1802-1861).

One of them called Majlis-i Uns ("Society of Friends")[2] founded in 1864 became especially popular and concentrated major poetic-intellectual forces of Karabakh of that time.

[citation needed] Natavan's Karabakh horses took part in the Exposition Universelle (1867), agricultural exhibition in Moscow (1869), in Tbilisi (1882) and were awarded golden medals and certificates of honour.

In January 2021, after control of the district was returned to Azerbaijan following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, French-Iranian Azerbaijani photojournalist Reza Deghati during his visit to Aghdam reported that the cemetery was destroyed and claimed that the tomb of Khurshidbanu Natavan was looted and her bones are missing.

Polad Bulbuloghlu, then the Minister of Culture of Azerbaijan bought the bronze busts from a Georgian scrap metal yard and transported them to Baku.

[14] Thomas de Waal who saw the monuments in Baku, wrote: "I saw the three bronze heads, forlorn and pocked with bullets, lying in the courtyard of the headquarters of the Red Cross in the center of Baku: the poet Natevan, an earnest girl in a head scarf reading a book, missing a thumb; the composer Hajibekov, a bullet-ridden gentleman in double-breasted suit and broken spectacles; and Bul Bul, a famous singer with a serious domed bronze forehead".

[15] The monuments were kept in the yard of the Azerbaijani Museum of Arts in Baku for many years,[16][17] with Natavan's bust returning to Shusha on 16 January 2021 after the city's recapture by Azerbaijan.