Zenana

Due to prolonged interactions between Hindus and Muslims, upper-class Hindu households, inclined to imitate elite cultural trends, also embraced these designated spaces.

Still, modern scholars evaluating court records and travelogues contemporary with the Mughal period detail the women's lodgings as offering courtyards, ponds, fountains and gardens.

[5] Rather than being the prison-like space of licentious activity popularized for the European imagination by Orientalism, the zenana functioned as the domain of female members of the household, ranging from wives to concubines to widows, unmarried sisters and cousins, and even further distant relations who were considered dependent kin.

[6] According to Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, author of the Akbarnama, the zenana of Akbar the Great at Fatehpur Sikri was home to more than five thousand women, who had each been given her own suite of rooms.

[9] It was because male members of Mughal society did not closely define the concept of purdah as a reflection of their own honor that wives, daughters, and particularly unmarried women in the upper-echelons of the empire were able to extend their influence beyond the physical structures of the zenana.

[10] Owing to the cultural precedent set by their Timurid ancestors, it was comparatively more acceptable for Mughal women to perform civic charity in the form of building projects and even engage in leisure activities outside the zenana like hunting, polo and pilgrimage, than it would have been for their Safavid contemporaries.