THE HALF SMILE 147
ality or an account of resistance to the state. In these invocations, there
is always the mention of a gesture-the half smile glimpsed centuries
earlier. To follow this image of the half sinile is to follow themes that
receive little attention in contemporary Persianate historiography. It
is limiting to focus exclusively on love and devotion in literary or his-
torical male-female relationships in Persian poetics.
Just as the material remains of Bibi Jawindi's tomb in Uch Sharif
testify that women have been powerful actors in history, Chachnama
is a historical indication of the participation of elite women in world
making. Yet there is no presence of women in our readings of that
textual past. This reading of Chachnama allows us to rethink other
readings of women and their occlusions in Indic pasts. Overdue is an
examination of the corpus of texts that constitute our primary &ources
for the Persianate world to address questions of gendered power.
Let me cite just one example: the oldest Mughal building in Lahore
is a tomb which has no name engraved on it.^35 The state of Punjab,
which maintains the tomb, calls it the Tomb of Anarkali. Anarkali was
a young slave girl in the Mughal emperor Jalaludin Akbar's court who
falls in love with Prince Salim. When Akbar learns of this, he punishes
the girl by having her immured. When Prince Salim becomes Emperor
Jahangir, he has a tomb built in Lahore to memorialize his young
love. That is the story known to millions of Lahoris-either thtough
K. Asif's Bollywood classic Mughal-e Azam (1960) or through Imtiaz
Ali Taj's drama from 1922. Taj, who wrote the drama in Lahore, said
this about it: "My play has its basis in the stories. Since childhood, lis-
tening to the story of Anarkali created in my mind such a picture of
love and passion, of failure and heartbreak, set amidst the grandeur of
the Mughal harem."^36 What were the stories that surrounded Taj? Here
is Syed Latif in 1892, narrating the account of Anarkali, in his book
on Lahore's monuments:
Anarkali (the pomegranate blossom), by which name the Civil Sta:
tion is called, was the title given to Nadira Begam, or Sharfun-Nisa,
one of the favorites of the harem of the Emperor Akbar. One day,
while the Emperor was seated in an apartment lined with looking
glasses, with the youthful Anarkali attending him, he saw from her
reflection in the mirror that she returned Prince Salem (afterwards
Jahangir) a smile. Suspecting her of a criminal intrigue with his son,