There are narratives fairer and more permanent than history where great heroes live. The reed pens of the scribes did not record her existence, and the folios of Mughal history were never graced with Sorceress Basamia’s name, the one as magnificent and glorious as her spells. She of radiant beauty, whose cause for rebellion remains unknown, had won a large body of followers and their fierce devotion with her munificence and kind deeds. Her onslaught from Mewar to Agra at the head of a 20,000 strong force was spectacularly relentless. She had defeated able Mughal commanders and her vow that she would capture Delhi did not seem an idle boast.

Dread seized the emperor’s soldiers at the baffling reports of the happenings on the battlefield which spoke of invisible magical claws plucking Mughal troopers off their saddles, flinging them skywards and dashing them against the ground.

Surgeons accompanying Mughal forces reported steel cuirasses pierced with stone arrowheads.

First person accounts of the footsoldiers recorded how invisible beings overpowered them and froze them in their charge; their daggers only met air when they tried to cut themselves loose.

Some said the rations Basamia served her forces had a magical property that made them invisible. Others credited the ferocity of her men to their being intoxicated by her beauty, for Basamia rode unveiled among her ranks before a charge.

Given the fear inducing repute of the sorceress’s approaching horde and its accumulated successes, Basamia may conceivably have become India’s first sorceress empress. But she faced odds too great in the mighty sorcerer then ruling India: one Abul Muzaffar Muhiuddin Mohammad Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir’.

As Basamia’s army moved towards Delhi, the emperor’s spies kept him abreast with hourly reports. He heard of the faqirs, jogis and miracle workers marching under Basamia’s flag and the mysterious events in the theatre of war. He read accounts about Basamia’s person which dwelt on her vernal charms, and others which described her as an ugly, old harridan who had attained youthful form through human sacrifices.

His commanders privately worried that the fear of Basamia’s demon warriors and the invisible claws had already begun to seep into their men and they might desert even before the first battle cry was sounded. They wondered why the emperor had not yet called a second council of war.

Unbeknown to them, a council of war was being regularly held every evening in an unmarked tent outside the city walls where the emperor retired to invoke with powerful spells the help of the unseen; and where for the first time the emperor had learned of fear, realising the powerful magic at Basamia’s command, as his spells yielded only silence. It meant a sacrifice was asked of him.

Then one morning the men of the imperial bodyguards witnessed the high canopy of the emperor’s tent, where no man could have reached, all covered with crimson hand imprints. What the emperor had sacrificed is not recorded. Powered by this unknown offering the spells became too strong for the unseen to ignore.

The war council of men was called at noon that day where the emperor announced that he would himself march against the sorceress. Each commander received a talisman inscribed in the emperor’s hand. There were talismans as well for the elephants and horses of the cavalry, and occult numbers to be engraved on the cannon barrels.

Basamia’s forces were routed in battlefield and she fell along with many of her followers. Her youthful body was recovered from the arena but not her head. It had been severed at her command by her deputy, and removed from the arena while the battle raged.

The emperor’s sorcery had prevailed over Basamia’s, and it brought him great honour as an occultist. From that day Alamgir’s farmans were stamped with his seal, and beside his own hand impression, a curious crimson hand imprint — the countermark of the jinn king, whose warriors had sworn allegiance to the emperor the other night.

But even the jinn could not guard the dream chambers of the emperor’s mind of which the sorceress had gained freedom. As rebellions and strife slowly began to tear apart his empire, he remained troubled and unfocused.

Basamia’s beauty and her art would not be lost to memory. In the 18th century when the storytellers of India began weaving the Dastan-i-Amir Hamza anew, their imaginations were suffused with a sorceress. In the stories they told, each recalled her differently in the characters of Bahar, Mahrukh, Hairat and others. The crowning achievement of Indo-Islamic literature and the world’s first magical fantasy epic, Tilism-i-Hoshruba preserved these stories in the accounts of beautiful and accomplished sorceresses who ruled over great dominions, and fought against and conquered the followers of the True Faith.

Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist and translator. He can be reached through his website www.mafarooqi.com and on Twitter at @microMAF