The Mughal Empire remains one of the most extensively documented periods in South Asian history, preserved through imperial chronicles, manuscripts and miniature paintings. Yet, within this vast archive, many figures survive only in fragments, overshadowed by dominant narratives. Their absence prompts a fundamental question: who decides what is remembered and what is allowed to disappear?
Behram Farooqui’s exhibition ‘Begi-Nama’ engages this question through a language of restraint. The folio becomes both artefact and void, while embroidery, traditionally associated with feminine labour and ornament, emerges as a medium that unsettles the authority of the archive. Farooqui’s solo exhibition, presented by the Vasl Artists’ Association, is part of the fifth iteration of ‘The Museum Series’ at The Vasl Gallery, Karachi.
The gallery space was darkened on entry, drawing the viewer towards a dense, shimmering veil of tinsel-like threads, behind which embroidered text intermittently revealed itself, suspended between presence and withdrawal.
The folio format of the show invokes the Mughal manuscript tradition, ie miniatures, calligraphy, gilded borders. Instead of text, cascading threads form dense veils of gold fibre that both reveal and obscure. The folio becomes an archival fragment whose contents are withheld rather than transmitted.
Through embroidered folios and an invocation of the Mughal artistic tradition, a recent exhibition reflects on the forgotten women of the Mughal court and the fragility of historical memory
Here, ‘text’ exists as gesture rather than language, hovering between Persian and Urdu calligraphic traditions and abstraction. It resists reading and denies interpretive authority. Farooqui constructs a visual analogue to purdah: meaning itself is veiled, controlled and partially inaccessible.
Embroidery, particularly zardozi, historically belongs to the registers of courtly refinement and domestic labour. By converting thread into a script-like system, the artist collapses distinctions between writing and making, intellect and craft, but without resolving them.
Yet the stitched surface refuses discipline. Where calligraphy traditionally signals control and legibility, these embroidered ‘texts’ foreground fragmentation and loss. Labour becomes visible not as embellishment but as duration: repetitive, embodied and materially insistent, echoing forms of work historically excluded from official narratives.
Within this dense field, female figures called Urdubegis appear intermittently. Also rendered in gold thread, these figures are shown in repeated, identical poses holding a shield and staff. Their bodies are standardised, absorbed into a visual system of repetition that echoes the logic of the textile itself.
This produces a critical tension: while the work gestures toward the recovery of overlooked female agency within the Mughal zenana [designated area for females] the figures are simultaneously contained within an ornamental grammar that limits their individuality. Visibility is granted, but only through stylisation.
Historically, Urdubegis occupied a paradoxical position. They were elite female guards of the Mughal zenana who were trained, armed and essential to the security of the imperial household. Yet they were confined within highly regulated spaces of seclusion. Their presence was both central and structurally unseen.In Farooqui’s work, their abstraction becomes a metaphor for this condition.
Like an unreadable script, their histories are present yet inaccessible. The embroidered surfaces are not reconstructing biography but suggesting its erosion. The curtain-like fall of threads reinforces this ambiguity: it functions simultaneously as barrier and threshold, echoing the spatial logic of the zenana with its screens, jaalis and regulated visibility.
The word ‘Urdu’ itself is derived from the Turkic ordu, meaning camp or army, pointing to its emergence in the military encampments of the Mughal period, where linguistic and cultural exchange was dense and fluid. A central tension in the works lies between ornamental excess and structural disruption. Gold thread, framing devices and compositional elegance evoke imperial luxury, yet the centre resists coherence. It fractures, dissolves and withdraws from interpretive stability.
This rupture destabilises the authority of the archive. The folio, traditionally a site of preservation, becomes instead a site of uncertainty. The viewer is left not with recovered knowledge but with the recognition of its limits.
Urdubegis appear only sporadically in historical records, notably in the Humayun-nama of Gulbadan Begum, one of the few surviving 16th century texts authored by a woman. She was a Mughal princess, who was the half-sister of Humayun. But even here, the presence of Urdubegis is brief.
Urdubegis were recruited from diverse groups, such as the Tatar (a Turkic-speaking ethnic group indigenous to Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia), Kalmyk (Mongolic people in the eastern-most part of Europe), Kipchak (Turkic nomads) and Habshi (African) communities, from outside the Subcontinent where purdah was not practised. Their roles extended beyond security to include escorting, mediation and managing the controlled passage between the zenana and the external world.
Scholarly writings, including those by Professor Dr Rukhsana Iftikhar at the Department of History, University of the Punjab, Lahore, situate Urdubegis within broader economies of female labour in the Mughal period, spanning domestic services, farm hands, craft production, performance and administrative roles. Even when salaried or privileged, these women remained embedded in hierarchical systems that regulated visibility and recognition.
In ‘Begi-Nama’, Farooqui does not attempt to reconstruct a continuous historical narrative. Instead, he constructs an aesthetic of opacity. The embroidered folios suggest that certain histories cannot be retrieved easily, just like embroidery itself is a slow, laborious and layered process. Threads sit on the surface, but they also conceal what lies beneath. The abstraction of the text here is not a deficit but a method. It foregrounds the limits of historical knowledge, while insisting on the material persistence of what has been excluded.
Farooqui, a graduate of the Visual Arts Department at Karachi University, continues to explore how histories are shaped, withheld and reconfigured. In ‘Begi-Nama’, the folio ceases to function as a stable documentary surface, becoming instead a site where absence acquires form. Quiet, resistant and unresolved, the work holds history in suspension.
‘Begi-Nama’ was on display at The Vasl Gallery, Karachi from May 19-June 1, 2026
Rumana Husain is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of two coffee-table books on Karachi, and has authored and illustrated 90 children’s books
Published in Dawn, EOS, June 14th, 2026