Person · line of women rulers · India
Begums of Bhopal
A succession of women rulers governed Bhopal for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating an unusual sustained geography of female sovereignty, public works and institutional patronage.
- Date
- 1819–1926
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Bhopal
- Condition
- historical rulers / surviving institutions
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.260, 77.410
About the place
Placed at Bhopal, the state four successive Begums ruled between 1819 and 1926 — the longest run of women rulers anywhere in India — and where their mosques and the old city are.
Connections (1)
- PatronageSānchī
The Begums of Bhopal ruled the state for four generations from 1819 to 1926 and are the direct reason Sāñchī was preserved. Shah Jahan Begum funded the excavations of the stupa in the 1880s, Sultan Jahan Begum built the first museum and rest-house at the site, and F. C. Maisey’s and Alexander Cunningham’s reports were carried out under her permission. Without the Bhopal court, the site would have been quarried like Bharhut.
Sources
Bhopal state records and modern histories of Shah Jahan Begum, Sultan Jahan Begum and their predecessors.
Open Begums of Bhopal in the repository →