"Lal's work is significant and achieves much that it sets out to do. Women who inhabited the world of the early Mughals are truly brought to life in the context of wider historical processes. Her argument against the public/private division is well etched out. The book is a vivid and well-written account spanning a few generations, and weaves in the momentous historical changes that occurred in that time-span. An attempt to write such a text has perhaps never been made, and it is worth reading simply for the alternative perspective that it presents." - Indian Journal of Gender Studies
"Ruby Lal [is a] young Indian historian whose study of the domestic life of the Mughals is likely to rewrite completely the social history of the period" - The New York Review of Books