Zainabadi Mahal

Zainabadi Mahal (; born Hira Bai; died 1654 ) was a concubine of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Life Singers and dancers attending Aurangzeb, Hira Bai possibly among them. Described as the 'darling of Aurangzeb's youth', Zainabadi Mahal was a Kashmiri Hindu, abandoned by her parents and sold in the market. She was a slave girl of Mir Khalil, and had been a singing and dancing girl.

In 1652 Her musical skills and charms captivated Aurangzeb.

She was surnamed Zainabadi Mahal, because ever since from the reign of Emperor Akbar, it had been ordained that the names of the women of the imperial harem should not be mentioned in public, they should be designated by some epithet, derived either from the place of their birth or the city or country where they had entered the imperial harem. Aurangzeb then lingered in Burhanpur for the next nine months in spite of Shah Jahan's repeated orders urging him to go to Aurangabad. One day, Zainabadi taunted him by offering him a cup of wine in order to test his love. and died in around 1654. Niccolao Manucci, a Venetian adventurer, who traveled through India during the period reports that after she died, Aurangzeb "vowed never to take up wine or to listen to music," and would later claim that God had been very gracious to him by putting an end to that dancing girl's life, for through her the prince had "committed so many sins that he can risk of never reigning by being occupied in such vices." Zainabadi is a character in Hamid Ismailov's historical novel A Poet and Bin-Laden: A Reality Novel (2018).