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Abstract
An enchanting seventeenth century epic of great passion and adventure, The Taj Mahal Trilogy by the Indian English novelist, Indu Sundaresan tells the charismatic tale of Mughal Empire. Indu Sundaresan’s Trilogy unveils the enigmatic life of two women in Indian history namely Mehrunnisa better known as NurJahan, and Jahanara the blue blood princess, in The Taj Mahal Trilogy which comprises of The Twentieth Wife published in 2002, The Feast of Roses in 2003 and Shadow Princess in 2010. The Feast of Roses tells the story behind one of the great tributes to romantic love and Shadow Princess is about how heartbroken husband builds tomb called the Taj Mahal and is one of the seven wonders of the world. Both women lived enough lives for ten women in their span of lives and thus rose to power beyond the feminine mystique of beauty which in Mughal India was employed as a strategy to lure man even though their identities in these novels are constituted within the framework of cultural or power discourse/regime that was essentially patriarchal and despotic. Present paper attempts to scrutinize how both woman emerge as substantive identities through rule bound discourse that is inserted in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of cultural/ social/ political life in the Mugal Era and how Indu Sundaresan adopted the history in her fiction.