She is frozen in time as a Bollywood romance, draped in gold, her eyes soft with longing for Akbar. But the woman history has long called 'Jodha Bai' was never Jodha Bai at all, and the real story of who she was is far more compelling than any film.

Her name was Harkha Bai. 

Born a Rajput princess of Amber, she married Emperor Akbar in 1562 in a political alliance brokered by her father, Raja Bharmal. The name 'Jodha' in fact belongs to Jagat Gosain — a princess of Jodhpur who married Jahangir, Harkha Bai's own son. 

The confusion, compounded by Hindi films and long-popular historical misreadings, has buried Harkha Bai under someone else's identity for centuries. In truth, she was the longest-serving Rajput empress of the Mughal Empire, holding that position for 43 years.

After Akbar's death, when Salim crowned himself Jahangir, he doubled her royal stipend and gave her command of 12,000 cavalrymen — a rank held by only four senior members of his court, and she was the only woman among them. (In the Mughal court, this was a mark of extraordinary authority. It gave her rank, income, status and a place among the empire’s most powerful figures.)

She could issue firmans (imperial orders), owned properties, ran trade operations, and had the right to a salary for overseeing the harem, which functioned as a miniature government of its own. 

As historian Ira Mukhoty writes in Daughters of the Sun, once Harkha Bai gained power, "the capable, intelligent, shrewd woman used it to her full capacity and for the benefit of the empire."

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