Emperor Akbar’s wife Jodhabai was merely a figment of imagination, if one were to go by Salman Rushdie’s latest short story that has come at a time when a section of the Rajput community is protesting a film on the royal couple for allegedly distorting facts.

Rushdie, the magic realist, has the great emperor and his altogether imaginary wife meditate on life, existence, identity, love and other abstract nouns in the short story, The Shelter of the World — the Urdu word for which is Jehanpanah — published in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

“Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajputs and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and, in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha...”

Naturally, “Jodha’s sisters, her fellow-wives, resented her. How could the mighty Emperor prefer the company of a woman who did not exist?”

They know the emperor has “put her together ... by stealing bits of them all”.

“So: the limitless beauty of the imaginary queen came from one consort, her Hindu religion from another, and her incalculable wealth from yet a third. Her temperament, however, was Akbar’s own creation. No real woman was ever like that.