Chand Bibi
Chand Bibi governed two Deccan sultanates as regent and held the walls of Ahmadnagar against a Mughal army in person, which is why she is the one member of her family with a legend. She was the daughter of Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar and was married in 1564 to Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, the match that sealed the coalition which destroyed Vijayanagara at Talikota the next year; she was about fourteen. When Ali was murdered in 1580 the heir, his nephew Ibrahim, was nine, and she governed Bijapur for him through four years in which the court's factions and the neighbouring sultans, her own brother among them, each tried to take the regency from her. She was imprisoned once and restored, and in 1584 handed the state to Ibrahim's new guardians and went home to Ahmadnagar. There the succession collapsed after 1588 in a run of murdered and infant sultans, and in 1595 she was regent again, for a grandnephew of four, when Akbar's son Murad brought a Mughal army to the city. The siege of Ahmadnagar that winter is the episode the Deccan remembered: the Mughals mined the wall and brought a bastion down, and she is recorded on the breach in armour, with a veil, directing the repair through the night while the garrison fought in it. The Mughals took a treaty instead of the city, with Berar as the price. It bought four years. In 1599 a second Mughal army came, the garrison's factions turned on her, a rumour went round that she meant to surrender, and she was killed by her own soldiers in her palace; the city fell within months. The Mughal chroniclers, who had every reason to make little of her, did not. Her name is on the Ahmadnagar fort's gate and on a palace outside Bijapur, and on a good many things in the Deccan she had nothing to do with.
- Lived: 1550 CE – 1599 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: regent, military_leader, noblewoman
