Idea 13: Develop a Plural Ethical Framework

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Ruby Lal speak on the “Vagabond Princess,” Gulbadan Begum, a late 16th century Mughal princess and the first female historian of the Mughal empire at Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the subject of her recent book. This is a little-known history which some historians have called a “critical fabulations.” 

Yet, a key component of Dr Lal’s presentation was sketching the story of her practice as a historian and retrieving and rescuing traces and fragments in archival texts around the world and assembling a feminist counter-narrative to the ‘official’ historical record. Dr Lal emphasized the storytelling aspects of history-making and history-telling, but also a practice that leveraged her skills in deciphering multiple languages and scripts, decoding archival texts and Mughal-era paintings and iconography. Perhaps most fascinating was Gulbadan Begum’s own feminist storytelling, focusing on the prosaic and everyday life in a Moghul court, revealing the roles of women, eunuchs, and others that have been written out of the “official” archive, and intriguingly, recounting a voyage of the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, over land and sea, again, in the late 16th century!

Remarkably, Dr Lal’s historical practice displays a range of skills, from creativity, curiosity, and problem solving, a willingness to confront naysayers. Additionally, Dr Lal mentioned the importance of a "plural ethics,” of multiple worldviews co-existing and intersecting with each other, which to me speaks to the everyday truths and realities of multiculturalism and pluralism of the necessity of intercultural communication and competence.

It also left me speculating on how our current time seeks to collapse antagonistic and dissenting worldviews into Us vs Them binaries that distort the ways in which we approach the past and present and can shape the future Indeed, Dr Lal’s notion of plural ethics suggests the importance of all of us in countering that and learn to navigate and explore, decode and decipher and create our own “critical fabulations” of the worlds in which we live.

#history #feminist #archive #multiculturalism #intercultural #creativity #curiosity #storytelling #art