In seventeenth-century Mughal, India the patterns of imperial succession, informed by Islamic laws of inheritance, remained specific to male members of the royal family. The oldest son or heir-apparent assumed his father, the emperor’s rank and with it political/fiscal powers. Additionally, each heir to the throne was charged with the responsibility of perpetuating legacies as ‘reifications’ of the imperial past and legitimizing the dynasty’s future. Though Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s (1592-1666) reign was plagued by competing sons who made rightful claims to the throne, his oldest daughter Jahan Ara Begum (1614-1681) assumed the rank of the head of the imperial haram by default: upon the untimely death of her mother Mumtaz Mahal in 1631. As part of imperial ideology and practical politics, the ruling house relied on female agency to convey the sovereign’s pietistic and Islamic ‘face’ through ‘public’ acts of patronage, prayer and pilgrimage. Jahan Ara Begum exceeded the imperial charge on her gender by redefining and wielding her imperial powers through prevalent patterns of male authority in the sacred sphere as a piri-muridi and in the secular realm through the commission of a congregation mosque in Agra, the Mughal capital and seat of government and the Mullah Shah Badakhshi mosque in Srinagar, Kashmir. Jahan Ara Begum’s unparalleled rank and authority among royal Mughal women and her ‘gendered’ literary and aesthetic representations in the sacred and secular landscape were facilitated by her considerable fiscal holdings and freedoms assigned by her father who recognized in her persona and abilities her extraordinary political acumen and pious proclivities. The emperor’s official histories and chronicles cite the unmarried princess as the personification of the feminine ‘ideal’ that existed in Shah Jahan’s imagination and symbolized virtue, divine compassion and justice. It was an ideal to which the emperor and Mughal society hoped all women would aspire through Jahan Ara’s imperial and spiritual agency. This paper explores Jahan Ara Begum’s negotiation and cultivation of her imperial and spiritual personas within the mystical tradition of Islam in the sphere of Sufism and how her extraordinary relationship with her father facilitated, sanctioned and ‘represented’ an unmarried imperial woman’s unprecedented ranks of spiritual and imperial authority through her literary prowess and her patronage of the arts in the Mughal landscape.