Sarai Julena Gaon is one such area of antiquity. In the suburban village of Okhla, one of the oldest in Delhi stands a tall board that reads ‘Sarai Julena Gaon’. This signboard is the last remaining proof of a Sarai, or rest house, built for weary travellers built in the 18th century. The celebrated historian Sohail Hashmi, comments on the almost lost existence of the Sarai and about the fragmentary of the area only called Sarai Julena and a village Julena there. How Juliana got corrupted into Julena, can be seen as the impact of semantics and difficulty for locals to speak Juliana. Today, the area houses DDA (Delhi Development Authority) flats. The architect of this lost wonder was a Portuguese Christian woman, Dona Juliana Dias da Costa, who worked in the Mughal Harem and became a close confidant of Bahadur Shah 1, India’s 8th Mughal emperor. Here, we trace the Portuguese woman’s story, historical significance, and her journey fading to obscurity since then.

Throughout the lifespan of 89 years, Dona Juliana Dias da Costa, a Portuguese woman in the late 17th-18th century Mughal India, was known for her multiple talents. She was a doctor (acquiring knowledge of medicine from her early childhood), a tutor to the royal prince and a diplomat and ambassador for Portuguese.

Dona Juliana fell in love with the emperor Aurangzeb’s son and successor Shah Alam (at that time 17 years old), whom she tutored and secretly helped during the latter’s imprisonment of seven years by his father Aurangzeb under suspicious acts. Their fate was sealed from the reign of Shah Jahan, when he attacked and captured 4,500 Portuguese, which included Juliana’s parents, in Hooghly (Bengal) in the year 1632. Her father was converted to Islam and her mother started working as a maid to one of the Shah Jahan’s wives whom they served until her death. After the begum died, the mother-daughter duo came under the care of Padre Anton Magellan. He also arranged Juliana’s marriage to an unnamed Portuguese man after her mother’s death. As fate would have wanted it for the two of them, her husband died shortly after in a battle. Thus, she was an 18years old widow when she started tutoring the future successor. Her prominence in the Mughal court rose over time. Her loyal attitude towards Mughals would remain even after the death of Bahadur Shah-1 in 1712 as she went on to serve his successors and sons.

Although forgotten in history, we find various references about her life in multiple language sources- Persian, Portuguese, Urdu, English to name a few. Due to concrete evidence, her birth year is dubious. But still, a large mass of historians consider she was born in 1645 and remained a Christian. Former director of National museum and the co-author of the book on Juliana’s life called Juliana Nama (2017), Raghuraj Singh Chauhan  with the archivist Madhukar Tewari recalls the fierce woman as an “extraordinary and unique one, with no one else like her.” Further, they add that the medieval historians did not give her the space in history that she deserved. “In 1726, Juliana’s sole portrait was published in The Netherlands by the Dutch. Then, there is some mention of her in the Persian text Tarikh-e-Muhammadi,” said Chauhan.

It is inferred from some available sources that she had acculturated the young prince to Christianity to that extent that he started kneeling before Jesus in prayer, sent blessings to the Church and did just everything sorts of baptism. Even while waging a war, Juliana had made him believe that he will win because Jesus and all Christians were with him. After Juliana’s prophecy of Bahadur Shah’s win in the battle, she was given immense wealth and the palace of Dara Shikoh. Her interventions in the rulings of the Mughal court helped the Portuguese in many ways such as Surat becoming a duty-free port for them and the construction of a church with her donated money. For her work for both the empires-the Mughal and Estado da India, she was gifted a few villages around Delhi and was made the jagirdar of four villages. It was in 1720, when Muhammad Shah ‘Rangeela’ took over the Mughal throne, that Juliana built a Sarai or a rest house in Okhla for European travellers. 

To conclude, she can be best described as in the words of Indian author Biklees Latif, likes to call her- “she is emblematic of a lost Indian past, in which people could claim multiple religious and ethnic allegiances, and as a person representing better times.”