In the concluding couplet of one of her ghazals (lyric poems), the Mughal princess Zīb al-Nesāʾ (1638-1702) issues a challenge to Majnūn, the archetypal Arabic poet from the classical past: placing her pen-name Makhfī (“hidden” or “concealed from sight”) alongside his own, she writes, “Come, Majnūn; I am the desert guide today.” This article surveys Makhfī’s remarkable corpus of poetry, which reveals how she leveraged a unique set of privileges and constraints–as a royal woman, an Indo-Persian intellectual, a devout Sufi, a prisoner under house arrest–to craft a distinct and powerful lyric voice of her own that was capable (as she herself declares) of “conquering the realm of verse, with ease.”