‘Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia’ series review: A wickedly well-read corrective to Orientalist caricature

One of the year’s most erudite historical anime, ‘Jaadugar’ rummages through the machinery of empire with scholarly curiosity, gives Islamic history the dignity of lived experience, and discovers that the Mongol court is a remarkably good place for dangerous women to sharpen their wits

Published - September 15, 2026 02:31 pm IST

A still from ‘Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia’ | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll

I’ve been looking forward to writing about this one all year. With its first season having come to a close, Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia has made a considerably strong case for itself as one of the most meticulous and humane historical anime to grace the screen in recent memory. But it still tickles me that a work this serious, this painstakingly researched and this culturally attentive comes from somebody called Tomato Soup.

In 1213, the city of Tus stood in northeastern Iran at the threshold of a world about to be violently rearranged. A celebrated centre of Persian and Islamic scholarship, Tus was already steeped in the intellectual traffic of the medieval world when Tomato Soup’s young fictional heroine, Sitara, is bought as a slave into the household of Fatima, a woman from a family of scholars. Sitara initially has little use for books, until Fatima’s son Muhammad teaches her that knowledge gives a person some agency over what happens next. Eight years later, the Mongol armies reach Tus, and that lesson acquires an entirely different meaning.

Jaadugar follows Sitara after that catastrophe, when Tolui, Genghis Khan’s fourth son, captures the city and carries her into the expanding Mongol Empire. The historical setting is the period in which the Mongols are transforming from a confederation of steppe peoples into the largest contiguous land empire in history, while their western campaigns are devastating cities across Central and East Asia. Tolui’s campaign through the region was extraordinarily brutal. Tus itself would suffer during the Mongol conquest, and the anime uses that historical violence as the rupture separating Sitara’s intellectual childhood from the political life she is forced to construct afterward.

This premise makes Sitara a uniquely compelling protagonist because her education survives the destruction of almost everything else. After Tus is ransacked, Sitara is taken east as a slave and eventually transported to Mongolia. She assumes Fatima’s name and enters the Mongol court with revenge burning underneath an outward performance of usefulness. Her weapon is literacy. Her ammunition is years of accumulated knowledge. She studies medicine, religion, languages, customs and the habits of powerful people because each piece of information gives her another degree of manoeuvrability. Jaadugar grapples with this humiliation of being intellectually formidable while legally and socially disposable.

The court Sitara enters is populated by people whose private temperaments make the business of empire a curious thing to witness. Ögedei, Genghis Khan’s third son and eventual successor, carries himself with a disarming geniality that’s especially intriguing against the scale of the conquest he inherits. Tolui has a different sort of intensity. His devotion to Ögedei is so sincere that he seems to regard military conquest as an extension of brotherly loyalty. That makes him unpredictable in a way the usual lust-for-power archetype cannot quite explain.

Meanwhile, Töregene, Ögedei’s sixth wife, has developed an impressive talent for turning personal grievances into political leverage. Her own displacement makes Sitara’s fury legible to her, and she quickly sees that the girl’s appetite for revenge can be put to work in the court’s larger contests for power. Their alliance is therefore one of the series’ most combustible relationships, although I would be lying if I said the prospect of these two women plotting the downfall of the Mongolian empire wasn’t also the yuri subplot keeping certain watchers (me) invested.

A still from ‘Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia’ | Photo Credit: Crunchyroll

Elsewhere, Sorghaghtani, Tolui’s wife, has her own ideas about how power works. Her fascination with military technology and foreign cultures gives her another way into the court’s machinery. The women surrounding the Mongol household have been absorbed into the imperial order through marriage and conquest, with patriarchy setting the terms of their existence, yet those same domestic confines place them close to the conversations where decisions are made. The court may belong to the men who rule it, but the women are usually in the room where everyone says something they will later regret.