Framing gender in Mughal South Asia

Abstract

Research on gender in Mughal South Asia has tended to focus either on the nature of the harem and elite female seclusion or, alternately, on constructions of elite masculinity. The first body of literature centers on debates as to the degree to which the harem functioned to limit (elite) women and constrain their political, economic, and social roles. The second analyzes how normative masculinity took shape during different reigns, according to both the preferences of the emperor and his advisors as well as the broader socio-political context. Taken as a whole, this body of work provides nuanced, contextualized accounts of how gender functioned to shape the lives and/or representations of elite men and women, even as it echoes archival sources in focusing on Mughal elites and tends to be framed primarily in terms of the Persianate or Islamicate world. Recent research suggests not only the value of examining questions of gender in relation to non-elites, but also the relevance of the household and the family, the influence of the Indic, the relationship of notions of gender to understandings of the body itself, and alternatives to a narrowly defined gender binary.