Gender History and Medieval India: Women, Men, Bodies and Power

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Gender history is not simply another name for the history of women, and the distinction between the two is fundamental. Women’s history arose from the necessary effort to recover women who had been rendered almost invisible in conventional histories dominated by kings, dynasties, wars, administrative institutions and economic structures. Gender history builds upon that achievement but asks a broader question: how did a particular society construct the categories of woman and man, femininity and masculinity, and how did those constructions shape relationships of power? It therefore concerns women and men, family and household, sexuality and reproduction, labour and property, honour and violence, religious practice and political authority. Increasingly, it also examines persons who do not fit easily into a simple male-female binary, making the history of eunuchs or khwājasarās particularly important for medieval and early modern India.

Gender, in this sense, is historical. Biological difference alone cannot explain why particular societies associate courage, political authority, warfare or rationality with men, while associating domesticity, modesty, obedience or emotionality with women. Nor are such associations constant. What constituted an ideal man or woman in thirteenth-century Delhi need not have been identical to the ideals prevailing at Akbar’s court, among seventeenth-century Rajputs, within a Sufi household, or among the peasants and artisans of Mughal India. Gender history therefore investigates the historical production of femininities and masculinities rather than assuming either to be timeless.

This distinction considerably alters the questions we ask of medieval Indian history. An older history of women might ask what political role Raziyya Sultan, Chand Bibi, Nur Jahan or Jahanara played. Gender history certainly remains interested in that question, but it goes further. Why did the exercise of sovereignty by a woman appear exceptional? Why did female political authority require particular forms of justification? Was identical political behaviour described differently when performed by a woman rather than a man? Why could the emperor’s reliance upon male relatives, nobles and favourites be treated as ordinary politics, whereas Nur Jahan’s political network could become a “junta”? Such questions take us from biography into the historical construction of political authority itself.

Then there is the question of Gender and Performance. A useful point from which to begin this discussion is Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance, developed most influentially in her 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Butler questions the assumption that categories such as “man” and “woman”, or “masculine” and “feminine”, are simply natural, fixed and self-evident. Gender, she argues, is socially and culturally constituted and is continually reproduced through what she calls “performativity”. By this she does not mean that gender is merely acting or pretence, or that we consciously get up every morning and decide to perform as a man or a woman. Society already possesses certain expectations about how men and women should behave, dress, speak, walk, sit, occupy space, express sexuality or exercise authority. We repeatedly follow, negotiate and sometimes challenge these conventions. It is through their constant repetition that masculinity and femininity acquire the appearance of being natural and permanent. Gender, therefore, is not simply something that we are; it is also something that we continually do.

Such a formulation is immediately useful for medieval Indian history. Take, for example, the Rajput or Mughal warrior. His masculinity was not demonstrated merely by the fact that he was biologically male. It had repeatedly to be made visible through particular forms of conduct: carrying weapons, riding a horse, displaying physical courage, participating in warfare and the hunt, defending honour, maintaining dependants and demonstrating generosity and loyalty. A man who failed to exhibit these expected qualities could have his masculinity questioned. Thus, what appears at first sight to be a natural attribute of the “warrior male” can instead be studied historically as a set of socially recognised practices through which a particular kind of masculinity was continually produced and affirmed. This is where Butler’s formulation becomes useful to the historian: it encourages us to look not simply for men and women in our sources, but for the acts, rituals, gestures and expectations through which societies made them recognisable as particular kinds of men and women.

This becomes still more interesting when we turn to Mughal sovereignty. What did a Mughal emperor have to do to demonstrate that he was both a powerful man and a sovereign? He hunted, rode horses and elephants, fought wars, appeared in the darbār, dispensed justice and publicly displayed courage and authority. These were performances of sovereignty, but they were also performances of masculinity. What, then, do we do with Nur Jahan, who hunted, issued farmāns, had coins struck bearing her name and participated in imperial authority? Was she entering a masculine world, or was she demonstrating that authority itself could be performed differently by a woman? Butler therefore gives the historian not so much a ready-made explanation as a useful way of asking questions. In medieval India, what did one have to do, display or repeatedly enact to be recognised by others as a proper man or a proper woman? And, equally importantly, who decided what was “proper” in the first place?

The earliest scholarship on medieval Indian women was principally concerned with making women visible. Rekha Misra’s Women in Mughal India, 1526–1748, published in 1967, was an important early intervention. It gathered evidence concerning royal women, marriage, education, political activity, cultural accomplishments, privileges and architectural patronage. Its conceptual framework belonged essentially to women’s history rather than the later category of gender history, but such work performed the indispensable task of demonstrating that Mughal women were historical actors.

A second stage involved moving from visibility to agency. Here the work of Ellison Banks Findly has been particularly significant. Her studies of Maryam-uz-Zamānī and Nur Jahan demonstrated that Mughal imperial women could possess considerable economic resources and exercise substantial political and cultural influence. Her celebrated examination of the Portuguese seizure of Maryam-uz-Zamānī’s ship, the Rahīmī, revealed an imperial woman participating in the world of Indian Ocean commerce on a remarkable scale. Her Nur Jahan: Empress of Mughal India similarly explored Nur Jahan’s political authority, cultural patronage and position within Jahangir’s court.

Nur Jahan provides an especially fruitful subject for gender history. Her coins, farmāns, hunting, architectural patronage, control of access and participation in imperial politics are not simply evidence that an exceptional woman acquired power. They raise a larger question about how Mughal sovereignty itself was gendered. The older controversy surrounding the so-called “Nur Jahan junta”, involving Beni Prasad, Nurul Hasan and subsequently Irfan Habib’s critique of such formulations, can therefore be revisited from a gender perspective. The important issue is not merely whether a particular faction existed but why female political agency so easily became the explanatory centre of Jahangir’s later reign.

A major conceptual change came with Ruby Lal’s Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Lal challenged the conventional assumption that the haram represented an essentially private female sphere standing outside the public world of politics. The Mughal household was itself political. Marriage created alliances; women transmitted lineage; mothers and foster-mothers acquired influence; marriages and births affected succession; and senior women could mediate conflicts and distribute patronage. This becomes still more interesting when the early Mughal world is considered in relation to its Timurid inheritance. Timur and his descendants belonged to a profoundly peripatetic political culture. Courts moved, households moved and women moved with them. Babur’s world cannot easily be divided into a permanent male court and an architecturally segregated female haram. The increasing organisation and regulation of imperial domestic space under Akbar consequently needs to be understood historically rather than projected backwards upon Babur and Humayun. This has implications for architecture as well. The relationship between gender and space at Fathpur Sikri, Agra, Lahore and Shahjahanabad cannot simply be reduced to identifying “zenāna quarters”. We need to ask who could enter particular spaces, under what circumstances, what degrees of visibility existed, how movement was regulated, and how domestic, ceremonial and administrative spaces intersected. Architecture becomes a source for gender history.

Within Indian scholarship, Shadab Bano deserves particular attention because her work has systematically moved beyond the histories of famous imperial women towards the social structures governing gender relations. Her research on marriage and concubinage in the Mughal imperial family raises questions concerning sexuality, legitimacy, reproduction, status and bondage. Marriage and concubinage were not simply different forms of sexual relationship. They conferred different rights and statuses upon women and their offspring and consequently affected the organisation of the imperial household itself. Her work on women performers and prostitutes in medieval India moves still further away from elite domesticity. Performers, dancers, courtesans and prostitutes occupied complicated social positions. Their histories bring together sexuality, cultural accomplishment, entertainment, patronage, economic independence, social stigma and attempts at moral regulation. The boundaries separating the respectable woman, entertainer and prostitute were neither as obvious nor as stable as later moral categories might suggest. Bano’s studies of laws and norms governing women similarly draw attention to the relationship between normative prescription and actual social practice, while her research on eunuchs, slavery and bondage extends gender history into relations of dependency and unfreedom. Particularly suggestive is her exploration of masculine domesticity, because it questions one of the most persistent assumptions in older historical writing: that domestic space was intrinsically female while public space was intrinsically male. Her recent work on slavery and bondage in medieval North India further demonstrates that gender cannot be separated from status, class and coercion.

The work of Lubna Irfan carries some of these questions in particularly interesting directions. Her research on slavery, servitude, eunuchs, khwājasarās, women’s bodies and violence connects gender history with the histories of marginality and material space. The khwājasarā is particularly significant. Eunuchs occupied a position that destabilises simple assumptions concerning medieval gender. They could be slaves and yet exercise extraordinary authority. They were closely associated with the imperial household but could operate within the wider political world. They might control access to powerful individuals, manage property, perform administrative functions and exercise architectural patronage. Lubna Irfan’s work on the socio-spatial presence of eunuchs is therefore valuable because it uses buildings and material remains to recover people who are often only intermittently visible in chronicles. Her work on women’s bodies as sites of power, honour and violence raises another central question. Gendered violence is not simply violence happening to women. The female body could be made to carry the honour of a family, lineage or community. Control over sexuality, marriage and reproduction therefore became mechanisms through which wider structures of social authority were maintained.

Perhaps the most important conceptual advance after the recovery of women’s history was the realisation that men also have a gender history. Historians had long studied male rulers, nobles, warriors, scholars and saints without treating their maleness as historically significant. Women were gendered; men were simply historical actors. Rosalind O’Hanlon challenged this assumption. Her work on the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad and particularly her influential study “Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India” opened masculinity as a field of historical investigation. Concepts such as javānmardī linked manliness to courage, generosity, loyalty, physical capacity, self-mastery and honour. But Mughal masculinity was not simply martial. O’Hanlon’s discussion of mirzāʾī points towards another masculine ideal: the cultivated gentleman, refined in behaviour, dress, conversation, literature and aesthetic appreciation. A man could therefore establish masculinity through mastery of the sword but also through mastery of manners. This suggests that there were multiple masculinities, not one medieval Indian masculinity. The emperor, mansabdār, Rajput warrior, Afghan chief, ʿālim, Sufi, merchant, artisan and peasant inhabited different social worlds and were subjected to different expectations of male conduct.

Ali Anooshahr has taken this analysis into the sphere of Mughal kingship, particularly in his study of Humayun and the gender roles of the warrior king. Kingship depended partly upon the ruler’s capacity to perform masculinity. Courage and cowardice, physical endurance and softness, maturity and childishness, self-discipline and indulgence could all function as political judgements. This provides a remarkably productive way of rereading the Bāburnāma. Babur repeatedly presents his body to the reader: marching through snow, swimming rivers, fighting, hunting, drinking, abstaining, becoming ill and recovering. But he also writes poetry, loves gardens, records friendships, expresses grief and speaks with extraordinary emotional openness. Rather than dismissing these features as picturesque autobiographical details, gender history can ask what they reveal about Timurid ideals of masculinity. Akbar offers another model. Elephant combats, hunting, physical courage and martial prowess coexist with paternal kingship and increasingly sacral conceptions of sovereignty. Jahangir constructs yet another masculine persona, combining connoisseurship, justice, hunting and intimate autobiography. Aurangzeb’s presentation of the ruler brings warrior kingship into a different relationship with Islamic piety, discipline and patriarchal authority. Masculinity was therefore continually being reconstructed.

Indrani Chatterjee’s work on slavery, household and dependency represents another important development. Gender determined forms of labour, servitude, marriage, sexuality and opportunities available to enslaved people. This approach also reminds us that the household should not be romanticised. It could be a site of affection and kinship but equally of hierarchy, labour, coercion and sexual vulnerability. There is also much to be gained from the documentary tradition of social and economic history. Irfan Habib’s work on women in the Braj region, using Mughal-period documents, is instructive because women appear not merely as subjects of normative discourse but as donors, sellers, property holders and participants in transactions. Such evidence can tell us about actual behaviour rather than simply ideals. The methodological distinction is crucial. The Fatāwā-i ʿĀlamgīrī, other juridical works, Brahmanical normative literature and moral texts can tell us what authorities thought should happen concerning marriage, mahr, divorce, inheritance, widowhood, sexuality and property. They cannot automatically tell us what happened in an Agra neighbourhood or Mathura village. Legal documents, petitions, property transactions, wills and disputes must therefore be placed alongside prescriptive literature.

Gender history also has considerable potential for the study of Sufism and Bhakti. Mirabai and other female devotional voices have naturally attracted attention, but gender history permits broader questions. Did renunciation allow women to escape some structures of patriarchal authority while placing them within others? How was the female saint represented differently from the male saint? How did celibacy, asceticism and control of sexuality contribute to the construction of religious masculinity? The Sufi khanqah, shrine and dargah similarly deserve gendered analysis. The Sufi shaykh embodied a form of spiritual and paternal authority different from that of the warrior or noble. The relationship between biological lineage and spiritual lineage, master and disciple, household and khanqah, and male and female access to sacred space provides a potentially rich field of investigation.

The newer historiography, surveyed usefully by Emma Kalb, has increasingly emphasised the need to move beyond both elite women and simple male-female binaries. Gender must be understood together with class, caste, religion, occupation, age and status. There was never a single entity called “the medieval Indian woman”. A Mughal princess controlling jāgīrs, a Rajput queen, Brahman widow, peasant woman, slave girl, wet nurse, courtesan, craftswoman and agricultural labourer occupied profoundly different social positions. Nor did patriarchy affect them in identical ways. Elite seclusion, for example, could itself be a marker of status. A peasant household dependent upon women’s agricultural labour could hardly reproduce the spatial practices of an imperial haram. The same qualification must be applied to men. Masculinity was profoundly conditioned by class. The aristocratic ideal of generosity presupposed wealth; martial masculinity required access to horses and weapons; literary refinement required education. The masculinity of the landless labourer could therefore not be identical to that of a Mughal mirzā.

Despite considerable advances, medieval Indian gender history remains heavily weighted towards courts, aristocracies and exceptional women. We know vastly more about Nur Jahan and Jahanara than about the women who spun cotton, worked in agricultural fields, sold goods, served elite households or accompanied armies. We know much more about imperial marriage than about marriage among artisans and peasants. Several fields therefore remain comparatively underdeveloped: fatherhood and motherhood, childhood, sexuality, same-sex relationships, emotional history, gendered labour, ageing, disability, dress, the body, domestic violence and everyday relationships between husbands and wives. The gender history of the battlefield and military camp also deserves attention. Armies were not exclusively communities of fighting men; they were moving societies containing servants, artisans, traders, families and women. Material culture offers another underused resource. Paintings can be examined not simply as illustrations of women and men but for bodily posture, clothing, gesture, proximity and the organisation of space. Architecture can reveal patterns of accessibility and segregation. Objects associated with dress, cosmetics, weapons, writing and religious practice can illuminate how gender was physically performed.

The historiography has thus travelled a considerable distance: from recovering women, represented by Rekha Misra; through the exploration of female agency and political power, exemplified by Findly; to household, domesticity and sovereignty in Ruby Lal; marriage, sexuality, prostitution, slavery and social relations in Shadab Bano; eunuchs, bodies and gendered space in Lubna Irfan; masculinity in Rosalind O’Hanlon; warrior kingship in Ali Anooshahr; and slavery, household and dependency in Indrani Chatterjee. The documentary social-history tradition represented by Irfan Habib provides another essential route towards recovering gender relations outside normative texts.

The question with which we began therefore needs reformulation. Asking “What was the position of women in medieval India?” is no longer sufficient. Indeed, the question assumes that “women” constituted a single historical category possessing one identifiable “position”. Gender history asks something much more demanding: how did medieval Indian societies produce women and men as gendered beings, how were femininities and masculinities constructed, and how did those constructions interact with class, caste, religion, sexuality, labour and political power? Once the question is framed in this manner, gender ceases to be a specialised corner of medieval Indian history. It enters virtually every major field. Kingship was gendered; sovereignty was gendered; the household was gendered; labour was gendered; property and inheritance were gendered; religious authority was gendered; warfare was gendered; architecture and space were gendered; even ideas of courage, honour, refinement, piety and self-control were gendered. The history of gender, properly conceived, is therefore not simply about inserting women into an already existing history of medieval India. It requires us to reconsider how that society itself was organised and how power was imagined, exercised and experienced.

Select Bibliography and Essential Readings:

1. Anooshahr, Ali. ‘The King Who Would Be Man: The Gender Roles of the Warrior King in Early Mughal History’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd series, vol. 18, no. 3 (2008), pp. 327–340.
2. Bano, Shadab. ‘Marriage and Concubinage in the Mughal Imperial Family’. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 60 (1999), pp. 353–362.
3. Bano, Shadab. ‘Women Performers and Prostitutes in Medieval India’. Studies in History, vol. 27, no. 1 (2011), pp. 41–53.
4. Chatterjee, Indrani. Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
5. Findly, Ellison Banks. Nur Jahan: Empress of Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
6. Findly, Ellison Banks. ‘The Capture of Maryam-uz-Zamānī’s Ship: Mughal Women and European Traders’. Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 108, no. 2 (1988), pp. 227–238.
7. Irfan, Lubna. ‘Nature of Slavery and Servitude in Mughal India’. South Asian History and Culture, vol. 13, no. 4 (2022), pp. 466–480.
8. Irfan, Lubna. ‘Leaving a Lineage in Stone: Eunuchs in Socio-Spatial Setup of Mughal India’. In Sutapa Dutta and Shivangini Tandon (eds), Making the ‘Woman’: Discourses of Gender in 18th–19th Century India. Abingdon: Routledge, 2024, pp. 153–166.
9. Kalb, Emma. ‘Framing Gender in Mughal South Asia’. History Compass, vol. 19, no. 11 (2021), article e12691.
10. Lal, Ruby. Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
11. Misra, Rekha. Women in Mughal India, 1526–1748 A.D. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967.
12. Moosvi, Shireen. ‘Work and Gender in Mughal India’. In People, Taxation and Trade in Mughal India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 135–158.
13. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. ‘Issues of Masculinity in North Indian History: The Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad’. Indian Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (1997).
14. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. ‘Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42, no. 1 (1999), pp. 47–93.
15. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. ‘Kingdom, Household and Body: History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar’. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 5 (2007), pp. 889–923.
16. Orr, Leslie C. Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
17. Scott, Joan Wallach. ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’. The American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5 (1986), pp. 1053–1075.