Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World
Ruby Lal explores domestic life and the place of women in the Mughal court of the sixteenth century. Challenging traditional, orientalist interpretations of the haram that have portrayed a domestic world of seclusion and sexual exploitation, she reveals a complex society where noble men and women negotiated their everyday life and public-political affairs. Combining Ottoman and Safavid histories, she demonstrates the richness as well as ambiguity of the Mughal haram, which was pivotal in the transition to institutionalization and imperial excellence.
ISBN 978-0521615341
260 pages (paperback)
Cambridge University Press
– Francis Robinson, University of London
Praise for Domesticity and Power
Ruby Lal’s Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World is a path-breaking book that completely overturns long held beliefs about the nature of the harem in the early Mughal world. It remains, in scope and in scholarship, an unparalleled contribution to the understanding of the Mughal domestic space and its role in a constantly evolving Mughal empire. Using previously ignored resources including Gulbadan Begum’s biography, Ruby Lal entirely dismantles the enduring myths of the oriental, exotic harem to bring to life a vibrant and fluid world teeming with the complicated lives of the women-the sisters, mothers, daughters, care-takers and nurses- who made up the world of the harem, and thus shone a light on the blurred lines between the public and private spaces of the Mughal empire.
Ira Mukhoty, Author of Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire
Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World describes a female world quite at odds with the usual image of harem life as a place of orgiastic sexual pleasure for men, and of harsh and exploitative confinement for women. Ruby Lal’s study … is likely to rewrite completely the social history of the period.
William Dalrymple, New York Review of Books, November 22, 2007
After Lal’s persuasive exposé of the inextricable links between the male and female, the political and domestic worlds…, it should be impossible to write about Mughal politics without considering domestic factors and issues of gender…required reading for anyone working in the fields of Mughal history, gender history, and the history of Islamic civilizations.
Katherine Butler Brown, The Journal of Asian Studies, London, May 2007
Ruby Lal’s book breaks completely new ground and does so with an ease and a mastery that do not suggest that this is her first book. Yet it is. The book marks the arrival of a major historian of Mughal India, a historian who is not stuck in the rut of merely reading the available documents and taking them at their face value. As this book shows, she is relentless in her questioning of the source material, penetrating in the way she teases out answers (and more questions) from the documents, and fearless in the way she applies her imagination to the sources. Admittedly, this is not a book aimed at the general reader. But students of history will find in this book a new excitement, which is not always available in academic monographs.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, The telegraph, December 29, 2006
Ruby Lal’s monograph … can legitimately claim to be a pioneering work. Historians have… [been] in denial of the fact that gender played an important role in history as it does in life. Domesticity and Power breeches this denial by not just “visibilising” royal women of Mughal India but showing how complex their relations were with men as well as between themselves.
Saleem Kidwai, Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006
Arguably this is the most important book to appear on Mughal history for a generation … Lal has rescued the engagement of women with the world from a patriarchal and orientalist historiography which hid it from view.
Francis Robinson, University of London
Lal’s monograph is a highly imaginative study of family life under the first Mughal rulers of India based on a very sophisticated use of source material. It questions the received wisdom on life in the haram and opens up a very original line of enquiry into the role of women in the society and politics of the early Mughals. I feel sure that it will be received as a pathbreaking work.
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Emeritus Fellow, St. Antony’s College, Oxford
… an original and signal contribution to the study of women, family, court cultures and the politics of empires. By examining the shifting political contexts of the first three Mughal generations – of women and men alike – Ruby Lal demonstrates the evolution of a ‘domestic’ politics that lay at the heart of imperial self-fashioning.
Leslie P. Peirce, University of California, Berkeley
This supposedly unconventional subject, the domestic world of the Mughals, is predisposed to question the politics of history writing… and this book marks a first attempt to understand gender relations at the Mughal court…lively description of women’s role in the making of the empire, its traditions, and grandeur, the Mughal social and domestic world becomes part of the historical discourse…. Written lucidly, the book opens a new paradigm…
Karuna Sharma, Reviews in History, May 2007
By fleshing out the ways in which gender relations were central to the shaping of the early Mughal state and its political enterprises, this path-breaking study calls for nothing less than a need to rethink the notion of politics under the Mughals.
Monica Juneja, The Book Review, October 2007