Women, Wealth, and the Law in Late Mughal Indo-Persian Historiography

It is increasingly clear that women’s control of capital was a critical dimension of state formation in early modern and early colonial South Asia. As managers of dynastic wealth and overseers of expansive households, monied female elites played significant parts in the generation, operation, and transformation of South Asian polities, particularly in the tumultuous transition between Mughal and British rule. So, too, did contentious and often tendentious claims to their property. Yet such influence has often been obscured by overlapping historiographic traditions that have either denigrated women’s command of financial and political capital through tropes of moral and political degeneracy or ignored them as ultimately irrelevant to the larger masculine sweep of history. This paper considers one such historiographic tradition by examining depictions of wealthy women and attendant property disputes in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Indo-Persian histories. Focusing on three female magnates in mid-eighteenth-century India, it considers how these women’s contemporaries and later historians portrayed them and how their images were iterated—and sometimes obliterated—in successive historical works. In so doing, the paper considers how women and their wealth were construed in a historiographic idiom that was itself undergoing considerable change during the expansion of British colonial rule and attempts to chart a methodological approach for reconstructing elite women’s legal lives from a fragmentary and often hostile textual record.