Women, Wealth, and the Law: Histories, Concepts, and Claims in South Asian Society

AHA Session 240
Society for Advancing the History of South Asia 5
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Indiana Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Julia A. Stephens, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Papers:
Women, Wealth, and the Law in Late Mughal Indo-Persian Historiography
Nicholas J. Abbott, Old Dominion University
Insuring Women’s Wealth: Gold Jewelry and Financial Instability in Late Colonial India
Melina Gravier, University of Lausanne
Of Debts and Dower: Inheritance Disputes and Women’s Claims to Property in 20th-Century Hyderabad
Elizabeth Lhost, University of California, Los Angeles
Comment:
Julia A. Stephens, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Session Abstract

Women’s wealth has always been the subject of contestation and debate. Shaped by legal frameworks and customary practices, these debates often reflect competing ideas about gender and property that impact not only how women find financial security but also how they live. From cash, to land, clothing, jewelry, pensions, and insurance policies, women accumulate wealth in many forms, working within and against the legal regimes that dictate the terms of their ownership. In courts, complaints, petitions, and periodicals, they make claims to the property they own, their right to accumulate wealth, and in some cases even demonstrate their ability to amass sizable amounts of capital. Looking at different moments in South Asian history, the papers on this panel explore the conceptual and legal frameworks that undergirded women’s wealth from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Nicholas Abbott (Old Dominion University) will open the panel with a discussion of how monied women were written into—or out of—Indo-Persian historiography and how the historical memory of elite women’s contributions (financial and otherwise) to late-Mughal politics and state formation shaped subsequent narratives about South Asian history. Melina Gravier’s (University of Lausanne) paper takes up these themes of knowledge production to explore how discussions of women’s legal rights circulated in popular periodicals and how these ideas helped women assert and protect their claims to wealth and property. In her paper, Elizabeth Lhost (University of California, Los Angeles) explores how women’s claims to property appeared in Islamic and colonial legal venues, and how these venues responded to their claims.Together, the papers on this panel draw on different sources (histories, periodicals, legal records) to explore conceptions of and discourse surrounding women’s claims to property and wealth. Julia Stephens (Rutgers University) will provide comments to highlight these themes and draw connections across the papers.

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