Friday, January 8, 2027: 10:50 AM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans)
Concubinage has long been noted as a form of licit sexual relations in the Islamicate world, including in Mughal South Asia (1526-1857). The secondary literature on concubinage in the Islamicate world has tended to emphasize the legal protections for enslaved women who bore their owners children and achieved the formal status of umm walad. This status theoretically protected such women from being sold and entitled them to freedom at the death of their owners; their children would be recognized as legitimate and freeborn. Examples such as imperial concubine Udaipuri Begam (d. 1707), who bore a potential heir to the emperor and was honored in contemporary chronicles, would seem to verify the possibilities of enslaved women occupying such statuses. However, such arguments sit uncomfortably with the coercion behind such relationships, and the lesser-known experiences of childless and lower-status concubines. They also tend to reinforce colonial-era assertions of “mild” slavery in South Asia.
This paper will put better-known stories of imperial concubines into conversation with eighteenth-century texts depicting female slavery and concubinage in less elite circumstances, through examining collections of ‘witty tales’ (latā’if). These texts allow for consideration of the cultural expectations and generic norms which would have shaped them and the social relationships undergirding both the production of such collections and their authors and audiences. How do depictions of the sexual lives of enslaved women sit alongside depictions involving other, non-enslaved women? What is specific about representing sexual relations in the context of slavery, and how can this be read in ways that neither over-idealize mobility, nor fetishize violence? While latā’if cannot be read naively to present everyday life in Mughal households, this paper will argue for their utility in bringing out the strands of thinking and practice that would have shaped understandings and experiences of concubinage.
This paper will put better-known stories of imperial concubines into conversation with eighteenth-century texts depicting female slavery and concubinage in less elite circumstances, through examining collections of ‘witty tales’ (latā’if). These texts allow for consideration of the cultural expectations and generic norms which would have shaped them and the social relationships undergirding both the production of such collections and their authors and audiences. How do depictions of the sexual lives of enslaved women sit alongside depictions involving other, non-enslaved women? What is specific about representing sexual relations in the context of slavery, and how can this be read in ways that neither over-idealize mobility, nor fetishize violence? While latā’if cannot be read naively to present everyday life in Mughal households, this paper will argue for their utility in bringing out the strands of thinking and practice that would have shaped understandings and experiences of concubinage.