A Harem in Disorder: Narrating Elite Female Seclusion in Late Mughal Delhi

Abstract

This article examines the late Mughal period, a time of dramatic political reconfiguration, to trace the relevance of practices of elite female seclusion, and particularly of the complex space of the imperial harem, to narrations of an empire under strain. Contemporary Persian-language histories of the reign of Ahmad Shāh (1748–1754) provide divergent accounts of internal and external threats to the sanctity and order of the harem, expressed in differential representations of even its most prominent denizens and their diverse social backgrounds. This article argues that this evidence reveals the centrality of the birth and social origins of individual harem women to how gender segregation was variously invoked within articulations of dynastic vulnerability. Attention to these diverse representations enables a better understanding of the multiple ways in which elite female seclusion was understood, referenced and negotiated during a period of uncertainty and change, both in the historical sources and by historical actors themselves.