Making Modern Mughals: Gendered Labour, Colonial Governance and the Household in Colonial India

British officials in India disparaged the Mughal zanana to construct a linear argument on progress from a decadent Mughal past to the modern colonial period. This discourse was accompanied by the systematic marginalisation of Mughals under British rule, especially after the Rebellion of 1857. This article complicates tropes about the Mughal zanana and offers a historical perspective on late Mughal households. Using the colonial archive on Mughal genealogies, pensions and petitions, and educational records and scholarships, it illuminates how Mughal women confounded the teleology in colonial narratives. It demonstrates how Mughal women, of varying status and rank, fostered a tenuous modernity by weaving Mughal pasts into their present. Weighed against colonial attempts to gradually bring about the erasure of Mughal identity, this article suggests that these women's efforts to raise new generations of Mughals can be read as quotidian political acts.