Power and Contestation in a Period of Turmoil: Shifting Gender Relations and the Rise of the Khwājasarās in Eighteenth-Century North India
摘要
Despite being instrumental in the rise and fall of dynasties, the medieval Indian eunuchs, especially those working under the Mughals and widely referred to by the term khwājasarā, have not been sufficiently explored quite contrary to the treatment meted out to their contemporary counterparts in Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Persia. Mughal India, at least in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, largely maintained an incorporative attitude towards the khwājasarās, with only occasional references suggesting otherwise. With the eighteenth century ushering in, however, a gradual deterioration in this attitude was noticed. Marked with political uncertainty and intermittent change of rulers on the Mughal throne, the eighteenth century played a decisive role in the lives of the elite eunuchs, not only in the Mughal capital but also in the distant provinces. Bearing witness to an inversion of the masculine character of the Mughal state and the gradual proliferation of feminine presence in political and cultural spheres in various parts of the Indian subcontinent, this period not just recorded a continuity of active eunuch participation in various homosocial spaces, but also happened to be the culmination point for the power and agency the elite eunuchs had at their disposal for centuries together. The attempt of this chapter is to map this climax which revealed itself in the form of a peculiar phenomenon of an almost synchronised, albeit short-lived, rise of eunuch-slaves in the various power centres of North India—that of Jawed Khan in the Mughal capital of Delhi, Miyan Khush Fahem, Miyan Arjumand and Miyan Muhabbat in Punjab, and Jawahar Ali Khanin Awadh—and to study the effects this meteoric development had on the contemporary society and politics at large.