Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia

154 Pages·2004·57.66 MB·English

by  Indrani Chatterjee (ed.)

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• U nfan1iliar Relations
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FAMILY AND HISTORY
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I lNDRANI CHATIERJEE
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permanent black
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Publish~d by
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D-28 Oxford Aparrmencs, II, I.P. Extension,
Ddhi 110092
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Contents
Distribut~d by
ORIENT LONGMAN PRIVATE LTD 0
Bangalorc Bhopal Bhubanc:shwar Chandiiilrh
Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hy!,lcrabacJ jaipur 0
Kolkata Lucknow Mumbai New 'Delhi P-!'!1" •
Introduction 3
Honoring rhe Family: Narratives and Politics of •
J
This collection copyright© 2004 by Rutgers, The State: University Kinship in Pre-colonial Rajasthan
Individual chapters copyright@ 2004 in the namc:s of their authors RAMYA SREENIVASAN 46
2 The .family Feud as a Political Resource in
lSBN 81-7824-083-1 Eighteenth-century India 0
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StJMIT GUHA 73
FOR SAU IN SOUTH ASIA ONLY 3 Becoming and Making "Family" in Hindusran •
MICHAEL H. fiSHER 95
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' 4 White Mughals: The Cas~ of James Achilles Kirkpatrick
and Khair un-Nissa
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WILLIAM DALRYMPLE 0
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5 "Family" as a Contested Concept in
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Early-ninereenrh-cencury Madras
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SYLVIA VATUK
6 Kin, Clan, and Power in Colonial South India •
G. 192
PAMELA PRICE
7 Gossip, Taboo, and Writing Family Hisrory
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lNDRANI CHAITERJEE
8 Domes~icared Convicts: Producing Families in the 0
Andaman Islands
261
Ty pc:set in Adobe Garamond SATADRU SEN
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hy Guru Typograph Technology, Owarka, N!!w Delhi 1100'15
Now on Contributors 292
Primed by Pauls Prc:ss, New Delhi I 10020 •
Binding by Saku lnd(x 295
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··unfamiliar Relations
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Family and History in South Asia
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Introduction* 0
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INDRANI CHAITER]EE
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ihe history of the family has long been the poor relation in the
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great household of South Asian history, which enthusiastically
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.adopted the study of colonialism and nati<;malism, and has in
a
creasingly made room for peasants, women, and the environment. •
Oucside South Asia, historians of the family have developed as a special
branch of the historical discipline; though they experienced a crisis •
when antpropologiscs critiqued "kinship" as an ethnocentric concept,
a feminist interest in domestic politics from the later 1970s has aided
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their ~apid recovery.1 A similar crisis and revival may weJl have occur
red in: anthropological studies ofS outh Asian lcinship and household,
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where imperial and Indological inspirations were replaced by postcolo •
nial, nationalist, and feminist concerns; at the very least, the study of
the family stayed alive. 2Yet, the same political and intellectual currencs •
have only reinforced the neglect with which the family has been treated
within the'disciplin~of South Asian history. As a result, a mere handful e
of professional historians has seriously consid~red household-form
arion as concrete pam of larger processes, such as the establishment of
®
monarchy in rhe course of the Vedic period,3 or the spread of Puranic
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Brahminism, 4 or analyzed its place in shaping medieval subjeccivicies
in parricular regions.5 While such studies have identified and high •
lighted a wide variety oflirerary and non-literary sources for a history
of the household,6 it is nor a history that has been wrinen yet. •
•t t'hankAnannya 6hanachary.1, Michael Fisher, Sumit Guha, Suprif;t Guha,
San jay Joshi, Michael Salman, Ramya Sreenivasan, Sylvia Vatuk, and cwo ano 0
nymous referee.~ for their critical comriburions in the re\•ision of this essay. My
sincere thank~ also to Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy at Permanem Black,
and to Brendan O'Malley and Melanic: Hallcias at Rutgers, for their expert stew •
ardship of the whole volume:.
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4 Unfamiliar Relations . Introduction 5
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This has not prevented scholars of modern South Asia from as relationships, for the obliteration of stratification within the family
• suming the existence ofs uch histories when addressing issues such as and rhe household? How have these erasures, in turn, conditioned
the ideological deployment of the family in the transformations of contemporary scholarship?
the political economy under colonialism, or in the policies of nation These questions need co be addressed by historians if the political
building. By making the "imagined" family cenrral co political pro engagements oft he present are not to entrap them into an overdeter
cesses and self-representations, such scholarship directs energy and mined interpretation oft he past oft he family, the nation, ofe motions
attention toward the ideological production of the family in the late and of women. It is pressing in the lighf of che recognition that the
•
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But, as is to be expected in the "colonial interregnum in India produced a much less decisive break
• absence ofh istories of the family, there is no consensus regarding the with the hierarchies of rhe pre-colonial family."11 Yet there is little · ·
nature of this "imagined" family. Partha Chanerjee and Tanika ·Sar available informacion on these hierarchies, their persistence, spread • :
kar, two important SouthAsianists involved in chis debate, have taken and role in refashioning social and political processes ofa Iacer period. t
different, changing and complex positions on the subject of how the It became even more pressing when large political conglomerates i~
..
family was imagined in the narionalist discourse. Chatterjee argues the lace twentieth century appropriated to themselves the Sanskritic
0
that nationalists of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries ima Hindi term, pttrivar, the violence and che gendered dimensions of
• gined the family as the last unconquered space under colonialism. 7 which have been historicized for a pan ofn orth India recently. 12 While
r
Sarkar, on the other hand, finds that early nationalist males likened the such contemporary use of parivar appropriately collapses the "family"
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household "to an enterprise to be adminisrered, an army to be led, a into the "encourage" or "warband" of the powerful, such elision itself
state to be governed. "8 But just as Chatterjee'slatest publication offers raises a ques'tion: was the pre-colonial"family" coo an attribureoflord-
proof that the inviolability oft he historical family was only metaphori ship? Could a Iacer democratization oft he "family"-its availability co
cal, Sarkar's research shows a fur more complex experience of"f amily" all at least theoretically-have constituted a silent social revolution in
0 by age and gender during the nineteenth century. The Iackof a consen South Asia? Is it the very newness of this form of power that makes its
sus among scholars about the outline and experience of the family modern holders {esistant.to submitting it co scrutiny? As a well-known
0 the~
continues to be significant. While one historian reminisces about the sociologist puts 'it, her su.iaents resist the critical interrogation of
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lack of privacy in domestic archilecture in early-twentieth-century family as "an ill;t.rusion into chat private domain where the nation's
• Bengaf,9 another reads the desire for privacy as an aspect of women's most cherished cultural values are nurtured and reproduced, as though
memoirs of the century. IO the very fabric ofs ociety would be undone ift he family were in any way
Ic is fitting, then, that this absence ofc onsensus should allow us co questioned or reshaped. "13 As an ethnographic comment on the intel
0 wonder about the prehistory ofs uch imagined-and material-fami ligentsia of modern South Asia, chis statement outlines the invest
lies in South Asia. For instance, could the "new conjugality" of the ments made in the idea ofc he affective and private "family" at the same
()
nationalist social groups-one characcedzed by companionate rela time chat ir emphasizes the inhibitions operating on the same social
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tionships between sexually mature individuals-have had a more group that is expected to adopt the professional historical method.
complex history than the one given to us by modernise scholarship on Such contradictions concern us because they impinge on what we
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South Asia? Is there a relationship between panernsof"family" consti do as "history." Chakrabarty sums up this paradox as the mode -
tuted under early modern lordship and nauonalisc male "desire?" Indian inrellectual's ambivalent relationship with the past, which is
0 What significance did the overwhelming focus on affect and con jugali cy "embodied in one's older relarives."14 When history is thought of as
during the nineceenrh cenrury have for a contemporary obfuscation of simultaneously familial and unfamiliar, simultaneously relational and
0 friendship and patronage, for the representation and rigors ofs ervice remote, what are the methodological implications for the narration of
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6 Unfamiliar Relations lmroduction 7
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s1,1ch pasts? Must every generation of historians relendessly domesti censuses, trade figures, official records, land grancs-a historian of
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cate the unfamiliar? Is it possible ro resist the translation ofs trangeness Balinesesociecy poses the following q uesrion: "What ... can be glean
inro the familiarity oft he here-and-now? What place does multidisci ed when the sources are overwhelmingly literary and not only literary,
plinariry occupy in such resistance? but produces of formalized, structured genres char have themselves 0
'· The present volume arose from such concerns. At a panel during the been circumscribed by strict rules ofp rosody and poetics?"17 The chal
29th South Asia conferenye at the U niversicy of Wisconsin-Madison, lenge for rhe hisrorian ofS outh Asia is identical. lr req1,1ires undertak 0
the participants concurred on the need ro bridge che gap rhar had ing multifaceted tasks: the identification and classification ofa variety •
sprung up between scholars oft he pre-colonial and the nalional in rhe of"l iterary" forms in which the history oft he family has been narrated
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study ofr he household. This volume is impelled by the belief chat the in remote and more recent pasts; the articulation of multiple connec
history off amilies between the sevenreenrh and the nineteenth cen cu tions between political and economic processes with the changing
ries, over various regions and over time, has qeen exiled as "old social ideas and structures of household and kinship over the same centuries; 0
hiscory"~.5 at great cost-to both women's histories in South Asia, as and, finally, explaining shifts and reformulations of power and inti
well as to the larger practice ofincerdisciplinaricy icself. An illustration macy within specific kinds ofh ouseholds and families between differ- 0
will exemplify the intertwined nature of the problem. ent periods. · •
In the ptesen t book, two contributors grapple with the first oft hese
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challenges, from across two different spatial and temporal ~ontexts.
Multidisciplinarity and the New Social Historian
They attempt w place narrative traditions within the social relations
•
To narrate the past is also co relate history. One oft he more pernicious of production and dominance, at the same time as they conte.xtualize
aspects of the establishment of the first colonial universities in the the work chat such narratives performed in producing both a history
1S 50s was co mark off two discrete domains in the curriculum of the and an ideology of familialism. Ramya Sreenivasan examines seven 0
h&Jmaniries. One was called Lirerarure and the other History. In con teemh-c;entury Raj put bardic·narratives. Arguing char the definitions
trast co the emergent W esc ern idea from the fifteenth. century onwards, ·and histories of the family in past rime cannot be separated from the
ofHistory as a fixed and stable genre, marked formally by a frame, and context of the production and reproduction of such narratives, she •
method-the collection ofs ources, the sifting, organization and rank locates both the ideological production and the historical reproduc
•
ing ofs uch sources for reliability-history in early modern Sourh Asia tion of the "family" within a militaristic ethos in western India. This
was written "i"n the dominant literary genre ofa particular commun point is reiterated by my own study of the poetic and prose histories
ity, loca~e4 in space, acagiven moment in time."'6The multiplicity of of particular households in eastern India. I conclude that while such
genres in South Asia meanc that the choice ofg enre or mode frequently te.XJ:S produced a transactional sense oft he familial, they simultaneous
changed over rime, as a community changed irs preferre4 modes of ly familiarized the violence inherent in the processes ofs tate formation 0
lit~rary production. When such a shift occurred, the earlier genre losr as ancient and hence "historical." Such histories too were produced •
patronage as well as historicity, and became more "literary" (or was from within a complex fusion ofn ormative codes ofs peech and a radi
meanc to be read in this way). •
cal new sensibility regarding rhe boundaries ofkinship and ritual in the
This movement in tastes andsryles creates difficulties fo~ historians late nineteenth and twentieth cemuries.
of many pre-colonial societies. Referring to the "prescriptive Western While these two contributions simultaneously address and compli
academic frameworks that require rhe writing of'hisrory' to be based cate rhe textual archival challenges before the histqrian of the South
on particular kinds of sources"-rhe narrarive histories, chronicles, Asian family, they are themselves caught up in the undertow of an 0
/ •
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8 Unfamiliar Relations
Introduction 9
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in.rerdisciplinary debate. That debate is internal ro social and cultural that is increasi~gly on the wane in modern South Asian studies. To
• anthropology and critical social history. lr revolves around the con know both older regional and classical languages is to know emire uni
ceptual category of the family, implicitly borrowed from colonial verses of meani~gs, and alternative epistemological traditions encod
Western law in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a ed as "literature." As Sylvia Varuk reminds us, it is difficult to fix on
e
rwen.tieth-cenruryanthropologyand historical sociol~gy. In rhis scho a "history" of "f.unily" when multiple words used in local languages
• larsfJ•p, the household or "domestic group" was understood as an eco indicate differenr aspects of social relationships at differenr times. •,
no~~c. unit in whic~ people were related to each ocher through rhe While my essay offers a glimpse of the interpellation ofs peech and
•
acttVItJes of producnon and consumption, and implied co-residence silence in specific narratives about families, Varuk shows how the
• as the locus for the practice of these relations. FaJ]li.Jy and kinship languages and meanings of kinship shifted around for administrative
referred ro the group of people linked through culturaHy defined and social purposes in the early nineteemh century. The vocabulary
relations ofbirth, adoption, marriage, worship and death, regardless for "family," Vatuk argues, was more elaborate in Persian-and in
of whether those who were so linked lived together within the same Arabic, as well as in many regional languages spoken in the subconti
space or nor.18
nent-chan in English: the absence of specific terms for paternal and
.I
This analytic distinction between lcinship and the household was maternal uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents within English has
• itselfl ater modified by feminists who pointed to the ideologicallimirs been noted by ochers too.21 In addition co this important absence of
generally, and the hetero-normarivicy in particular, inherent in such kinship terminology in the English lang~age, there was also a shifting
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disrincrions.19Irwasequallychallenged bys cholars who pointed to rhe and self-interested management of meanings that marked the nine.
nee.d ro historicize .these categories by paying attention to rhe larger ceenriHentury forrunes of a household in the southern part of India. · ·. ..
a
soc1al and economic processes at work within a particular temporal Vatuk reveals chat both within colonial judiciaries as wdl as indigen-0 ,
J:s
~came. G~ody pointed out,.in both pre-industrial Europe and pre- ous households and kin-groups, there was a contest over the borders t
0 1n dustnal As1a, where producnon and reproducrion rook place within and boundaries of the family, no less materially devastating for beirt&
the household and a large number of activiries were closely interlock discursive. ..
ed, decisions about marriage, heirship, and kinship in general were
•
influenced by the nature of productive processes, by the position of
The Dead Weight of the Present, Women's History r
partners with regard to these activities, and by rheexistingconsritution
and the "Family"
e ofd omestic groups. In other words, there could be no "specific kinship
domain that is nor also an economic, political and religious one. "20 By While the profusion oft erms for the" family" in any single South Asian
0 extension, .the heuristic separation of all these domains appears as a language may constitute a problem of one kind, the polyvalence of
..
historical problematic worthy of its own investigation, particularly familial terms in historical use constirures quire a differenr kind of
G) since such a separation is almost impossible to read in early modern or problem. Whenasingleterm(tarbur amongtheSwatPathans) meant
• later regional-la?guage narratives in South Asia. brother, cousin a~d ene111y, or the same term was used to refer to hier
t
archically differ~nt female-bodies, modern historians need more than
•
linguistic training to be able to distinguish the different histories being
PolygloSSla and the History of the
narrated by the 'rec:ords. This is particularly true for the hiswry of
a Early Modern "Family"
South Asian women. Following as much upondassical Sanskritic text
While attention ro such narratives can and does provide alternative ual maneuvers as upon the traditions of an English-language archive
ways ofc onceptualizing the f..1.mily, this, in turn, requires a polyglossia of the nineteenth century, South Asian women's histories have been
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10 Unfomdiar &latiom Introduction 11 ()
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framed insistently within f.·m1ilial categories-daughters, wives, wid regarding the srams differences between various women in the house
ows. Yet the inability m inrerrogate such categories for their multiple hold-be£Ween mistress and slave/servant-perhaps because such •
meanings has diminished the substantial scholarship, as, for instance, matified households were institutions familiar to many early modern
on sati:22 Marked by a profound ami-imperialism, ami-Orientalism, Europeans.25 Such stratified households remained central to plant
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and the predicament of the sari in Deorala in 1987, this scholarship ation-based social structures and imaginations oft he eighteenth-and
26
takes for granted the nature of"widowhood" and hence shortchanges early-nineceerirh-cenrury British middle and upper classes as well.
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the history of the early modern family in South Asia. So heavy is rhe They remained egually salient ro the experiences and imaginations •
dead wei~ht of the present that complexities ofh ousehold and family of many groups in the subconcinenr during che early moderll period.
•
relationships are erased even for studies of this phenomenon in rhe In the histories oft he Raj put house of Jodhpur, for instance, one finds
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.23 that childless wives, women who were mothers ofd aughters aJone, and
Y~t, regional-language genealogical narratives of households in slave-concubines, all were described as "raoji saath~ bali" (was sacri
Rajasthan and Maharashtra yield such o;>mplexicies, which are corro ficed/ sacrificed herself with the Rao).27The distinction between the
borated, nor contradicted, by contemporary European travelers. A wives ·and the slave-concubine-others is made obvious from the way
0
simple ami-Oriencalist suspicion of suc:h re,ords merely evades the the former are always identified with a lineage-dynasty and the name •
problem and does nor address ir. That problem is the one oudin.ed by of a father, while the slave-others are listed under single names. For
Bernier, a Frenchman traveling between "Ahmedabad toAg~a. through instance, rhe women oft he household oft he seventeenth-cenrury chief •
the territories ofRajas"-terrirories at the heart of rhree.comribucors' Ama:r Singh are distinguished between sauvaaniya, of respectable
•
work in the presem volume. Bernier described the immolation of a lineage, and khavaas; one of the Iauer has an additional description
group of women in the late seventeenth century thus: · after her name, which gives her original status-thus Niratkaran
La.hor~ kharid kari sau, which, literally translated, means "Niratkaran,
There was one woman seated on the pile ... five middle-aged women, 0
bought in/from Lahore."
tnlerahl}• well dressed, holding one another by the hand, singing and
Such ~tratified households were much more widely shared across
dancing round the pit ... 0
geographical and cultural spaces chan later hiscorians imagined. Re
.. . grea: therefore was my astonishment when I saw ihar the flames •
ports oft he Cencrallndian Mararha household oft he Bhosles in 1772
having ignited the clothes of one of these females she cast hersdf head
foremost into the pit. The horrid example was followed by another indicate that distinctions between slave girls and lineage-identified •
woman ... the three women ... also precipitated therruelves ... into wives became panicularly significant at the death of the master. The
the fire. slave-girls were burm with the corpse of their master (natakshala sati
I soon learnt the meaning of these multiple sacrifices. The five women g~lia}, while che lineage-defined wife who had been widowed was not
were slavi.!S, and having wimessed the deep affliction of their mistress in asked co sacrifice herself. 28
0
c<.mscqucnce of rhe illness of her husband ... they emered into an en Scholarship on sari has argued char inferior social groups, jtttis or
•
gagement to perish by the same flame that consumed their beloved mist-
castes, might have emulated chestructures and practices ofs uch domi
ress.
nam households. But it has remained divided when identifying the •
Many per.mn~ whom I then consulted on the subject would fain have groups that rerained their claims to social dominance in the aftermath
bpuerrsnu athdeemd smelev Iet hs a.t. a.n excess of affc~:•u on was the cause why these women ofc olonial land rev~:cnue and military recruitment drives in the transi •
H •
tion between che late eighteemh and the early nineteenth centuries.
Bernier's parent skepticism regarding the explanarion (ofa ffective ties) Nandy has referred to che upper-caste Brahmans in Bengal promoting
G
offered co him by his informants does not extend co his descr.iprion a "traditional" hegemony through the reinvention of such ricuali~ed
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12 Unfomiliar Relations Introduction 13
deaths. Yang has argued that the majority of such widows came from Maharao:ofKurch to the much more powerful neighboringporencate,
increasingly impoverished lower-caste groups in the western regions of Damaji Gaikwad. Walker was explicit on cwo counts: one, chat the
the Bengal Presidency. Jhareja chiefs preserved their concubine-born daughters "from a con
• Yet neither of these scholars raises the question of the shifring temptuous opinion of their inferiority than from humanity" since
nature of marriage-payment practices of either Brahmans or lower these children were not considered to belong within the caste (as
•
castes in the same period, affected by long-term economic or social distinct from daughters born of same-status wives, whose marriages
changes. It was feminist historians of dowry and property in other would have co be associated with expensive dowries and ceremonies).
regions who reminded us that various groups purchased their brides In other words, daughters born ofs ame-status wives were killed while
and regarded it as "demeaning;". that, in rimes of financial distress, .rhe availability of female slaves and slave-born daughters fulfilled the
such bought brides could be, and were, resold, and a fine rrafficking expectations of these chieftains in political terms.
0
• could develop in such wives.2'>The "sale" of daughters: by Brahmans Secondly, Walker explained, slave-concubines regularly commit
were especiaHy noted in late-eighteenth-cemury Pune as a sign of the tedsati with tht:jcorpses oft heir deceased masters, whereas same-status
• "bad times" faced by early modern Maratha regimes. Mid-nineteenth wives did not. In fact, of one lot of fifteen Jhareja rakhails who were
century reports from eastern Bengal spoke of the relative economic burnr with their deceased master in 1808, cwo were Muslim, one a
• advantage offered by the market in young girls and women to lower Siddi (East African) and the rest ofv arious different caste-ranks: nor ·.
cast~ unable to afford bride-wealth payments. Some Brahmans of one of those sacrificed was a same-status woman, and identified with
CencraJ India, as well as new urban landlords in Calcutta, receiv:ed gifrs a lineage head. Though Walker had thought this was a" deviation from
0
of such young girls at funeral obsequies.'0 Historians of forest-dwel the general Hindu practice," a familiarity with Raj put genealogies and
ling groups in Central India have found that che abdu.ct.ion ofg irls and succession lists might have taught him otherwise. They might also
• women was vital to the success ofs uch groups' claims of"Rajpur" iden have taught him, as they reach the modern scholar, rhar th~ differences
tities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 31 between households caught in such competitive politics·lay in their
• It is clear that high and low castes alike experienced "bride acquisi varying access to groups from which to recruit such "outsiders."
tions" of multiple sorts. It is also evident that anthropological terms It is not merely a relenrless presemism that blinds the modern
in English-hypergamy, endogamy, hypogamy-could accommo social historian ofS outh Asia co the possibilities that such "pasts" sug
0 date all kinds of transactions in situations where jati boundaries gest. It is equally the conviction char such formations were "ma~gina~"
themselves were being reshaped. In chis conrext, a document from the co modern South Asian families, that So~th Asian early modern fami
0
• colonial archive about a similar social group claiming hegemonic sta lies shared nothing wirh the histories of relatedness in Ming or Qing
tus can equally well be undersrood within a politics ofs ocial mobility, China, Wesr Asia, Africa, or indeed the Arlantic world. Thinking,
• marked by the transformations ofkinship practices. In 1805, Captain about complex, connected, layered and fluid households and families,
Walker, the British Residem at a court in western India, described rhe and thinking about them within the multiple regional and liceraryt
•
institution of rakhails (concubines), which was common among the languages, can be enabling only ifw e are wttling to give up the larrerda,y
Jhareja (Jadeja) chiefs. These concubines were taken from atnong che assumption chat early modern families are easily recognizable, both . '
slaves ofs uch chiefs, and represented sexual connections wirhin which structurally and affeccively.lt is anachronistic to read our modern, fix
the men "were under little or no res;:raim with respect to caste. "32. The ed and neat degrees ofc onjugality, consanguinity, corresponding cir
daughters born of these concubines were preserved for use in political cles of senti men;: and ranked labors, back into a domain ideologically
• allian~e-making. They would be wedded to rhe sword (khnnda lf<gan) and materially bleached of commerce and power. It would be better
oft he f.1rher's political adversary-;;s in rh~ case of rhe daughter of rhe tO give up rhe nOtion that captives, gifu and kinship COnStituted thref
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14 Unfamiliar Relations Introduction 15
differc:nc layers within a. single domestic group. lnstead it would be intimacies ofa ll kinds (eating, or sleeping, together) constitUred privi
0
more helpful to think ofa shifting range of practices that could be de lege and "freedom." Self-choice of marital partners was abhorrent be
•
ployed at various conjunctures to either blur or distinguish berween cause it was associated with "male and female slaves in India."
the three, or berween the "family" and ocher social institutions ofv alue Khan's descriptions are good co chink with. They tell us that the •
and meaning. Thinking of practices, in turn, helps to focus attention mere presence ofs laves within the domestic group inverted the mean
on both formulations of, and contests within, lqcal societies in the ings, practices and functions of intimacy and affect, of kinspip, i~ •
eighceen.ch. and ninece~nth cemuries-arpund simulr~eously _large specific ways. Co-residence ofc onsorts did not imply status-endowing
concepts (ltke blood, descent) as well assmall-scale actions that render conjugality for non-slaves. Productive as wdl as reproductive labors
0
ed these ~on.cepts meaningful. Such small-scale practices-off eeding were both considered the normative domain of lower-scams groups
(both mtlk and grain), dressing, addressing, fighting ~d worship~ within the household. If romantic Jove between opposite sexes was 0
ping:-produced familial structures as well as power and ~ule, and tied degrading from the perspective of the masters' collective honor and •
multtple families together in "caste" and "community.'! rank, other affects can be glimpsed in the relations ofe lders and jun
iors. TheM ughal household settled in Banaras ~uring rhe 1780s illus •
trates this inversion well. Qudaq Sulran Begum, a widow of Emperor
The Affective Family Revisited
Jahandar Shah, claimed to be the mother of a son, Muzaffar Bakhr,
0
A histor~cal sensitiviry.t~ how intimacy was created in tht; past appears who enraged her by "deserting" the household on his facher's death.
to stand tn stark opposmon to the question ofp ower that haunts South The mother's letter ro the Company said: "Mirza Muzaffar Bakht is
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Asianisrs: the question of how humans have created "absolute ochers the son of a slave-girl. who was an attendant to her grandmother and
o~t of ~rher human~. ·:33Yet such opposition is itself premised upon a whom the late Prince had taken into his harem. She still lives at Delhi
dtscurstve and cognmve erasure of the affective center of dominant for the late Prince did not bring her with him. Only Bibi.Zeban, who •
hou~eholds-the servants.34 Historicizing the family from the pers was a slave girl ofMehdi Begham [sic], daughter ofHis Majesty, came
pecttve ofs uch servants has great potential. 35 In any case, borh rhe hist with the Prince. In this manner che fare Prince had several slave girls
ory of: l.ffecr and the hisrory ofp ower were summed up well in the very in his harem."37The son in question, Muzaffar Baklu, in his address
derivacic;m ~f the E~glish "family" from its Latin root in the fomulus, co the Company accepted the "motherhood" ofQuclaq Sultan Begum,
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servant. Thts ga'(e nse co the familia, or household. How might affect bite pointed to che failures ofs uch motherhood thus: "The humiliation •
have been conceptualized among people who would have been famil and ill-treatment chat he [Muzaffar Bakht] has been receiving at rhe
iar with the slave and servant-using practices ofa South Asian house- hands of his mother Qutlaq Sultan Begam cannot be adequately des •
hold? ·
cribed. He on his part was never remiss in the observance off ilial duty
Abu Talib Khan, sojourning in Britain berween 1799 and 1802, and expected naturally to receive a kindly treatment from her. But his •
r~~orced. an ·:English lady's" assertions, echoed later in a diverse.-range· expectations were belied. "38
oft mpenal discourses, that the women ofA sia were unfree "like slaves While chis meant that on the one hand, agnatic descent was impli
without honour and authority. "36 Khan, who had sold his ~wn Afric~ citly understood to make all male children the sons of a particular
slave (ghulam-i habshi) at Cape Town, and presumably knew che dif father vis-a-vis the rest oft he community. on the other, mothers were
f~r~n.c~ berween sf~v.e and. no~-.sfave :"iscence, did not equate public subject to a subtle ranking within the household. Relations berween •
VISibthty and ~obdtry wrth ftberty (azadi). On the contrary, he ' putative sons and mothers, the core of much mythmaking in South
as~e~teq, secl~ston was a strategy only available to the powerful: the Asia, was substantively tormented and tense, a point made again in •
abtltty to avotd compulsory physical labor of all kinds and physical yet another memoir of an eighteenth-century soldier and courtier in
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