The king who would be man: The gender roles of the warrior king in early Mughal history

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 327-340

  Anooshahr, Ali ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949273394     PISSN: 13561863     EISSN: 14740591     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1356186308008547     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge, 2005)
2. Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India", Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 42, No. 1 (1999). pp. 47-93
3. Especially O'Hanlon. "kingdom, household and body: history, gender and imperial service under Akbar", Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 5 (2007), pp. 889-923
4. Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakh, The Age of Beloveds: love and the beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society, (Durham, 2005)
5. Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, (Chicago, 2005)
6. Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, (Cambridge, 2002)
7. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with mustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of Iranian modernity, (Berkeley, 2005)
8. See for example J. F. Richards, The Mughal Empire, (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 9-10
9. The fullest accounts of these events are by William Erskine, Histoy of India: Under the First Two Sovereigns of the House of Taimur, Baber and Humayun (reprint New York, 1972)
10. and Ishawan Prasad, The Life and Times of Humayun (Bombay, 1956)
11. The only full account of Kamran is the brief but good monograph of Iqtidar Alam Khan, Mirza Kamran: A Biographical Study (Aligarh, 1964)
12. The most recent treatment of Sher Shah's reign from the perspective of Afghan chroniclers is by Raziuddin Aquil, Sufism, Culture, and Politics: Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India (Delhi, 2007)
13. Thomas W. Lentz and Glen D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1989)
14. Humayun's passion for organising his immediate surrounding and attaching it to natural cycles and astrological markers is informed by the same mentality. Khvandamir tells us that after becoming king, Humayun divided "all the people in his kingdom" into three classes, each class subdivided into twelve ranks: people of the state (soldiers and notables), men of fortune (scholars), and people of pleasure (musicians, singers, etc). The names of each group had been suggested to him by an omen he had taken while riding one day. In addition, court ceremony was restricted to each group on specific days of the week in association with the relevant stars (so, Saturday and Thursday, associated with Saturn and Jupiter respectively, were set aside for the people of fortune, Tuesday and Sunday, associated with Mars and the Sun, were restricted for the people of the state). Each day had its own particular colour according to which the king and his servants would dress. Moreover, the business of each day had been decided upon before hand by its planetary determinant. So for example, on Tuesdays (Mars) the court would dress in red, the soldiers would be invited, and sentencing on capital cases would be read out. Ghiyas al-Din Khvandamir, Qanun-i Humayuni, ed. Hidayat Hosain, (Calcutta, 1940), pp. 25-28
15. Bayazid Bayat, Tazkira-i Humayun va Akbar, ed. Hidayat Hosein (Calcutta, 1941), pp. 128-129
16. Bayazid, Tazkira, p. 42
17. Bithu Suja, Chhanda Rau Jetasi Rau, tr. Rajvi Amar Singh (Bikaner, 1986), pp. 93 & 128
18. For example, Babur Baburname, 3 volumes, ed. and tr. by W. M. Thackston (Cambridge, 1993), p. 14a
19. Abdullah Tarikh-i Da'udi, (Aligarh, 1954), p. 144
20. Jawhar, quoted in the Urdu introduction to M. Mahfuz-ul Haq's The Persian Diwan of Kamran, (son of Babur Padshah) edited from the unique manuscript in Patna by kāmrān. (Calcutta, 1929) p. 33
21. Ahmad Yadgar, Tarikha-i-Shahi. ed. M. Hidayat Hosain. (Calcutta, 1939), p. 185
22. The Persian Diwan of Kamran, p. 3. For more on the political background see also Mahfuz-ul Haq's English introduction, p. 3 and footnote 15
23. McChesney "bisexual" see for instance R. D. McChesney's characterisation of Babur as "bisexual", R. D. McChesney, "Review of The Garden of Eight Paradises by Stephan Dale", Iranian Stuidies Vol. 39, No. 3 (2006), p. 441
24. O'Hanlon, "Kingdom, household and body" p. 30