Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World

Ruby Lal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on issues of gender relations in Islamic societies in the pre-colonial world.

• 1. Introduction; 2. A genealogy of the Mughal haram; 3. The question of the archive: the challenge of a princess's memoir; 4. The making of Mughal court society; 5. Where was the haram in a peripatetic world?; 6. Settled, sacred, and all-powerful: the new regime under Akbar; 7. Settled, sacred, and 'incarcerated': the imperial haram; 8. Conclusion.

'Arguably this is the most important book to appear on Mughal history for a generation … Lal has rescued the engagement of women with the world from a patriarchal and orientalist historiography which hid it from view.' Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London