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Beyond the Colonial Trope: Economic Independence and Spiritual Agency Among North Indian Women, c. 1400–1799
Subject area: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities · Area of research: Women Gender Inequality
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV10I1-1719669
Abstract
Colonial historiography of South Asia, most of it written between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built an enduring picture of the North Indian woman as secluded, propertyless, and without a religious voice of her own. That image did double duty; one, it was offered as proof of Indian civilizational decline and other, at the same time, as moral cover for British rule. This is to test that picture against the documentary and material record of North India from roughly 1400 to 1799, drawing on Mughal administrative and mercantile records, hagiographical and devotional literature, and the historiographical work of scholars such as Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Lata Mani, and Ruby Lal. Two arguments are developed. First, elite and sub-elite women exercised real, sometimes substantial, economic agency through landed revenue jagirs, commercial investment, and customary property rights called stridhan. Second, the bhakti and Sufi devotional movements opened avenues of spiritual authority and self-authorship that operated partly outside patriarchal and caste hierarchies, with Mirabai being the perfect example. The study also pushes back against both the colonial "declension narrative" and its nationalist mirror image, the "golden age" counter-narrative, warning against swapping one totalizing myth for another. The record, in the end, supports a picture of agency that was constrained but real, and unevenly distributed by class, caste, and religious community as a picture that colonial epistemology worked hard to obscure.
Keywords
North Indian Women, Mughal History, Bhakti Movement, Colonial Historiography, Stridhan, Gender and Agency, Precolonial India
How to cite this paper
@article{1719669,
author = {Vikas Yadav},
title = {Beyond the Colonial Trope: Economic Independence and Spiritual Agency Among North Indian Women, c. 1400–1799},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {1},
pages = {965-971},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1719669.pdf},
abstract = {Colonial historiography of South Asia, most of it written between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, built an enduring picture of the North Indian woman as secluded, propertyless, and without a religious voice of her own. That image did double duty; one, it was offered as proof of Indian civilizational decline and other, at the same time, as moral cover for British rule. This is to test that picture against the documentary and material record of North India from roughly 1400 to 1799, drawing on Mughal administrative and mercantile records, hagiographical and devotional literature, and the historiographical work of scholars such as Uma Chakravarti, Kumkum Sangari, Lata Mani, and Ruby Lal. Two arguments are developed. First, elite and sub-elite women exercised real, sometimes substantial, economic agency through landed revenue jagirs, commercial investment, and customary property rights called stridhan. Second, the bhakti and Sufi devotional movements opened avenues of spiritual authority and self-authorship that operated partly outside patriarchal and caste hierarchies, with Mirabai being the perfect example. The study also pushes back against both the colonial "declension narrative" and its nationalist mirror image, the "golden age" counter-narrative, warning against swapping one totalizing myth for another. The record, in the end, supports a picture of agency that was constrained but real, and unevenly distributed by class, caste, and religious community as a picture that colonial epistemology worked hard to obscure.},
keywords = {North Indian Women, Mughal History, Bhakti Movement, Colonial Historiography, Stridhan, Gender and Agency, Precolonial India},
month = {July},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV10I1-1719669}
}