Slavery and South Asian History

6. Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines: Female Slaves in Rajput Polity, 1500–1850

6 Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines: Female Slaves in Rajput Polity, 1500–1850 Ramya Sreenivasan This essay explores the forms of female slavery and servitude among the Rajput ruling clans of Rajasthan between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The twenty-first-century historian seeking to recover such a history faces the obstacle of sparse information, given the nature of the archive. Uneven record-keeping practices were compounded by norms of “respectability ” that proscribed the discussion of women in public.1 The biased nature of the historical record is apparent in Varsha Joshi’s rich exploration of polygamy and purdah among Rajput women.2 Joshi pieces together an intricate history of concubinage and domestic servitude in elite Rajput households between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, she echoes her sources’ emphasis on the distinctions between “concubine” and “wife,” based on an assumed and asserted “purity” of the Rajput lineages from which“wives”were drawn. Nor have the continuous histories of boundary marking between lineage , clan, and jati (“caste”) been kept in sight by other historians of medieval Rajasthan.While B. D. Chattopadhyaya demonstrates the mixed-caste origins of the Rajputs of Rajasthan between the seventh and twelfth centuries , he argues that a distinctive Rajput clan structure was in place by the end of this period.3 Most historians have treated such “Rajput” identity as changeless in the period between the twelfth and early nineteenth centuries. They have focused instead on specific strategies for consolidating power employed by particular lineages within the broader understanding of “state,” such as intermarrying with other Rajput clans, establishing monopolies over resource extraction, and acquiring the trappings of kingship, such as pa- tronage of temple centers, public works, and monumental architecture.4 Such an emphasis on state formation has led historians to pay less attention to continuing histories of jati formation, in which Rajput elites and their chroniclers defined evolving boundaries for the jati through an ideology of “purity.”5 This essay demonstrates that the boundaries of lineage, clan, and jati asserted in the Rajput courtly sources and assumed in the historiography were not absolute, but were interwoven with a history of slavery in Rajput polities between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Constructions of lineage , clan, and jati evolved during this period, as much through the management of slave labor in elite households as through the oft-rehearsed network of marriage alliances among the Rajputs. The Historical Moment Little is known of the political history of modern Rajasthan during the fourteenth century, after >Ala al-Din Khalaji’s conquests in the region. It was during the fifteenth century that several new lineages became prominent, such as the Sisodiyas in Mewar and the Rathors in Marwar, with their capitals in Chitor and Jodhpur respectively (see map 3). By the mid-sixteenth century, rulers in these new lineages were attempting to shift the basis of their power away from their clans toward a more hierarchical monarchical polity, built on patron-client relationships rather than kin networks.6 Members of the clan networks of course contested these new claims by the rulers, so that kings and clan chiefs continued to assert their respective (and often mutually incompatible) rights. The intense politicization of the Rajput lineages and clan networks also coincided with the growth of Mughal power in the same period. However, Mughal intervention had complex consequences for the various Rajput kingdoms. On the one hand, service in imperial military campaigns during the period of Mughal territorial expansion brought independent rewards for both Rajput rulers and chiefs, in the form of increased assignments of rights to revenue from other parts of the empire. On the other hand, by the late sixteenth century, the Mughal emperor became overlord and arbiter of conflicts between the Rajput rulers and chiefs. It was in this context that a variety of genres emerged for narrating the past in the Rajput courts, partly because of the Mughal emphasis on record keeping. Simultaneously, the Mughal emphasis on“illustrious ancestry”as a stated basis for political favor reinforced the Rajput drive to assert glorious genealogical pasts. Through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, therefore, the Rajput kingdoms of Rajasthan witnessed another spurt in the Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines | 137 redefinition of the boundaries of clan, lineage, and ultimately jati. Both internal and external stimuli impelled ruling lineages to redefine, regulate, and narrow the conditions for “belonging” that determined access to...