Lesson Plans

Women and property in early modern South Asia

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As in most pre-modern societies, women in early modern South Asia had lesser rights in all spheres of life, including rights related to the ownership and control of property. Religious laws as well as regional customs discriminated between women and men over inheritance. Women were also restricted in their access to public spaces and paid employment, which further limited their ability to acquire and use property. Despite these limitations, several documents on this website point to women property-owners. Studying these documents in detail allows us to identify the conditions under which women managed to acquire property, and use it to further their interests and agency.

Religious laws and customs

The largest polity of early modern South Asia was the Mughal empire, which ruled by a Sunni Muslim dynasty. The Mughals recruited many erstwhile Hindu warrior groups, especially the Rajputs, to their nobility and army. In the eighteenth century, some of these groups formed their own independent kingdoms. For an introduction to the Mughal empire and the Rajput states, click here.

A significant number of people in early modern South Asia were Muslim, but the majority were not. The Mughals appointed Islamic judges (qazis) in all major cities, but they did not impose a single version of Islamic law on all their subjects. There were several other village and caste authorities who also exercised legal jurisdiction. For an introduction to qazis and other legal authorities in the Mughal empire click here.

Under Islamic law, women had clear rights of inheritance but these were lesser (usually half) of that of male equivalents. Customs in many parts of South Asia prevented women from benefiting even from that lesser right. Among Hindus, women had even lesser rights – in most cases, limited only to a marriage portion and maintenance.

Under colonial rule, the laws of inheritance, as well as other matters related to family life, were separated by religion. These religion-based laws, came to be known as personal laws. In early modern South Asia, however, things appear to have been differently arranged, with people appealing to legal authorities across religious boundaries, as we shall see below.

An inheritance dispute in a Muslim shrine-keeper's family

Document 1 refers to the shrine of Hamid ud-din Chisti, a thirteenth-century Sufi Muslim saint buried in the city of Nagaur, in present-day Rajasthan. The saint is referred to as the Sultan al-tarikin, or the king of renunciants. Nagaur formed part of a major province of the Mughal empire until the early eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, when this document was written, however, it was part of the Rajput state of Marwar, which was a semi-independent princely state, under indirect control of the British colonial government. In the document, we encounter a dispute between two branches of a family of pirzadas, that is, people who claimed descent from the saint Hamid ud-din. The dispute was centred on the rights over property exercised by a woman called ʿInayat Bibi, who is referred to in this document only as Kamaluddin’s wife. When her husband died, this woman adopted a son, and also appointed him her heir. A few years later, a male member of the family called Wasil challenged the validity of the document, as well as the documents transferring the property, and demanded his own share in the property. The dispute was decided not by a Muslim judge or qazi, but by the Rajput king of Marwar, although members of the pirzada community were consulted in the process. In the end, ʿInayat Bibi’s decisions were upheld as valid. This is surprising from a present-day context, because adoptions are generally prohibited in Islamic law. Clearly, different customary rules were considered applicable in this decision, giving the widow of a shrine-keeper greater agency than religious rules would.

A Maratha queen give orders about taxes on landlords

Document 2 refers to the period of decentralised Maratha rule in central India, and to the kingdom formed by the the warrior lineage of the Holkars. For a brief history of the Maratha empire, see here. Between 1767 and 1797, Ahilyabai Holkar was the queen of the state of Indore, following the deaths of her husband, father-in-law, and son. Queens are rare in South Asian history, but those that managed to gain such power were generally propelled by sympathetic and powerful male relatives, in the absence of viable male alternatives. In this document, which is a royal order written in Marathi language, she instructs a government official, a revenue collector called Khando Babu Rao, to ensure that all fines that are imposed are with the agreement of the local landlords. Such fines may have been penalties for infractions committed by individuals: the Maratha empire had an advanced system of criminal justice in which the penalties were predominantly in the form of cash fines. They may also refer to additional taxes or cesses imposed on traders, artisans or farmers. In any case, here we see a woman in the most powerful position possible, deciding upon the property and monetary rights of others.

An Afghan widow sells her house

Document 3 is also from a Maratha state, the neighbouring one of Dhar, in present-day Madhya Pradesh. Once part of the Mughal empire, Dhar had come under the Maratha warlords of the Puwar dynasty, who had formed a kingdom of their own in the eighteenth century. The city of Dhar was ancient and associated with early medieval Hindu kings. It also had an important shrine dedicated to a Muslim Sufi saint, Kamal uddin, who had settled there in the sixteenth century. There was a small but significant settlement of ethnic Afghans in the city. In the document, we see a widowed woman called Chand Bibi, selling her haveli or mansion, which was a bad state of disrepair, three of its four fountains broken, for the price of fifty rupees, to the local Hindu landlord. This was quite likely a distress sale, and fifty rupees would perhaps sustain Chand Bibi and her dependants in a frugal lifestyle for slightly over a year. However, having access to property that she could sell at will would have helped her tide over a difficult time, hopefully in anticipation of better times to come.

A Muslim brother and sister sell their land

Document 4 is also from Dhar, from the period of Maratha rule under the local Puwar dynasty. The document also records a sale, this time of a parcel of land, jointly owned by a brother and a sister: Sultan Khan and Haiyat Bibi. They declare themselves to be of the community of Afghans, hence, the same community as Chand Bibi, so they probably knew each other. They said that they had inherited the land from their father. As mentioned at the start, Muslim women had clear inheritance rights, although a sister’s share would have been the half of that of a brother. What is notable is that while in many parts of the country, Muslim women were customarily denied their inheritance rights, particularly in agricultural land, in this case, the sister’s rights were recognised. Haiyat Bibi sold the land together with her brother, albeit for the small sum of ten rupees, once again indicating a process of impoverishment and distress sales. But women such as Haiyat Bibi were not helpless onlookers in such times; they actively used their property to salvage themselves and support those that they cared for.

Next steps

Look at this document and or other document clusters by shared features or theme

Graphic symbols used by people to represent themselves – search for ‘figure’

Rajputs from different levels of society

Lawforms

Digitised Legal Documents from the Indo-Persian World