Description
In the discipline of International Relations (IR) or FIR, there has been a recent push to excavate historical women’s international/political thought. However, like any academic endeavour, this one is not without epistemic silences and epistemic violence. The lack of investigation of women belonging to the Global South/South Asia within this recent reappraisal of historical women’s international thought is a significant lacuna. This paper is an attempt to think epistemologies differently by bringing out strategic and intellectual narratives of the Mughal women from pre-colonial India, with a particular focus on periods of political crisis.
Mughal women, despite operating within an entrenched patriarchal system, produced writings and engaged in strategic and diplomatic interventions that revealed their critical engagement with some of the core concepts of IR, such as war. The project draws on an eclectic range of sources, all comprising Mughal women’s writing. Through a close reading of Gulbadan Begum’s Ahval-i-Humayun (a memoir by the only woman historian of the Mughal era that records the reign of the first two Mughal Emperors of the Mughal empire) and Jahanara Begum’s letters (written during the period of the Mughal war of succession), the study offers a conceptual rethinking of war within International Relations (IR).
Ahval-i Humayun is often read as a book documenting Mughal domestic life. However, a re-reading would inform that the historical book also documents the experiences of war and how war impacts men and women differently. I recover the war memories and experiences, linking these to the trauma that shaped successive generations of Mughal women. Furthermore, I argue that since the historical documents record the differing experiences of war for men and women, it would be interesting to investigate the different trajectories of addressing the conflict advocated by Mughal women.
