Begum in Kachehrii: Family, Law, and Sovereignty in Muslim Princely States

The paper attempts to study the history of dialogue and dissent on the issue of family law from the princely state archives in Rampur, Bhopal and Hyderabad. Taking a connected and comparative history approach, I argue the need to study debates in Muslim ruled princely states as crucial in the larger histories of law and family in colonial and post-colonial India. The paper attempts to compare and contrast the three different and yet connected routes to family law in the three Muslim princely states. It centers Muslim women as key actors not just in the family but also in courts as active litigants. Moving beyond an approach focused on Muslim personal law and the issue of divorce, this paper hopes to show the larger terrain of marriage, inheritance, adoption and child custody laws that were contested by Muslim princely women. The paper attempts to think beyond case study approach to the larger question of family law and processes of legal reformism, modernism and democratization in South Asia.

Dr. Razak Khan is a historian affiliated with the Department of History, Free University, Berlin. He is interested in histories and archives of minorities at the intersections of religion, class, gender and sexuality. His monograph Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions, and Belonging in Princely Rampur was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

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Host or Publisher Centre for South Asian Civilizations