Forbidden Privileges and History- Writing in Medieval India

*King’s India Institute, King’s College London. Email: [email protected]

Acknowledgements: This article has been written over several years and it is not possible to name all those who have helped variously—through discussion, opinion and by sending materials. For this version, I wish to thank Daud Ali, Mukulika Banerjee, Marina Chellini, Veena Das, Emma Flatt, John Fritz, Benno Gammerl, Monica Juneja, Matthew Kuefler, Caroline Osella, Filippo Osella, Avril Powell, Jayabrata Sarkar, Atreyee Sen, Sunil Sharma, Samira Sheikh, Gulshan Rai Taneja and anonymous reviewers. A grant from the Charles Wallace India Trust (2007) helped in collecting material and I benefited from audiences in the Department of History, University of Delhi (2008) and Queer @ King’s Seminar, King’s College London (2013).

Forbidden Privileges and History-Writing in Medieval India

Nilanjan Sarkar*

This article uses evidence of non-hetero sexual relations in medieval India to examine the art of writing History and the making of Persianate textual archives. It focuses on political and sufi texts, and demonstrates the possibility of recovering a more textured knowledge of history-writing in pre-modern Islamicate India where texts remain the primary source for understanding and recovering histories.

… if an idle talker says to you, that the [holy] Qur’an has prohibited investigation and enquiry into the condition of the people, for it orders ‘Do not investigate into sins’, [say that] this prohibition

only applies to the dealings of individuals in relation to each other; for individuals are neither under obligation,

nor are they responsible to each other, nor answerable, nor entitled to command, nor bound to obedience.

Fatawa-i Jahandari, Delhi, c. 1350s1

This quote embodies the agonised relationship between religious and political Islam in medieval India, organised in an arena comprising ‘idle

The Medieval History Journal, 16, 1 (2013): 21–62Sage Publications Los angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/097194581301600102

1 ‘… ke īshān rā bā yek-dīgar kārī o dād o sitadī o guft o shunūdī o āmrī o farmānī nīst’; Barani, Fatawa: 115; trans. Afzal ud-Din, ‘The Fatāwā-i Jahāndārī’: 162. References

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 18, 2016mhj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://mhj.sagepub.com/

22 Nilanjan Sarkar

The Medieval History Journal, 16, 1 (2013): 21–62

talker(s)’, ‘sin’, the ‘individual’ and ‘obedience’ and is structured carefully: the author acknowledges disobedience of Qur’anic injunctions regarding sin by individuals, with the tactful use of ‘idle ( fazūl(ī))’ forewarning us of moral laxity and recalcitrance.2

This article uses evidence of parallel, non-hetero sexual practices as an entry-point to profile the Islamicate ‘political’ archive in medieval India. Information is derived from a variety of sources but most prominently from Persian historical chronicles and other texts connected to the mainstream political spectrum.3 Despite its exploratory nature based on piecemeal evidence culled from various contexts, the article aims to comment on several intercalated issues—languages and modes of historical recording, medieval scribal cultures, subjective identities in textual archives and perhaps most importantly, re-reading of medieval Indian Persianate archives.4 In fact, an underlying strain is the suggestion to map unconnected, ‘minor’ evidence to enable a more textured history, especially for the period from c. AD 1200–1500 which is still dominated by ‘political’ texts and is especially wanting in new source materials. A possible way to overcome this limitation is through a more nuanced perusal of available sources. The article also hopes to amplify the complex, pragmatic tensions at the crossroads of religious rectitude and political morality that was systemic in Islamic cultures of the time, as also juxtapose the hegemony of languages of control with the dynamics of lived experience; and it is a rare opportunity to be able to profile the individual (albeit indirectly) in a collective, statist archive.

from Persian sources are cited as ‘text/trans.’; for readability, diacritics are limited to transliterations from texts only, but the ain and hamzeh are marked everywhere.

2 ‘Religious’ and ‘political’ Islam refer to the textual/canonical/faith & belief-based practices of Islam and the actions of Muslim political rulers respectively.

3 The structural scaffolding of these texts is the political ‘state’, which I have chosen to de-centre; as such (and to retain focus on my theme) I do not frame this article in ‘gender’, ‘state’, ‘power’, ‘periodisation’ and other related meta-debates.

4 This article bypasses poetry, a vast corpus that flourished in Persian (and later Urdu), and an important source of information for same-sex relations. For the Delhi Sultanate, see the discussion of the ‘sacred/profane’ in Sharma, Amir Khusrau: 40–51; and Losensky and Sharma trans., In the Bazaar of Love: xi–liii; for the later Mughal/Urdu period—and focusing especially on women—see Naim, ‘Transvestic Words?’: 42–66; Petievich, ‘Doganas and Zanakhis’; and Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: 220–28 passim.



Forbidden Privileges and History-Writing 23


Colonial historiography of the subcontinent often included references to non-hetero/same-sex liaisons in histories of other topics, but never considered them worthy of study in itself. This was largely due to a tacit, even unconscious, acceptance of a field of historical analysis that fenced off un-‘Victorian’ subjects of study, despite their visibility.5 Thus, for example, one reads of ‘androgyny’ in ancient Indian art and sculpture as part of an aesthetic concern of art-visual histories but with almost no comment on the causes for its appearance or depiction in relation to practices in society; likewise in a prosopographical medieval historiography, eunuchs occupying important political offices find sanforised mention, a case in point being that of Malik Kafur, a leading military general in fourteenth century Delhi. To be fair, there has been some interest in studying non-hetero sexual practices in Indian history as academic categories of analysis have evolved. Two books—Same-Sex Love in India (2001) and Queering India (2002)—are most prominent, and together make a case for the presence of ‘same-sex’ love through Indian history, arguing that earlier times were less socially conservative and angst-ridden about such practices, relationships and associations.6

A significant contribution of Same-Sex Love in India is the difference it makes between ‘sex’ and ‘love’—an indication of the importance of nuance in the reading of these archives. Studies dealing with non-hetero sexual practices in Islamic societies, especially those that go back to pre-modern times, have repeatedly emphasised the need to rework or abandon modern categories of analysis for more inclusive ones—if seemingly ambiguous and overlapping, even callous and irreverent, from our current

5 See Burton, Love, War and Fancy: 175f; and Elliot & Dowson, History of India, vol. 3: 155n1, 208n2. This reticence was part of a wider, élite denial of such acts: in a case concerning an alleged sexual relationship between two female schoolteachers in Edinburgh in 1811, the House of Lords ruled that ‘a British woman is incapable of such an act’. Interestingly, the ‘witness’, one Jane Cumming, was unreliable ‘because she was of illegitimate birth, colored and a native of India […] several of the Lords claim[ed] that such lascivious behaviour might exist in Miss Cumming’s native India […]’; cf. Brooten, Love Between Women: 189; and for details, Moore, ‘“Something More Tender Still than Friendship”’: 513–17.

6 Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India; Vanita (eds), Queering India. A similar argument—about India’s ‘tolerance’, then and now, is made in studies of eunuchs like Reddy, With Respect to Sex, while a counter-argument identifying the homogenising tendencies of ‘modernity’ as the cause of less tolerance appears in Menon (eds), Sexualities: xv–xvi. Vanita and Kidwai’s studies had several useful precursors, but mostly in the form of individual articles.



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point-of-view—to apprehend those times better. Terms like ‘homoeroticism’, ‘homoaffectionalism’, ‘homosociality’, ‘formal friendships’, ‘same-sex’, etc. often accompanied with, or as near-translations of, words from non-English languages are used in these studies to underline the inability of current academic vocabulary in English to capture the nuances of the subject.7 Most dramatically, Andrews and Kalpaklı have struck through available words to suggest their inability to come up with new terms yet asserting the inapplicability of current terms for their study.8 Further, linguistic complexities of the original and translated languages need to be borne in mind—classical languages need to be approached in accordance with the literary, aesthetic, social and legal conventions of the time to appreciate both their apparent and implied meanings. Using modern categories uncritically would mean transposing inapplicable identities backwards in time:9 for instance, it is easily demonstrated that there is no single term to denote sexual relations between a biological male and a castrated male (eunuch)—a seemingly common presence in the archives of this article.

7 For these usages see Wright and Rowson, Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature; Hardman, Homoaffectionalism, especially: 142–65; Goitein, ‘Formal Friendship in the Medieval Near East’ and Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India. See also Rowson, ‘The Effeminates of Early Medina’ for the diverse use of mukhannas in early Islam; and Gilmour-Bryson, ‘Sodomy and the Knights Templar’ and Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland: 11–12, for variant uses of ‘sodomy’ in Europe.

In this article, I have presumed words like mukhannas, mābūn and naqsī as referring to the passive partner and bachchebāzī as referring to the active partner, in both instances presuming anal sex since that seems to be implied though no specific details are provided in the sources appeared. In both cases, I have used ‘sodomy/sodomite’ in translation. I have found ‘non-hetero’ to be more useful to address the evidence, though in some instances I have used ‘same-sex’ to stress its homosexuality in the pre-modern context.

The closest reference to detail ‘during’ a sexual act is in the following line: ‘This illegitimate traitor, while being sodomized by the Sultan, which is a strange state, would complain about other faithful nobles, ān harāmzāde gaddār dar h ālāt-i tams [lit., in the state/condition of deflowering/sensual intercourse] ke hālatī bū al-‘ajab ast az mulūk-i mukhālif-i khud bā sultān qutb al-dīn galhā kard, Barani, Tarikh: 400, emphasis mine; partial trans. in Elliot & Dowson, History of India, vol. 3: 220; complete trans. in Vanita and Kidwai (eds), ibid.: 134.

8 Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: 24: ‘… if for example, we were to mention that it be read “homoerotic sexuality” [… it indicates] that homoerotic (or homo-anything) and sexuality are words belonging to discourses that did not exist in the period under examination.’

9 In a different context, Richard M. Eaton has made a similar argument regarding the use of the terms ‘missionary activity’ and ‘conversion’; cf., ‘Shrines, Cultivators and Muslim “Conversion” in Punjab and Bengal, 1300–1700’.





There is thus a dual problem of ‘misapplication’ and ‘inadequacy’ of categories of analysis.10 Somewhat counter-productively, nuanced modern categories like ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘queer’, ‘bisexual’, etc. trigger context-insensitive meanings, or imply a labelling that is alien, even unfair, to the reality of medieval Islamicate India. According to Judith Butler, ‘[b]eing called a name is also a way by which a subject is constituted’, by the prior power that it possesses to determine the components and contours of its formation;11 those dealing with societies, cultures and times removed from the ‘modern’ must be especially careful in employing identity-categories catering to more recent times. Thus, I do not say (nor agree) with statements like ‘Babar, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, is said to have been gay […]’.12

Even a cursory reading of the medieval Islamicate archive will reveal the extent of overlapping, ambiguous and flexible references to what ‘may’ be apprehended by a litany of terms—both in Persian and in translation.13 The Tarikh and the Fatawa contain multiple references of this sort, placed in binary opposition to the more ‘heterosexual’ elements of fear, awe, majesty, grandeur, pomp, dignity, etc., these being the benchmarks of proper, Islamic kingship. The principal reason for this complexity is of ‘voice’—who speaks, for whom and for what end? The texts cited here were invariably written by ‘ālims—privileged and élite in profession and social inclination, educated in Islam, often occupying important

10 This argument has been made by several scholars from different perspectives. Briefly, see Lagrange, ‘The Obscenity of the Vizier’, where he argues that the medieval did not conceive of homosexuality in the modern sense; El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, for a remarkable analysis of the misapplication of ‘homosexuality’ to same-sex relations in pre-modern Islam; Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: 18 underline how modern terms ‘distort’; and Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’: 333 believes that modern terms and concepts ‘simply did not exist’ in medieval times.

11 Butler, Excitable Speech: 2. However, Butler, ibid. also says that ‘by being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call.’ By contrast, see the quote of Martin Bauman in Lagrange, ‘The Obscenity of the Vizier’: 161, ‘No, in the end all I could conclude was that the fault lay with the categorization itself, that crude and elementary tool the inadequacy of which becomes more evident the deeper one probes’. The question of terms in the Indian context is discussed in Vanita (eds), Queering India, Introduction.

12 Khan, ‘Sexual Exiles’: 292; emphasis mine.13 Persian words like ‘aish (sensuality), ‘ashrat (pleasure), kāmrānī (gratifying one’s

desires), jawānī (youthfulness) and translated words like ‘dissipation’, ‘pleasure’, ‘sensuality’, ‘licentious habits’, ‘youthfulness’, etc. may refer to ‘hetero’ and ‘non-hetero’ sexual activity.



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official/courtly positions.14 Written by men about men and societies of men, they are the principal and official voice of History. This voice is hegemonic in many ways, not least because it flattens ‘ambiguous’ sexual practices that then peep through occasional and/or incidental references. Only heterosexual masculinity has a voice, a language—that which fits the agenda of written History. The muffling of variety is its hallmark; heteronormative hegemony—both political and social—its objective. If patriarchy is about power and dominance, ‘his-story’ is an anxious narrative of discipline, order and control.15 Categories of ‘non-men’ (women, children) or ‘thwarted’ women (eunuchs, effeminates) are almost always mentioned in relation to the master-narrative of men. ‘Men thus become for us the norm, the universal subjects of history, against which women, children and other less complete in their humanity should be measured.’16

One cannot, in retrospect, give these other sexual practices a language or voice because ‘the language of power that articulated them never meant to elevate them, only to subordinate them’.17 But by amplifying their presence we may be able to partially access and recover their histories—and ‘further’ histories—from within the master narrative. And with reference to the epigraph, it allows us to understand why texts struggling to create a sense of political community felt obliged to acknowledge the assertive independent agency of the individual in those times.

‘Al-Hind’ in the ‘Dar al-Islam’

Islamicate textual–sexual–political anxieties need to be placed in the noetic economy of the wider Arabo-Persian literary world because of its strong influence on canonical education; locating the political and textual traditions of the subcontinent within it will allow us to identify important overlaps and departures, the latter revealing an important set of circumstantial and other preferences.

14 Foucault’s suggestion that in pre-modern societies sex was ‘the province of religious and moral authorities’ usefully frames the ‘voice’ I am referring to over here; quoted in Cameron and Kulick (eds), The Language and Sexuality Reader: 3.

15 Carter, ‘Language Control as People Control in Medieval Islam’: 65f, talks of the ‘close relationship of language and law in Islam’ and how Arabic grammar served both as a ‘medium and a tool in the struggle for control of Muslim society.’ One challenge to this male voice is via feminist/gender studies, but they remain minimal for this period.

16 O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service’: 47. Kesavan, ‘Nowhere to Call Home’: 182, uses ‘thwarted women’ to refer to groups of MSM.

17 This is discussed best in Butler, Excitable Speech: 1–41.





The official basis of Islam’s anxiety with same-sex relations comes from injunctions in the Qur’an which prohibit non-hetero sexual practices (condemning the People of Lot), and from the Hadith, which determines the actions of all believers, governs and punishes them.18 The operative word here is ‘official’; prejudice against non-hetero sexual practices was a religious commandment that entered the psyche of the élite and impacted upon their knowledge, forming the basis of their vocabulary. Thus, in all formal, textual settings—dominated by conservative ‘ālims, heterosexual men whose intellect (and idea of correct History) derived principally from orthodoxy—it was ‘natural’ and ‘correct’ to condemn non-hetero sexual practices and view it as corrupt and depraved. Coupled with these was Islam’s preoccupation with fitna, caused by unfettered sexualities induced especially by women, but also by various categories of ‘non-men’.19 Only heterosexual, reproductive sex was ideal and the heterosexual male the axis of the morally correct social–sexual universe.

The debates that flowed out of these commandments were immense and complex, not least because (ironically) the promised rewards of Paradise included handsome boys and rivers of wine.20 Anxiety increased especially

18 Cf., Ali, Al-Qur’ān: 76, 141; Jamal, ‘The Story of Lot’; and Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 30. This prohibition appeared in sufi discourses as well: for the Delhi Sultanate, see Digby, ‘The Tuhfa i nasā’ih of Yūsuf Gadā’: 112, ‘If you commit sodomy or adultery, even kissing and touching/The good deeds of all your life become as nothing’, and n 46 infra.

19 Women were regarded as ‘potential disrupters of sexual morality for most of their lives’, unlike prepubescent boys who would grow up into bearded men one day. See the very interesting discussion—surrounding fitna and the writings of Ibn Taimiyya—in Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries: 7f. Noth and Conrad, The Early Arabic Historical Tradition: 27–37, identify fitna as an important concern/trope in early Arabic Islamic writings as conquests took the Faith farther.

20 This anxiety, as well as the historical background to Qur’anic injunctions, is explained in Daniel, ‘Arab Civilization and Male Love’; and Roscoe, ‘Precursors of Islamic Male Homosexualities’. However, Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: 284–91, argues that these ‘rewards’ are based on incorrect readings of the holy text.

Wine was another ‘forbidden’ yet rampant social reality in Islamic cultures. For the Delhi sultanate, see Barani’s innumerable references to wine-drinking but note especially his remark in ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji’s reign: ‘The prevention of drinking being found to be very difficult, the sultan gave orders that if the liquor […] was drunk privately in people’s own houses [… then the royal informers] were not to interfere in any way and were not to enter the houses or arrest the offenders’; Tarikh: 286/181; also Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: 276; for the Mughals, see Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity: 91–93, from amongst many examples. More generally, see McAuliffe, ‘The Wines of Earth and Paradise’; and Keuny, The Rhetoric of Sobriety.



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because intellectuals of every school of interpretation found themselves in societies and communities where parallel, non-hetero sexual practices held true for people of various classes. It thus entered textual debates not just on purity, pollution, dream interpretation and medicine, but also on more mundane subjects because it had far-reaching implications even for everyday activities like praying in the mosque.21

This anxiety was not particular to Islam; it is evidenced in the official position of almost all established religions despite the presence of androgyny in the myths and legends of most of them.22 What is important to note is that contrary to the extreme intolerance of the medieval Christian world, the conservatism that we note in Islamic textual archives was in fact mostly limited to the texts. Non-hetero sexual practices rarely led to a death sentence in medieval Islam; nor does it seem that it was, or could be, used as an accusation against heterosexual men to question their masculinity.23

21 This was a wide-ranging intellectual activity in medieval Islam, with scholars and theologians from the various ‘schools’ of (Qur’anic) interpretation engaged in heated discussion about the meanings of religious injunctions. For the purposes of this article, the following are interesting representative examples. Katz, Body of Text: 24, 125–26 passim, argues that there were ‘significant and meaningful differences of opinion about individual issues’ amongst Islamic jurists, not least about sexual intercourse and pollution/taboo regarding sexual parts of the body; Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation: 38, discusses Ma’afiri’s Urjuzah fi ta‘bir al-ru’ya ‘ala sifat khalq al-insan, the earliest known dream manual in verse, which discusses the meaning of ‘dreaming of men and women, as well as youths’ (emphasis mine); and Digby, ‘The Tuhfa i nasā’ih of Yūsuf Gadā’: 122, asks followers to not go to ‘heathen women for the interpretation of dreams’. In medicine, concerns over male virility, sexually transmitted diseases and non-hetero sexual practices appeared early on: for the classical Islamic lands, see Nathan, ‘Medieval Arabic Medical Views on Male Homosexuality’: 37–39; Rosenthal, ‘Ar-Râzî on the Hidden Illness’; and Rowson, ‘The Categorization of Gender’; for the Indian subcontinent, see Zahuri, ‘A Medical Treatise of the Time of King Muhammad Tughlaq’: 176; and Speziale, ‘The Relation Between Galenic Medicine and Sufism’: 161. Finally, see Cook, Commanding Right: 240, 443 and passim for anxieties regarding the ‘conduct of boys’ (who should be prevented from wearing silk, golden rings, anklets or earrings) and ‘wrongs in the mosque’ (which included ‘the presence of boys … in the mosque’). For an outstanding overview of the circulation of medical knowledge in the medieval Islamic world, see Pormann and Savage–Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine.

22 Roscoe, ‘Priests of the Goddess’; and Parker, ‘The Myth of the Heterosexual’. 23 I have found only one example of a death sentence being advised, in Fatawa: 204/297

where Barani imposes it on those ‘who have sexual relations with children, bar bachche mashghūl shud’; for medieval Europe, see Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe; Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: 177–83; Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, chapter 1 for the hunt for ‘sexual heretics’; and Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: 12–13.





In Islam, such practices between males were part of a ‘normal’ heterosexual profile where sex with women—legally permissible only in conjugality—was for the social and religious obligations of marriage and procreation, while lust, yearning, (sexual) satisfaction, fulfilment and the like were often imagined and realised in the more libertinous settings of majlises, amidst poetry and wine, in bath- and coffee-houses and other private and public spaces (including the court), with beardless boys and eunuchs who acted as ‘ersatz women’.24

If religion and its knowledge formed the basis of formal education, familiarity with canonical ‘genres’ and styles was an equally important vector in the making of a pre-modern Muslim intellectual. As such, scribes imbibed canonical tropes and motifs and reproduced them within the variables of their local settings. What is significant is that this reproduction of traditions happened selectively: over a period of time certain categories of literatures popular in classical Arabic and Persian lands were neither subscribed to nor imitated in newer Islamic polities and societies, perhaps because of their content. Thus, a lot of ‘bawdy’ and ‘ribald’ texts were made invisible through lack of academic subscription, imitation and/or reproduction.25 Note, for our purposes, that texts like those written by al-Jahiz (Nine Essays, ninth century), al-Tifashi (The Delight of Hearts, thirteenth century), Nafzawi (Perfumed Garden, fourteenth century) and Obeyd Zakani (One Hundred Maxims, fourteenth century)26—all with high homoerotic content but with clear undertones of social and political

24 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World: 28 uses the term ‘ersatz women’; and Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 142 writes about Jahidh’s Mufakharat al-Jawari wal Ghilman (‘Concubines and Youths in Competition’, ninth century). The connection between majlises, where poetry was recited, wine was drunk and liaisons with boys were often initiated, is a repetitive motif in political and other texts of the time; see Yarshater, ‘The Theme of Wine-Drinking’; and Southgate, ‘Men, Women and Boys’.

25 Texts with homoerotic motifs were common in classical Arabic and Persian: see Wright and Rowson, Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature; and Giffen, Theory of Profane Love.

26 There was also a lot of banter—especially self-irony and parody—surrounding same-sex liaisons, the latter a reflection of confidence and comfort with such practices, as evident most prominently in al-Tifashi, The Delight of Hearts; see also Lagrange, ‘The Obscenity of the Vizier’: 162–63. Once again, no such source exists for Islamicate medieval India. Zakani was known especially for his parodies of classical Persian high culture, as noted by O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service’: 74. For an appreciation of his literary activities, see Zakani, Ethics of the Aristocrats: 7–30; and for the ‘rumour’ of Zakani’s visit to India, see Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: 291–92.



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wisdom—find no mention in texts written in the Indian subcontinent despite its integration through migrants, travellers and traders with the classical Islamic lands which made the circulation of other (more conformist) texts, ideas and politics possible.27

Contra-Heterosexuality?

Since the purpose of this article is to examine the social dynamics and intellectual strategies of history-writing, negotiating evidence (on non-hetero sexual practices) from a dominantly political, statist, hetero sexual archive in frontier Islamic polities has posed specific challenges. Attempting to be non-judgemental in a hyper-judgemental corpus has meant that evidence has had to be extracted from a language that deployed anti-mechanisms towards it; simultaneously, trying to apprehend practices as actions and not ‘identities’ (thus avoiding the identity-sensitive categories of modern academia) has made articulation of the evidence a tense exercise.

My concern here is both ‘historical’ and ‘historiographical’, with the politics of history-writing then and in later centuries.28 I have thus not entered debates on ‘gender-state’/‘gender-power’/‘power-sex’ because it would alter the focus of this article, namely to amplify the presence of a possible ‘history’ of practices embedded in another history (that of the political state). Accordingly, I have interwoven my comments with the examples, examining the varied prongs of historical recording, what

27 ‘The tenth century AD literary theorist Abu Hilal al-‘Askari compared essay and sermon forms […] while the sermon most often is devoted to religious concerns, prose writing serves political authority. In fact, even the most secular or profane of the essays or epistles of al-Jahiz retain some sermon-like character. Yet even his most sermon-like essays seem to have served political authority’; cf. al-Jahiz, Nine Essays of al-Jahiz: 6, emphasis mine; yet al-Jahiz or his style of writing remained almost unknown in the subcontinent. For the other texts mentioned, see al-Tifashi, The Delight of Hearts; Nafzawi, The Glory of the Perfumed Garden; Gürgan, ‘Images of Sexuality’, especially: 53–93; and Sprachmann, Suppressed Persian. Wink, Al-Hind, 3 volumes till date, outlines how the Indian subcontinent (‘al-Hind’) was connected to the larger Islamic world (‘dār al-Islām’).

28 Nonetheless, I am aware that a lot of what I say in the following pages—the examples as well as my comments—may well contribute to each and all of these debates. It is important to underline here that questions of gender and sexuality in pre-modern societies need not always be organised in modern frameworks of analysis. Also, this article addresses only one of several contentious discourses about archives and how we read them.





they reveal in a wider context and how we may engage with them, thus enabling a narrative from fragmentary evidence. The ‘state’ is never too far from this because it was the context in which a lot of this evidence was produced; I do return to the ‘state’ in the Conclusion, granting it a corollary status vis-à-vis its historical-textual production.29

The Sultanate of Delhi

An early reference to a mukhannas comes from Juzjani’s Tabaqat-i Nasiri. The death of Sultan Shams al-Din Iltutmish (r. AD 1210–36) led to a crisis in leadership where his two sons, a daughter and a grandson were made rulers in quick succession, each being deposed/replaced by powerful nobles. The second of these was Sultan Rukn al-Din Firuz Shah, who reigned for a few months in AD 1236. While recording his reign, Juzjani writes that

[the sultan’s] misfortune was this, that his inclinations were wholly towards buffoonery, sensuality, and diversion, and that he was entirely enslaved by dissipation and debauchery; and most of his honorary dresses and his presents were made to such people as musicians and singers, buffoons and sodomites [mukhannasān].30

Referring to the same period, Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuzshahi says: ‘for thirty years after [Iltutmish], during the reigns of his sons, the affairs of the country had fallen into confusion through the youth and sensuality [of his immediate successors]…their lives were passed in pleasure.’31 Note that the singular example of Rukn al-Din Firuz from the contemporary Tabaqat of Juzjani is expanded by Barani (in his Tarikh) to include ‘all’ Iltutmish’s children to explain the state of political affairs of the period. The connection between moral depravity and sovereign, kingly power—a recurrent motif in these political chronicles—should be noted here.

29 The examples that follow are arranged both chronologically and thematically, depending on the number of examples I have used as illustrations: where there are several of a kind across centuries, I have arranged them chronologically; in other instances, I have clubbed them thematically because the examples were few. At their best, the examples are representative and not exhaustive.

30 Juzjani, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, vol. 1: 457/636. 31 Barani, Tarikh: 26/98, emphasis mine. (The 2005 edition has inconsistent pagination

between pp. 18–26; I have used the number printed at the top of the page.).



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Accordingly, Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Balban (r. AD 1266–90), a ‘strong’ ruler, keeps admonishing his younger son Bughra Khan for his ‘convivial parties’, wine-drinking and ‘dissipation’, warning that rulership would not be easy for him with such habits.32 At one point the successful ruler–father tells his confidants: ‘I know that whatever principles of government I may enforce upon this my son, he, through his devotion to pleasure, will disregard.’ The woeful awareness of disobedience by the prince to the political wisdom and counsel of the father will echo later, in a similar lack of obedience, combined with an awareness of the limited political authority of kings in society.33 Barani records Balban as admonishing Bughra Khan once again, but this time for the ‘youthful passions and indulgence’ of Bughra Khan’s sons Kaikhusrau and Kaikubad, these habits making them ‘unfit to govern my kingdom, if it should descend on them’. Khizr Khan, another successor, also seemingly ‘gave himself up to pleasure and debauchery, and buffoons and strumpets obtained the mastery over him’.34

One of the most successful rulers of the Delhi Sultanate was ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji (r. AD 1298–1316) whose singularly innovative idea of price regulations and astonishing military and political successes come in for unadulterated appreciation from Barani in his Tarikh, and in the normative Fatawa as a recipe for political stability and success. One would imagine that ‘Ala’ al-Din would have a heroic status in the narratives of the period, but the following extracts show that early references to moral depravity in fact apprehend more objectionable habits found later in the sultan, at least for Barani.

Alau-d din, in the pride of youth, prosperity, and boundless wealth … plunged into dissipation and pleasure, sultān ‘alā’ al-dīn az mastī-ye jawānī o mastī-ye dawlat o mastī-ye gañjhā-i bi-andāzeh o mastī-ye hashm o khadm o pīl o asp bisyār b‘aish o kāmrānī-i mashghūl shud.35

One would be inclined to believe that here ‘dissipation’ and ‘pleasure’ refers to women and wine; however, the following information—also from the early years of ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji’s reign—may bring in another

32 Barani, Tarikh: 120–21/120. 33 Ibid.: 95/121. The issue of limited authority of kings is underlined here in light of the

epigraph.34 Ibid.: 121f/123, 125–26 (for Kaikubad), 363/207 (for Khizr Khan). 35 Ibid.: 246–47/160–61.





perspective. In the third year of ‘Ala’ al-Din’s reign, he acquired Kafur as slave, later made Malik Nāib (Deputy Ruler). Kafur’s worth is evident from his title Hazār Dinārī (lit., ‘a thousand dinars’). Barani’s agonised words say: ‘Kafur Hazar-Dinari, who was made Malik-naib [… and] whose beauty captivated ‘Alau-d din’, sultān ‘alā’ al-dīn āshufta jamāl-i ū gasht […] in the third year of his reign ‘Ala’ al-din had little to do beyond attending to his pleasures […]’.36

Kafur, militarily a highly accomplished eunuch-slave, contributed significantly to the consolidation of ‘Ala’ al-Din’s rule in the farther corners of the empire. Fierce loyalty being a central element of military slavery, it was considered heightened in the case of eunuchs who were marked by their sexual identity. Being outside ordinary social-sexual registers and thus occupying in-between spaces, their only bond was with their masters/owners.37 Their ‘non-men’ sexual status coupled with physical and military prowess meant that they were regularly employed in a gamut of coveted portfolios of trust and loyalty (e.g., guards of the harem), which brought them in close physical proximity to the rulers. If some of them did get sexually involved with their masters/rulers, this would not be unimaginable and was not out of the ordinary as a sexual practice either.

Accordingly, Kafur’s personal military prowess and successes meant that he was given important assignments as reward—arguably also favoured because of his sexual intimacy with ‘Ala’ al-Din. For someone like Barani, Kafur elicited severe condemnation despite acknowledgement of his military success. After praising ‘Ala’ al-Din’s reign as a time when ‘several remarkable events and matters which had never been witnessed or heard of in any age or time, and probably never will again’, he says:

The overthrow of [‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji’s] throne and family arose from certain acts of his own […] He was infatuated with Malik Naib Kafur, and made him

36 Barani, Tarikh: 251/163, 168.37 ‘The eunuchs, by virtue of their castration, were removed from the normal path that

leads across the boundaries between childhood and gendered adulthood. And unlike the hermaphrodite […] whose very existence confuses those boundaries, or the voluntary celibate, who defies them, the eunuch did not violate the natural process of maturation since he was completely outside of it’; cf. Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries: 145n256. As an extension of the same argument, I am suggesting that the deracinated identity of the eunuch—much like the military slave—enhanced their singular attachment (and thus loyalty) to the masters. This also explains why both eunuchs and slaves continued to be valuable ‘gifts’ to rulers.



34 Nilanjan Sarkar


commander of his army and wazir … this eunuch and minion held the chief place in his regards.38

Kafur, who went on to ‘rule’ after ‘Ala’ al-Din’s death from dropsy in AD 1316, ‘married’ one of the royal queens and remained in power for 35 days, till a group of people entered his chambers one night and ‘severed his wicked head from his foul body’.39

Kafur’s death paved the way for Qutb al-Din (r. AD 1316–20)—one of the many sons of ‘Ala’ al-Din whom Barani had earlier accused of ‘dissipation and licentious habits’—to become sultan. Barani’s record of this sultan says:

There was a young Parwari, named Hasan [initially called Tauba, later Sultan Nasir al-Din Khusrau Khan], who had been brought up by Malik Shadi, the Naib-hajib [Chamberlain]. The sultan took an inordinate liking for this youth. In the very first year of his reign […] his passion and temerity carried him so far that he raised the youth to the office of wazir, and he was so doting that he could never endure his absence for a moment.

And further,

[t]he sultan plunged into sensual indulgences openly and publicly, by night and by day, and the people followed his example […] licentiousness spread among the Mussulmans […].40

38 Barani, Tarikh: 367–68/207–8. Also important was Barani’s view that the privileges of the old aristocracy and loyal servants of the crown should be protected. Ibid.: 392/216, he complains about the rise of ‘youths of new-made fortunes lacking experience, nau-dawlatī be-tajurbe o jawānān’; also, idem, Fatawa, Advice # 19, ‘On How the Helpers and Supporters of the State ought to be Adorned with High Birth, Noble Lineage and Meritorious Character so that Governmental Business may be Regulated in the Best Possible Way’: 280–91/412–29 and # 22, ‘On the Advantages of the King’s Preservation of Ancient (Royal and Noble) Households’: 305–17/450–68 respectively. It is useful to remember here that with the accession of Sultan Firuz Shah Tughluq Barani had lost his royal appointment and all attendant privileges (reducing him to abject poverty) and most of his writings (including a new recension of the Tarikh) hoped to regain courtly privileges for himself.

39 Barani, Tarikh: 376/210. It should be underlined here that not all eunuch-slaves who rose to political eminence did so because they were sexually involved with the sultan or the royalty; in fact, most eunuchs, in various courtly/political service, remain invisible in the records. The example of Imad al-Din Raihan, another eunuch–military commander who even controlled power briefly (in AD 1253) in Delhi, is significant; cf. Kumar, The Emergence of the Delhi Sultanate: 269–73.

40 Barani, Tarikh: 381–82, 384/211–14, emphasis mine. Compare the price of a ‘handsome slave-boy, ghulāmche amrad-i khūbrū’ in his time with that in his father’s reign only a few





Barani also includes some interesting, unique details about the expression of non-hetero sexual practice in private and in public; whilst mourning the sultan’s various negligences, he adds that

he cast aside all regard for decency, and presented himself decked out in the trinkets and apparel of a female before his assembled company […] In his recklessness, he made a Gujarati, named Tauba, supreme in his palace, va az nihāyat-i bī bākī taube nām-i gujrātī maskhar rā dar majlis-i khud istīlā dād, and this low-born bhand would call the nobles by the name of wife or mother, va ān bhāñd-i kam asl mulūk rā nām-i zan o mādar mīguft, would defile and befoul their garments, and sometimes made his appearance in company stark naked, talking obscenity […]

and

[the sultan] would be publicly kissing him [… and he would be] publicly offering his body to the sultan […]

and finally,

[a] surge of passion engulfed the sultan at the coquettish crying and wailing of the delicate one. He took him in his arms and hugged him, kissed him on the lips, be-hīch sibīlī, and threw him on the floor, bar zamīn zade būd, and did what he had to do.41

years earlier (‘20 to 30 tañkās’; ibid.: 314/196): the inflation should alert us to the increased value ascribed to these ‘products’ in his reign. Khusrau Khan’s reign has been much debated by modern historians for his sexual liaison with the ruler: for various details about him, his background and reign, as well as the caste of Parwari/Barwari, see Lal, ‘Sultan Nasiruddin Khusrau Shah (1320 AD)’; Sharma, ‘Nasar-ud-din Khusru [sic] Shah’; Srivastava, ‘Origin of Nasir-ud-din Khusrau Shah of Delhi’. See also Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites’: 57 and passim for some interesting comments on Barani’s projection of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq as a ‘saviour of the Faith’—an epithet earned as much for ending the reign of Nasir al-Din Khusrau Khan as for checking the advance of the Mongols; likewise, the central theme of Khusrau’s Tughluq Namah is the triumph of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq ‘over the regicide Hasan Khusrau Khan’ and its last 2 chapters deal with the arrest and execution of Khusrau Khan; cf., Faridabadi, ‘The Tughluq-Namah’.

41 Barani, Tarikh: 395–96, 391, 407/217–18; the second and third quotes do not appear in Elliot & Dowson’s translation, but see Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: 135. More interestingly, see Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: 286, who considers ‘Tauba’ to be ‘Thobo’ on the grounds that he has ‘often heard [it] in Kathiawad’ and thinks that ‘what Barani wants to say is that this Thobo used to abuse the wives and mothers of the great Amirs’. I disagree with this reading and note instead the details of transvestism in this quote, a rarity in sources of the time.



36 Nilanjan Sarkar


The influence of Khusrau Khan, according to Barani, was such that shortly before being murdered the Sultan is alleged to have said that ‘if all the world were turned upside down, and if all his companions were of one voice in accusing Khusrau, he would sacrifice them all for one hair of [Khusrau’s] head.’42 Between the Sultan and Tauba/Hasan/Khusrau Khan, the violation of the organisational poles of Islamic probity—religion and blasphemy, public and private, masculine and feminine, heterosexuality and homosexuality, domination and subordination, élitism and subalternity, purity and pollution—was complete, that too in the royal court in the capital city.43

Khusrau Khan—like Kafur—would seize power briefly (as Sultan Nasir al-Din Khusrau Shah) after murdering Qutb al-Din in AD 1320. He comes in for a vitriolic attack from Barani: not only had he actually murdered the Sultan, his brief reign was also marked by illegitimacy of political rights, insult of Islam and rise of the low born (Hindus and their kin), which could potentially spell doom for political Islam.44

The various anxieties mentioned above find resonance in Barani’s other work, the normative, homiletic Fatawa. Despite being a prosopographic text, its purpose—to instruct Muslim rulers in the art of proper governance—ensures that a lot of information in it is about ‘the inhabitants of the kingdom, ham-i ahl-i mamlakāt’, since that was the performative arena of kingly duties. This is distinctly different from the Tarikh which, being a chronicle, focuses mostly on events and activities of the ruling class.

The evidence that we gather from the Fatawa apprehends, with greater agony, the relationship that religious admonitions have with the realities of earthly life in Islam. From the outset, Barani’s mention of sodomists

42 Barani, Tarikh: 406/222. The metaphor of ‘hair’ is very potent in Islam; cf., Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 35, ‘there is an undeniable fetishism of hair in Islam, the significance of which is both sexual and religious’; and Rowson, ‘Homoerotic Liaisons Among the Mamluk Elite in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria’: 236, where he quotes al-Bahhathi (d. AD 1071): ‘And his black curly hair (sha‘r) exhausts the wellsprings of my verses (shi‘ri)’. For a rare visual depiction of this sexual aspect of hair, that too in a sufi context, see the miniature illustration from Jami’s Haft Awrang (completed in Mashhad, Iran in AD 1556–57) in Minnisale, ‘The Dynamics of the Gaze in Mughal Painting’: 51.

43 Ironically, the word ‘Tauba’ means ‘vowing to sin no more’, ‘repentance’, ‘penitence’, etc. Cf., Steingass, Dictionary: 333; Platts, Dictionary: 341.

44 Barani, Tarikh: 410–12/224; also, Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites’ for some examples of Barani’s pragmatic textual renditions.





(mukhannasān) seems to imply not just its acceptance as a practice, but its prevalence in the kingdom and most definitely in the capital city. Early in the text, he informs us that sodomists

should be prevented by being flogged from behaving like women, va mukhannas rā az tashbe-i kardan be-aurat … and should be compelled to leave the capital, and go to the countryside and obtain their means of livelihood through farming and other means.45

An example from the sufi saint Nizam al-Din ‘Awliya’s discourses, Favaid al-Fu‘ad, echoes this prevalence from a time slightly earlier than the Fatawa. While discussing types of ‘patience’ in September AD 1318, he says: ‘And then, if God forbid one […] falls into sin [e.g., by pursuing young boys], then there is “patience before the fire (of hell)”.’46

It is significant to note the nature of punishment recommended for these ‘sinners’ and ‘victims of passion’ in the Fatawa. While they should be ‘compelled’ to survive through more ‘respectable’ means like farming, Barani also makes clear that they should be exiled from the capital city, not killed. On the contrary, he tries to explain the acceptance of the practice of sodomy amongst the people both realistically and philosophically. In Advice # 11, dealing with the ‘Establishment of Truth at the Centre’, he lists sodomy, liwātat, with a number of other sins and vices and then explains how the complete abolition of evil amongst the citizens is not possible

either through the guidance and preaching of the Prophets or through the dominion of a kingdom and the authority of kings […] the total suppression of sin and evil is among things impossible and beyond achievement; it cannot be brought within the realm of the possible.47

For our purposes, the cumulative inference from the quotations above is that while the ruler was expected to uphold the tenets of religion (which forbade non-hetero sexual practices), there was only an extent to which

45 Barani, Fatawa: 13/16–17.46 Dihlavi, Fava‘id al-Fu‘ad, §4: 50: 333/303; see also ibid.: §2: 33: 143/177, where ‘Ain

al-Quzat Hamadani uses ‘cavorting with boys’ to invite ‘blame’ upon himself. 47 Barani, Fatawa: 173/248–49. In fact, in a rather radical twist, Barani says that the

imperial officers should inform the king of ‘matters in which the Shari‘a cannot be enforced’ (or ‘cannot be brought to realisation’).



38 Nilanjan Sarkar


he could hope to achieve this and so, all he should try to achieve is to stop its ‘open and public practice’.48 Accordingly, on distant campaigns kings should not be too strict or severe and ‘should not investigate into the possession of handsome slave boys, ghulāmān-i sāhib-i jamāl’ by the soldiers.49

Further, having given us details in his Tarikh about the passions of the ruling classes, Barani is clever to not present the king as being free from vice in the Fatawa. His astuteness is evident in his attempt to combine the sinfulness of the person of the king with his duties as a ruler. Thus, on the one hand he warns that the king should not use the blessing of kingship as a means to sin,50 yet soon afterwards he says:

Sultan Mahmud…has still not prohibited, manah namī kunad, all enjoyment and pleasure to you…For Mahmud himself in his youth and middle age has enjoyed much of luxury and pleasure, and he has indulged in sensual pleasure and enjoyment in numerous ways.51

Somewhat tellingly, Barani recognises the contradictions of what he says and clearly does not expect his readers to accept this dystopia unconditionally. At one point he betrays a veiled surprise towards his own logic: ‘It is strange [ajab ānast] that in spite of his failure in supererogatory devotions and his commitment of carnal sins, a king is ranked among the prophets ….’52

48 Barani, Fatawa: 11, 13/13, 17. 49 Ibid.: 200, 242/291, 356. Importantly, he advises this restraint on the grounds that these

things would remind soldiers on long, distant campaigns of life in the capital city, thereby hinting at their prevalence and practice in the capital, resonating once again with the tenor of the epigraph here. There are important political significances here: the rule of Shari‘a is not supreme for the ruler; for politics to establish itself kingship needs to maintain an Aristotelian balance and not become so intrusive as to jeopardise the support of its subjects-citizens, even if it means overlooking or bypassing the Shari‘a. His idea of zawābit (‘state laws’) should be borne in mind in this context, ibid.: 218–19/318–20.

50 Ibid.: 13/16.51 Ibid.: 147/211. Note that Barani does not mention the sultan’s alleged boy-lover ‘Ayaz

by name even once. Studies of ‘Ayaz raise several questions about ‘voice’ and bias in modern historiography, but see Raza, ‘Mahmud’s ‘Ayaz in History’, which is a rare example of his assessment as an individual in historical texts.

52 Barani, Fatawa: 153/220. I have argued elsewhere that such contradictions of character, in Barani’s eyes, were in fact part of a discourse that articulated the official Islamic roles and duties of the ruler whilst simultaneously explaining as ‘human’ the blatant un-Islamic infelicities of character and behaviour; cf., Sarkar, ‘The Voice of Mahmūd’.





Lodis and Mughals

The most prominent example from this period is that of Shaykh Jamali (b. c. AD 1483), the peripatetic sufi and poet who finds mention in the reigns of Sikandar Lodi and the Mughal emperor Babur, and died fighting in Humayun’s Gujarat campaign in AD 1536. In his ornate tomb enclosure in Delhi is another grave, supposed to be of his ‘lover’ Kamali.53 Since the latter’s existence cannot be empirically verified, I am wary of making presumptions of any kind, but the fact that there is a second grave in an enclosure evidently made for one grave is worth noting; and even if one were to discount the ‘gossip’ of the second being that of a lover, the absence of alternative historical ‘gossips’ (e.g., of it being that of a favourite disciple or companion) is intriguing.54

We rely on the progenitor of the Great Mughals, the emperor Muhammad Zahiruddin Babur (r. AD 1526–30) himself, for evidence from his reign. In Baburnama, his memoir, he writes openly of his fascination with a boy who lived in the ördū bāzār, known to us only by his first name, Baburi.

Even his name was amazingly appropriate […] Occasionally Baburi came to me but I was so bashful that I could not look at him in the face, much less freely converse with him. [… One day] I found myself face to face with Baburi. I was so ashamed I almost went to pieces.55

53 See Beach, ‘Jamali-Kamali’: 8–19, 75–76. Stephen, Archaeology and Monumental Remains: 173 identifies ‘Kamali’ as a ‘brother of Jamali, but for this statement I have not been able to find any authority’—Stephen’s identification of Kamali as a ‘brother’ may well be a result of Victorian evasiveness; see also Sharma, Delhi and Its Neighbourhood: 58.

54 I disagree with Stephen, Archaeological and Monumental Remains: 173, that ‘there is room for a third grave on the left of the grave in the centre’, suggesting that this tomb was originally made for three graves. It seems fairly obvious that the tomb enclosure was in fact for one grave only (the middle one, of Shaykh Jamali) and the second grave was a later addition which introduced an imbalance in its spatial aesthetics much like Shah Jahan’s grave did inside the Taj Mahal. It is this inclusion of the grave so close to the sheikh’s own that is intriguing. I do not necessarily attribute any romantic or sexual significance to the inscriptions encircling the ceiling of the tomb, since those may be as much a sufi yearning for union with God as lament for a beloved; cf., Chase, Jamali-Kamali: 77–79 for a transliteration and translation of the Persian text.

55 Babur, Baburnama: 75a–76a; trans. in Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: 18.



40 Nilanjan Sarkar


Despite this inalienable confession, ironically, it is the same Babur’s severe chastisement of the poet Hilali (for having composed a book in which a young prince was described as a beloved of a sufi) that hints at the beginning of imperial textual unease with such motifs:

Hilali […] has made a dervish the lover and a king the beloved, a shameless strumpet at that. It is really an affront that, in the interest of his poem, [Hilali] describes a young man—and a king at that—as a brazen woman or prostitute.56

It would be the regnal fate of Humayun (r. AD 1528–30; 1540–56) to negotiate and oversee this imperial tension, heralding a more strident official textual heteronormativity. Interestingly, Humayun himself would be branded by his contemporaries as not being masculine enough, an indicator of changing attitudes in courtly circles, as political Islam once again found itself in a ‘frontier’ position in the subcontinent. While examining the ‘gender roles of warrior kings’ in early Mughal history, Anooshahr makes several insightful remarks about Humayun as king: rulers were expected to possess harsh martial characteristics, the infliction of violence and ability to bear hardship and pain being expressions of choice and not of necessity. Humayun had not scored well in any of these categories. Further, he lost his kingdom to the Suris (r. AD 1540–50) and regained it only with help from Shah Tahmasp of Iran, in whose kingdom he had sought refuge. In addition, his love for the ‘fine’ things of life conditioned his textual fate: the historians Gulbadan Banu Begam and Khwandamir describe his lavish coronation feasts attended by ‘youths, pretty girls and beautiful women’; and early in his reign his brother Kamran sent him some presents and an ode wherein Humayun had been compared to the archetypal beloved.57

Humayun’s inability to appropriate and manipulate textual language for himself either via an autobiography/memoir (like his father Babur), or through patronage (like his son Akbar) meant that the recording of

56 Quoted in Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’: 334. 57 Ibid.: 328, ‘Humayun’s indifference or failure to realise the importance of exerting

direct control over his image had dire consequences. Chroniclers such as Bayazid Bayat and Jawhar (men of relatively low military rank) compared the emperor with his rivals, including his brother Kamran and his Afghan enemy Sher Shah, in such a way as to suggest that Humayun had fallen short specifically in fulfilling gender roles appropriate to a warrior king, particularly regarding the categories of violence.’





his regnal years was left to unsympathetic pens influenced by formulaic understandings of kingly performativity (and identity), a profile that was deeply affected by the political instability of the Mughals in the first half of the sixteenth century.58 As Anooshahr astutely comments, ‘sexuality’ was not the organising trope of these details: ‘while an older man’s love for a youth was perfectly acceptable, sexual contact, and particularly sodomy, was condemned […] the crucial difference in gender roles [was] not between effeminate and manly, but between not-yet-man and adult male’, the latter—especially in his kingly roles, admired for cognisable heterosexual masculinity.59

This tension would get systematised in favour of heteronormativity over the following decades; official, political chronicles beginning from Akbar’s time (r. AD 1556–1605) no longer allow us to make same-sex associations involving royalty very easily.60 Imperial textual political ideology underwent a dramatic re-articulation under Akbar, focussing on a political masculinity that was singularly heterosexual, demanding similar adherence from its supporters and survived till well into Aurangzeb’s reign (r. AD 1666–1707).

In the high tide of Akbar’s reign, when it became known that one of his officials Ali Quli Khan Zaman was infatuated with the son of a camel driver, the emperor—in a heightened amplification of a heterosexual imperial ideological profile—asked the nobleman to repent his deeds and amend his evils ‘by good service’ and the camel-driver’s son to be sent to the court so that his deeds may be regarded ‘as not done, and exalt [him] by royal favours’.61 Although Jahangir (r. AD 1605–27) says in his

58 Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’: 331–33. See also Mirza Haidar Dughlat’s comment in Tarikh-i Rashidi: ‘in consequence of his having dissolute and sensual men in his service, and of his intercourse with them, and with men of mean and profligate character…’; cited in Parodi, ‘Humayun’s Sojourn at the Safavid Court’: 149. For a similar reference from the reign of the Delhi Sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji, see Barani, Tarikh: 282–83/178 where ‘intimacy, affection, alliances, and intercourse of maliks and amirs with each other’ is cited as one cause for insurrection.

59 Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’: 333, 337.60 The articulation of an imperial discourse based on a strident, heterosexual masculinity

under Akbar is developed most strongly in O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service’; and idem, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’. This is contextualised in relation to the earlier period in the Conclusion.

61 Cited in Lal, Domesticity and Power: 154; O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’: 910, says that Akbar ‘conducted a very public campaign to discourage overt homosexual attachments’.



42 Nilanjan Sarkar


own memoirs that he forbade the castration of young boys to make them eunuchs, they continued to be prized; he appointed capable eunuchs to important offices of wakīl (one Ikhtiyar Khan) and faujdār (known only as Itihar) on his own jāgīr. Khwaja Saras Hilal, appointed in Agra as one of Sai’d Khan’s 1,200 eunuchs (and who later joined Emperor Jahangir’s service) is said to have named the town of Hilalabad after himself62—in no instance, however, were there any suggestions of sexual intimacy with the ruler. The recording of same-sex relations amongst the common people in these chronicles also disappeared, except the odd example, as texts now focused more on the technologies of building and consolidating the empire and its ideologies.

‘Who Kiss’d the Maiden All Forlorn’

I have found only one example of a reference to a (sort of) female– (fe)male sexual liaison in this period. The Mughal emperor Jahangir is said to have punished to death a maid belonging to his queen Nur Jahan for having kissed a eunuch. Interestingly, this information comes not from the emperor’s memoirs but from the travel account of Sir Thomas Roe:

This day a gentellwoeman of Normalls was taken in the King’s house in some action with an eunuch. Another capon that loved her kylld him. The poore woeman was sett up to the armepitts in the earth hard ramed, her feete tyde to a stake to abide three dayes and two nights without any sustenance, her head and armes bare, exposed to the sunns violence: if she died not in that tyme, she should bee pardoned. The eunuch was condemned to the elephants.63

The near-complete absence of any mention of such liaisons, or even a word/category in the sources referring to female–female sexual liaisons somewhat confirms the unimaginability of such practices in political texts though that does not rule out its possibility.64 But this lack should not be

62 Cf., Sharma, ‘Eunuchs: Past and Present’: 383–84; Hall, ‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane’: 435; Saletore, Sex Life Under Indian Rulers: 203.

63 Foster (eds), The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe: 190–91. All spellings sic. For the etymology and usage of ‘capon’ to denote ‘eunuch’, see Penzer (eds), The Ocean of Story, vol. 3: 319. Perhaps the same incident is narrated by Edward Terry in Foster, ibid.: 191n1. Reverend Edward Terry acted as Roe’s chaplain for the greater part of the latter’s embassy.

64 Both Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 31, 142–43, 201, and Ali, Sexual Ethics in Islam: 77, 80, highlight the concerns of same-sex relations between women, and particular terms for them.





surprising: in most pre- and early modern societies, legitimate sex for women could only be imagined after marriage, which was by definition and presumption heterosexual and for procreative purposes. Societal virtues, morals and ideals deriving from religion held ‘passionlessness’ to be the most desirable womanly/wifely virtue, a point reiterated in studies of pre-modern European medical texts as well.65

One suggestion could nonetheless be made. Given the dominance of homosociality in pre-modern societies, arguments are often made for non-hetero sexual practices among males (in bazars, majlises, military campaigns); women too spent long periods of time in the company of other women and eunuchs. If it has been argued successfully that harems were hotbeds of political machinations, it may not be impossible to suggest that such cloistered, homosocial worlds provided a context for same-sex practices between women: as in the case of males, the line separating homosociality from same-sex relations could well have been fine and porous.66 An extract from the diary of the Venetian physician–traveller Niccolao Manucci captures some telling scenarios in the high Mughal period.

This Princess [Jahanara, c. AD 1618–80] treated herself to many entertainments, such as music, dancing and other pastimes. It happens one night while engaged in such-like dances that the thin raiment steeped in perfumed oils of the

65 Chauncey, ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality’: 118, says that ‘if women could not even respond with sexual enthusiasm to the advances of men, how could they possibly stimulate sexual excitement between themselves’. For studies on same-sex relations between women in pre-modern India, apart from the relevant sections in Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India, see Thadani, ‘The Politics of Identities and Languages’, though neither deals with Islamicate medieval India.

66 I should clarify that my suggestion is not that the absence of males for long periods of time (say, on military campaigns) led to same-sex relations between women by ‘default’ but underlines the active possibility of such relationships within all-female settings, as the following examples suggest. It is also a theoretical attempt to study both men and women through similar analytical registers of ‘homosociality => homoeroticism’. The absence of any conclusive evidence for female–female sexual relations in the sources retains this suggestion at the level of a possibility only. As a relevant aside, note however the following quote from the Kamasutra for ancient/early medieval (non-Islamic) India: ‘The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they are carefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common, they are not satisfied. Therefore they give pleasure to one another….’ Vatsyayana, Kamasutram, v. 5.6.1–2; see also Sweet, ‘Eunuchs, Lesbians and Other Mythical Beasts’.

For harems as political hotspots, see the pathbreaking study by Peirce, The Imperial Harem, and for India, Lal, Domesticity and Power.



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princess’s favourite dancing-woman caught fire, and from the great love she bore to her, the princess came to her aid, and thus was burnt herself on her chest. From this arose great disturbance at the court but what caused the greatest sorrow to the princess was that the dancing-woman had died.

The second (also from Manucci) refers to the reign of Emperor Aurangzeb:

It was in this year that the learned, or the Mullās, of one faith […] wanted him [the emperor] to make a rule against women drinking, or eating bhāñg, nutmeg, opium or other drugs. The women had paid no heed to the orders that he had given at the beginning of his reign, saying those orders did not apply to them, but to men only….67

Both examples suggest degrees of freedom and license—and the defiance of standard norms—in the harem. However, the absence of any clear evidence suggesting or implying non-hetero sexual practices amongst women does not allow us to draw more definite conclusions from this archive.

‘Both Male and Female’

A final, rarely visible, category of ‘non-hetero men’ remains to be mentioned: hermaphrodites and two examples provide avenues for comment.

Carl Ernst, whilst studying the sufis of Khuldabad in the Deccan, records a legend regarding Shaykh Jalal al-Din Ganj-i Ravan, who is believed to have settled in the Deccan in AD 1236–37.

Also near [his] tomb is a tree that he caused to bear fruit for his children. Such is the virtue of this tree that barren women may conceive children by eating its fruit. It is said that a hermaphrodite once mocked the saint’s powers by eating the tree’s fruit; miraculously, the hermaphrodite became pregnant and bore a child, though both died soon after. Both parent and child are buried in the courtyard near the tomb….68

This legend is significant for a number of reasons because it operates at multiple levels of politics, religion and society simultaneously. Note that

67 Irvine, trans., Storia do Mogor, vol. 1: 219, 149–50 cited in Lal, Domesticity and Power: 45–46; see also the fascinating incident of Hulhul Anika, a woman who wanted to be included in one of Babur’s drinking parties, in Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity: 91.

68 Ernst, Eternal Garden: 233–34.





the legend identifies the person as a hermaphrodite and not a eunuch, revealing an important sensitivity in a pre-modern setting and uncannily apprehends Michel Foucault’s plea to not try to ascertain the ‘error’ of hermaphroditism by classifying it as either male or female, thus letting them remain in ‘the happy limbo of a non-identity’69 Further, that the legend does not attribute either of the two primordial sexes to the hermaphrodite as part of the shaykh’s miraculous powers, yet making it ‘pregnant’, highlights an abiding belief in the superior potency of combined sexuality. In life and in death, in social and religious frameworks, the ambiguity of sexual identity elicited neither fear nor correction; if anything, it bestowed worship.70

The other example is from the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, the memoirs of Emperor Jahangir. In 1621, the emperor records the arrival of gifts, including eunuchs, from the sūbadār Ibrahim Khan Fath Jang from Bengal. The gift of eunuchs was common, they being a valued commodity in the empire: ‘One of these, yekī az ānhā’, Jahangir records, ‘was a hermaphrodite, khunsī zāhir shud’.71 Gavin Hambly suggests that this may have been included as a ‘curiosity’,72 which seems possible. Again, an important point to note is the identification of a hermaphrodite as different from a eunuch, its particularity evident in the specific noun (khunsá).

What makes these examples especially worthy of comment is that they appear simultaneously within and outside an elaborate grid of worldly activity conceived on sexual difference, exemplified best in the words of the thirteenth century Indian sufi Shaykh Jamal al-Din Hansawi (c. AD

69 Foucault, Herculin Barbin: x, xiii. Note Paul Boyce’s important objection to the application of Foucault’s analyses to non-European contexts in his ‘Truths and (Mis)representations’: 114–15. The legend also alerts us to other contextual factors: first, Shaykh Jalal al-Din was initially welcomed by Sultan Iltutmish in Delhi; yet he moved to the Deccan, which was still a Hindu seat of power, underlining the chronic tension between mainstream Islam and Sufism which rocked the period of the Delhi Sultanate.

70 The statement about ‘worship’ is made here in the medieval context; I am not suggesting a similarity with belief in divine powers of modern-day eunuchs in the Indian subcontinent which is a widely held academic argument, the latter contested in Hall, ‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane’: 431–32 and passim.

71 Jahangir, Jahangirnama: 373/vol. 2: 201; and Steingass, Dictionary: 476, s.v. ‘khunsá’ meaning ‘hermaphrodite, neutral’. See also Jahangir, ibid.: 373, he clarifies further by describing it as ‘having both the male (sexual) organ and the private parts of a woman, hum ālat-i mardī hum mahal-i makhsūs-i zanān dārad’. This sentence is omitted in the translation.

72 Hambly, ‘A Note on the Trade of Eunuchs’: 129.



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1187–1261): ‘the seeker of the world is feminine, the seeker of the other world is a hermaphrodite, and the seeker of the Lord is masculine.’73 Paula Sanders has argued that the Qur’anic/Islamic anxiety over fitna resulting from uncontrolled or disorganised sexuality was based on the premise that there were only two kinds of sexes in society: male and female. ‘They could not be both’ at the same time, not least because all actions in Islamic society (place in public prayer, laws of inheritance, rules of marriage, rituals concerning death, etc.) had to fall into one of five categories: obligatory, recommended, neutral, reprehensible and forbidden, each determined by the sex of the individual.74 Yet, while hermaphrodites, by virtue of their biologically unclear sexual identity, were a ‘pole of ambiguity’ and presented a problem in all sectors of Islamic life, the desire of jurists and legalists in medieval Islamic societies was not one of medical correction, but one of social anxiety, a preoccupation with keeping society workable within the religious notions of correctness and acceptability.75

Conclusion: Text and Polity

Non-hetero sexual practices and identities—natural or acquired, by birth or infliction—do not seem to have been cause for Islamic political angst any more than any other activity in medieval Islamicate India. In fact, both court and society seem to be ambivalent, ambiguous participants in and regulators of it. Vanita and Kidwai suggest that one reason may have been the dominance of Hanafism which was in many instances less severe than other schools of interpretation in Islam, especially with regards to sexuality.76 How, then, did political Islam (and its archives)

73 Cited in O’Hanlon, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service’: 53. On Hansawi, see Lawrence, Notes from a Distant Flute: 38. Nanda, ‘Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India’: 374, 376, discusses the ‘ideal of hermaphroditism’ in Hinduism and argues that the religion in fact ‘provides a positive context for alternative sex and gender roles’.

74 Sanders, ‘Gendering the Ungendered Body’; Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 30–31; and Ali, Sexual Ethics: 78, 95.

75 Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 41. It is interesting to note that in the thirteenth century, al-Tifashi, The Delight of Hearts, mentions the pleasures obtained from sexual intercourse with hermaphrodites in the classical Islamic lands; see also the example of ‘the Hermaphrodite of Medina’ in Bouhdiba, ibid.: 40–42; and Dreger, who says that (in Europe) ‘the discovery of a “hermaphroditic” body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies’; cf., idem, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex: 6.

76 Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: 111; on the Hanafis, see Swartz, ‘Hanafite Madhab’.





engage with and negotiate—seemingly at an everyday level—non-hetero sexual practices? And what conclusions may we possibly draw from this evidence?

It is useful to remind ourselves at this point that the principal motive of Juzjani and Barani’s texts was Islamic political establishment and consolidation. The stability of a fragile, frontier political ‘state’—with the king as its central actor—was their utmost priority because on it depended their own survival and that of political Islam in the subcontinent. They thus viewed all developments—whether true, imagined or hypothesised—from within this priority and the religio-moral prism of their intellect. In the subcontinent, where political Islam needed to appear upright as much for local assertion and consolidation as for recognition and legitimacy (initially) from the caliph in Baghdad and (later) the competing Islamic empires, it was hardly prudent for chroniclers to condone un-Islamic, anti-Qur’anic practices. What we have therefore are texts that seek to apprehend religio-political dystopias functioning at various levels in society and accommodate them within political boundaries—those that would indicate, affirm and (textually) constitute political ‘stability’—anxiously recorded, desperately stifled and clearly condemned by a class of people writing for political and personal survival. This attitude was closely associated with political and religious insecurity in an alien land in the time of the Delhi Sultanate and the early Mughals. Thus, in mature and confident Islamic polities, Kay Kaus ibn Iskander’s Qabus namah (written in the twelfth century) advised his sons on how to buy slaves of both sexes and when to make love to them and Zakani’s fourteenth century ‘Mirrors for Princes’ text included counsel on the benefits of kings knowing the rules of sodomy and adultery, but Barani’s Fatawa—belonging to the same literary ‘genre’ and also written in the fourteenth century, but in a ‘frontier’ Islamic state—adopted a different tone. Barani, however, was not alone in this silence/condemnation; as the examples from Indian sufi texts have shown, this attitude was shared by the mystics as well, who in other contexts often departed dramatically from the political state (especially in the subcontinent where the Chishtis were dominant) and re-oriented canonical Islam to be more socially inclusive. It is a temptation to wonder whether political insecurity impacted on the ‘peripatetic’ sufi in the same way as it did on the conservative ālim when it came to non-hetero sexual practices.

An important concern in Barani’s and Juzjani’s texts was the Islamic state, an institution that was quintessentially heterosexual in its discursive



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constitution and practices because it grew out of and stood on the shoulders of, society, the perpetuation of which depended on heterosexuality.77 Heterosexuality was thus the implicit norm, encoded in every societal institution, be it religion, education or whatever else and the state—as the hegemonic regulatory body—ascribed to this ‘natural’ order.

But this template was in conflict with realpolitik. As the examples above have shown, rulers themselves—along with others—were culpable of the ‘sin’ of non-hetero sexual practices. They pursued these desires, even as they waged wars to establish Islamic political suzerainty and command, on occasions ironically with the help of their lover-companions. The textual ethics of the state were thus at variance with the conduct of its political executors and the chronicler needed to apprehend both in their respective realities, with the ruler at the helm. Saleem Kidwai’s suggestion that Barani ‘condemns sultans who lost their better judgement over male lovers and thus surrendered the crucial instruments of power—fear, grandeur and majesty’,78 needs to be considered with some critical care. ‘Ala’ al-Din Khalaji, by any reckoning (and most definitely by Barani’s), was one of the most successful rulers in the Delhi Sultanate, showing little or no sign of ‘surrendering the crucial instruments of power’ till the very end. But this did not restrain Barani’s vituperative outburst against Kafur, one of ‘Ala’ al-Din’s most successful military generals who was also a eunuch-lover of the sultan; he was, however, careful never to ‘condemn’ the sultan himself!79

While it could be argued that all the weak heirs apparent and incumbents to the throne were projected by Barani as being incapable in a number of ways, with the pursuit of sensuality, dissipation and pleasure being recurrent motifs in their perdition, the inclusion of ‘Ala’ al-Din and Kafur in this trope should alert us more towards Barani’s conservatism, class bias, his sense of entitlement and his loss of privileges in his dotage (at which stage he was re-compiling the Tarikh), than his condemnations.

77 Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam: 14: ‘The Qur’anic exercise of sexuality assumes […] an infinite majesty. It is life conveyed, existence multiplied, creation perpetuated.’ See also the counterpoint in Schultz, ‘Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies’.

78 Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: 131.79 Such selective silence was directly informed by the interests of the scribe and is visible in

other instances as well. Kumar, ‘The Ignored Elites’: 75, suggests that while Barani referred derisively to Mongol frontier commanders serving in the Delhi Sultanate as ‘new-Muslims (nau-musulmān)’, he was careful not to use this description for the Sultan (Ghiyath al-Din) because the latter’s ‘retinue were rulers and patrons and it would not be politic to refer to them as new-Muslims’; emphasis mine.





On the other hand, Kidwai’s statement becomes important when located in the context of the homiletic Fatawa because it draws attention to Barani’s genuine and chronic fear of the potential loss of Islamic political dominance in the subcontinent and his abiding desire to warn rulers of its possibility if kingly lack of restraint became rampant and uncontrolled. His many statements urging control and disciplining of the visibility of sin are an important indicator of this and his anxiety regarding the publicness of such acts is part of his discourse on the profile of the state as the supreme regulatory body, but disciplining and supervising, it would seem, ‘only’ the public sphere of the polity.80

In such a scenario, then, the imperfect ‘human’ king was the ideal—pragmatic in politics and religion, his sole aim was to be recognised as the ruler, execute his principal kingly duty—namely justice (‘adl) and maintain his supremacy in a society that was not in consonance with the ideal because ‘It has been laid down a long time ago: “The state can co-exist with unbelief [al-kufr], but it cannot co-exist with injustice [al-zulm].”’81 By extension then and deriving from evidence presented above, political authority in the Delhi Sultanate was in fact never completely absolute; disobedience, referred to in the epigraph to this article, was not endemic, it was innate to polity. The most that the sinner–ruler—as the Chosen upholder of the Faith—could do was to attempt to keep ‘sins’ like non-hetero sexual practices of his subjects away from the public eye as much as possible. Absolute political power was a levitating discourse, realised in part and in form.

80 It should be added here that the reference to ‘openness’ and ‘publicness’ indicates a significant awareness of the public/private spheres, howsoever determined, with ‘state’ and ‘politics’ located clearly in the public sphere. This location is an important indication of the role that politics was understood to play in the lives of its peoples at the time, one that would change fundamentally in Mughal texts. Cook, Commanding Right: 300 mentions how the Safavid rulers, ‘in their official attempts to execute the duty of curbing the pleasures of their delinquent subjects, had very specific notions of the wrongs they were seeking to right: […] the pursuit of beardless youths, and the employment of such youths in bath-houses’; emphasis mine. However, see also Meisami, ‘Kings and Lovers’: 1 where she suggests that in classical Persian historical–fictional romances ‘in which the protagonist is often seen in the role of the lover, the two [love and chivalry] are viewed as complementary and analogous, assuming an ideal continuity of values between the private and public spheres’; this, I believe, is true in fiction-writing and does not apply to the realpolitik of Islamicate India.

81 Barani, Fatawa: 327/483–84. The political discourse, especially in Barani’s writings, centres on the performance of justice, a purely political concept often wrapped in an Islamic garb but when examined closely, reveals a singularly political timbre.



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This realisation of levity, however, did not mean a dismantling of the political edifice in society. Even in the recording of ‘disobedience’—both kingly and otherwise—was implicit a reproduction of hierarchies that lay at the base of the state. Note that we do not have multiple examples of a socially privileged person (be it king, noble or an elder) being in the position of the passive, penetrated partner.82 It was always élite, Muslim men who sodomised slaves, eunuchs and bazar boys from often unknown backgrounds. There is thus a distinct patriarchal and class element that we need to bear in mind in understanding the positionality of ‘sin’ in these texts.83 While one implication is that it were only the poor who would indulge in such acts, seeing them as opportunistic avenues for personal gain and upward mobility, a more potent significance is that the sodomiser being of an upper social class and Muslim, was always dominant, aggressive, ‘on top’.84 This ‘linguistic articulation of social domination’ amplified the image of the lesser groups as incapable and weak—exemplified for instance in Barani’s narrative of Kafur, whom he refers to frequently as ‘ungrateful, harāmkhwôr’, as also ‘severed at the front [and] torn at the back, pīsh barīde pas darīde’—seeking ‘any’ means for upward social mobility, wealth and power and represented (as in the case of Khusrau Khan) through the depraved motif of their offering their ‘bod[ies] like shameless women [to the sultan], va dar zāhir hamchu-i zankānī be-sharm tan dar dādī’. Never is Kafur measured by his military and political contributions to the expansion of Islamic rule and the political consolidation of the Sultanate in the subcontinent: even if his military conquests are commended, he remains the ‘mutilated, sodomised, ungrateful, infidel, nāqsī, mābūnī, harāmkhwôrī, kāfir’.85

82 The exception is that of Sultan Qutb al-Din Mubarak Shah Khalaji. The details from the Tarikh suggest that he wore women’s garments and appeared in public, which implies that he may also have been the penetrated partner. Babur’s objection to Hilali’s fictional composition (where too the king is the penetrated partner), underlines the anxiety surrounding such imagery.

83 Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland: 11 sees such textual positioning as a ‘cultural’ notion in which ‘it mattered who was “on top”—that is older, superior, penetrating ….’

84 Cf., Gürgan, ‘Images of Sexuality’: 78f; and Chatterjee, ‘Alienation, Intimacy and Gender’: 66 and passim; in the European context, see Trumbach, ‘The Third Gender’: 497.

85 Barani, Tarikh: 369, 391, 337/375, 382 for two amongst several references to Kafur as harāmkhwôr; translations mine. See also the multiple and textured meanings/usages of mukhannas in Rowson, ‘The Effeminates of Early Medina’ which frame Arabo-Persian usage of the term more usefully for the modern reader. Butler, Excitable Speech: 19 discusses ‘hate speech’ and social dominance.





Another significant resonance should not be overlooked either—the passive partner was always compared to the woman, whose allocated position in Islamic society was inferior to men; in fact, according to Lagrange, in the tenth century al-Tawhidi ‘invites us to explore the importance of the insult [of being the passive partner] in the construction of heteronormalization’.86

Finally, how did these texts account for such actions of the ‘Islamic’ sultan and his ‘Faithful’ followers—both élite and commoner—and reconcile their ‘unIslamic’, forbidden practices with their Muslim identity and being? Was religion not important in their everyday lives? Two points need to be underlined here. First, the glorification of the Faith, parroted howsoever many times in these texts, was never the motor of politics: the actions of the rulers and the wisdom of the counsellors both attest to its relative, circumstantial priority while determining political actions. Second, as El-Rouayheb has argued, pre-modern societies embodied a ‘multiplicity of ideals’;87 its irreconciliability was indeed an issue, but not one so disruptive as to reorient (at least in these texts) their principal motive—the survival of the Islamic state. It is thus that ‘[individuals] in relation to one another’ makes sense in the epigraph: an admission and articulation of the need and possibility to keep the textual state and its ethics separate from the actions of individuals.

Political texts and their writers in the pre-Mughal period did not serve as mouthpieces and ideologues for rulers in the way that, say, Abu’l Fazl

86 The inferior position of women in Islam is derived most commonly from the following verse of the Qur’an (An-Nisa, IV: 34): ‘Men are the guardians of women as God has favoured some with more than others […]’; Ali, Al-Qur’ān: 78. The social order and hierarchy in which the man was in command, on top, was reproduced by Barani in referring to the penetrated same-sex partner not only as ‘like women, b‘aurāt’ (Fatawa: 13/17), but also as used to ‘lying under men, zīr-i khusp-i mardān’ (Tarikh: 411 and passim, omitted in the Elliot & Dowson translation). Such anxieties were present in other religious cultures as well: see Olyan, ‘“And With a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman”’.

The categories of ‘passivity’ and ‘unmanliness’ are usefully debated. Andrews and Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: 13, argue that ‘in the ancient world sex was thought of as a (penetrative) thing that men did to others—women, boys, slaves/servants—who were (or ought to be) socially inferior. It was not thought about separately from other relations of dominance and submission’; Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’: 332, says that ‘being unmanly was not necessarily the same as being “effeminate” in this period […] passivity [in the sense of inaction] is too inadequate a concept for describing a man who fails in his male gender roles’. On al-Tawhidi see Lagrange, ‘The Obscenity of the Vizier’: 166.

87 El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab–Islamic World: 155.



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would serve for Akbar. Up until then, texts were restrained perhaps in part by the circumstances of patronage. They were often able to write strongly about the superiority of their views (deriving from religious dicta) over political actions. If this hints, on the one hand, to a greater freedom of expression, on the other it potentially allows the recording of the separateness of the textual state and the ground-level practices of the polity.

But with the coming of the Mughals, official political histories became sovereign imperial voices, articulating and upholding a masculine, heterosexual imperial ideology so fierce and strident that even the incidental or minor inclusion of parallel masculinities became a rarity in the voluminous political–textual archive available to us from the period of Babur onwards. There were two important elements in this transition, which was slow but definite. First, the Mughals under Babur and Humayun remained newcomers in the subcontinent: even as they tried desperately to establish themselves in a new ‘frontier’ homeland, they still carried a human and cultural retinue that harked back to a beloved land in Central Asia. As such, one finds conflicting evidence towards forbiddances: Babur became besotted with a young boy; organised drinking parties with a palpable homosocial nature aimed distinctly to develop ‘social networks’ and tie the retinue in loyalty to the throne; and directed his son Humayun to utilise these opportunities to establish Mughal rule in the subcontinent, an advice that Jahangir would use later on to justify the ‘moral dilemma of alchohol’. Yet, he reacted strongly against Hilali’s fictional account of a king as a passive lover.88

As the Mughal political dispensation consolidated and expanded itself under Akbar, it was his vision of an ‘empire’ (that was no longer a ‘frontier’ polity)—as a strong, well-equipped and well-administered territory, with the emperor as a paternal, pastoral and just ruler—that began to get implemented by and recorded in, the political archives.89 The king was no longer ‘imperfect’ or merely ‘human’; on the contrary, under Akbar, political texts, scribes, the administration, marriage alliances, architecture, the

88 Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity: 91–93. 89 Note that Akbar commissioned the writing down of the ‘Laws/Rules of Akbar’ (‘Ain-i

Akbari), aimed at consolidating the structures of society wherein his regulations on marriage clearly reveal a deep-seated anxiety about homoerotic relations: marriage was a preventive against ‘the outbreak of evil passions’; cited in Lal, Domesticity and Power: 154. For textual-archival tensions in Babur and Humayun’s time, see Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would be Man’.





imperial atelier, etc.—all articulated an ideology that presented Akbar ‘as the insān-i kāmil, “the perfect man”, whose inner virtues of justice, self-control and renunciation of worldly attachments enabled him to attain the divine blessing of sulh-i kull, an attitude of universal concord and toleration’. All subjects were thus transfixed on the king and his personality, who embodied and represented the farr-i izadī, ‘the fire of kingship’.90

We no longer find references to non-hetero sexual practices involving rulers in political texts as easily because kingship was now more than just a political role: it was an ideology, an employer of imperial service and servitude of people very different from eunuchs and slaves. As the ballast of the Mughal state became increasingly upper class with the influx of new peoples from Central Asia and the inculcation of local princely and other élite groups from the subcontinent, the ruler’s imperial profile became more assertively masculine, aspiring to refer universally to the multiple cultural registers of its myriad and eclectic supporters.91 Loyalty, trust and intimacy were now determined through subscription, acceptance and performance to this imperial identity—articulated both literally and symbolically; heteronormativity was a crucial component of this hegemony and the textual sources of the period were part of the technology that articulated and asserted this dynamics. It was not as though the chroniclers of the Mughal period were more orthodox or conservative than their predecessors; the reasons for this change were different and differently politically motivated from the time of the Delhi Sultanate.92

90 O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’: 890 and passim. In an ironical twist, note that a late sixteenth–early seventeenth century painting by the Mughal artist La’l shows a ‘Bathhouse Keeper Consumed by the Heat of Passion’ upon seeing the king. The Keeper, fallen on the ground, is lit (and thus ‘consumed’) by the imperial flame of divine effulgence, ‘his profane love a metaphor for the phototropic desire of sacred love’; cf., Minnisale, ‘The Dynamics of the Gaze in Mughal Painting’: 53.

91 ‘At the multi-ethnic, multi-religious royal court of Akbar, in a society of Rajput nobles, Persian intellectuals, Arab scholars, Turkish and Uzbek military men, local lineage chiefs and caste leaders, Jesuit missionaries, diplomats, mercenaries and merchants, efforts by the emperor to establish an imperial cult resulted in the creation of a body of intensely loyal courtiers in an intimate relationship with the emperor—regardless of individual religious, ethnic or hereditary service loyalties’; Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity: 50; also, O’Hanlon, ‘Kingdom, Household and Body’: 889–90.

92 O’Hanlon’s suggestion that Akbar’s heteronormative imperial discourse was ‘already established in the traditions of moral and political theory inherited from the Delhi Sultanate and it was a critical part of Akbar’s political project to strengthen them’ needs to be taken cautiously; cf., idem, ‘Manliness and Imperial Service’: 50, 53–55.



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There is no evidence to suggest that this Akbari ideology was altered in any fundamental way, despite the varying realities of the successive reigns and the many intergenerational differences of its rulers. The manner in which Akbar dealt with the camel-boy episode; Jahangir’s attitude towards a slave-woman who allegedly kissed a capon; the anxiety of nobles over Jahanara’s sadness at the death of her favourite dancing girl—all need to be viewed from within this Akbari ideological–textual world where kingship had altered its performative profile to anchor itself in a new, upper class, conservative, cosmopolitan battery of servants of the crown.

*

The relationship between the political state and its textual production is complex because both inhere dynamics of human activity, the state as ‘regulator’ and the text as ‘recorder’. This commonality of turf—conditioned by factors like political establishment and consolidation, strategies of legitimisation, writing of History and its patronage, technologies of control, probity and projections of identity, etc.—meant that the mechanics of official textual production were neither singular nor linear. Alongside the political were the multivalent social, religious, textual, authorial and individual vectors that intersected with and impacted upon one another in the making of the textual archive.

For our purposes, what is noteworthy is that the admonitory, accusative, negative judgemental tone towards non-hetero sexual relations seems to have been universal across ‘genres’ and canon; and within the context of this article, one can safely say that it was also closely tied to the identity of a frontier polity that was reticent to record non-hetero sexual practice as an acceptable political strategy in its texts—like Kay Kaus and Zakani did in theirs, a signature of political, social and intellectual maturity and confidence. Persianate texts in the Indian subcontinent took a more conservative approach, creating a contested terrain for recording History, embedding and rendering invisible apparent realities.

If one compares the examples from the Delhi Sultanate, the Lodis and the Mughals in broad strokes, one can easily argue that the insecurities of political consolidation, the need for recognition of dominance, the significantly eclectic nature of the political community, the pressures of expansion of territory and personnel, etc. meant that the regulatory body of politics—the ‘state’—needed to officially affirm to high moral standards. The textually close relationship of religion and politics in Islam created





avenues of dystopia and statist textual archives became embodiments of this tension, apprehending the discursive ebb and flow of political consolidation. And yet, there are significant differences: in the Delhi Sultanate one could hear more easily of non-hetero sexual practices concerning the ruling class despite it being a frontier polity because chroniclers were not yet imperial loudspeakers; in the time of the early Mughals—a period marked by the absence of professional chroniclers—it became a political–textual–ideological contradiction, revealing a tense transition towards heteronormativity; and by the time the Mughals emerged from ‘frontier’ insecurities (Akbar onwards), other factors crucial to imperial consolidation intervened to confirm the near-complete textual suppression of non-hetero sexual practices, especially concerning the royalty. An illustrative summary example of this change is in the status of the eunuch: in the Delhi Sultanate eunuch-slaves were bulwarks of the state apparatus, given important political posts and archived in various profiles, political (Raihan) or sexual (Kafur); they continued to occupy political posts in later years as well but less in number despite the vastly expanded bureaucracy. Further, Jahangir is said to have banned the castration of males and one never hears of any sexual (or emotional) intimacy between rulers and eunuchs.93

In time, this contained motifs of non-hetero sexual expression in the realm of poetry, a ‘genre’ whose identity in Islam from the earliest times was risqué.94 It found expression in qasīda and ghazal, in Persian

93 Eunuchs remained valuable, as evidenced in the gift of eunuchs to Jahangir by the governor of Bengal. From the poor archives of the Saiyyid–Lodi period one finds reference to a large, domed gateway leading to an enclosure—with a mosque, tomb and step-well inside with inscriptions on them—built by a high-ranking and rich eunuch named Khwaja Sara Basti Khan in the service of Sikandar Lodi (r. AD 1489–1517), alerting us to the continuing élite presence of eunuchs in the court and in politics; cf., Husain, A Record of All the Quranic and Non-Historical Epigraphs: # 48–50; and Stephen, Archaeology and Monumental Remains: 164–66. As an aside, note that a Lodi-era graveyard has (in the twentieth century) become a Sufi retreat and resting place for 50 eunuchs’ graves, in Soofi, The Delhi Walla: 94–95.

94 See Bonebakker, ‘Religious Prejudice Against Poetry in Early Islam’; more generally, Meisami, Medieval Persian Court Poetry; and von Grunebaum, ‘The Aesthetic Foundation of Arabic Literature’. Poetry has always acted as an alternative space for expression; apart from the references in n. 4 supra, for examples from Judaism (another Abrahamic religion opposed to same-sex relations), see Schirmann, ‘The Ephebe in Medieval Hebrew Poetry’; Roth, ‘“Deal Gently With the Young Man”’; and idem, ‘The Care and Feeding of Gazelles’. The license of the poetic genre is exemplified by Jahangir, the ‘self-admitted addict’, when he ‘openly discussed the moral dilemma of alchohol, seeking justification in the poetry of Hafez’, cf., Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity: 93.



56 Nilanjan Sarkar


and in Urdu, the latter developing energetically through the late Mughal period. While this shift deprives us of evidence concerning non-hetero sexual practices in society and the real–fictional combine innate to poetic metaphors leaves much to imagination, it played one important, redeeming role: from being a condemnable sin in the political archives, non-hetero sexual practices were now an aesthetic trope, rendered in beautiful language, full of passion, liberated from social and religious prejudice, a motif in the development of a ‘genre’ and a new language and thus immortalised.

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