Families, Marriage and Property in Mughal South Asia

Mughal South Asia, from the empire’s foundation in 1526 to its formal end in 1857, contained households shaped by kinship, work, marriage and claims to resources. The surviving examples here range from a royal wedding in 1541 to a child’s care during political flight in 1545 and property and debt records from Malwa in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They show how family ties could be negotiated through personal mediation, labor obligations, written transfers and local investigations.

On this page6 sections

Marriage arrangements and family negotiation

In Muslim marriage, mahr was the property or money the husband undertook to give his wife under their marriage agreement. It was distinct from gifts supplied by her natal family. Gulbadan Begum, a Mughal princess and Humayun’s sister, recounts the negotiations for Humayun’s 1541 marriage to Hamida Banu. Hamida resisted the match, and Humayun’s brother Hindal opposed it. Dil-dar Begum, the mother of Gulbadan and Hindal, helped bring the parties together. After forty days of discussion, Humayun used an astrolabe, an instrument for measuring celestial positions, to select an auspicious wedding hour and asked Mir Abu’l-baqa to solemnize the marriage. He gave the official two lakh (200,000) in ready money for the dower. Gulbadan’s account presents a specific court marriage shaped by a woman’s resistance, an elder’s mediation and a negotiated payment.

Abu’l-Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari, a late-sixteenth-century account of Akbar’s court and government, records the emperor’s preferred rules for marriage. It says a marriage should not take place before puberty and calls for the consent of both prospective spouses and their parents. Two marriage supervisors, called Tui-begis in the account, were to ask about the bride’s and groom’s circumstances; the fee due to the state varied by social rank and the bride’s father’s means. The Ain records Akbar’s regulations, while Gulbadan’s account narrates one marriage negotiation.

Work within households and villages

Household work connected cultivation, craft production and food preparation. Shireen Moosvi’s study of Mughal labor describes women weeding and transplanting crops, tending cattle, picking Kashmir saffron, husking and grinding grain, and ginning cotton or spinning yarn. In some pottery households, women prepared clay while men worked the wheel. These tasks brought women’s labor into both agricultural seasons and household manufacture.

In villages, a customary service system linked households with workers in caste-based occupations. Moosvi describes hereditary barbers, potters, carpenters, smiths, watchmen and other service workers receiving small tax-free plots or shares of each family’s harvest in return for recognized work. Extra jobs could bring additional payment. These customary rights tied service families to village households through recurring labor and produce. Domestic attendants formed another part of household labor: a seventeenth-century account of Agra notes that large households could assign servants separate duties, while less wealthy employers expected the same attendants to perform several kinds of work.

Children entrusted to relatives

Gulbadan describes how care for the young Akbar shifted between relatives during Humayun’s struggle to regain his throne. In 1545, when Akbar was about two and a half, Askari, one of Humayun’s brothers, sent the child to his other brother Kamran in Kabul, now in Afghanistan. Khan-zada Begam, Gulbadan’s paternal aunt and Akbar’s paternal great-aunt, received and cared for him affectionately. The memoir elsewhere identifies her as Babur’s sister. When she later travelled to Kandahar, she returned him to Kamran, who placed him with Mukhtarima Khanam. The account makes caregiving a visible act within a politically divided family: the child’s safety depended on relatives and women of the household moving him between courts.

Women’s property and recorded gifts

A 1690 deed from Malwa, in central India, records Puran transferring rights attached to eight villages, a garden and two houses to Narsingh Das and Gambhir Chand, sons of Purshottam Das. The legal historian Nandini Chatterjee identifies Puran as a Hindu widow. In the deed, Puran declared that she held sole title to the property and described the recipients as children because they had performed the duties of children toward her. The document uses the term mankuha, “legally wedded wife,” to state her marital status and warns future claimants against challenging the transfer. A qadi, an Islamic judge, sealed the deed. Its inventory labels the village rights with categories associated with a chaudhri, a village headman and revenue official, whose customary dues included a share of peasant produce for revenue work. The gift therefore conveyed revenue entitlements as well as a garden and houses, linking her property claim to kinship expressed through reciprocal care.

Debt and inherited office

Family obligations could also pass through debt. In 1660, Purshottam Das repaid loans that his father and uncles had taken from the banjara trader Nayak Khandha. Banjara traders transported goods such as grain between markets. The repayment deed names Khandha’s brother Nayak Sundar and Sundar’s sons as the creditors receiving payment. It states that the family’s dues were cleared except for twenty-five rupees remaining on one bond. At Dhar, the district qadi Sheikh Ilyas sealed the record after creditor Nayak Sundar declared the repayment. Dhar qanungos, revenue record keepers, and other associates signed as witnesses. The record identified which relatives had borrowed, who settled the outstanding accounts and what balance remained.

An office could be claimed as family property too. After Purshottam Das died in 1684, Muhammad Asad claimed descent from Suraj Bhan to seek the hereditary revenue headship, or chaudhri office, at Dhar. Qadis and local grandees discussed the claim in three sittings but could not verify Asad’s descent. Years later, Asad obtained an order from Emperor Bahadur Shah. In 1710, the emperor instructed the faujdar, the district military and administrative official, to secure Asad’s appointment. Hamir Chand contested the order, and the faujdar appointed a deputy, Abu al-Khair, to investigate. Hamir inspected the imperial document and asked respected local residents to provide written evidence. Muslims and Hindus in the district testified that Hamir held the office by hereditary service and that Asad was not Suraj Bhan’s son. The surviving record preserves that testimony in support of Hamir’s claim.

Written legal forms

The Fatawa-i Alamgiri, commissioned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and compiled by a team of Islamic jurists, included the Kitab al-shurut, or Book of Legal Forms, with models and instructions for writing deeds of marriage and divorce, gifts, sales and leases.