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Enslaved childhoods in eighteenth-century AwadhJessica Hinchya
a School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity, SingaporePublished online: 22 Apr 2015.
To cite this article: Jessica Hinchy (2015): Enslaved childhoods in eighteenth-century Awadh, SouthAsian History and Culture, DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2015.1030874
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2015.1030874
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Enslaved childhoods in eighteenth-century Awadh
Jessica Hinchy*
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Childhood in South Asia prior to the nineteenth century is still an under-researchedtopic. This article aims to shed some light on the experiences of a specific group ofeighteenth-century children, slave children, through an analysis of khwajasarai boys inAwadh. The khwajasarais were eunuch slaves who in their adulthood became guardsand attendants of the zanana (or female quarters), as well as courtiers, administrators,military leaders, and intelligencers. This article analyses two khwajasarais, Jawahir Aliand Darab Ali, whose child and adult lives were narrated in the tarikh (history) ofMuhammad Faiz Bakhsh. Historically contingent concepts of childhood, literary genre,the politics of patronage, and the historical context of British colonialism shaped FaizBakhsh’s account of enslaved childhood. Nevertheless, his tarikh provides evidencefor the cultural construction of enslaved childhood in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century north India, as well as fragments of the experiences of child slaves. FaizBakhsh’s account provides little evidence of children’s ‘resistance’ to their enslave-ment. Reflecting broader processes of enslavement and acculturation in South Asia,most khwajasarai children sought to adapt to their new social context by forminginterpersonal relationships and acquiring new forms of cultural knowledge. However,the lack of evidence for khwajasarai children’s subversion of adult authority andexpectations is also a function of the way the concept of adab works within FaizBakhsh’s text. Adab encompassed the cultivation of intellect, spiritual piety, properaction and character, and marked the boundary between boyhood and adulthood foreunuch boys in early-modern Awadh.
Keywords: childhood; slavery; Awadh; discipleship; kinship
… [Y]our humble Petitioner, during his minority left the place of his birth and the residence ofhis ancestors called Africa and by the attraction of fortune came to ‘Lucknow’ and devotedhimself to the perpetual service of Naseerooddeen Haider the late King of Oude who appointedhim as a Khaje Surrah [khwajasarai] (Eunuch) for the purpose of guarding and protecting thehonor of the Royal Mistresses and performing other multifarious duties.1
– Nazir ud-Daula, Petition to Government of Oude, 4 January 1874
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Awadh, an autonomous state that was formerlypart of the Mughal Empire, khwajasarais or eunuch slaves were employed as householdservants, but were also prominent political figures, government officials, military com-manders, diplomats, revenue farmers, and intelligencers. Some khwajasarais were evencounted among the nobility of Awadh.2 Indeed, the most powerful figure in Awadh duringthe late eighteenth century, with the exception of the Awadh ruler himself, was akhwajasarai revenue farmer named Almas Ali Khan.3 Yet adult khwajasarais sharedchildhood experiences of enslavement and deracination. Some khwajasarais wereenslaved within South Asia following capture in war, kidnapping, or sale or gifting bytheir families. Others, like Nazir ud-Daula, the eunuch slave whose petition is quoted
*Email: [email protected]
South Asian History and Culture, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2015.1030874
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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above, were transported as children across the Indian Ocean from East Africa. In Nazir’sshort account of his life, we see two images of child eunuch slaves: first, as personssubject to forces beyond their control; and second, as young people who could makechoices. Nazir’s petition raises questions about children’s experiences of enslavement, aswell as the narration and understanding of child slaves’ lives. Unfortunately, Nazir wroteonly a few sentences on his childhood, leaving many unanswered questions. However, weknow more detail about the lives of two other Awadhi khwajasarais who were enslaved inrural Awadh in the mid-eighteenth century: a senior khwajasarai guru (master) namedJawahir Ali Khan and his chela (disciple), Darab Ali Khan.
The mid-eighteenth-century childhoods of Jawahir Ali and Darab Ali were recountedin the early- nineteenth-century tarikh (history) of the scholar-bureaucrat Muhammad FaizBakhsh. Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh told the history of late eighteenth-century Faizabad, aformer capital of Awadh, through the lives of: his first khwajasarai patron, Jawahir Ali;his khwajasarai patron later in life, Darab Ali; and his patrons’ mistress, the ruler’smother, Bahu Begam. Faiz Bakhsh understood the childhood of these khwajasarais inlight of adab, an Islamic concept which brought together scholarly learning, spiritualvirtue, ethical behaviour, and the cultivation of character. Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh thusprovides evidence for the cultural construction of enslaved childhood in eighteenth- andearly-nineteenth-century north India, as well as fragments of the experiences of childslaves.4
Despite growing separate bodies of literature on both slavery and childhood in SouthAsia, these two areas of historical scholarship have rarely intersected. Existing accounts ofslavery in South Asia have not addressed children in great detail. For instance, whilehistorians have mentioned some of the processes by which children became slaves, weknow little about children’s daily lives as slaves or how the childhood of slaves wasconceptualized.5 More broadly, there are significant gaps in our understanding of early-modern childhoods since the historical literature on children in South Asia largely focuseson the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.6 Historians of medieval and early-moderncourtly cultures, such as Daud Ali and Ruby Lal, provide some glimpses of elitechildhoods.7 Yet the lives of children (particularly non-elites) and concepts of childhoodprior to the nineteenth century represent significant lacunas in the history of South Asia,of which this article only scratches the surface.
In Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh, fragments of the experiences of child slaves are intertwinedwith – and understood in terms of – concepts of enslaved childhood. Faiz Bakhshprovided short accounts of the ‘origins’ of his two patrons, Jawahir Ali and Darab Ali,who were both enslaved in the midst of political and economic upheavals caused by thefragmentation of the Mughal Empire and the emergence of new regional powers. Theeconomic distress experienced by many cultivators in Awadh due to changing agrarianrelations forms the backdrop to the enslavement of both eunuchs and sheds light on theexperiences of rural north Indian children more generally. Faiz Bakhsh’s account ofJawahir Ali and Darab Ali’s enslavement also illustrates several features of the culturalmemory of enslaved childhoods. In particular, Faiz Bakhsh’s short biographies show theways that north Indian society made sense of the involvement of child slaves’ families intheir enslavement.
Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh provides little evidence of children’s ‘resistance’ to their ensla-vement. Historians of slavery in South Asia, and the broader Indian Ocean region, haveshown that slaves were more likely to adopt strategies of acculturation and adaptation,rather than escape or resistance. This was due to the function of Indian Ocean slavery as amode of incorporation of people into households and societies (in contrast to the strict and
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racialized boundaries of plantation slavery in the Americas).8 Most khwajasarai childrensought to adapt to their new social context by forming new cultural ties and interpersonalrelationships. Child eunuchs formed intimate or affective relationships with both peersand authority figures. Relationships of discipleship and kinship were central to theprocesses of enslavement in north India; nevertheless, forming these relationships was asignificant way in which children lessened the emotional impacts of enslavement, thesevering of familial ties and estrangement from their origins. Child khwajasarais alsogradually became adept in the cultural knowledge and deportment expected of male elites,as well as the practical skills necessary to be an administrator and agent of their master.9
However, the lack of evidence for khwajasarai children who subverted or challengedpower structures or adult expectations is also a function of the way the concept of adaband relationships of patronage work within Faiz Bakhsh’s text. Adab described thecultivation of intellect, spiritual piety, proper action, and character. Faiz Bakhsh portrayedthe character and conduct of the young Jawahir Ali and Bahar Ali in light of their adultstatus as adibs, men who had cultivated adab. This is partly a product of Faiz Bakhsh’spatronage by Jawahir Ali, and later in his life, Darab Ali. Childhood lapses in ethicalconduct and proper comportment – such as misbehaviour or neglect of studies in favour ofplay – would undermine the adult reputation and adab of these slave-nobles. Jawahir Aliand Darab Ali generally emerge from Faiz Bakhsh’s history as serious, intelligent, anddiligent children – as reflections of their self-defined adult selves. What marked theboundary between boyhood and adulthood in this period in Awadh was not only theability to assume the varied responsibilities of an adult khwajasarai, but also the cultiva-tion of a certain level of learnedness, ethical conduct, and character – in short, theachievement of adab.
The source: Faiz Bakhsh’s history
Faiz Bakhsh wrote his Tarikh Farahbakhsh around 1818. The text was in two parts: thefirst part examined the history of Mughal Delhi, while the second part was an account ofthe rise and decline of the former Awadhi capital of Faizabad, told through the stories ofFaiz Bakhsh’s khwajasarai patrons and other notable people of the city whom hepersonally knew. Faiz Bakhsh’s career began in the service of Jawahir Ali, BahuBegam’s chief eunuch, and he eventually became the eunuch’s treasurer. In the early1780s, Jawahir Ali made Faiz Bakhsh the tutor of his chela Darab Ali, the secondkhwajasarai whose story is told in this article. When Darab Ali assumed the position ofchief eunuch on Jawahir Ali’s death in 1799, Faiz Bakhsh was subsequently a key advisorto Darab Ali.10 Faiz Bakhsh’s history of Faizabad focused on the lives of his twokhwajasarai patrons’ and their mistress, the dowager Bahu Begam, the mother ofNawab Asaf ud-Duala.
Below, I analyse individual stories for what they tell us about the social history ofenslaved childhoods. Why take this approach? In his social history of the Deccan, RichardEaton has argued there are ‘compelling reasons’ why historians should ‘restore biographyand narrative to their craft’, but the question is ‘how to do it?’ Eaton argues that historicalrecords of precolonial Indians’ lives highlight ‘microcosms’ of the ‘social macrocosms inwhich they lived’, but are also products of ‘the collective memory of communities’. Henotes that medieval and early-modern ‘biographies’ exist on a ‘continuum’ betweenbiography and hagiography. Like Eaton, I am aware that, when constructing a narrativeof an individual life, ‘one is to some extent also reconstructing the culture of thecommunity that had preserved his or her memory’.11 Adult-authored historical records
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for the study of children pose additional issues as they represent adult understandings ofchildhood. However, like Catriona Ellis, I argue it is possible to ‘uncover brief fragmentsof the experiences and lives of children within a specific historical context’, whileforegrounding the ways social constructions of childhood shape adult-authored historicalaccounts.12
In Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh, snippets of childhood experiences are intertwined with – andinseparable from – collective memory and historically contingent concepts of childhood.It is important to not merely reconstruct the ‘fragments’ of slave children’s lives in FaizBakhsh’s account, but rather to analyse the ways literary genre, concepts of childhood andadulthood, and the historical context shaped Faiz Bakhsh’s narrative. In his study ofmilitary slavery in the Delhi Sultanate, Sunil Kumar has highlighted the importance ofanalysing ‘rhetoric about slaves and slavery … in the context of its production’, inparticular examining the patronage of writers and the values and ideologies to whichthey ascribed.13 Similarly, we need to have an understanding of the social and politicalideologies of bureaucrat-historians like Faiz Bakhsh and his networks of patronage (whichincluded powerful slaves) to understand the ways he narrates enslaved childhood.
The purpose of history, or tarikh, in the Mughal tradition was to ‘record [the]collective memory’ of the elites as part of a ‘commemorative enterprise that madehistoriography … central to book-writing at court’.14 However, history was also regardedas ‘a discourse about political power’, in particular the ‘patrimonial-bureaucratic Mughalstate’, which combined a concept of kingship in which the Emperor had an ‘almost divinemandate to rule’ with notions about proper bureaucratic practices.15 Histories in this Indo-Muslim tradition represented the ideologies and values of their authors, the scholar-bureaucrats who administered the Mughal Empire and successor states like Awadh. FaizBakhsh was located in this Persianate bureaucratic culture, though he worked as a munshi(scribe) for private individuals. The term khanazadgi was often used to refer to ‘the properbehaviour and attitudes’ of Mughal nobles, and by the end of the seventeenth century, thishad filtered down to lower-ranking bureaucrats and munshis.16 Adab – ‘the embodimentof ethical norms through intellectual knowledge, spiritual cultivation, and correctbehavior’17 – was central to the self-definition of the bureaucratic class who wrotehistories. Scholarly learning, ethics, and character were inseparably intertwined in SouthAsian Islam. Intellectual discipline involved training in ethical codes of behaviour andvalues, and was consequently a ‘method … of personal formation’.18 In adab, as BarbaraMetcalf puts it, ‘[k]nowledge, doing and being are inescapably one’.19 The notion of adabshaped Indo-Muslim historiography into the early nineteenth century.20 From the openingpages of Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh, it is clear that adab was important to his identity, as FaizBakhsh cites his study of logic at the age of 13 and his youthful exposure to the society ofPersian scholars.21 The notion of adab also impacted upon Faiz Bakhsh’s narratives ofchild slaves’ lives and his conceptualization of childhood, as we will see below.
Additionally, the patronage of historians shaped their texts in important ways. Indianhistoriography underwent important changes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies in the context of the East India Company’s (EIC’s) efforts to acquire knowledgeabout peoples and territories which it ruled, either directly, or as in Awadh, indirectly.Kumkum Chatterjee has argued that Persian histories of this period ‘embody a tensioncreated by the fact that the authors were voluntarily or involuntarily communicatinginsights into India’s history, customs and practices to an alien political regime, while atthe same time seeking to represent the ideology and values which characterised the[Mughal] social and political order that had created them’. Even as the EIC commissionedIndian-authored histories, ‘Indians expressed some of the first coherent political critiques
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of colonial rule’ through these histories.22 The Company’s information gathering was partof the context in which Faiz Bakhsh decided to begin his history. Faiz Bakhsh wasapparently prompted to write his tarikh when another scholar-bureaucrat, Ghulam AliKhan, who was in the employ of the British Collector of Gorakhpur, wrote to Faiz Bakhshon the Collector’s behalf to clarify some details of the history of Faizabad. However, theEIC did not actually commission Faiz Bakhsh to write his history.23
The context of indirect colonial rule of Awadh also impacted upon William Hoey’slate nineteenth-century translation of Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh, which I draw upon in thisarticle. Hoey was interested in Faiz Bakhsh’s account for its ‘picture of Oriental life …untouched’ by colonialism. He also saw ‘political significance’ in Faiz Bakhsh’s narrativeof a political crisis in the 1770s that had pitted Jawahir Ali’s and Darab Ali’s mistress,Bahu Begam, against her son, the Awadh Nawab (ruler), and the Company.24 It isimportant to be aware that Hoey’s perspective on the value of the tarikh influenced histranslation, for instance, his exclusion of some passages which he did not regard asrelevant to history, including some poetic and metaphorical sections and ‘moralplatitudes’.25
Notwithstanding the impacts of colonial interest in Faiz Bakhsh’s knowledge on boththe manuscript and its translation, Faiz Bakhsh’s relationships to his khwajasarai patrons,Jawahir Ali Khan and, subsequently, Darab Ali Khan, shaped his history in significantways. The latter eunuch was Faiz Bakhsh’s employer and patron when he conceived of histarikh and the fact that Darab Ali ‘favoured the undertaking’ was important in FaizBakhsh’s decision to begin writing.26 However, Darab Ali died in 1818 while FaizBakhsh was still writing his history. While Darab Ali’s patronage shaped Faiz Bakhsh’saccount in important ways, Darab Ali’s death prior to the completion of the manuscriptappears to have provided Faiz Bakhsh with slightly greater latitude to criticize his patron.Below we will see how Faiz Bakhsh’s social background as a bureaucrat-scholar, thevalue he placed on adab, and his patronage by powerful khwajasarais shaped his accountof eunuch boys’ enslavement and their attributes.
The khwajasarais of early-modern Awadh
The elder khwajasarai whose story is told here, Jawahir Ali, was a child in the 1740s and1750s, during the heyday of Awadh. In 1722, Sadat Khan used his appointment to the postof the Mughal Subadar (Governor) of Awadh to expand into neighbouring territories,transforming Awadh into an autonomous state.27 The Awadh rulers were known as‘Nawab-Wazir’, the deputy or first minister to a sovereign.28 Darab Ali, the youngereunuch examined in this article, was enslaved in the late 1760s, a decade that witnessedthe growing power of the EIC, following the Company defeat of Awadhi forces at Baksarin 1764. However, even as British power grew in the final decades of the eighteenthcentury, khwajasarai could still assume positions of significant political power in Awadh.
The ability of slaves to acquire authority within the households and administrations ofIndian rulers was a feature of Mughal India and Mughal successor states.29 In MughalIndia, the ruler’s household was considered harim, sacred and inviolable, and eunuchs hadimportant roles as the keepers of social and sexual boundaries.30 Political power wasconcentrated in the ‘inner’, rather than the ‘outer’, sphere31 since power was located inbody of the ruler and radiated outwards to the household and the kingdom.32 In Mughalpolities, servants tended to perform multiple functions in both the politically important‘inner’ sphere and the ‘outer’ sphere.33 Khwajasarais in Awadh were powerful partly dueto their proximity to the Nawab. Adult khwajasarais held numerous roles within their
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master or mistress’s household (including daily attendance on the women’s quarters, orzanana), in the management of estates and businesses, and in the governmentadministration.34 However, khwajasarais were particularly prominent: among the com-manders of the military forces of the Nawab and nobles35; as negotiators and envoys36;and as transmitters of intelligence.37 However, it is important to keep in mind that not alladult khwajasarais had such valued roles: many were illiterate and some performed moremenial tasks in the household.38
The social status of some khwajasarais could change remarkably over the course of theirlifetime. Richard Eaton argues that slavery in South Asia was not ‘a fixed status, but … aparticular origin, a particular career, and a particular relationship to a ruler or politicallyimportant master’. Enslavement was a ‘process’ and master–slave relations could changeover time.39 The relationship between lower-ranking adult khwajasarais and their masterswas highly asymmetrical. Whereas prominent adult khwajasarais could become the client oftheir master/patron and exercise a high degree of autonomy in administrative decision-making,40 even powerful adult khwajasarais were vulnerable as slaves.41
One of the most important social bonds in the lives of khwajasarais was that betweenthe khwajasarai teacher (guru, pir, or murshid) and disciple (chela or murid).42
Genealogies of generations of khwajasarai gurus and chelas were recognized withinAwadh society and gurus were a dominant presence in child eunuchs’ lives.43
Khwajasarais also established formal adoptive kinship ties with non-biological kinwhich were socially recognized.44 Even though slaves were able to pass on property toheirs in some circumstances under Shi’a law, in north India and Bengal masters heldkhwajasarais to be heirless. In late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Awadh,khwajasarais resisted masters’ claims on their property by attempting to pass propertyonto heirs from among their kin – often, with limited success.45 Nonetheless, adultkhwajasarais’ kinship-making modified the rationale behind their employment in theMughal Empire and other regimes: that since eunuchs could not produce heirs, theywould be loyal to the ruler.46
Processes of enslavement in rural Awadh
Whether they were powerful magnates or illiterate household attendants, khwajasaraisshared the experience of childhood enslavement. Child slaves in South Asia were usuallyof South Asian origin or had been transported across the Indian Ocean from East Africa.In South Asia, children were usually enslaved following either: capture in war; kidnap-ping; sale by families in the context of famine, natural disasters, or poverty; or theinheritance of slave status.47 Both Jawahir Ali Khan and Darab Ali Khan were enslavedwithin Awadh, in the context of political instability and economic pressures brought aboutby the gradual fragmentation of the Mughal Empire. Since Faiz Bakhsh was the client ofboth Jawahir Ali and Darab Ali, it is likely his account reflects the ways these powerfuleunuchs wished to be represented, as well as socially prevalent notions of enslavedchildhood. Children’s experiences, individual recollections, and the collective memoryof khwajasarai childhoods are inextricably intertwined in both Faiz Bakhsh’s memoir andthe history that follows.
Jawahir Ali Khan
Faiz Bakhsh’s biography of Jawahir Ali, the elder of the two khwajasarais whose stories Iexamine, demonstrates that political flux associated with the emergence of autonomous
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regional ‘successor states’ out of the Mughal Empire – as well as increased economicdemands on landholders and cultivators – resulted in land wars between the Awadh stateand rural people, thereby creating situations in which children were vulnerable to captureand enslavement. Faiz Bakhsh relayed very little of Jawahir Ali Khan’s early childhood,prior to his enslavement sometime in the 1740s or 1750s. Jawahir Ali came from theKhairabad district of Awadh, north of Lucknow, and it appears he was the child of acultivator family. In the 1740s and early 1750s, the Khairabad area experienced conflictbetween local rajas – who refused to pay any revenue – and the administrator of theprovince, Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan.48 The emergence of Awadh as an autonomousstate saw significant increases in the revenue demands on landholders and cultivators. Therural elite of this period were powerful revenue farmers or bureaucrats associated with theAwadh court, who were typically either Shi’a Muslim or Islamicized Hindu groups,whereas the local rajas were largely of Hindu Rajput origin.49 Rent had been paidprimarily in kind, but from the eighteenth century, there was an increasing monetizationof rent.50 Increased revenue demands often led to conflict between, on the one hand, theAwadhi provincial administrators, revenue farmers, and other rural magnates, and, on theother hand, landholders and cultivators.51 In the case of Jawahir Ali, Faiz Bakhsh tells usthat,
On one occasion he [Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan, the district administrator] had anengagement with the rájas of that neighborhood [Khairabad], who were rebellious andobstinately refused to pay the government revenue. A great battle ensued. The … Muslim[Muhammad Ali] proved victorious. Hundreds of unbelievers went to hell, and most of theirwomen and children were captured. When the Nawáb [Muhammad Ali] recovered from hiswounds, he made eunuchs of the boys.52
Jawahir Ali, along with several other boys, girls, and adult women, were thus takencaptive in a land war between the newly formed successor state of Awadh and locallandholders and cultivators.
From Faiz Bakhsh’s Shi’a perspective, the Khairabad conflict had religious overtones.It was a battle between the Shi’a Muslim administrator, Muhammad Ali, and the local‘foolish unbelievers’.53 The eighteenth century in north India was characterized by theconsolidation of Hindu and Muslim identities due to religious purification movements, butalso by an incredible religious syncretism. It was not until the 1790s that the AwadhNawabs began to significantly emphasize their Shi’a identity.54 Hence, it is possible thatFaiz Bakhsh was interpreting the mid-eighteenth-century conflict in Khairabad in reli-gious terms due to his early-nineteenth-century vantage point. Nevertheless, conflicts overland could ‘assimilate the symbols of religious conflict’ since Awadhi administrators wereoften Muslim, and the landholders and cultivators predominantly Hindu.55 Jawahir Ali’senslavement evidences that children were caught up in the political flux and economicstrains that resulted in land wars in rural north India. For Persianate scholars and bureau-crats like Faiz Bakhsh, religious difference defined such rural conflicts and the transfor-mation of Hindu boys of cultivator background into Shi’a slave-nobles.
Jawahir Ali and several other captured boys survived their castration, but one boy diedfrom the operation. Their master, Muhammad Ali, set about organizing the boy eunuchs’education and Jawahir Ali became ‘brothers’ with some of the other boy eunuchs.56
However, Jawahir Ali would experience one further dislocation in his childhood. Havingbeen captured in war, Jawahir Ali was again kidnapped, this time by one of the eunuchs ofthe Awadh Nawab. In the mid-1750s, the new Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Duala,
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removed Muhammad Ali from his post as the provincial administrator following ‘somedisobedience on his son’s part’. Muhammad Ali sent his boy eunuchs to Shuja but ‘keptback for his own service Jawáhir ‘Ali Khán, who promised to turn out a man ofintelligence, good conduct, good appearance and heart’.57 The Nawab of Awadh wasinsulted by Muhammad Ali’s failure to send Jawahir Ali and conspired to acquire the boy:
Shujá ‘u’d-daulah … ordered Dánish ‘Ali, one of his eunuchs to bring the boy away fromschool without letting Jawáhir ‘Ali Khán know. The eunuch went into the school and said tothe boy: ‘The Nawáb wants you.’ The lad, who knew no other Nawáb but Muhammad ‘AliKhán [his master] thought it was he who had sent for him and came out. The eunuch mounteda horse at the door, took the boy up behind him, rode off at full speed and arrived in Panj-Mahla. Shujá ‘u’ddaulah liked the boy when he saw him …58
Faiz Bakhsh suggests that nobles and rulers prized intelligent child khwajasarais and thatthe possession of eunuchs was connected to their master’s prestige. This vignette alsosuggests that the loyalty and naiveté of child eunuch slaves were particularly valued. AtShuja’s court, Jawahir Ali was at least reunited with his brothers, the boys with whom hehad been enslaved in Khairabad. Studies of child slaves in the broader Indian Oceanregion have shown that the repeated transfer between masters was a common feature ofenslaved childhoods.59 Jawahir Ali was perhaps fortunate to have only two masters in hischildhood.
Darab Ali Khan
Around 20 years after Jawahir Ali was enslaved, Jawahir Ali’s future disciple, Darab AliKhan, also became a khwajasarai. Darab Ali was a boy of tenant farmer background fromBaiswara, an area to the south of Jawahir Ali’s region of origin, Khairabad.60 Darab Ali’schildhood first demonstrates that economic pressures created by the Awadh state’srevenue demands sometimes compelled families to gift or sell their children. Second,Faiz Bakhsh’s account of Darab Ali’s enslavement illuminates the distancing of familiesfrom processes of enslavement in individual and collective memory.
Darab Ali was apparently ‘born a eunuch and lived with his parents till he was sixyears old’.61 It is impossible to know whether Darab Ali was born with atypical genitalia.However, it is noteworthy that the most prominent khwajasarai of late eighteenth-centuryAwadh – the revenue farmer, entrepreneur, and warrior Almas Ali Khan – was alsoreputed to have been born a eunuch.62 It may be that families sometimes gifted or soldchildren who were born with atypical genitalia to become khwajasarai slaves.Alternatively, those involved in the enslavement of khwajasarais may have emphasizedthat a child was a ‘born eunuch’ to justify their enslavement.63
Darab Ali’s family was from the town of Rasulpur, eight miles from Salon. In thisregion, the landholders were Kurdizai Saiyads. Faiz Bakhsh tells us, ‘Dáráb ‘Ali Khán’sancestors … held a farm of sixteen standard bíghas’, or approximately ten acres.64 Ineighteenth-century north India, both ecological disasters and political upheavals couldhave significant impacts upon the well-being of cultivator families and consequently onchildren.65 It was common in periods of famine and agrarian distress for children to besold or given away by families who could not feed them. For example, one khwajasarainamed Bahar Ali Khan, who was employed by Darab Ali’s future mistress, was sold byhis parents ‘in a year of famine’.66 Similarly, Darab Ali’s story illustrates that even outsideof times of acute agrarian crisis the economic pressures of monetized revenue on ruralcultivator families could compel them to gift or sell children.67 In the Baiswara region that
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surrounded Darab Ali’s home of Rasulpur, the land was fertile and farming was not highlydependent on infrastructure since the levels of groundwater allowed agriculture withoutwell-built and deep wells.68 Nevertheless, Darab Ali’s family ‘found it difficult to paytheir rent’.69
Faiz Bakhsh suggests that Darab Ali, as a eunuch by birth, provided his family withpotential means to improve their economic situation. When Darab Ali was seven, in 1769,his uncle, Ghasi Ram, brought him to the Awadh Nawab’s court at Faizabad ‘in the hopeof getting the freehold of his ten acres’.70 Unfortunately, the Nawab had recently left forLucknow. When Ghasi Ram, who was carrying Darab Ali in his arms, reached theoutskirts of the city, he encountered a Hindu noble named Prasad Singh. According toFaiz Bakhsh, Ghasi Ram explained,
‘I am bringing my child to present him in the hope of getting a freehold of ten acres.’ PrasádSingh said: ‘I cannot confer a freehold, but I will procure you any price you ask,’ and aftersome bargaining he offered five hundred rupees. Ghási Rám would not take the money, butPrasád Singh was a cruel and hard man, and he snatched the boy from him and drove himaway. Ghási Rám returned home in tears and in despair.71
Faiz Bakhsh’s account, written by a non-slave, reflects the prevailing social understand-ings of enslaved childhoods in Awadh. However, since Darab Ali patronized the writingof Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh, this story also reflects Darab Ali’s construction of childhoodmemories and his adult self-definition. It is impossible to disentangle culturally dominantideas about childhood enslavement from Darab Ali’s memories in Faiz Bakhsh’s account,which, to borrow from Eaton, reconstructs ‘the culture of the community that hadpreserved’ Darab Ali’s memory.72
Two aspects of Faiz Bakhsh’s account together suggest that families were distancedfrom the enslavement of children in memories of enslaved childhoods. First, Faiz Bakhshdrew attention to Ghasi Ram’s refusal of monetary payment and suggested that GhasiRam wanted a more honourable exchange of gifts. Indrani Chatterjee writes that sales ofchildren by families in poverty, as well as sales of slaves by masters, were associated with‘dishonor and discredit’ because such transactions suggested an inability to provide forone’s dependents.73 In this context, the enslavement of children by their families mayhave been constructed as a gift. Faiz Bakhsh prefaced his narrative of Darab Ali’senslavement with the legend of a son of a zamindar from the town of Duna who wasattacked by a wolf and had his genitals bit off. ‘When he recovered’, Faiz Bakhsh related,‘his father presented him as a eunuch to Nawáb Shujá’u’ddaulah, who made him a gift ofthe village as a revenue-free holding in return. The story of this spread all over theNawáb’s dominions’.74 Telling this story prior to the account of Darab Ali’s enslavementserved to highlight that Ghasi Ram merely wished to present Darab Ali in return for anhonourable ‘gift’ of land. As Faiz Bakhsh stated, Ghasi Ram ‘would not take themoney’.75 The distancing of families from the shame and dishonour of monetary transac-tions in children may have been a strategy on the part of adults involved in the enslave-ment of children to justify their actions, as well a way that khwajasarais constructed theirown pasts.
The second element of Faiz Bakhsh’s account which suggests that popular andindividual memory sought to disassociate families from enslavement is the emphasis onGhasi Ram’s grief at the kidnapping of his nephew. Familial grief may be a broader themein narratives of khwajasarai childhoods. Faiz Bakhsh also writes of the childhoodenslavement of another eunuch, Jawahir Ali’s contemporary Bahar Ali Khan, in similar
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terms, claiming that Bahar Ali’s adoptive mother ‘lost heart and died of grief’ on thekidnapping and emasculation of her adoptive son.76 In her analysis of the writings of theeighteenth-century slave Tahmas Miskin, Indrani Chatterjee notes the significance of theimagined grief of his parents to Tahmas’ construction of his origins: ‘the ancestral home iswhere he imagines he is loved enough for his absence to be mourned’.77 Similarly, DarabAli’s uncle apparently went home ‘in tears and in despair’.78 Remembering the grief of hisuncle may have been an important way in which Darab Ali made sense of his new statusas a khwajasarai slave and rationalized the involvement of his family in his enslavement.Thus, child slaves coped with their enslavement and made sense of their detachment fromtheir families through memory-making.
Having analysed Faiz Bakhsh’s narration of the enslavement of boy eunuchs, I turnbelow to their experiences as slaves. Faiz Bakhsh’s history provides us with glimpses ofthe everyday lives of Jawahir Ali as a child in the Awadh Nawab’s household and DarabAli as a child slave of the dowager Bahu Begam. Child eunuchs spent part of their dayworking as guards and attendants in the zanana (the women’s quarters) and runningerrands. In Bahu Begam’s household, after a series of several gates that were patrolled byinfantry and ‘big fat’ Kashmiri women guards and staffed by slaves, there was a door thatwas locked on both sides, where ‘all the eunuchs, about twenty-five counting both theyoung and old, [were] present on guard’.79 Child eunuchs were thus within relativelyclose physical proximity to their mistress or master. Child khwajasarais spent significanttime with other eunuchs. All Bahu Begam’s eunuchs dined together and, except for high-ranking eunuchs, her khwajasarais lived in thatched houses on the Gumti river inFaizabad.80 However, there are two aspects of child slaves’ daily lives that Faiz Bakhshelaborates in more detail: first, their establishment of kinship relationships with their peersand authority figures; and second, their scholarly learning and cultivation of adab, orethical conduct. Faiz Bakhsh’s account suggests that child khwajasarais coped with theirenslavement by forming cultural and interpersonal bonds, anchoring themselves culturallyand emotionally in their new social contexts. I also argue below that the emphasis on adabin Faiz Bakhsh’s account reveals aspects of the construction of childhood in eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Awadh.
Child slaves’ kinship-making
Kinship-making emerges from Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh as a central aspect of young and adultkhwajasarais’ lives. This may reflect the ways Faiz Bakhsh’s khwajasarai patrons wishedto be represented. Chatterjee has noted that for slaves in a South Asian context ‘freedom’may have meant ‘a fully related self, which could find itself enmeshed in a range ofvertical and horizontal relationships’.81 Child eunuchs formed affective relationships,including friendships and brotherhoods, with their khwajasarai child peers. Jawahir AliKhan, the elder of the two khwajasarais examined in this article, was brothers with two ofthe eunuch boys with whom he grew up, Ambar Ali Khan and Yusuf Ali Khan. JawahirAli and Ambar Ali came from the same region, Khairabad, and were captured andemasculated together.82 Jawahir Ali and his second brother Yusuf Ali Khan met in thehousehold of Jawahir Ali’s second master, the Awadh Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula, where theywere educated and trained together.83 These relationships formed in childhood wereevidently affectionate and intimate. Faiz Bakhsh wrote that the brothers were ‘on termsof harmony and amity … more than fraternal’.84 But brotherhoods were also relationshipsthat were status differentiated, between older and younger brothers. Thus, in adulthoodJawahir Ali and Yusuf Ali fell out when the latter became offended that Jawahir Ali
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treated him as a younger and subordinate brother.85 Like all familial relationships, thekinship ties child eunuchs formed could be fractious.86 Nonetheless, it is significant thatchildren’s kinship relationships could endure into adulthood, despite occasional disagree-ments and tensions.
Following Faiz Bakhsh’s stories of Jawahir Ali and his disciple Darab Ali into theirrespective adulthoods, Faiz Bakhsh provides further examples of child slaves who formedkinship relationships with figures of authority. In their adulthoods, both Jawahir Ali andDarab Ali adopted or fostered slave children. Jawahir Ali formed kinship relationshipswith at least two of his khwajasarai chelas or disciples, though the formality of therelationships appears to have differed. The khwajasarai chela Aqalmand was a ‘fosterchild’ of Jawahir Ali and ‘the greatest favourite among all … [his] underlings’.87 JawahirAli also ‘took under his wing’ a ‘eunuch boy’ named Khurram who was his chela.88
Khwajasarai gurus’ adoption and fostering of chelas did not undermine the processes ofslave reproduction and assisted in the acculturation of child slaves,89 but neverthelessresulted in greater intimacy between child eunuchs and their guru/adopted father.
Whereas Jawahir Ali as an adult fostered at least two child khwajasarais, Darab Aliadopted non-eunuch boys, of both free and enslaved status. Darab Ali’s first adopted sonwas a non-slave and reportedly his biological nephew.90 However, Darab Ali’s adoptedson died from a fever at the age of 12. Darab Ali subsequently adopted a non-eunuchslave boy of African or habshi origin named Sultan Ali Khan. Thus, kinship-making withfigures of authority was characteristic of enslaved childhoods more broadly, beyond thespecific case study of khwajasarai children. Faiz Bakhsh opined, ‘Although this Habshihad not any personal dignity or high bearing, he was grateful to his benefactor and true tohis friends’.91 In 1817–1818, there was a cholera pandemic in much of India and one ofDarab Ali’s closest friends, the eunuch Mahbub Ali, died of the disease.
He [Darab Ali] had not recovered from this blow when the enemy laid his hand upon Sultán‘Ali Khán, his adopted son. … The best physicians did their utmost to save him. … [T]hepestilence carried him off after nine or ten days. These two deaths filed Dáráb ’Ali Khán’sheart with grief and he grew despondent and indifferent to his own condition. He was tooreserved to give voice to his feelings, but those who had their eyes open could see that thesorrow for the loss of these two friends was too deeply seated to pass away.92
Soon after, Darab Ali himself died. Notwithstanding the asymmetrical power relationshipsbetween, on the one hand, slave masters and khwajasarai gurus, and on the other hand,their adopted child slaves, these relationships were also affective. This is evidenced inFaiz Bakhsh’s narration of Darab Ali’s grief on the death of his adopted son/slave. Thepatronage of Faiz Bakhsh by Jawahir Ali, and subsequently, Darab Ali, suggests that hisnarration of their childhood and adult kinship-making was an important aspect of thedesired self-representation of both khwajasarais.
Cultivating adab and ‘passing beyond boyhood’
The notion of adab shaped Faiz Bakhsh’s narration of the lives of child khwajasarais,reflecting the cultural construction of childhood in late eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Awadh. One of Faiz Bakhsh’s primary concerns in recounting theearly lives of prominent khwajasarais was to show their scholarly, spiritual, and ethicaldevelopment. Faiz Bakhsh interpreted the child Jawahir Ali and Darab Ali in light of theiradult selves, portraying them as adibs in the making. Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh evidences thatthe boundary between boyhood and adulthood in the case of khwajasarais was the
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achievement of a certain level of adab. Consequently, any reference to playfulness,misbehaviour, or neglect of studies undermined the adult khwajasarais’ reputation.However, it is important to note that in some sense non-slaves could conceive of allkhwajasarais – even adults – as children.93 In Faiz Bakhsh’s account, Bahu Begam, themistress of Jawahir Ali and Darab Ali, repeatedly refers to her khwajasarais collectivelyas her children.94 Notwithstanding infantilizing attitudes, Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh doesprovide evidence that the cultivation of sufficient adab allowed khwajasarais to ‘passbeyond boyhood’.
The education of child eunuchs varied in its extent. Faiz Bakhsh wrote that some adultkhwajasarais were illiterate, suggesting that as children they received a more practical orvocational education.95 However, Faiz Bakhsh’s account demonstrates that masters andmistresses were discerning about the education of children who were viewed as intellec-tually promising and were intended to be fostered as khwajasarai elites.96 Those khwa-jasarai children who became prominent administrators in adulthood received an extensiveeducation in Persian literature, poetry, and the Quran, under the instruction of a tutorappointed by their master or khwajasarai guru.97 The particular adaptability of children,as opposed to adults, to new cultural and social contexts was one reason why child slaveswere sought after.98 Moreover, the literary and cultural arts of slaves ‘heightened thehonour of the master or mistress because it displayed [their] ability to invest in sucheducation’.99
Although Faiz Bakhsh’s account is a reflection of the ways his two khwajasaraipatrons defined their adult identities as adibs, his account does provide sufficient detail onthe childhood learning of khwajasarais to evidence the significant work children did tobecome proficient in new forms of knowledge and conduct. Indrani Chatterjee hasdemonstrated that for adult slaves scholarly learning and adab was particularly importantto their sense of self.100 Adult slaves’ claims to nobility rested on ‘nobility of personality’signified by the ethical conduct of adab.101 It is doubtful that child slaves’ learning ofadab was a conscious process of identity-formation.102 Nevertheless, by learning newforms of intellectual knowledge – and the behavioural and ethical codes to which thisknowledge was linked – slave children anchored themselves within new cultural andaffective communities. Knowledge acquisition allowed children to form cultural affilia-tions and interpersonal links to tutors and fellow pupils, while close relationships withtutors often reinforced acculturation.
The investment of masters in the education of their khwajasarai children, theconsiderable work child slaves did to become culturally competent and knowledgeable,and the sometimes intimate relationships between tutors and their khwajasarai pupilsare evident in the education of the elder of our two khwajasarais, Jawahir Ali. WhenJawahir Ali was in the household of his first master, Muhammad Ali, a scholar fromKhairabad named Mirza Ahmad Ali was appointed to tutor Jawahir Ali and the otherboy eunuchs. The boys – who would have been largely illiterate – learnt Arabic andPersian and converted to Shi’a Islam. Under Mirza Ahmad Ali, ‘they studied theQurán,’ Faiz Bakhsh tells us, as well as ‘the Gulistán and Bostán of Sa’di, and severalother Persian works’.103 Mana Kia has noted the important role of Sa’di’s Gulistan (c.1259 CE) in the maturation of Muslim boys into adults in eighteenth-century India.104
Faiz Bakhsh’s mention of Jawahir Ali’s study of Sa’di’s works would have signalled toa contemporary Persianate Awadhi reader that the boy had received the appropriateeducation in adab.105
When Jawahir Ali entered the household of the Awadh Nawab, an elderly qazi ‘whowas considerably versed in Arabic and Persian literature’ was appointed to tutor Jawahir
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Ali and the Nawab’s other child eunuchs. On occasion even the Awadh Nawab personallyexamined his child eunuchs to ensure their education was up to standard. One day theNawab Shuja ‘sent for them [the boy eunuchs] and examined them’ and found that ‘[t]heirteacher, who was an old dotard, was not exerting himself properly as a tutor’.106 Failuresof knowledge on the part of slave children evidently reflected badly on their masters.Moreover, Metcalf points out that the ‘central strategy for achieving [the] discipline [ofadab] was seen as the relationship to a worthy teacher’.107 Inadequate teachers under-mined not only the scholarly pursuits but also the ethical development of children. Inresponse to the boys’ insufficient knowledge, Shuja changed both Jawahir Ali’s tutor andhis guru. Jawahir Ali’s new tutor was Akhwand Ahmad Ali:
Though he was not a hard or ill-tempered man, he was a most successful teacher. In a shorttime Jawáhir ‘Ali Khán became proficient in the Bahár-i-Dánish, Sikandarnáma of Nizámi,Yúsuf Zulaikhá of Jámi, the Masnaví Ghanímat of Mullá Akram Kanjáhí Panjábí, and in thewriting of nasta’líq [a style of handwriting] and orthography and letter-writing.108
Akhwand Ahmad Ali and Jawahir Ali developed a friendship in Jawahir Ali’s youth.Akhwand Ahmad Ali was one of the most trusted advisors and employees of the adultJawahir Ali and continued to work for his former pupil till his death.109 The relation-ships that developed between tutors and their slave child pupils were an importantaspect of child slaves’ development of new cultural and religious affiliations and couldbe lifelong.
The ways that adab shaped both the experiences of child slaves and the broader under-standings of adulthood and childhood is further evident in Faiz Bakhsh’s account of thechildhood of his second patron, Darab Ali. Darab Ali received an education in Arabic andPersian that was similar in content to Jawahir Ali’s. When Darab Ali entered the establishmentof Bahu Begam around the age of 12, a Saiyad scholar named Nur Ali Shah was appointed toteach Darab Ali Khan and two other young khwajasarai chelas, Mirza Hasan Ali and HusenAli. However, Nur Ali Shah was an ineffective tutor. Interestingly, Faiz Bakhsh included anaccount of Darab Ali’s childhood misbehaviour and neglect of learning which significantlyundermined the image of Darab Ali as a learned man of character portrayed elsewhere in thetext. Faiz Bakhsh wrote that Darab Ali and his fellow khwajasarai pupils
… spent most of their time playing. One day Dáráb ‘Ali Khán was fighting with Mírza Hasan‘Ali [a fellow child khwajasarai], and he threw a stone at him and missed him, but the stonestruck the foot of Mír Kallú of Rái Bareli, a friend of Akhwand Ahmad ‘Ali’s [Jawahir Ali’sformer tutor and advisor], who was sitting in the garden [near] Jawáhir ‘Ali Khán’s house. …Dárab ‘Ali Khan, who was a small boy, … [ran] into the school-room and sat down. …Jawáhir ‘Ali Khán [Darab Ali’s guru], who seldom grew angry, but … was all the moresevere when he did become irate, beat Dáráb ‘Ali soundly with his own hand.110
Thus, a non-slave bureaucrat-historian like Faiz Bakhsh could provide an implicit criti-cism of the power of his eunuch patron by including an anecdote of childish playfulnessand misbehavior.111 It may be that Darab Ali’s death during the writing of Faiz Bakhsh’starikh provided the author with more latitude to question the adab of his patron thanwould otherwise have been the case.
In this Persianate courtly culture, childhood was defined as a period of ignorance inwhich proper ethical conduct and intelligence were yet to be cultivated, as opposed to aperiod of innocence (as in the ideal of childhood that emerged in late eighteenth-centuryEurope).112 The eighteenth-century slave Tahmas Miskin’s writings provide further
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evidence for this definition of the boundaries of childhood according to the acquisition ofknowledge and cultivation of conduct. Commenting on Miskin’s statement that ‘[u]nlikeother children I generally kept away from mischief and childish pranks’, Chatterjee notesthat ‘the reading and learning itself is represented as the act that separated the men fromthe boys.’113
Following Darab Ali’s misbehaviour, Jawahir Ali punished Darab Ali for his ‘idlenessand inability to read and write’, overhauled his education, and appointed Faiz Bakhsh asDarab Ali’s tutor.114 For 3 years, Darab Ali was ‘under [Faiz Bakhsh’s] care’.115 FaizBakhsh recounted that for a period in Darab Ali’s teens, ‘when the first watch of the night[in Bahu Begam’s palace] had passed, Dáráb ‘Ali Khán used to come and lie down tosleep near me. We spent our nights together there for six months, and I did all that I couldto further his studies and instruct him’.116 Darab Ali reportedly acquired an extensiveeducation in literature and the various arts necessary for a learned official: ‘During thisperiod that we were thrown together he studied under me the “Bahár Dánish,” NizámGanjavi’s “Shírín Khusro,” Ghanímat’s Masnavis, and letter-writing, and he becameproficient in the art of conversation’.117
When Darab Ali was 18, his mistress, Bahu Begam, and his tutor, Faiz Bakhsh,determined that he had reached adulthood by achieving the requisite competence in adab,scholarly learning and professional training. At this time, the Awadh Nawab arrested BahuBegum’s two highest-ranking khwajasarais (including Jawahir Ali) due to a long-runningproperty dispute, leaving a power and administrative vacuum in Bahu Begam’s court.Darab Ali, though only 18, was considered intelligent and responsible enough to becomean advisor to Bahu Begam. Faiz Bakhsh wrote that Darab Ali had ‘now passed beyondboyhood’ and was responsible enough to take part in ‘important business’ and serve as an‘advisor’ of his mistress. Nonetheless, Darab Ali continued his scholarly learning andadministrative training into his twenties.118 Khwajasarais in their late teens could ‘passbeyond boyhood’. Yet the boundary between childhood and adulthood was based on thekhwajasarai’s progression through stages of scholarly, administrative, and moral training,as well as judgements about whether they were ready to assume adult responsibilities. Theachievement of a sufficient competence in adab marked the beginning of khwajasaraiadulthood, though cultivation of adab continued into adulthood. The boundaries ofchildhood were not numerically defined, but rather determined by the individual’s placein structures of apprenticeship and discipleship. The circumstances of khwajasarais’graduation to adulthood were different from other children, for whom puberty andmarriage would have been significant. However, the conclusions that childhood was notnumerically constituted and that competence in adab was a significant marker of adult-hood may have broader relevance, particularly for male Islamic childhoods.119
Conclusion
Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh weaves together the historian-bureaucrat’s own non-slave under-standing of slave children’s lives with aspects of the memories and self-representationsof the powerful khwajasarais who were his patrons. In the collective and individualmemories interwoven in Faiz Bakhsh’s account, the historian finds ‘fragments’ of slavechildren’s experiences that are shaped by historically contextual definitions of child-hood. Faiz Bakhsh’s narration of Jawahir Ali Khan and Darab Ali Khan’s enslavementshows that the fragmentation of the Mughal Empire and increased pressures oncultivators due to the monetization of rent made children vulnerable to enslavementin mid-eighteenth-century Awadh. Moreover, Faiz Bakhsh’s narrative shows that
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collective and individual memories distanced families from the shame of monetarytransactions in children and the coercion of enslavement through discourses of giftingand familial grief.
Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh suggests that two aspects of khwajasarai childhood wereregarded as particularly important: first, their embedding in networks of adopted kin;and second, their scholarship and cultivation of adab. This reflects broader processes ofenslavement in the subcontinent where slaves typically became assimilated to the culturalnorms of their master and formed kinship networks, which sometimes included the kin oftheir master. That is, acculturation and kinship-making were broadly speaking part of theexperiences of slave children in early-modern and modern South Asia. Forming culturaland interpersonal links appears to have been an important way in which child slavescoped with their enslavement and deracination. However, it is likely that Faiz Bakhsh’starikh also reflects the desired adult self-representations of his khwajasarai patrons andthe ways they made sense of their enslavement as children. The formation of kinshipnetworks and the cultivation of adab were evidently significant to the adult identities ofJawahir Ali and Darab Ali and shaped the ways they constructed and relayed memories oftheir childhood. I have further suggested that the emphasis on adab in Faiz Bakhsh’saccount of enslaved childhoods reflects a culturally and historically specific definition ofthe boundary between boyhood and adulthood. Although there was a tendency for slavesto be infantilized, elite slaves who had achieved a certain level of adab were held to have‘passed beyond boyhood’. Childhood was not numerically defined, but was a stage ofrelative ignorance. The cultivation of scholarly learning, virtue, character, and ethicalbehaviour was a process by which boys matured into men.
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes1. Emphasis in original. Nazir, Petition.2. Faiz Bakhsh, Memoirs of Delhi and Faizábád, 50, 96–7.3. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 165.4. Faiz Bakhsh mentions few non-slave children in his account. As such, it is difficult to
compare his views of slave and non-slave children.5. Indrani Chatterjee, Richard Eaton and Sumit Guha, among others, have mentioned the
demand for children (particularly girls) in the early-modern slave market; the sale of childrenby families in circumstances of distress; the inheritance of slave status by some slave off-spring; and the adoption of slave children by their masters or mistresses (and consequentintersection of kinship and enslavement). Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law; Eaton,“Introduction,” 5; Chatterjee, “Sound of Silence,” 292; Eaton, “Military Slavery,” 116;Guha, “Slavery, Society,” 167. See also Richard Allen’s work on the broader Indian Oceanregion: Allen, “A Traffic Repugnant”; Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic”; Allen,“Children and European Slave Trading.”
6. Sen, Colonial Childhoods; Vallgårda, “Adam’s Escape”; Ellis, “‘Snapshots’ of theClassroom”; Lal, Coming of Age; Bhagavan, Sovereign Spheres. The historical literature onchildhood in this period is particularly focused on social and political debates about child-hood, rather than the lives of children: Tambe, “The State as Surrogate Parent”; Bagchi,“Socialising the Girl Child”; Pande, “Coming of Age”; Anagol-McGinn, “The Age ofConsent Act”; Parker, “A Corporation of Superior Prostitutes”; Sarkar, “Rhetoric Againstthe Age of Consent.”
7. Ali, Courtly Culture, 55, 91–5; Lal, Domesticity and Power, 122–3, 187–93.8. Campbell, “Introduction”; Campbell and Alpers, “Introduction.”
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9. Indrani Chatterjee has also argued for the significance of adab in understanding narratives andexperiences of slavery. She writes, ‘To my mind, the double neglect of adab and of the slave-individual has had a seriously debilitating impact on the historiography of slavery.’ Chatterjee,“A Slave’s Quest,” 60.
10. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 1, iii; Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2,192–3, 195–6.
11. Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 4–5. On biographical approaches to history see also Anderson,Subaltern Lives; Arnold and Blackburn, Telling Lives in India.
12. Ellis, “‘Snapshots’ of the Classroom,” 398.13. Kumar, “Service, Status and Military Slavery,” 85.14. Similarly, Faiz Bakhsh’s tarikh of Delhi and Faizabad was intended to record the tales of
Mughal and Awadhi history he had heard in his youth from ‘noble persons of advanced years’.Green, “The Uses of Books,” 246.
15. Chatterjee, “History as Self-Representation,” 928.16. Ibid., 920.17. Metcalf, ‘Introduction,’ 15.18. Ibid., 2–3.19. Ibid., 9–10.20. For instance, Kumkum Chatterjee notes that Indian historians’ argued the decline of the
Mughal Empire and its successor states like Murshidabad was a result of failures to employmen with virtue who were ‘raised in the culture of khanazadgi’ (like the historians them-selves). Chatterjee, “History as Self-Representation,” 931.
21. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 1, i–iii.22. Chatterjee, “History as Self-Representation,” 916–723. I have not found any evidence that Faiz Bakhsh was subsequently employed by the East India
Company.24. To Hoey, Faiz Bakhsh’s account of this incident demonstrated the past corruption of no-
longer-corrupt British colonialism in India. Hoey, “Translator’s Preface,” iii–iv25. Ibid., vi.26. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 1, v–vi.27. By the early nineteenth century, Awadh was an independent state, ruled by a Padshah (King)
who did not recognize Mughal authority. Fisher, Clash of Cultures, 27; Barnett, North India,28, 33.
28. Fisher, Clash of Cultures, 14, 50–1, 187–99; Barnett, North India, 17, 33–5.29. The presence of eunuchs in Hindu states, for instance in Rajasthan, negates a simple equation
of Islamic political forms with the employment of eunuchs. On eunuchs in Rajasthan: Ebden,“A Few Notes.” Although the Nawabs were Shi’a, unlike the Sunni Mughals, Awadh courtrituals and culture reflected Mughal influence. Fisher, Clash of Cultures, 76–7.
30. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 36–45. On eunuchs in Mecca, see Marmon, Eunuchsand Sacred Boundaries.
31. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 36–7. This conceptualization of political power appliedalso to imperial servants and nobles. O’Hanlon, “Kingdom, Household and Body”; O’Hanlon,“Manliness and Imperial Service,” 54–6; Blake, Shahjahanabad, 20–1, 83–90.
32. Lal, Domesticity and Power, 142, 152; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 37.33. Lal, Domesticity and Power, 166, 194–6.34. See Faiz Bakhsh’s discussion of the various appointments of Jawahir Ali Khan in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 49–50.35. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 7; Barnett, North India, 130, 200–1.36. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 25–6.37. Bayly, Empire & Information, 94.38. Faiz Bakhsh wrote that the majority of eunuchs were uneducated. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh
Farahbakhsh, vol. 1, iii.39. Eaton, “Introduction,” 6.40. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 113–4, 290–1, 304, 306.41. Slave status was usually referred to through euphemisms. Chatterjee, “Sound of Silence,”
287–315. However, direct references to the slave status of khwajasarai could be used bymasters and non-slave elites to force even powerful khwajasarai to comply with theircommands. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 123, 144–5, 148. Chatterjee notes in
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her study of khwajasarai in Murshidabad that they often became pawns in the politicalmachinations of their masters. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 52.
42. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 186.43. Ibid., 49–50, 268–84. In other contexts, anthropologists studying South Asia have argued
guru–chela relationships could be termed a form of kinship since ‘[o]ne basic definingcriterion of a master-disciple relationship … is that of unbroken ‘genealogy’.’ Böck andRao, “Introduction,” 18–20.
44. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 289, 297–8.45. In the case of the manumission of a slave, Shi’a law provided that a manumitted slave’s blood
relatives (regardless of proximity of the relation) had prior claims to inherit the property of thedeceased former slave over the master or mistress of the slave. The relationship between themanumitted slave and the former master was referred to as wala. This was a unilateral relation-ship in which the freedman or freedwoman had continued dependency on the former master.However, in the case of eunuch slaves, Indrani Chatterjee explains that ‘the genealogicalheirlessness of slave-eunuchs was obvious’. Eunuchs and other slaves were endowed with‘full proprietory capacities with respect to small portions of immoveable wealth’. However,Chatterjee explains that most of slaves’ wealth ‘was a temporary endowment by a mistress [ormaster] … of the capacity to improve and manage resources on the condition that such acapacity ended naturally with the physical death of the slave’. Chatterjee suggests that in thecase of eunuchs in Murshidabad, ‘even if they left behind their own acquired “chelas” with thepotential to act as “‘legal heirs,” they did not try to pass on heirship to their own slaves’, possiblybecause they took it for granted that the property was not theirs to dispose of. Chatterjee,Gender, Slavery and Law, 140–1, 151, 169–70. However, in the case of Awadh, some khwa-jasarai did attempt to dispose of property to heirs, though it appears that most were unable to doso. Ali, Observations on the Mussulmauns, vol. 1, 72; Elliott, Chronicles of Oonao, 131. FaizBakhsh wrote that ‘eunuchs have no heirs’. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 316–19.
46. Fisher, Clash of Cultures, 53.47. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law; Eaton, “Introduction”; Chatterjee, “Sound of Silence”;
Eaton, ”The Rise and Fall”; Guha, “Slavery, Society.”48. Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan was the paternal uncle of the second Awadh Nawab,
Safdarjung. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 46–7.49. In some cases, the rural elite also included expansionist rajas. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and
Bazaars, 45–6; Bayly, “Pre-History of ‘Communalism’?,” 190.50. This was due to the penetration of ‘men of capital and trade’ into the agrarian economy and
the establishment of revenue farms. In the revenue farming system, a person was granted theright to raise revenue from certain lands and passed onto the Awadh state a fixed annualamount, creating revenue certainty for the state, but encouraging revenue-farmers to extractmore revenue for their own profit. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 45–6, 95–6, 107.
51. Bayly, “Pre-History of ‘Communalism’?,” 179–91.52. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 46–7.53. Ibid., 47.54. Bayly, “Pre-History of ‘Communalism’?,” 183–6.55. Ibid., 193.56. I expand on khwajasarai children’s kinship-making below. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh,
vol. 2, 47.57. Ibid.58. Ibid., 47–8.59. Eaton, “Military Slavery,” 116; Morton, “Small Change,” 57.60. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 193.61. Ibid.62. Elliott, Chronicles of Oonao, 124.63. Thanks to Annie McCarthy for prompting me to emphasize this point.64. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 193.65. This was particularly the case as there were few regions that presented ideal conditions for
agriculture and could be made productive without investment in infrastructure. Bayly, Rulers,Townsmen and Bazaars, 80–4.
66. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 218.
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67. On the general impacts of monetized revenue, see Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars,45–6, 95–6, 107.
68. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, 96–103.69. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 193.70. Ibid., 194.71. Ibid.72. Eaton, Eight Indian Lives, 5.73. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 22–3.74. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 193–4.75. Ibid., 194.76. Bahar Ali was a non-eunuch slave boy who was sold to a wealthy Saiyad woman who had no
children and who raised Bahar Ali as her son. This suggests how kinship and enslavementoften intersected in the adoption of slave children by their master or mistress, an issue that willbe discussed further below. Bahar Ali was kidnapped sometime between 1739 and 1754,during the reign of the second Awadh Nawab, Safdar Jang. The army of the Awadh Nawabwas marching through the countryside surrounding Bahar Ali’s village and, in Faiz Bakhsh’sdescription, ‘the castrators’ kidnapped him, emasculated him, and sold him to the Nawab’sson, the heir to the Awadh throne. Faiz Bakhsh wrote, ‘The Saiyad lady, who could not findhim [Bahar Ali] again, though she searched hard for him, lost heart and died of grief.’ Ibid.,218.
77. Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest,” 75.78. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 194.79. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 176.80. Ibid., 128, 262.81. Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest,” 85. A number of historians of slavery in the Indian Ocean
region have noted that slavery was not defined in opposition to an abstract notion of ‘freedom’or ‘liberty’. Campbell, “Introduction”; Miers, “Slavery.”
82. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 47.83. Yusuf Ali Khan was educated by Akhwand Ahmad Ali, along with both Jawahir Ali and
Ambar Ali. Ibid., 241.84. Ibid., 139.85. Ibid.86. Fisher, “Becoming and Making ‘Family’.”87. Ibid., 53, 130, 181.88. Ibid., 149.89. For discussion of slavery and the formation of kinship bonds, see Chatterjee and Guha,
“Slave-Queen, Waif-Prince”; Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest.”90. As an adult, Darab Ali was reportedly in contact with his natal family. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh
Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 306.91. Ibid.92. Ibid., 313.93. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 189.94. Ibid., 267, 283.95. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 1, iii; Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 47.96. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 48. On the history of madrasa schooling, see
Beckwith, Warriors of the Cloisters.97. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 195.98. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, 11–2.99. Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest,” 66.100. Ibid., 67.101. Ibid., 81.102. Chatterjee has written in reference to the memoirs of an eighteenth-century slave named
Tahmas that ‘he was enslaved as a child, when he would probably have little knowledge ofappreciation of either belonging to a particular qaum, or of the specific symbols and practicestaken to be the badges of that cultural and political identity’. I agree with Chatterjee, thatcultural knowledge and learning of norms of conduct would not have been a means ofconcerted subjectivity-formation for children (as for adults). Nonetheless, Faiz Bakhsh’s
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account suggests that slave children did attempt to belong in new contexts through culturaland behavioural competence. Ibid., 78.
103. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 47.104. Kia, “Adab as Ethics,” 290.105. Kia notes that the Gulistan ‘was an exemplar of social adab’ in eighteenth century India. Ibid.,
282.106. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 48.107. Metcalf, “Introduction,” 11.108. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 48.109. Ibid., 241–2.110. Ibid., 195–6.111. For a parallel case of Persian scholars’ implicit and explicit critiques of military slaves in the
Delhi Sultanate, see Kumar, “Service, Status, and Military Slavery.”112. Aries, Centuries of Childhood; Heywood, History of Childhood. Thanks to anonymous
reviewers of this article for prompting me to draw out this point.113. Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest,” 67.114. Faiz Bakhsh, Táríkh Farahbakhsh, vol. 2, 195–6.115. Ibid., 196.116. Darab Ali stayed with Faiz Bakhsh after Bahu Begam banned her eunuchs from sleeping in
her palace because one of her eunuchs had insulted a female attendant. Ibid.117. Ibid., 193.118. Ibid., 192–3.119. Mana Kia’s study of adab in eighteenth century India and Indrani Chatterjee’s study of the
eighteenth-century slave Tahmas Miskin’s writings both provide passing references to thecultivation of adab as key to the process of becoming an adult. Kia, “Adab as Ethics,”289–90; Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest,” 66–7.
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