Condition of Women in the 16th and 17th Centuries
The condition of women during the 16th and 17th centuries in India was shaped fundamentally by the institution of the joint family — traditionally the single most important pillar of domestic life. Within this framework, women’s lived experience varied considerably by class and social station, ranging from the confined but culturally influential lives of women in the royal haram to the harsh, labour-intensive existence of peasant and artisan women. Examining this variation offers UPSC History Optional aspirants a nuanced picture of gender and social structure in Mughal India, well beyond simple generalisation.
Family Life
The family system across most of India during this period was predominantly patriarchal in character, with several broad features common across regions:
- The senior-most male member headed the family and held ultimate authority over its affairs.
- There was, notably, no individual property within the family structure as such — members instead enjoyed only a right of maintenance drawn from the shared family property.
- Women members were, as a general rule, subject to the dictates and decisions of the male members of the family.
- Families displayed a distinct and consistent preference for male offspring: a son was preferred over a daughter, and among sons, the first-born typically received particular preference.
On the whole, this joint family system fostered a strong sense of mutual dependence and collective relationship — cultivating the broader consciousness that life, without the support of the wider family unit, would be considerably more difficult for its individual members.
Women across social classes shared certain common challenges, chiefly their structural dependence on father, husband, or son, and the pervasive effects of the male-dominated patriarchal family system. Within these shared constraints, however, the actual lived experience of upper-class women and working women differed enormously.
Upper-Class Women
Upper-class women were, as a rule, relatively well educated, and led lives of considerable material luxury — though this luxury was typically confined within the walls of the haram, where a woman often shared her husband with numerous other wives and mistresses.
Role in Politics
Some women played a genuinely active role in political affairs, occasionally as rulers in their own right:
- Rani Durgawati of Gondwana and Chand Bibi of Ahmadnagar governed as independent rulers themselves.
- Others, such as Nur Jahan, exercised substantial political power indirectly, through their husbands.
- Jahanara, daughter of Shah Jahan, remained closely associated with political affairs across two successive reigns — both under Shah Jahan himself, and later under Aurangzeb, following her father’s confinement.
- During the period of Mughal decline, several other women likewise came to exercise real political influence — including the vegetable-seller Zuhra, active during the reign of Muhammad Shah, and his own queen, Udham Bai, a former dancing girl who wielded considerable behind-the-scenes power.
Cultural Patronage
Beyond formal politics, women also played a significant role in shaping the moral and cultural tone of society, often working from behind the purdah curtain.
- They meaningfully influenced royal taste and patronage, and frequently extended their own direct patronage to artists, singers, and other cultural figures.
- Several royal women left behind notable literary works of their own:
- Jahanara wrote poetry under the pen-name “Makhfi” (meaning “concealed”).
- Roshanara, banished to Delhi by Aurangzeb, used her time there to establish a literary atelier known as the bait-ul-ulum.
Social Problems
Numerous harmful social practices affecting women persisted throughout this period, including child marriage, forced marriages, and the systematic denial of any meaningful share in parental property.
- Akbar made an effort to reform some of these practices, attempting to fix a minimum age of marriage and to grant girls greater freedom to marry according to their own choice rather than purely under parental pressure. In practice, however, these reforms were largely disregarded across the wider population.
Sati
The Mughal state’s attempts to regulate the practice of sati had, in reality, remarkably little practical impact — all the major Rajput ruling houses continued the practice largely undeterred.
- When Maharaja Man Singh Kachhwaha died at Elichpur in the Deccan in 1614, four of his ranis committed sati alongside him, and a further five did so at Amber.
- At the same time, it is notable that large numbers of ranis — whose names and full pedigrees are recorded in contemporary Rajasthani sources — continued to live on as widows following the death of a ruler, suggesting that no truly overwhelming social pressure compelled every widow to commit sati.
- A particularly troubling aspect of the practice was the deliberate inflation of a ruler’s posthumous sacred honour through an increase in the number of women who committed sati alongside him — accomplished by extending the practice to common-law wives and maids who had been called to the ruler’s bed and granted a special status, many of whom belonged to non-Rajput or lower-caste backgrounds.
- Thus, when Maharaja Anup Singh of Bikaner died in 1698, in addition to his two formal ranis, a further nine common-law wives (khawas, patar, khalsa) and seven maids (sahelis) also committed sati alongside him.
Marriage
Marriage stood as the single most notable social institution governing rural Indian life during this period.
- The responsibility for arranging the marriage of sons and daughters rested primarily with the parents, and early marriage was, as a rule, the strongly preferred practice.
- Abul Fazl, in the Ain-i-Akbari, records that Akbar attempted to establish a minimum marriageable age — sixteen years for males and fourteen years for females — though it remains uncertain how consistently this order was actually enforced in practice.
- Distinct marriage customs prevailed among the Muslim and non-Muslim segments of the rural population. For instance, marriage among Hindus was understood as a religious sacrament, whereas among Muslims it was structured as a formal contract.
- However, in both religious traditions, girls themselves were generally unable to exercise meaningful personal choice in the matter of marriage. Similarly, the practice of dowry remained a shared social affliction affecting both communities alike.
Divorce
Divorce was generally not favoured among Muslim nobles during this period, though a small number of documented instances of it do survive in the historical record.
Property
Regarding property rights, upon the death of a Mughal noble, his property was — following the process of escheat — distributed by the ruler among his sons according to the ruler’s own preference.
- There are, notably, no clear references to daughters of nobles receiving any formal share of paternal property under this system, though such inheritance laws may well have been enforced through the courts for ordinary Muslim subjects more broadly.
- Among certain sections of the landed gentry, by contrast, women did possess a genuine right to inherit property.
- Evidence from the Punjab, for instance, shows women — including widows — actively participating in the rural land market as sellers of property they had themselves inherited.
- Both Hindu and Muslim women are recorded inheriting zamindaris, which they remained free to sell or mortgage entirely at their own discretion.
- Women zamindars were, in fact, a recognised feature of 18th-century Bengal — notably, one of the largest and most celebrated zamindaris of the century, that of Rajshahi, was headed by a woman.
Life of Common Women
Life for the great majority of ordinary women was, by contrast, considerably harder than that of their upper-class counterparts.
- Contemporary paintings depict women actively engaged in construction and building work, often carrying young infants alongside their labour.
- Working women consistently received wages lower than those paid to men for comparable labour — official records from Kota, for instance, show that women working in the fields were paid less than their male counterparts.
Petitions to the Village Panchayat
Surviving documents from Western India — Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra — record numerous petitions submitted by women to the village panchayat, seeking redress and justice for grievances within their households.
- Wives frequently protested against the infidelity of their husbands, or against the neglect of a wife and her children by the male household head (grihasthi).
- While male infidelity itself was not always formally punished, the state and the “superior” caste groups of the village did tend to intervene where it came to ensuring the family was adequately provided for materially.
- Notably, in most cases where women petitioned the panchayat, their own names were entirely excluded from the surviving record — the petitioner was instead referred to only as the mother, sister, or wife of the relevant male household head, a small but telling detail of how women’s individual identities were routinely subsumed within the family structure.
Women’s Specialised Vocations
Women specialised in a number of distinct economic vocations during this period.
- Artisanal tasks such as spinning yarn, sifting and kneading clay for pottery, and fine embroidery depended heavily on female labour across many branches of production.
- Spinning, in particular, was widely practised by women of almost every social class.
- In Bengal, the exceptionally fine thread from which the famous Dacca muslin was woven was prepared specifically by women — often themselves from upper-caste backgrounds, prized for their nimble fingers and sharp eyesight. Such skilled women earned wages comparable to those of a skilled male worker, reaching as much as Rs. 3 per month.
- The delicate chikan embroidery for which Awadh became famous was likewise a distinctly female speciality — though it is clear that women engaged in such work generally operated under the close and tight control of a merchant or master craftsman.
- As a general pattern, the more commercialised a given product became, the greater the resulting demand placed on women’s labour to produce it. Peasant and artisan women, in fact, worked not only within their own fields but frequently travelled to the homes of their employers, or even to open markets, whenever the nature of their work required it.
Women Workers in Contemporary Paintings
Surviving Mughal-era paintings offer further visual evidence of women’s economic labour. Documented scenes include:
- Women carrying heavy building loads — migrant women from neighbouring villages frequently worked at such construction sites.
- The construction of Fatehpur Sikri, in which women are depicted actively crushing stone.
- A woman shown in the act of spinning thread.
Women in Agrarian Society
The broader production process of rural Mughal India regularly involved men and women performing distinct, specified roles.
- Women and men typically worked genuinely shoulder to shoulder in the fields — men were generally responsible for tilling and ploughing, while women handled sowing, weeding, threshing, and winnowing the harvest.
- With the growth of nucleated villages, and the broader expansion of individuated peasant farming that characterised medieval Indian agriculture, the fundamental basis of agricultural production rested on the combined labour and resources of the entire household as a single productive unit.
- Naturally, given this structure, a sharp gendered segregation between the “home” (as women’s domain) and the wider “world” (as men’s domain) was simply not practically feasible in the agrarian context — women’s labour was too economically essential to permit such a rigid separation.
- Nonetheless, certain deep-rooted biases related to women’s biological functions did persist. Menstruating women, for instance, were not permitted to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel in Western India, nor to enter the groves where betel-leaves (paan) were cultivated in Bengal.
Women as a Reproductive and Economic Resource
- Women were regarded as a genuinely vital resource within agrarian society, not least because they served as child-bearers in a social and economic system fundamentally dependent on human labour.
- At the same time, high mortality rates among women — driven by malnutrition, frequent pregnancies, and death during childbirth — often produced a persistent shortage of wives within many communities. This shortage, in turn, gave rise to distinct social customs within peasant and artisan communities that differed markedly from those prevalent among elite groups:
- Marriages in many rural communities required the payment of a bride-price to the bride’s family, in contrast to the dowry system more typical of elite households.
- Remarriage was generally considered entirely legitimate for both divorced and widowed women within these communities — again, a notable contrast with elite social norms.
- The considerable social importance attached to women as a reproductive force also meant that the fear of losing control over them ran correspondingly deep.
- Established social norms consistently held that the household should be headed by a male figure. As a direct consequence, women remained under strict oversight by both male family members and the wider community — and male authorities were capable of inflicting genuinely draconian punishment where infidelity on a woman’s part was even merely suspected, rather than proven.
