Becoming Elizabeth

Abstract

Abstract In the late eighteenth century, a Mughal woman named Sharaf un-Nisa lived with and bore children by the first Company Supervisor of Purnea. She followed him to Britain, changed her name to Elizabeth, and converted to Christianity. Cohabitations between native women and British East India Company servants were common. While scholars have attempted to compensate for the notorious dearth of information about these native women’s lives by reading East India Company archives, material evidence of this woman’s life lends insight to the embodied process of Anglicization. This article supplements existing research on native consorts with consideration of a family archive to consider the subjectivity of Elizabeth Sharaf un-Nisa as a process of transformation characterized by hybridity. This argument proceeds by a textual material analysis of a diverse range of materials from a family archive, including eighteenth and early nineteenth century private correspondence in English and Persian, as well as material analysis of paintings, jewelry, textiles, and a penmanship book.