Fatima’s inheritance: Law, Islam, and gendered archive-making in India’s early modern global connections

Abstract

Abstract Sometime around the first half of the seventeenth century, a Muslim woman known by the name Fatima brought her slaves to court over an inheritance dispute in the Indian port city of Surat. Tracing Fatima’s lawsuit and its many afterlives through the study of the transmission of its sole surviving record, this article charts the genealogies of the gendered (re)interpretations of the meaning of law and Islam from the courtroom of Surat to a Mughal official’s anthology and to a French Orientalist’s library. Along the way, Fatima’s invocation of divine legal authority in protecting her right of inheritance became abstracted by the Mughal official into a Persianate scribal articulation of ideal social order that saw the masculine as the default gender of law. This scribal vision of order then converged with the Orientalist’s universalist narrative of natural law that struggled to comprehend simultaneously the legal, economic and bodily agency of Muslim women. These layered processes of archive-making ultimately invite us to rethink not just Fatima’s story itself but also our current efforts to write gender into global history.