“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

Abstract

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.