Food, diet, and a princely court
Prof. Siobhan T. Lambert-Hurley
Tues, October 21, 2025 | 4:15 (CET) | University of Lausanne | Anthropole 4088
The princely state of Bhopal in central India is renowned for its dynasty of Muslim women rulers that reigned through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The last of these nawab begums was Nawab Sultan Jahan Begum (1858-1930, ruled 1901-26), who gained a reputation as an effective administrator and reformer, while still maintaining strict purdah. The Begum’s court – open to women subjects of all social strata, but curtained off from male ministers – thus challenges conceptions of a male-dominated arena circumscribed by certain gendered norms and values. This paper explores how this zenana court had a unique impact on state policy and practice, particularly in relation to food. Sultan Jahan, it will show, was especially concerned with propagating advice on what and how to eat through a number of didactic texts on health, diet and consumption. These writings – widely circulated within and beyond Bhopal – exemplified her vision of Muslim modernism in that they were guided by Unani medical practice even as they borrowed from colonial science. With women ascendant at court, her gastronomic ideals were then translated into everyday practice for her Hindu and Muslim subjects through educational curricula, public events and even a cookbook. From this example, we see how a woman at the helm enables court imaginaries to be reformulated through the prism of food.
