University of Wisconsin, Madison (October 30 – November 2, 2024) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Session 6<\/strong>: Friday, 10:30 AM – 12:15 PM <\/p>\n\n\n\n This panel examines women’s engagement with early modern and modern law courts. In projecting sovereign authority, the court is commonly understood as a male-dominated arena structured by fixed rules and masculinist norms. In contrast centering women\u2019s relationship to courts reorients our very understanding of law and legal authority. By delving into undervalued archives, developing new methodological tools, and addressing the gendered approaches of history writing, this panel not only seeks to reassess women\u2019s role in shaping the court, but also to reframe how we view law itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The court \u2013 understood as e.g., \u02bfad\u0101lat or kacahar\u012b – unfolded plural realities and imaginaries of power. Rather than an immutable power structure, the panel engages the court as a variegated and protean space that women reinvested at different scales to assert their claims. From this perspective, we ask how women imagined and navigated official and nonofficial legal venues, not necessarily centered on the courtroom, to appeal to justice. What strategies did they develop to negotiate with legal authorities? The court is an arena of performance as well as of contestation. At the same time, law is an active category of discourses and debates. We therefore analyze how \u201ccourts\u201d spatialized dialectical and dynamic fields of law and justice. As such, the discussion will investigate the language, material engagements, and positionalities that women used to define their rights when appealing to justice. The papers will also explore visual archives and gendered biographies of prominent feminine figures to reflect on how women\u2019s presence in court and legal records interfaced with other spheres of representation. Finally, panelists will comment on the obstacles and possibilities for overcoming the problem of women\u2019s invisibility in the archives, and hence in historical narratives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Chair<\/strong> : Rohit De<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nandini Chatterjee<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Barring talented princesses and objectified courtesans, the lives and thoughts of women of Mughal South Asia are hardly legible\/visible. The problem of feminine insibility is even more acute when it comes to Mughal courtrooms, about which our knowledge is only preliminary. Extant documents suggest exclusively masculine spaces, peopled by male judges, male scribes, male guards and mainly male litigants and\/or representatives. Were women, then, outsiders to law, as has been suggested even in other, more proximate contexts, or are we in need of imaginative reconstruction of legal spaces and episodes to locate women, if not necessarily in<\/em> the courtroom, somewhere nearby, and highly aware of it? In answering this question, we might need to rethink the spatial limits of the courtroom itself, and re-situate it in scholarly and noble households, and see it less as a discrete space and more as a specific form of authority and mode of exercise of power. In this paper, I shall use documents recording specific low-level legal episodes from different locations around South Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, to trial the \u2018tracking of women in law\u2019, commenting on the challenges and possible imaginative leaps necessary in order to create narratives that are comprehensible to us today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Julia Stephens<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Studies of trade, politics, and law in the western Indian Ocean often revolve around towering male figures, such as the Ismaili-Khoja business tycoon Tharia Topan. Women, such as his third wife, Janbai, have, at best, been mentioned in footnotes appended to histories of their more famous male relations. This paper inverts these optics by tracing Janbai\u2019s presence and absence across legal, family, and museum archives. Janbai, the illiterate daughter of a fruit seller, amassed significant influence in the cosmopolitan worlds through which she traveled. The paper follows Janbai\u2019s evolution from a girl peddling her wares in the alleyways of Zanzibar\u2019s Stone Town, to a young wife petitioning the Aga Khan to bless her with sons, to a matriarch demanding that the Sultan of Zanzibar attend the wedding of her daughters, to a litigant battling her sons in courtrooms in Bombay. It finds her entanglement in networks of women in unexpected places, including a gold bracelet and photograph that she gifted to the wife of an American sea captain, now housed in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Triangulating between these different archives and spheres of influence suggests that women like Janbai used their visual presence and embodied consumption to exercise power in circuits of commerce, religion, politics, and law dominated by men engaged in textual exchanges. The paper considers how centering such visuality and embodiment unsettles frameworks of gendered agency that revolve around questions of voice and silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conference Room 2
Floor 2<\/p>\n\n\n\nWOMEN IN LAW COURTS<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
ARCHIVES, PERFORMANCE AND LEGIBILITY<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Where were the women? Efforts to imagine women in and around Mughal courtrooms<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
Veiled Sightings: Tracing Janbai\u2019s Visual and Embodied Presences and Absences across Legal, Family, and Museum Archives<\/h6>\n\n\n\n