Everyday Lives of Medieval Indian Women: Gender, Labor, and Domesticity

Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate the lives of the Indian women in medieval times, their daily life, in terms of gender, work and domesticity. It transcends court-centered and elite-oriented historiography by bringing to the fore the contributions of non-elite women, e.g., peasants, artisans, tribal collectivities and urban labor, whose role in household and economic life has been sidelined in the historical narrative. With the help of such extensive literature resources (including religious sources, court evidence, inscriptions in temples, material culture, and oral practices) the study recreates the experiences of women in their domestic and agricultural lives, as artisans, and as participants in rituals.Feminist historiography and subaltern studies are applied to interrogate how caste, class, and religion shaped entree to labor and power. It examines the home as an arena of patriarchal control as well as a site of cultural production and how women are implicated in the management of the house, transference of knowledge and maintenance of the spiritual life. The paper explains the work of women in the agricultural and informal economy, their engagement in Bhakti and Sufi worship, and how their bodies were controlled socially through the norms of sexuality, menstruation, and widowhood through thematic analysis.Finally, the paper has challenged the view that medieval Indian women were only receivers of tradition, but they were co-producers of their social worlds. Their input which is being made invisible in the prevalent narrations is critical to a better understanding of the medieval Indian society. This research rethinks exclusionary models of history by restoring everyday gendered experience to the historical record, and demands a more open feminist history of South Asia.