Murad’s travels: courtesanly mobility, honour, and defiance in late eighteenth-century Multan

Abstract This article seeks out the spaces and strategies through which hereditary women performers enacted mobility and articulated power in early modern South Asia. The fraught relationship between a Multan-based courtesan, Murad Bakhsh, and a Durrani aristocrat of Dera Ghazi Khan, Muhammad Raza Khan Pupalza’i, is at the heart of Raza’s Persian memoir titled Jaur-o-Jafā , which is written in a distinctive literary style and lavishly illustrated with several miniature paintings. While overtly about the romantic entanglements of Murad and Raza, the story offers us a window into the cultural history of south-western Punjab during the political tumult of the late eighteenth century. It features a range of characters, including Multan’s last Durrani ruler, Muzaffar Khan (1775–1818), and a vast retinue of courtiers, musicians, and messengers embroiled in Raza and Murad’s love–hate story. The article focuses on the many journeys Murad took during her life, highlighting her ‘courtesanly mobility’. Written by her paramour-turned-enemy, we read Jaur-o-Jafā against the grain to amplify the voice of Murad Bakhsh in order to highlight the arc of her mobility, resistance, and agency in defying the limits of both patriarchal honour and the determining social, legal, and political positionalities of women in the region.