Gendered Sovereignty and Domestic Statecraft: Household Power in Seventeenth-Century Rajput Polities

The political history of seventeenth-century Rajput polities has conventionally been examined through kingship, warfare, clan honour, territorial sovereignty, and relations with the Mughal Empire. Within this historiographical framework, royal women have often been represented as symbols of honour, loyalty, sacrifice, or dynastic virtue rather than as participants in the institutional processes through which political authority was reproduced. This article reconsiders that framework by examining the Rajput royal household as a site of domestic statecraft. Focusing comparatively on Marwar and Mewar between c. 1600 and 1707, it argues that sovereignty was produced not solely through the formal authority of male rulers but also through gendered practices involving kinship, succession, ritual, patronage, and political memory. The article draws upon scholarship on Rajput political culture, Mughal-Rajput relations, royal households, gender, and vernacular historical traditions. Particular attention is given to the succession crisis following the death of Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar in 1678 and to the political and cultural environment of Maharana Raj Singh's Mewar. These cases demonstrate the importance of examining royal women not simply as passive members of dynastic households but as participants in processes through which lineage and legitimacy were preserved. The article proposes that the zenana should be understood neither as an autonomous centre of political power nor as a purely private space, but as a gendered institutional environment connected to wider structures of sovereignty. By integrating gender history with political, kinship, and spatial history, the study offers a revised interpretation of early modern Rajput state formation.