of pedigree, generations elapsed since conversion to
Islam, religiosity, wealth, occupational status, and
intellect.
This attention to legal detail in social life coin-
cided with the increasing “purification” of Islam
within South Asia during the nineteenth century. In
this social and legal context, memories of accepting
brides from socially distinct or even non-Muslim
communities became an embarrassment in the
contemporary Islamic scale of values. While the
historical record for many such households in the
subcontinent reveals a range of relationships from
slave-concubinage to ritualized unions with daugh-
ters and sisters of local non-Muslim hegemons, the
indigenous language histories produced by these
Muslim households either tended to erase these
women from the relevant family histories or spoke
of them as mankù™a. This last usage inverted the
formal meaning of nikà™(Islamic nuptials) by
recording it as a ceremony inferior to the elabo-
rately performed shàdìin South Asia. So custom
continued to operate alongside a growing reference
to Sharì≠a among many Muslim households.
The role of the colonial administration in both
reshaping and maintaining customs among Mus-
lims in South Asia is a deeply contentious one. In
some annexed provinces like Punjab (annexed in
1849), colonial administrators maintained custom-
ary practices such as unilineal descent, patrilineal
inheritance, and primogeniture. This legitimized
deviation from the system of proportionate shares
allotted to women in Islamic law, and appears
to have seriously affected the property rights of
daughters, sisters, and widowed and divorced
Muslim women.
Imperial British law directly reshaped household
customs at another level too. While diverse sexual
relationships could co-exist within the same house-
hold from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,
colonial legal measures and interpretations of
Islamic laws diminished the viability of such pat-
terns by classifying children born of non-ritual
unions as illegitimate. This process also led to the
degradation of earlier fosterage and adoption prac-
tices that had prevailed in these households, and
now began to be identified by Muslim legists too as
un-Islamic.
These changes significantly altered relations within
substantial households. Hortatory Islamic litera-
ture in the nineteenth century addressed women in
print for the first time. Texts began to urge women
of upwardly mobile Muslim groups to become
knowledgeable and skilled laborers. This signals
both the entry of new groups without established
claims upon, and the older elites’ loss of command
south asia 257over, servile and dependent labor. The autobiogra-
phies of educated Muslim men in the nineteenth
century suggest that skilled labors by women, par-
ticularly as seamstresses and spinners, in turn sus-
tained households through the stress of economic
and social transition.
Muslim households everywhere were affected by
the Partition of 1947. Large numbers of Muslims
migrated from India to the newly established
nation of Pakistan. Joint-family households were
split up. Property-owning Muslim households in
both nationsappear to have responded to financial
and political stresses by becoming ever more vigi-
lant about marriage and family constitution. In
some areas, the survival strategies of Muslim house-
holds headed by widows and unmarried women
reinforced kinship claims upon the younger males,
who would reside in multiple households by rota-
tion. Such membership of multiple households
may be located in a continuum that includes the
dual residence (rural-urban) households of incipi-
ent professional groups of the nineteenth century
and the households from which males migrated as
precolonial soldiers and postcolonial blue-collar
workers in the Middle East. In sum, the shape and
function of Muslim households in South Asia
should be seen as historically responsive to the
challenges faced by diverse Islamic groups, rather
than as fixed and permanent through all time.Bibliography
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