The Presence of the Marginalised in the Life Sketches of the Ruling Elites : Slaves, Musicians and Concubines in the Mughal Tazkiras

The effort of my paper is to trace the presence of the marginalized social groups in the biographical narratives of the ruling elites, known as the tazkiras. Written in the Mughal period, they are collective biographies of the social and political elites, but these tazkiras also make incidental reference to the peripheral groups, as well. In exceptional cases, there are even biographical sketches of lower class individuals who had apparently crossed the social divide that separated the elites from the plebian elements. In the present paper, I would be looking at the representation of the socially inferior groups in the tazkiras with a view to examine the nature of elite perception of the marginalized groups, within a diachronic frame of reference.