SHOW NOTES
She was a concubine, courtesan, wife, lover, warrior, leader, a Mughal noble, a British ally. She was Christian and Muslim. She threw grand parties that South Asians and Europeans alike were enamored with. In the nineteenth-century male-dominated world of South Asia, Begum Samru stood out, and purposely so. The Mughal emperor Shah Alam II depended on her as much as the British sometimes did. In this episode, we discuss the remarkable life of a woman leader who fought on the field and off it. Born in poverty, she died as one of the richest people in the subcontinent, Begum Samru's life and legacy is the topic of this podcast episode.
REFERENCES
Banerjee, B. N. (1925). Begam Samru. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar.
Ghosh, D. (2006). Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hingorani, A. (January 01, 2002). Artful Agency: Imagining and Imaging Begam Samrū. Archives of Asian Art, 53, 54-70.
Lall, J. S. (2012). Begam Samru: Fading portrait in a gilded frame. New Delhi: Lotus Collection.
Nair, P. (1963). Sardhana: Its Begum, its shrine, its basilica. Meerut: Prabhat Press.
Rajagopalan, Mrinalini (January 01, 2016). Stranger at the Door: Hospitality as Legitimacy in the Nineteenth-Century Mansions of Begum Samru. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 28, 1, 46-46.
Rajagopalan, M. (June 01, 2018). Cosmopolitan Crossings: The Architecture of Begum Samrū. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 77, 2, 168-185.
Ruggles, D. F. (2014). Woman's eye, woman's hand: Making art and architecture in modern India : a collection of essays. Delhi: Zubaan.
Singh, Brijraj. "The Enigma of Begum Samru: Differing Approaches to Her Life." India International Centre Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1997): 33-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23002292.