ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how khwaja-sara'i responded to the British East India Company's deepening involvement in the administration and court politics of Indian states through a case study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Awadh, a state in north India. It suggests that research into Indian representations of eunuchs is necessary to determine how eunuch gender was constructed within different contexts. The chapter explores the ways that eunuchs reacted to the new political circumstances of indirect colonial rule through three controversies involving eunuchs and the East India Company that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It draws on two sets of primary sources: first, Muhammad Fa'iz Bakhsh's Ta'rikh-i Farahbakhsh, which was written around 1818; and second, East India Company records. The chapter also draws upon eighteenth and nineteenth-century East India Company records. It finally draws the context of indirect colonial rule of Awadh also shaped William Hoey's late nineteenth-century translation of Fa'iz Bakhsh's ta'rikh.
