Eunuchs in Mughal Establishment Shadab Bano A.M.U. AM- 17094 The Islamic harems been obscured from the public-eye, there was hardly ways to know about it except from the hear-say, which the European travelers, to these lands, imaginatively built up into exaggerated narratives about the personal lives of the orient. The elaborate description of Ottoman harem by European observers carried forward by recent historians 1 in describing it as prison–like structures consisting of ‘constellation of fragmented spaces enveloped by high-wall, designed for intrigue, where deprivation and sexual licentiousness lived side by side’, had served as model for knowing harems in all other Islamic parts. Unfortunately, in face of the reluctance of contemporary writers about the ruler’s private domain, considered beyond propriety to discuss; the sway of the European accounts in providing the concept of the Islamic household had been great. Eunuchs by such description had a fundamental role to play - to keep women in place, to guard them, to spy over them, play their guardians etc., in short simply to enforce rigid discipline of seclusion. The presence of eunuchs immediately became useful in highlighting the brutal servitude and sexual debauchery in these harems. It is today well known that the institution had existed in a number of societies ancient to Islamic societies, to as early as societies in the antiquity in Rome and Greece. Young boys were castrated to serve in churches and temples, given also by their parents. 2 India too received white eunuchs from the West, as we know from the 9 th century Persian chronicler 3 (specifically the regions Sind and Malabar). Malabar along 1 Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: the Topkapi in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, new York, 1991,p.182. 2 The Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, B. Lewis and Ch. Pellat, Vol.IV, Leiden, 1978,p.1088. 3 Ibn Khordadbeh wrote about the trade carried out by the jewish merchants of the time.Amitav Ghosh, ‘The Slave of Ms. H.6’, Subaltern Studies, Vol.VII, ed. Partha