Beyond the Colonial Trope: Economic Independence and Spiritual Agency Among North Indian Women, c. 1400–1799

This document pulls out the specific evidentiary claims made in the article and organizes them by case and category, with the article's own citations attached to each row. It leaves out the historiographical argument and the framing discussion; those stay in the original article. Where the article flags a source as journalistic or secondary rather than direct, that qualification is carried over here. Period covered: 1400 to 1799, spanning the late Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and the eighteenth-century successor states. The cutoff at 1799 is deliberate: it sits before the colonial codification projects that began reworking customary property and religious practice into fixed “personal law.” The article is explicit that evidence here is much thinner than for the imperial household. Women across social strata are documented as central to textile production, spinning, weaving, and embroidery among them, one of the principal commodities in both internal and export trade and a major source of household income from female labor. Roy (1999) is cited as recent work beginning to reconstruct this largely undocumented labor history, though the source base remains thin next to the administrative record for elite women. The article describes a parallel but less prominent pattern in North Indian Sufi devotional movements: a similar focus on direct experience of God produced a restricted toleration of women's reputational and informal authority as devotees, patrons, and in some cases protectors of shrine cults. As with bhakti hagiography, this record has been mediated by later compilers and needs the same source-critical caution.