The Wicked Ways of Transoxiana: Sexual Deviance or Political Transgression? A Question for Early Mughal Historiography

This paper explores how early Mughal historiography papered over the mid-sixteenth-century political contestation between Iranian and Central Asian émigrés on the one hand, who advocated for decentralized confederate rule, and the ruling Timurid-Mughal family on the other, which attempted to centralize its administration and exert absolute political authority. In order to do so, this paper looks at how contemporary Mughal historians recorded and reframed episodes from the tumultuous career of the amīr ‘Alī Qulī Khān Uzbek, whose early political success was soon marred by a scandal concerning his alleged sexual transgressions, resulting in one of the many military actions initiated against him and members of his extended kinship network. As such, this paper offers new insights not only on the political realities of the nascent Mughal polity, but also on the rhetorical and figurative strategies employed by Mughal historians in narrating the rise of the dynasty to power. Finally, this paper will also offer a corrective to existing scholarship on ‘Alī Qulī Khān Uzbek, which has tended to study his life in a piecemeal fashion.