History Has a Grammar Problem.

I have been sitting with Rana Safvi’s account of the Begums of Bhopal for three days now and I keep returning to the same feeling. Not admiration exactly. Something closer to fury at how close we came to not knowing any of this at all. Four successive women rulers. A century of continuous female governance over a significant princely state. And the way this tends to get framed even today, when it gets mentioned at all, is as a charming anomaly. An exception. A curiosity.

It was not an anomaly. It was a system. And the reason it reads as anomaly is entirely about whose hand was holding the pen when the record got made.

This is what I want to write about today. Not the famous names. Not the ones who made it into the chapter heading because their visibility became too large to edit out. The ones underneath. The translators who made the treaties possible. The women managing correspondence that their husbands signed. The poet-saints whose devotional verses restructured the social fabric of entire regions and who are remembered, when they are remembered, primarily as inspiring rather than as thinkers. The structural invisibility of women in history is not an absence of women from history. It is a failure of the recording apparatus to recognise certain kinds of power as power at all.

History did not forget these women. It never learned to see them as the kind of people history happens to. That is a different problem with a different solution.

The three ways you disappear from the record

The first is reclassification. What you did gets renamed as something lesser. Translation becomes assistance. Political management becomes wifely support. Running the correspondence of a diplomatic mission becomes accompanying your husband. The activity is acknowledged. The agency is removed. You remain in the footnote as a presence rather than in the chapter as an actor.

The second is adjacency collapse. Your historical survival depends entirely on the man you were adjacent to. If he is remembered you get a footnote. If he is forgotten you vanish with him. Your significance was never recorded independently so it cannot survive independently. The woman who shaped a treaty through her translation work exists in the historical record only as long as the treaty is interesting to historians, and then only as context for the negotiator who signed it.

The third is the naturalisation of skill. A woman who spoke five languages was not considered a remarkable linguist. She was considered accomplished for a woman. A woman who managed a vast estate’s administrative correspondence was not considered an administrator. She was considered capable. The moment competence is framed as natural rather than earned, it stops registering as competence. It becomes background. And background does not get chapters written about it.

What makes the Indian context specifically interesting is that these three mechanisms operated simultaneously with a fourth one that is somewhat unique: the deliberate colonial project of reclassifying Indian women’s power as either exceptional or as evidence of social disorder requiring reform. The Begums of Bhopal were remarkable despite their tradition according to the colonial framing. The possibility that their tradition was precisely what produced them was not a framing the administration found convenient.

When you read these accounts carefully you start noticing a specific kind of sentence. A sentence that contains a woman doing something consequential and then immediately pivots to the man she was doing it for or beside or in service of. The grammar of historical attribution has a built-in redirect.

Daughters of the Sun by Ira Mukhoty does something that I find genuinely methodologically interesting in response to this. She reads the gaps as evidence. The silence around certain women in certain periods is itself data about what was being suppressed or simply not considered worth recording. This is not speculation. It is the same interpretive move that archaeologists make when they note the deliberate absence of something from a site. Absence has a shape. The shape tells you something.

The question I am sitting with is what happens when you apply this method to texts I grew up with. The Mahabharata has Draupadi, who is one of the most complex political actors in the entire epic and is routinely reduced to her suffering. It has Kunti, who makes strategic decisions of enormous consequence that the text records but does not frame as strategic. It has Gandhari, whose curse carries more geopolitical weight than most battles in the war, and who is remembered primarily as the blindfolded wife. Every one of these women is doing something the text records as significant and frames as personal. The personal was political. The text just would not say so directly.

Why this is not just a feminist argument

I want to be careful here because I think reducing this to representation politics misses the more important point. This is not primarily about fairness to women across time, though that matters. It is about the accuracy of our historical understanding. If women were operating as consequential political actors and the record systematically reclassified their actions as support rather than substance, then our picture of how decisions got made is wrong. Not incomplete. Wrong. We are misattributing causation. We are identifying the wrong people as the agents of change.

This means every conclusion we draw from the historical record about leadership, about governance, about how power worked in pre-colonial India is at minimum questionable and at maximum inverted. The Begums of Bhopal governing effectively for a century is not evidence that women can govern. It is evidence that governance was already structured to include and cultivate female political capacity in ways the colonial historiography was constitutionally unable to recognise.

That is a much bigger claim. And it is the one I think the books I am reading are quietly building toward without always stating directly. The record is not missing women. The record is missing its own blind spots. Those are different problems and they require different solutions.

Where I am going with this

I do not have a clean conclusion yet. I am still in the middle of the reading and the margin notes are genuinely out of hand. But here is what I think I am moving toward.

The decolonisation of Indian historical knowledge and the recovery of women’s place in that history are not separate projects. They are the same project. The colonial recording apparatus that decided what counted as significant political action was the same apparatus that could not see women as political actors. The categories were built together. They have to be dismantled together.

And the reason this feels urgent to me right now, in 2026, is not nostalgia. It is that we are still using those categories. The way we talk about Indian women’s empowerment as something that needs to be introduced into tradition rather than recovered from it. The way we frame ambitious Indian women as departing from their inheritance rather than continuing a lineage that was always there. The way the Begums of Bhopal get framed as exceptions rather than evidence.