Domesticating the Harem

Loosely bound with a black ribbon in a now long forgotten gesture of affection, one hundred and twenty photographs of the women of the Seventh Nizam of Hyderabad’s royal zenana (female household) were discovered in the dark storerooms of the King Kothi palace in Hyderabad, India. One expects these so-called harem pictures to depict the stereotypical sexualized image of lounging half nude odalisques smoking hookah pipes. A common misunderstanding is that the harem and the zenana are one and the same; operating as pictorial or semantic designations, they are most often used interchangeably. The surprise in the discovery of these photographs is their presentation of women as wives, sisters, and mothers, as well as consorts and concubines, an uncommon depiction that complicates the conventional understandings of what a harem might be. Rather than eroticize, the pictures domesticize the Indian female, and present the possibility for a different understanding of the predominant definition of the harem