In Islamic Persia, a khādim was a youthful servant or slave who was often forced to become a eunuch to dissuade him from challenging
the authority of his captors. The incidence of slavery has generally been excluded from early Iranian history and documentary sources
rarely specify the nations from which eunuchs were captured. The Safavid civil servant and soldier known as Riza Quli Beg probably became a eunuch as the child of a captive from the Caucasus region. After Beg resettled in India and joined the Persian Golconda army during the 1630s, Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah sent him to capture the thriving Carnatic
region in 1660. When Beg succeeded, Abdullah granted him the title Neknam Khan, in recognition of his piety, and appointed him commander-in-chief of Golconda’s armies until his death in 1672. As Neknam Khan’s portrait demonstrates, his absence of a beard publicly symbolized his loss of virility and probably elicited contempt when he was encountered outside the sanctuary of the sultan’s palace, where gender subversion and homoeroticism among members of the servant class had historically been tolerated, if not encouraged.

Niknam Khan [sic], painting on paper from an album of
Persian portraits, ca. 1685. Courtesy of the British Museum, item 1974,0617,0.4.40. RFM1130 ncq. Sources: Brennig,
Joseph Jerome. “The Textile Trade of Seventeenth Century Northern Coromandel: A Study of a Pre-modern Asian Export Industry.” Ph.D. dissertation, the University of Wisconsin,
1975. Rahbari, Ladan. “Gendered and Ethnic Captivity and Slavery in Safavid Persia: A Literature Review.” Social Sciences 10 (1), Article 22.