ABSTRACT
In March 1872, as a result of a petition from Keshub Chandra Sen and the Brahmo Samaj (the ‘Keshubites’),1 the Governor General of India assented to ‘an Act to Provide a Form of Marriage in Certain Cases’, otherwise known as Act III of 1872. This Act provided for the fi rst time in India a law for civil marriage. It was not a civil marriage law that made no distinctions on the grounds of religion, but rather was conditional on certain declarations that the bride and groom had to make before the Registrar could marry them. The Legislative Council, responding to the call by social reformers for the legalisation of inter-caste and inter-community marriages, managed to make the ability to contract such marriages conditional on a repudiation of faith in the form of a written declaration. The declaration said: ‘I do not profess the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muhammadan, Parsi, Buddhist, Sikh or Jaina religion’.2 While it did not demand a renunciation of ‘religion’ altogether (one could profess other beliefs such as the creed of the Keshubite Brahmo Samaj, which were not Christian, Jewish, Hindu etc.), it did imply that any persons choosing to avail of the law would have to place themselves outside the professed faiths of these eight religious groups. The law thus sought to create an open-ended category of those who, quite literally, belonged to ‘not-community’, or at least none of the communities mentioned here.
