ABSTRACT
The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929-the first important piece of social reform legislation affecting the status of women in India since the passage of the highly controversial Age of Consent Act in 1891-was heralded by contemporaries as the advent of a modern India that was ready to stake its claim as an equal among the modern nations of the world. Marriage reform in India, as Geraldine Forbes has noted, had been less concerned with the social position of women per se than with a commitment to modernity.1 The further point about the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, however, is that it marked a crucial turning point in the historical trajectory of colonial modernity in India. Contemporaries often compared the passage of the Act to another landmark ‘modernizing’ social reform for women during the colonial era: the Act of 1829 that abolished the practice of widow immolation, or sati, as it came to be called.
