ABSTRACT
As the first two chapters demonstrated, Indian feminists and reformers, whether Christian or Hindu, sought to improve the position of women by campaigning against oppressive traditional practices, such as child marriage and widow remarriage, and educating them to allow them a greater degree of autonomy. However, before this process could be completed, the British government embarked on a period of aggressive intrusion into Indian society by extending colonial law and eroding the legal systems, such as the caste panchayats [courts] and village councils, which had traditionally governed Indian life. This left women in a particularly exposed situation: bound by the constraints of traditional society and forced to undertake desperate acts hitherto shown a degree of understanding, they now felt the full weight of colonial law. Traditional institutions had shown greater flexibility because of their more intimate knowledge of the context of actions or ‘situational context’ deemed ‘criminal’ by the new British courts.1 When a more impersonal colonial law, framed at a distance, superseded these, new definitions of crime and criminality emerged. Defined, pursued and prosecuted by the courts as criminals, it was in the second half of the nineteenth century that ‘the female criminal’ emerged in India. This chapter explores several key areas in which this process unfolded. The policy of designating certain subaltern groups as belonging to ‘criminal classes’ had a profoundly negative impact on the women of such communities. Equally, wives who used force to resist brutal husbands through husband poisoning and killing felt the full rigour of the law. Perhaps the most important area in which we see the emergence of the female criminal was in the creation of the ‘crime’ of infanticide. A product of the
ban on widow remarriage in Indian society, traditional social mechanisms had been in place to deal with them. The extension of colonial law, before movements of social reform had made any headway, highlighted the mother’s responsibility for the act while ignoring the circumstances surrounding it. In each of these areas, the ways in which the law affected women detrimentally will be shown and how women’s actions served to highlight their resistance to the pressures thrown up by changing gender relations in the nineteenth century. In tracing the emerging female criminal, we also uncover women as agents in processes of social change under colonialism. Since the 1970s, increasing numbers of social historians have turned their attention to the subject of crime, a trend which has seen the broadening of definitions beyond the purely juridical to uncover alternative meanings which reflect the social context of infraction.2 Despite the widening of approaches in the subject of crime in South Asian history, women’s perspectives have remained largely absent.3 Indeed, even in instances when historians have turned their attention to crimes such as sati [widow burning] and female infanticide, they have tended to focus on the implications that they had on the development of the colonial state’s authority and missionaries and indigenous elites4 rather than what such acts meant to women themselves.5 Such approaches not only ignore the ways in which the new notions of crime and criminality that emerged under colonialism often had an adverse effect on many women’s lives; by failing to examine the issue from the perspective of these women’s lives, they also ignore the fact that many female perpetrators took a different view from the authorities about the actions that they had committed. Acts that, at first glance, appear to be straightforwardly criminal, such as spousal murder or infanticide, take on a very different character when relocated into the context of unequal power relations. By looking at certain forms of behaviour and violent acts by women, classified by the criminal justice system as ‘crimes’, in the context of changing gender relations, and the way in which they intersected with wider social and political relations in colonial India, this chapter will demonstrate how female crime was often a violent form of resistance, part of a limited range of strategies for survival available to
subordinated groups, whether they were battered wives or unhappy widows. It will argue that, far from being a manifestation of a criminal nature, acts of violence by married women, such as poisoning husbands, were often responses to instances of extreme brutality committed by men, which ranged from beating their wives when they were perceived to have done something wrong to branding and cutting their noses if they were thought to have committed adultery. The pressures on widows, although more intangible, were no less acute. Societal prohibitions on remarriages meant that some widows, particularly those who had lost their spouse at a relatively young age, had illicit liaisons, which sometimes resulted in pregnancy. The ensuing dilemma combined with the lack of escape routes for the widow meant that it resulted in infanticide; an act which the colonial authorities viewed with particular abhorrence. A further area of interest to this study is to reflect on why the state and the judicial apparatus were so concerned with reinscribing crimes, like that of infanticide, on to the social canvas of nineteenth-century Maharashtra, and the functions that this served. In addition, it also examines what motivated indigenous elites to participate in the debates surrounding issues of women’s chastity; by doing this, we can move towards an understanding of how power relationships between the state and indigenous groups often proved to be at the forefront of the restructuring of gender relations in colonial India.
