ABSTRACT
That conjugal relations should feature so prominently in the cultivator’s assessment of the Raj is highly indicative of a wider discussion on the ‘home’ and the ‘domestic’ taking place in late colonial India. Both the awareness of the movement for selfassertion that had begun among women which the peasant noted with disquiet, and the way in which the main subjects of the debate, Indian women, were absent from the dialogue between Indian men and the colonial authorities is reflected with clarity in the agriculturalist’s response quoted above.2 In the long historiography on the Age of Consent, which stretches back to the 1970s, scholars have analyzed the nature of this dialogue and the motivations of the male participants;3 Charles Heimsath and Geraldine Forbes, for instance, studied the issue of social reform as expressed in the
Age of Consent debates in order to understand how nationalism grew and why Indian elites undertook the project of ‘modernizing’ the nation.4 More recent scholarship, however, has turned its attention to highlighting the connections between gender categories and gender relations and the structures of colonial power. For these scholars, discussions of women and social reform served to further colonialist agendas.5 Himani Bannerji has claimed that the annexation of civil society in India was undertaken in a ‘hegemonic’ fashion via social reform as expressed through the child marriage debates at the time of the passing of the 1891 Act.6 In a similar vein, Mrinalini Sinha has argued that the British used ‘social reform as a test of native masculinity-a handy stick with which to beat Indian nationalists.’7 Indeed, ‘the imperial and the national’ discourses not only frames the politics of gender but, according to Sinha, are also ‘constitutive’ of its very meaning.8 This privileging of the politics of colonialism and nationalism has led scholars to miss the real dynamic of change in gender relations. Male anxiety was not a product of the entry of the colonial state into the private sphere as some scholars have maintained. It stemmed from the increasing recourse of Indian women to colonial structures, principally the law, as a means of renegotiating conjugal relations. The movement for self-assertion that had begun among women, which the peasant’s observation so clearly revealed, had vast repercussions that went beyond Maharashtrian society. As the above quotation indicates, it was women’s agency, especially their increasing resort to colonial law, that was seen as an unwelcome innovation by the male public. The critical moment of realization for Hindu men came when a Hindu wife, Rukhmabai, a product of the emerging feminist movement, defied the court’s injunction to join Dadaji, her husband, after he brought a suit for restitution of conjugal rights.9 Defiant
acts by such women set in train a fierce rearguard action by Indian men. So intense was the perceived threat from women that former stalwarts of progressive opinion joined conservative Maharashtrian groups in opposing reform.10 In fact, in Bengal, as Tanika Sarkar has shown, the Bengali orthodoxy clearly understood that the battleground for the confrontation between the ruler and ruled had shifted from the public arena to the private sphere of the domestic social arrangements that were represented by conjugal relations and were using ‘defence of tradition’ as a ‘political strategy’ in order to protect their last bastion of autonomy: the home.11 In the crucial decades prior to the 1890s, the centrality of the restitution of conjugal rights and women’s recourse to the colonial courts galvanized progressive elements in the Indian elite to call for marriage reform. By concentrating on women’s agency, while taking into account the Indian male reformist, revivalist and the colonialist discourse, I shall argue that, if the Hindu patriarchal system felt it was under siege, this was engendered not so much by the claims of the unreserved masculinity of the foreigner, but from the real threat of their womenfolk acting as agents of their own destiny. This chapter therefore begins by showing how considerable numbers of women were accessing the courts to renegotiate conjugal relations in the late nineteenth century. Though these actions galvanized some male reformers, like M.G. Ranade, to call for marriage reform, they brought forth a formidable rearguard action on the part of Indian men who sought the assistance of the colonial authorities in their attempt to stem the growing threat posed by female autonomy. Despite a clear attempt to exclude them from the debates that their actions had initiated, Indian women counterattacked by vigorously contesting the male and colonialist discourses that attempted to define them. It will be shown that, through their actions and interventions in debates about female sexuality, women’s public participation reveals that a clear sense of bhaginivarg [sisterhood] informed an emerging feminist movement in late nineteenth-century India.12
