Intimate Violence in Colonial Bengal: A Death, a Trial and a Law, 1889-1891

摘要

Much excellent work has been done on the colonial Act X of 1891. Yet, three important contexts have largely gone missing. One is the framework of colonial Personal Laws where the practice of infantile marital cohabitation was embedded till it migrated to criminal laws. Unless we comprehend how the framework constrained judicial decisions and legal interventions, no single law can possibly make full sense. There were highly acrimonious public debates, too, especially in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, that significantly shaped the Act. Legal reform in the field of gender, I argue, grew more out such debates than from colonial initiatives.