In August 1936, Muthulakshmi Reddy, member of the AIWC and of the Madras legislature, said in an article entitled ‘A Plea for Marriage Reform’: ‘Marriage at any cost, under any circumstances and at any age has proved a bane to our Hindu community and has produced many undesirable results.’

Reddy's critique of the institution of marriage was important in its timing, coming at the end of a long phase of activity aimed at reforming the structure of the Indian family. Ashwini Tambe usefully tabulates ‘laws affecting the form of the family 1800–1947’ to include both those related to marriage (such as sati abolition, widow remarriage, women's right to property and succession acts) and those not related to marriage (ranging from the criminalization of homosexuality and the abolition of infanticide and the devadasi system, to protectionist measures in factory laws and the Maternity Benefit Acts). In crucial ways, the reforms of the previous century challenged a plurality of conventional kinship networks which were no longer adequate in meeting the demands of an urbanizing, modernizing society under the twin pressures of nascent capitalism and colonialism.

The transformations that affected the family form were not striving towards a preconceived homogeneous ideal. The extraordinary changes effected by colonial rule throughout the 19th century made the material and heteronormative (that is, relations between men and women) foundations of conventional familial relationships more visible but also more unstable, necessitating the recasting of the family. Some of this recasting occurred within the legal-juridical space, making obligations and rights of members of the emerging forms of family enforceable in a court of law, bringing to the foreground one of the principal functions of the family, as a means of transferring property.