Recent feminist scholarship allows us to reframe the period of 19th-century ‘social reform’. For one, the extraordinary energy with which the colonial intelligentsia debated questions concerning women—for example, sati (widow immolation), widow remarriage or child marriage—were issues which concerned primarily upper-caste, middle-class women. These concerns cannot be disconnected from each other and from wider changes in the political economy of colonial India, since part of the colonial agenda was the transformation of the household as a unit. But was the Indian family to be seen as a religious unit or as an economic unit? Was it to be understood as space to be defended, an institution to be slightly modernized or a set of relations to be thoroughly recast? These questions wracked debates throughout the 19th century as the family form and conjugality were aligned with the emerging needs of capital.

The Family in Focus

The deindustrialization of India that transformed it from a manufacturing nation into a raw material producer, the assignment of property rights to zamindars that underwrote their feudal powers and reduced the rights of tenants, the development of enclaves of capital in plantations and mines, the active discouragement of industry and the constant effort of the British to widen their circle of indigenous collaborators—all these had profound effects on the family form and produced serious realignments within the family and in gender relations.

The ideology of the patriarchal nuclear family also gained ground through the efforts of colonial administrators, missionaries and educators. The ideal of companionate marriage, for example, increasingly took root amongst educated Indians. Some were therefore willing collaborators in modernizing, if not recasting entirely, gender relations.