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Widows, Family, Community, and the Formation of Anglo-Hindu Law in Eighteenth-Century India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2016

ROCHISHA NARAYAN
ROCHISHA NARAYAN*
Affiliation:
Division of Humanities, Yale-NUS College, Singapore Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Late eighteenth-century colonial agrarian and judicial reforms had a direct impact on women from elite and non-elite backgrounds. Informed by British liberal ideologies and upper-caste Brahmanical norms, colonial policies marginalized women's access to, and control over, resources in the emergent political economy. In this article, I reconstruct histories of the ways in which Anglo-Hindu law compromised women's status as heirs, businesswomen, and members of society who wielded social capital with other community groups. Focusing on widows in Banaras who commandeered their property disputes, I illustrate that pre-colonial precedents of case-resolution under the Banaras rulers, and practices of ‘forum shopping’ by disputants themselves, shaped the widows’ approach to the colonial courts. Colonial judicial plans being incommensurable to everyday life, the courts incorporated pre-colonial forms of dispute handling and maintained a flexible approach to the practice of colonial law under the supervision of an Indian magistrate for a period of time. These characteristics made the courts popular among local society in the Banaras region. However, British officials, insistent on applying abstract scriptural laws, aligned customary practice to the dictates of Anglo-Hindu law. This article shows that the narrow legal subject position available to widows under scriptural law reordered their relationships with family and community networks to their disadvantage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 866 - 897
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Indrani Chatterjee, Sumit Guha, Geraldine Forbes, Temma Kaplan, Juned Shaikh, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Thank you to colleagues from the Writing Across the Curriculum Professional Writing Group at William Paterson University and the audience at the South Asia Studies Council colloquium at Yale University for their comments.

References

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4 Sreenivas, Wives, Widows and Concubines, p. 48.

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7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 248.

9 Ibid., pp. 247–248.

10 Sreenivas, Wives, Widows and Concubines, p. 46.

11 Sturman, The Government of Social Life, pp. 110–124.

12 Sreenivas, Wives, Widows and Concubines, pp. 65–66.

13 Sturman, The Government of Social Life, pp. 24–25.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p.110.

16 Ibid., p. 238.

17 Ibid., pp. 230–231.

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26 See Uttar Pradesh Regional Archives Allahabad (hereafter UPRAA), Banaras Duncan Records (hereafter BDR), August 1792, Basta no. 11, Vol. 61, p. 300. As Sumit Guha has shown, state adjudication of disputes brought money into the ruling houses. See Sumit Guha, ‘The Family Feud as Political Resource in Eighteenth-Century India’, in Indrani Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), pp. 88–89.

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28 As Chatterjee has shown in the context of the matriarchs of the Bengal Nizamat, rulership was a ‘two-cornered’ affair involving the matriarchs and the male rulers. See Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law, pp. 49–50.

29 See, for instance, reference to a widow named Dhanaut in UPRAA BDR, June 1790, Basta no. 7, Vol. 37, p. 147.

30 UPRAA BDR, August 1792, Basta no. 11, Vol. 61, p. 282.

31 Ibid., p. 255.

32 Ibid., p. 268.

33 Ibid., p. 265.

34 National Archives of India (hereafter NAI) Foreign and Political Department, Secret Department S 12 Nov. 81 (7), Year 1781.

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38 Ibid.

39 Oldham, Historical and Statistical Memoir of the Ghazeepoor District, p. 5.

40 From the Nawab Ali Ibrahim Khan to the Resident, 22 March 1789, in UPRAA BDR, March 1789, Basta no. 4, Vol. 22, pp. 245–246.

41 Narayan, ‘Caste, Family and Politics’.

42 Ibid.

43 UPRAA BDR, March 1789, Basta no. 4, Vol. 22, pp. 245–247; and UPRAA BDR, April 1789, Basta no. 4, Vol. 23, pp. 319–329.

44 UPRAA Resident's Proceedings (hereafter RP), June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, pp. 520–534.

45 Ibid., p. 523. Bayly, Christopher, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 314Google Scholar. See also Cohn, Bernard, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar, p. 332.

46 UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, p. 524.

47 Ibid., p. 525.

48 Ibid., pp. 528–531.

49 Ibid., p. 531.

50 Ibid., p. 533

51 Ibid., p. 534.

52 Ibid., p. 532.

53 UPRAA BDR, January 1792, Basta no. 9, Vol. 54, pp. 37–38 and 40–53; UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, pp. 29–105; and UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, pp. 625–633.

54 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, pp. 79–85.

55 Ibid., pp. 83–84.

56 Ibid., pp. 89–90.

57 Ibid., pp. 46–47.

58 Ibid., pp. 57–58.

59 Ibid., p. 41.

60 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, p. 43.

61 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, p. 140.

62 Pinch, William, Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 40Google Scholar.

63 Ibid.

64 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, pp. 69–73.

65 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, p. 53.

66 Ibid., p. 53.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., pp. 53–54.

69 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

70 Ibid., p. 29.

71 Ibid., pp. 29–30.

72 Ibid., p. 85.

73 Ibid., p. 103.

74 Ibid., p. 102.

75 UPRAA RP, August 1792, Basta no. 35, Vol. 58, p. 179.

76 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, pp. 84–85.

77 Ibid., pp. 76–77.

78 UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, p. 627.

79 UPRAA RP, January 1792, Basta no. 32, Vol. 52, p. 65.

80 Ibid., p. 54.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid., p. 66.

83 Ibid., p. 67.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., pp. 85–86.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., p. 85.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid., p. 87.

90 Ibid., pp. 103–104.

91 Ibid., pp. 96–104.

92 Ibid., p. 105.

93 UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, pp. 625–633.

94 Ibid., pp. 629–632.

95 Ibid., p. 631.

96 See excerpt from Francis Buchanan's observations of religious sects in the Gangetic region in Pinch, Peasants and Monks, p. 40.

97 UPRAA RP, June 1792, Basta no. 34, Vol. 55, part II, pp. 632–633.

98 UPRAA RP, September 1791, Basta no. 32, Vol. 48, p. 112. For more details, see Narayan, ‘Caste, Family and Politics’.