The colonial period

It is surely remarkable that much of the social reform initiatives that centred on women during the long nineteenth century were primarily about the girl child. However, until very recently, there has been next to no discussion of the idea of childhood in this history. Although such a history remains to written, some beginnings have been made. My own strategy has been to glean from existing research as to when and how age became as much of a problem as the status of women. Without doubt, the institution of marriage came to be seen as being at the heart of what ailed Indian society in the eyes of the British colonial rulers, an opinion echoed by many Indians in the course of that century and beyond. We will see how this concern with marriage came to be indistinguishable from that of child marriage.

In her more lyrical account of “coming of age in the nineteenth century”, Ruby Lal has observed that she “felt it necessary to reconceptualise the woman question as the question of the girl child/woman for a number of reasons” (Lal 2013: 36). In a world where women - whether young or old - could do nothing on their own (here she is citing James Mill’s references to Manu) or, in other words, where women lived as lifelong dependents, the separation of a distinct stage called childhood was practically impossible. She emphasizes the namelessness of this imbricated condition where woman and child kept collapsing onto one another. Her resolution of the problem was to deploy the idea of playfulness gleaned from Urdu textual sources on the one hand and an oral history of coming of age on the other (her book centres on the life memories of Azra Kidwai, born into an aristocratic Lucknow family in the early twentieth century) which offer Lal an opportunity to recover spaces beyond male control. This contrasts with other accounts considered below, which are dominated by all kinds of control. Rather than being in a state of namelessness, the child wife is inexorably talked about, fought over and contested and becomes everyone’s problem. The child/woman dyad is, moreover, a very critical site of slippage, one that, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, is by no means confined to Indian terrain nor simply of historical significance.

There are many strands, events and famous men (and thereafter many women) associated with a history so focussed on marriage and the girl child/woman. Feminists and scholars of social history have been quite active since the 1970s in making some of this history more widely available. A major shortcoming is the considerable unevenness in regional terms, although this is beginning to get redressed. As a result, school textbooks across the country since at least the 1960s feature icons from colonial Bengal, like Raja Rammohan Roy and Pandit Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, while the achievements of Jotirao Phule in the western region of colonial Maharashtra are only now beginning to be better known.