The emergence of the female criminal in India: Infanticide and survival under the Raj

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 53, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 73-93

  Anagol, Padma ^a  

^a CARDIFF UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CRIMINAL LAW; HISTORY; HUMAN; INDIA; INFANTICIDE; NEWBORN; POLITICAL SYSTEM; SOCIAL WELFARE; UNITED KINGDOM; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

COLONIALISM; CRIMINAL LAW; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INDIA; INFANT, NEWBORN; INFANTICIDE; SOCIAL WELFARE; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 0036490740     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/53.1.73     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. For a study of the changing position of women in late nineteenth-century India see my Beyond the Courtyard: Feminism, the Politics of Gender and Social Reform in Maharashtra, 1850-1920, forthcoming.
2. Beyond the Courtyard, chap. 4.
3. As note 2.
4. Pioneers in the field are: Anand Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality in British India, Tucson, 1985;
5. David Arnold, 'Dacoity and rural crime in Madras, 1860-1940', Journal of Peasant Studies 6:2, 1979, pp. 140-67.
6. For the former see Radhika Singha, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India, Oxford University Press, India, New Delhi, 1998;
7. and for the latter Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998.
8. The term Maharashtra refers to the Marathi-speaking area of western India whose principal city is Bombay (Mumbai). The area is broadly consonant with the contemporary state of Maharashtra, which was created after the linguistic reorganization of states in the Republic of India in 1960.
9. All the correspondence between the Governor-in-Council and the judges, petitions by Vijayalakshmi and extracts from newspapers are to be found in Judicial Department (hereafter JD), 1881, Vol. 46, Comp. No. 1036, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai (hereafter MSA).
10. These figures are taken from a table showing the statistics for convictions of infanticide in five provinces during 1870-1884, in Mahratta, 25 June 1887.
11. See Beyond the Courtyard, chaps 1 and 2.
12. Tarabai Shinde wrote her tract, Stripurushtulana athava striya va purush yant sahasi kon he spasta karun dakavinyakarita ha nibandh (A Comparison between Women and Men or an Essay Showing who is more Wicked) (Marathi), Pune, 1882, as a vindication of the slander to which they were being subjected and to point out the real criminal.
13. Petition of Arya Mahila Association, 11 June 1883, to 'Hon'ble Sir Bartle Frere Saheb Bahadoor', unpaginated, Institutional Collection of the Mukti Mission, Kedgaon (hereafter, ICMM).
14. A well-researched social history of the crime of female infanticide in Gujarat and Rajasthan focusing on British policy is available in Lalitha Panigrahi, British Social Policy and Female Infanticide in India, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1972
15. and K. B. Pakrasi, Female Infanticide in India, Indian Editions, Calcutta, 1970.
16. Panigrahi, British Social Policy, p. 18.
17. Panigrahi, British Social Policy, pp. 140-3 146-54, 173.
18. Panigrahi, British Social Policy, chaps 4 and 5;
19. R. K. Saxena, Social Reforms: Infanticide and Sati, Trimurti, New Delhi, 1975, chaps 1 and 2.
20. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, p. 269.
21. Sandria B. Freitag, 'Collective Crime and Authority in North India', in Yang (ed.), Crime and Criminality, pp. 141.
22. Freitag, 'Collective Crime', p. 157.
23. Panigrahi, British Social Policy, p. 147.
24. Female Infanticide Bill, 14 Jan. 1870, Indian Legislative Proceedings 4 April 1870, cited in Panigrahi, British Social Policy, p. 148.
25. In recent years, scholarly analysis of another major legislative enactment, the Age of Consent Act of 1891, has claimed that it challenged male control over female sexuality and was an attempt to display British moral superiority in India. See Dagmar Engels, 'The Age of Consent Act of 1891: Colonial Ideology in Bengal', South Asia Research 3:2, Nov. 1983, pp. 107-34. Given that in this case the impetus for legislation came from indigenous society, this argument is somewhat overblown. as Sumit Sarkar has argued, if all attempts to reform Indian society 'are to be condemned as instances of surrender to Western values, we are really back to the crudest and most obscurantist forms of nationalism
26. see 'Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Indian History', Oxford Literary Review 16, 1994, p. 214.
27. Freitag, 'Collective Crime', p. 146.
28. For the changing nature of the colonial state, see P. McGinn, Maintaining the Mask: British Governance and Indigenous Resistance in India (forthcoming).
29. This system of surveillance had started as part of the operations for the suppression of female infanticide in Gujarat. See D. D. Wilson, History of the Suppression of Infanticide in Western India, London, 1855, pp. 115, 125. For a broader study of information gathering and surveillance system which made empire possible
30. see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
31. Cited in Panigrahi, British Social Policy, p. 147.
32. Proceedings in the case of Vijayalakshmi, JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, p. 343, MSA.
33. Governor's note on Sangowa Kom Gurshidapa, 16 June 1881, JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, p. 125, MSA.
34. Proceedings in the case of Vijayalakshmi, JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, pp. 239-40, MSA.
35. The judgement of West and Pinhey in the case of Vijayalakshmi is reported verbatim in Times of India, 27 May 1881
36. see extract, Proceedings (as in preceding note), p. 241.
37. Lionel Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain, 1800-1939, London, 1986, p. 8.
38. Cited in the resolution of the Governor-in-Council in regard to the Vijayalakshmi case, in JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, MSA.
39. JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, p. 242, MSA.
40. Rao, 'Considerations of the Crime of Infanticide', Journal of the National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress in India, no. 65, May 1876, pp. 131-7. (Hereafter Journal of the National Indian Association).
41. As previous note, p. 133. Though the suggestions of Sir Madhava Rao were considered, there was no amendment of the law. After 1879, however, every case of infanticide which reached the High Court was referred to the local government for reconsideration on appeal.
42. Extract from the Times of India, 27 May 1881
43. attached to another appeal by Vijayalakshmi, in JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, MSA.
44. Subodh Patrika, 4 June 1881, NNR.
45. Petition of Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, 5 June 1881, JD.
46. Extract from the Times of India, 27 May 1881.
47. The infanticide debates also triggered a defensive posture among high-caste Hindus. Brahmins were anxious to distinguish their case from that of lower castes and campaigned vigorously about Brahmin women while those at the bottom of the social scale were ignored.
48. Rao, 'Considerations of the Crime of Infanticide', Journal of the National Indian Association, p. 134.
49. The Arya Mahila Association reported one incident in Kolhapur when a man was readmitted in his caste after a payment of twenty rupees. See its petition to Sir Bartle Frere, 11 June 1883, n. p. (ICMM).
50. See V. S. Kadam, 'The Institution of Marriage and Position of Women in Eighteenth century Maharashtra', Indian Economic and Social History Review 25:3, 1988, p. 362.
51. From M. G. Mali, Krantijyoti Savitribai Jotirao Phule (The revolutionary Savitribai Jotirao Phule), (Marathi), Kolhapur, 1980, p. 87.
52. Daji Dhalchand Gujar and others, to the Chief Secretary to Government, 25 July 1881, JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 1, 036, MSA.
53. See the proceedings in this case in JD 1880, vol. 50, Comp. no. 917, MSA.
54. Sudha Desai, Social Life in Maharashtra under the Peshwas, Bombay, 1980, p. 88;
55. see also Raymond West and Johann Georg Buhler (eds.), A Digest of Hindu Law, Book 1, Bombay, 1867, especially Introduction and chap. 6.
56. The head of the household, usually the father-in-law and sometimes older relatives like great-uncles, took such decisions.
57. See the proceedings in the case of Sangowa kom Gursidapa, JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 996, pp. 115-31, MSA;
58. also the proceedings in the case of Thaku, JD 1882, vol. 52, Comp. 1, 525, pp. 414-5, MSA.
59. From 'Want of provision in the law for punishing such crimes as the prevention of the crime of exposing and abandoning infants', in JD 1883, vol. 56, Comp. no. 720, MSA.
60. The enrolment of the midwife as an informer was a legacy from the Company's regulations to suppress female infanticide. Panigrahi notes that a system of rewarding alert midwives was instituted in some extreme cases: British Social Policy, chap. 4.
61. JD 1882, vol. 44, Comp. no. 950, MSA.
62. See the proceedings in the case of Mamti in JD 1880, vol. 45, Comp. no. 942, MSA.
63. Reported on 10 March 1877, NNR.
64. JD 1887, vol. 76, Comp. no. 298, MSA.
65. JD 1887, vol. 40, Comp. no. 1, 179, MSA.
66. JD 1882, vol. 52, Comp. no. 1, 419, MSA.
67. JD 1890, vol. 107. b, Comp. no. 138, MSA.
68. For example, in the case of Baya who stated that she would not have abandoned her child if her mother had given her shelter, in JD 1881, Vol. 47, Comp. no. 1, 301, MSA.
69. For a study of notions of 'shame' and 'honour' as determinants in the act of infanticide in rural Mediterranean society see Stephen Wilson, 'Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honour in Nineteenth-century Corsica', Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, 1988, pp. 762-83.
70. Vijayalakshmi's petition, 21 June 1881, JD 1881, vol. 47, Comp. no. 726, MSA.
71. JD 1881, vol. 46, Comp. no. 998, MSA.
72. JD 1885, vol. 33, Comp. no. 1, 282, MSA.
73. JD 1885, vol. 53, Comp. no. 601, MSA.
74. For instance, Madivalowa's appeal was rejected by the Governor who stated that, 'Only mothers killing infants directly after birth are considered by the government': JD 1890, vol. 104, Comp. no. 238, MSA.
75. Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth century Egypt, Cambridge, 1985, p. 135.
76. See the proceedings in the case of Saipi kome Sonda, sentenced to ten years' rigorous imprisonment for procuring medicines in order to cause abortion, JD 1882, vol. 60, Comp. no. 865, MSA;
77. see also the case of Bhima who inserted a 'medicated twig in the private parts of Ganga', in order to help the latter to abort, JD 1885, vol. 99, Comp. no. 532, MSA.