Intimate Violence: Age of Consent Agitations in Colonial Bengal

About the Speaker

One of most eminent historians of our times, Professor Tanika Sarkar has held chair in Modern History at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She also taught at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and universities of Chicago, Yale, Witwatersrand, and Goettingen. She was elected Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at several other universities in the UK, Europe, and the US. She is the author of four monographs including Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalismand Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times. She has also co-edited six collections of essays with other scholars.

Abstract:

In this seminar, the speaker will discuss debates that raged around the death of a very young wife from marital rape in 1890 and the consequent passage of a colonial law which prohibited cohabitation between husband and wife until she is 12. Even though earlier Bengal had been the major site of legal reforms in gender relations, this time even liberals opposed the law. I will explore the reasons and connect the debates with a new phase in political and cultural nationalism. The debates will remain relevant for us since there is still adamant opposition to criminalisation of marital rape.

Report

In this talk, “Intimate Violence: Age of Consent Agitations in Colonial Bengal,” Professor Tanika Sarkar discussed the history of the Age of consent bill and the mass agitations that followed it.

It discussed how the rape and murder of a young wife, Phoolmoni lead to the amendment of the colonial law, raising the age of consent for physical relationships from 10 to 12 in 1891. This lead to huge protests in Bengal, and also the first mass gatherings and agitations in Kolkata.

In this response paper, I am going to discuss the circumstances and the narrative that lead to the glorification of the death of a young girl and mass protests against the new law.

Professor Sarkar began her talk by discussing a Bangla play, where two young wives, Kamal Kamani and Sureshbasini discuss this new law. They lament, with distress over the fact that now unless a wife is 12, she can’t have intercourse with her husband The author of the play, through these two women, also give out apprehensions of the Bengali gentry about the interference of the British in their personal laws.

In the play the author uses the female voice, not to moan about the death of a young wife, but to depict the image of a deprived wife, who is unable to have sex with her husband. This can also be seen by a report in the Bangabashi in the same year, which said, “Let a 100, no a 1000 Phoolmonis die, ….” and the general tone of reports from that period that glorified the death. Therefore the narrative of the Bengali bourgeois was to attack the colonial government through the use of this image of curtailing the woman’s freedom. Phoolmoni and the other woman facing the grievances of underage sex were seen as collateral damage to a larger movement against colonial interference.

By Pratiti, Undergraduate Class of 2020