The Ilbert Bill, Revivalism, and Age of Consent in Colonial India
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BODIES OF EVIDENCE, BODIES OF RULE: THE ILBERT BILL, REVIVALISM, AND AGE OF CONSENT IN COLONIAL INDIA Judith Whitehead 'A Native, given that he has no high moral principles inculcated by an educated mother, is unfit to judge a European.' ‘Our Mother is in the hands of foreigners.' ON January 9, 1891, an amendment to Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, which raised the Age of Consent for girls from 10 to 12, was introduced into India's Legislative Council. Its introduction followed long-term pressure by social reformers, particularly the publicizing efforts of the Parsi reformer, Behramji Malabari. Its aftermath was a veritable tamasha which I translate as a dramatic controversy with diverse implications. From January 10 until the amendment was passed on March 19, protest against it were especially sensational in west Bengal. Several demonstrations in Calcutta drew between 75,000 and 150,000 demonstrators, ending in a Puja at Kali Ghat which consisted of 200,000 protesters (Bombay Guardian, March 26, 1891). There were numerous petitions both supporting and rejecting the amendment from the Punjab and Northwestern Provinces. Demonstrations both for and against the amendment were also conspicuous in Bombay and Poona. The organization of support for the amendment in Maharashtra stimulated the development of important women's organizations and marked the first coordination of reform organizations on a nationwide level (Heimsath 1964: 157). Protests against the amendment had equally important political ramifications. Revivalist nationalists publicly unfurled a new rhetoric which opposed further colonial intervention in the domestic sphere, Judith Whitehead is on the faculty of Institut Simone de Beauvoir, Concordia University, 1455 Demaisonneuve Blvd., Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8, Canada SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN, 45 (1) March 1996 30 Sociological Bulletin regarded as the last remaining abode of Hindu traditions (Sarkar 1987: 2011). This discourse constituted a prologue to the display of nationalist strength in the early 20th century. The revivalists' idealization of the private sphere and Indian motherhood and their condensation of these with deshmata and past national glory pushed the reform movement on the defensive. Outright condemnation of Hindu conjugal relations from a Western epistemology of 'universal' reason was henceforward criticized as being anti-national. This strain of constructed the future symbolic boundaries of patriotism which fledgling Indian women's organizations had to negotiate in the early 20th century. Why did the amendment arouse such controversy, when similar reforms in 1925 and 1929 (Whitehead 1995a: 2) had provoked little op- position? It raised the legal age for consent to sexual intercourse from ten to twelve years for girls of all religious communities in India. Sex with an underage girl, whether married or not, was defined as rape and was punishable by a maximum of ten years' imprisonment or transportation for life (India Office Library and Collections L/P&J/5/54). In the historical milieu of Anglo-Indian racism and revivalist reaction in the late 19th century, however, the amendment provoked unconscious emotional reactions from the Indian middle class, particularly in Calcutta. The controversy reveals the dense connections between sexuality, conjugality, home, and national identity held by both the Indian and British middle classes in India at a major point of their ideological confrontation. It shows that the control and objectification of women's bodies was an important, if not central, component in the self- definition of each national community. It illustrates how gender identities possessed the power to provoke emotional reactions on both sides of the colonial divide. Many of the practices connected with the disciplining of masculine and feminine identities exist below the consciousness in daily, routine practices which Bourdieu defines as habitus. These practices condition individual choices and provide a 'feel for the game'; they orient our unconscious drives of sexuality and aggression with wider social directives through the 'hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy' (1990: 66-67). Conceptions of self versus the other among both the British community in India and the revivalists were highly polarized by the late Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule 31 1880s. The iconography of national identities was reflected in their opposed gender identities. Both the British and the Indian middle classes fantasized their national 'body' by idealizing their mother figures as the bearers of national traditions. The Age of Consent controversy which occurred eight years after the Ilbert Bill agitation, reveals the metaphoric connections that exist between social bodies and gender identities. The Ilbert Bill, introduced to the Viceregal council on February 2, 1883, sought to provide Justice of Powers to all District Magistrates and Sessions Judges. The bill was resisted by the Britishers because it gave Indian judges the power to adjudicate on criminal cases involving the Britishers. The connections between individual bodies and social or political bodies appear to be entrenched, perhaps even universal modes of human symbolic expression (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987: 7). Since we experience our social and political worlds through our senses, our body mediates these relationships, providing a constant interchange of meanings between the social world and the 'natural' world of the body. Gender symbolism often becomes particularly charged during periods of social change or cultural anxiety. During the 1870s and 1880s in north India, roles of women and rights of women were important symbols of national pride or submission, enlightenment or backwardness. The honour of both British and Indian communities was often equated with the honour of its women, while their protection corresponded with the defence of the nation. The women concerned in these debates, however, were mainly silent, objectified as symbols and icons of traditions in which they had, yet, little input. The Ilbert Bill agitation and the Age of Consent controversy engaged with two forms of gender subordination, the Victorian-medical and the Brahminical revivalist. Each form of moral regulation possessed its own notions of propriety and impropriety, high and low status, respectable or dishonorable conduct. The linguistic dualisms defining right or wrong behaviour were connected to the body through daily sexual, ritual, and hygienic practices. In other words, specific bodily habits in each society oriented individuals to explicit philosophical discourses which defined and defended status and gender distinctions. Victorian legislators, medical practitioners and administrators in India frequently viewed their social body as a hierarchical organism. 32 Sociological Bulletin Middle class males represented the head, middle class wives the angelic heart, and working class males 'the hands'. Menial workers, prostitutes and 'other races' were associated with lower bodily parts, usually unmentionable in the interest of preserving decorum (Davidoff 1983: 17-23). The ideal Victorian woman was one whose upbringing had enabled her to completely sublimate sexual and aggressive impulses, the difficulties of which were attested to by the widespread symptoms of hysteria during this period (Showalter 1985). Unlike middle class Victorian ideology however, women in north India were not though to be passive, repressed beings, either creatively or sexually. Rather, among middle class 'respectable' folk, women's active desires and aggressive impulses were to be controlled through early marriages and physical seclusion in the zenana or antehpur after marriage. These forms and norms of moral regulation were especially marked in 19th century Bengal, where Kulinist polygamy intensified status competition within the Brahminical community itself (Engels 1987: 91). In fact, Kulinist interpretations of the Sastras placed strong emphasis on marriage as the essential life-cycle ritual determining the status of the daughter's family. The overall reactions of middle class women in India to the amendment -e difficult to gauge, since only a small percentage of women of this period were literate. There were a number of petitions from emerging women's organizations in Poona and Bombay, which wholeheartedly supported the amendment on humanitarian grounds. One of these, from the Arya Mahila Samaj of Bombay, contained 20,000 signatures (IOLC L\P&J\5\54). In Bengal, where early marriages were apparently most prevalent, however, the historical sociologist finds a public gap on this issue, despite the attention which the Age of Consent controversy has received in the last decade. In fact, women's magazines in Calcutta, some established by male reforming elites, such as the Bamabodhini Patrika, Antahpur, Sahitya, and Mukul, barely mention the controversy. There was only one petition from women Brahmos in Bengal, organized by Kadambini Ganguly, and containing a mere 151 signatures (IOLC L\P&J\5\54). Although I have grounded my analysis from the standpoint of the middle class colonized Bengali women whom the amendment most affected, the gap in public discourse of these women can only Bodies of Evidence, Bodies of Rule 33 invite speculation. Did the simultaneous experience of gender subordination and racism arouse conflicting loyalties in women who were perhaps, like Sarala Debi Ghosal, already drawn into a nationalist fold in which colonial contradictions took precedence over social reforms? Or