Wicked Widows: Law and Faith in Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere Debates

Abstract

Alaw was enacted in 1856 abrogating an earlier legal and prescriptive prohibition against the remarriage of Hindu widows. This law also underwrote the inheritance rights of sons born of remarriage.¹ Even though a colonial legislature had enacted the law—a legislature where Indians were not represented—the idea of remarriage had originated among a small group of Bengali reformers who had approached and persuaded some members of the Legislative Council. Remarriage was then furiously debated as an issue in the public sphere in most parts of India for the rest of the century. I will underline some of the significant features of the discipline of Hindu widowhood, and then relate these to the debates on remarriage, in order to explore the implications of the reform for a normative system of social power.