Conjugality on Trial: the Rukhmabai Case and the Debate on Indian Child-Marriage in Late-Victorian Britain

Abstract

By now it is practically axiomatic that knowledge about the East – and in particular, about India – circulated throughout European cultures from the eighteenth century onward.¹ What passes for a truism in the wake of Edward Said and his critics has yet, however, to be fleshed out in historically specific detail. British newspapers’ coverage of the trial of Rukhmabai, a child-bride who contested her husband’s claims to conjugal rights in the Bombay High Court in the mid-1880s, is one discrete example of the extent colonial knowledge was available to western metropolitan audiences at home, as well as how constitutive ostensibly domestic matters – in this case, one Hindu woman’s conjugality – were to the performance and preservation of colonial rule. This essay argues that the late-Victorian metropolitan press, with some help from Rudyard Kipling, “made public” the body of an Indian woman as evidence of the necessity of British imperial rule at the exact moment that Indian nationalism emerged. Implicit in this display was the argument that by virtue of their incapacity to protect – or manage – recalcitrant wives, Indian men were as yet unfit for self-government. By publicizing the trial, the British press contributed to the reordering of Victorian “domestic” space for the consumption of imperial spectacle, a characteristically fin-de-siècle phenomenon in Britain.²