Remaking Her Family for the Judges: Hindu widows and property rights in the colonial courts of North India, 1875–1911

This article complicates the oversimplified image of the hapless, pathetic Hindu widow, doubly victimized by patriarchy and the British colonial state and stripped of a social and economic existence. It does so by telling the stories of individual widows who lived in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North India, and became embroiled in legal battles to retain and expand their control over inherited property. The court records examined here feature widowed plaintiffs and defendants, whose efforts to secure greater ownership and management rights to their late husbands’ estates brought them into the colonial legal arena, fighting their in-laws, their late husbands’ creditors, and sometimes even their own sons. Many of these widows were able to boost their proprietary rights by manipulating and reconfiguring their families as well as the path of devolution: in defending and prosecuting suits over inherited property, widows added members to their families, removed family members, disputed genealogies, and capitalized on various relationships within the immediate and extended family tree. Thus, widow litigants who came to the Allahabad High Court between 1875 and 1911 tried to loosen the restrictions placed on them by Anglo-Hindu inheritance law and grab increased property rights by re-engineering their families and their family relationships.

These widows and their stories sharpen our understanding of Indian women’s lives during the period of high colonialism. Our current picture of women under the Raj is bleak and, more importantly, one-dimensional: over the past several decades, South Asian gender historians have detailed the various colonial policies and institutions that disadvantaged women, especially changes in women’s property rights and the law. I believe that even within this context, there were important moments of resistance and action taken by women, resistance that was surprisingly exercised through the colonial legal apparatus. It is these histories that are recovered in the following pages, and subsequently, two well-worn themes on women, the colonial state, and Anglo-Hindu law are called into question. First, the action taken by widows to secure their financial futures provides color and detail to the otherwise monochromatic picture of the socially outcast, helpless Hindu widow. Second, the erosive effect of British colonial rule on women’s rights and status is qualified by widows’ successful use of the Anglo-Indian courts.

Much of the scholarship on Indian women in the late colonial period revolves around nineteenth-century legislative reforms meant to improve the status of women. These reforms, enacted by the colonial state and championed by Hindu male social reformers, were hotly debated and are doubtless worthy of historiographical scrutiny. But too strict a focus on the reform of abuse necessarily draws our attention to those abuses, and Indian women are consequently cast as passive recipients of abuse then reform. This body of literature tells the story of Hindu girls who are buried alive at birth or die in infancy due to the gendered allocation of scarce resources (Prohibition of Female Infanticide Act, 1871), while those who survive can look forward to marriage and consummation at a fantastically young age (Age of Consent Act, 1891). The large age gap between these child brides and their husbands creates widowed girls in droves, who are then forced to self-immolate (Regulation of Sati Act, 1829) or die social deaths, unmarried and celibate, living as drudges in their marital or natal homes (Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, 1856).¹ The lack of female voice and participation in these legislative reforms and the debates surrounding them powerfully reinforces the picture of the pitiable and victimized Hindu woman. Thus, while the scholarship on the nineteenth-century “Women’s Question” elucidates the motivations and intentions of Hindu male elite as well as the agenda of the colonial state vis-à-vis women, it leaves no room for women’s thoughts, actions, resistance, and agency. In other words, it does not show us how women and widows functioned within the context of these abuses, or how they lived the reforms once they were passed.

Situated alongside this body of literature are other studies with a decidedly more...