The Savage Family: Colonialism and Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century India

Between 1850 and 1870, British administrators in colonial India concluded that female infanticide was a problem of enormous proportions. They decided that the killing of infant girls was rooted not in individual deviance but in the culture of the zenana, or the women's quarters of the Indian home. These perceptions shaped countermeasures that sought to identify "infanticidal" communities and restructure the power relations within the infanticidal household. The project received cautious support from native elites who, it has been suggested, were typically reluctant to allow British interference in the "Indian" home. This article shows how the colonial understanding of the problem was shaped by ideas of collective criminality, and argues that the campaign against infanticide was inseparable from the British effort to colonize the zenana. It argues also that Indian men accommodated the intervention in order to promote their own moral authority, their national legitimacy, and their patriarchal privileges.