English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India

On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, connected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predicated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life. Indeed, the few existing studies of European civil marriage laws do take such a view. One scholar asserted upfront, “If the central characteristic of democratic capitalist society is mass choice, then democratic capitalist marriage arrived in Britain on 1 July 1837” (the date on which the Marriage Act of 1836, which for the first time permitted civil marriage, came into operation). Prior to this, all marriages to be legally valid had to be celebrated in an Anglican church, in daylight hours, with appropriate Anglican ceremonies conducted by an officiating Anglican priest. Excepted were the marriages of Jews and Quakers, royal marriages, marriages abroad, and marriages under the Archbishop’s special