The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights

The British colonial state in India was continually forced to grapple with the forms of law and governance appropriate to Indian society. This question of the necessary, possible, and desirable relationship between colonial law and Indian social life produced a plethora of policies and dilemmas. It also created a new political significance for issues demarcated as social, particularly those related to religion, to women and the family, and to property and economic production and exchange. This is a book about the practices of government that emerged as the colonial state delineated and engaged with this arena of Indian social life during the long century between the 1810s and the 1940s. It is also about how a group of largely elite Indians responded to and reworked these ideas and practices, shaping Indian political modernity in the process. Focusing on the dominant forms of Hindu law and the Hindu family, this study traces the increasing importance of governing society and the family to the work of the state in this era.1 At the same time, it explores the uneven ways in which this modern state marked the significance of social differences understood as grounded in the body or defined by birth. Most pointedly, it places colonial debates on religious law, the history of the family, and women’s rights within this framework of analysis. The question of women’s rights has a long genealogy in India, dating to the early colonial era. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth