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Prohibited Marriage: State Protection and Child Wife
| Title: | Prohibited Marriage: State Protection and Child Wife | | Author: | Janaki Nair | | Publication: | Contribution to Indian Sociology / Sage Publishers | | Enumeration: | Vol 29, No. 1 and 2, January-December, 1995 | | Abstract: | In 1893, the Government of Mysore (GOM) rejected the will of the majority of representatives of the Mysore Assembly who opposed an Infant Marriage Regulation, declaring that 'the regulation is in some quarters regarded as an undue interference with the liberty of the subject, but (general sentiment) demands the abolition under the authority of law of certain usages which are as much opposed to the spirit of the Hindu Sastras as to the best interests of society'.1 Forty years later, the then Dewan of Mysore, Mirza Ismail, overriding the majority opinion in the Representative Assembly that favoured extension of the Indian Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 to Mysore, said: 'The balance of considerations seems to be in favour of leaving things alone. To be real and lasting, reform must proceed from within. It cannot be imposed from without'.2 In the space of a few decades the GOM had moved from a position of confident interference in 'social questions' to a position that was firmly tempered by caution. The apparent paradox spoke volumes of the shifts in the field of political forces that had occurred in the intervening decades. But this article suggests a different focus on the bureaucratic imagination of the state which fashioned a conception of modernity through the instrumentalities of the law, one that would replace heterogeneous law- ways with the abstract legality of the state, affecting marginal changes in patriarchal arrangements to make them commensurate with its imagined economy, without fundamentally challenging patriarchy itself. This becomes clearest when we consider Mysore's child marriage regulation and its operations in detail against the totality of legislative initiatives of the Princely State which were aimed at extending the generalised legal form throughout Mysore society without effecting the social transformations adequate to such a vision. Source of Abstract: Provided by Author(s) | | See Also: | | Tools: |
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