Gender, Religion, and Infanticide in Colonial India, 1870–1906

Abstract

In October 1870, a scathing editorial in the Derby Mercury proclaimed that is almost as common in England as is in (Baby-Farm ers) .This was a damning statement. Since the eighteenth century, the murder of female infants in India—alongside the subject of sati (widow-burning)— had acted as a cipher, conjuring images of unbridled violence, ignorance, and depravity for British readers (see Mani; Major). Such images of savagery across the empire were increasingly used during the nineteenth to emphasize perceived moral and physical failings among the British working classes, with commentators likening unrespectable urban and rural communities to the inhabitants of Africa and Asia (see Thorne, Congregational; Religion). These rhetorical parallels also served to spur on campaigns to eradicate what were perceived as heathen customs in the colonies. From the early nineteenth onward, missionaries had taken a leading role in attempting to stamp out infanticide in India, arguing that only by acting in concert with religious educators would the secular government be able to eliminate these acts (see Cormack; Peggs). This tallied neatly with widespread perceptions that faith and custom were inextricably linked in India for both Hindus and Muslims (Metcalf 133). Many in the colonial administration shared this view, one author arguing that it is only divine revelation which proves itself adequate to the preservation of the equilibrium of perfect morality (Wilson 10). A number of different strategies were deployed to eradicate the practice during the early and mid-nineteenth century, with varying degrees of success (Bhatnagar et al.). The eventual eradication of female infanticide (that is, the murder of female infants) remained a key aim for missionaries in the late nineteenth century. One Bristol-based cleric—who, like many Western critics, wrongly believed that female infanticide was sanctioned in practice (if perhaps not in theological doctrine) by both Hinduism and Islam1 —even claimed in 1886 that eliminat ing infanticide in British colonies was the ultimate goal for which to strive, stressing that Christianity had century after come into victorious conflict with that damnable form of cruelty (Christianity). Yet to claim that only Christianity could prevent Indian child-murder ignored the fact that infanticide could, and did, happen in Christian Britain and Ireland (Arnot; Farrell; Grey, Discourses; Women's). Indeed, scholars have noted that Victorian Britain and Ireland experienced a parallel