Abstract
The informal criminal defence in India of ‘injured masculine honour’ was steadily narrowed over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet this remained a popular – and extremely effective – appeal to the judiciary. This article argues that such regular and successful appeals by husbands in India are best understood by examining how lethal domestic violence was represented in England, and how this cultural baggage was transferred to Indian courts as a central part of the new ‘Anglo-Muhammadan’ criminal law. Such gendered legal ideas, as I demonstrate here, seriously limited the chances that wife-killers in colonial India would be brought to justice.
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