Locating Consent

Abstract

Abstract This chapter locates the social and historical contexts of women’s choices in marriage in India, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores the patriarchal dynamics of the endogamous marriage system among the traditional Hindu upper castes and its connections with the questions of status, power, honour, and property. The chapter examines the role of such marriages in maintaining the structures of production as well as reproduction of family, caste, and community. It shows how the colonial regime, invoking their ‘liberality’ as a demonstration of their superiority, brought in certain laws in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to address the women’s question. British legal policies introduced unprecedented tensions within the structure of marriage and reproduction; however, questions of marriage and consent were never centrally addressed but worked around, and the structures of reproduction remained undisturbed. There were reverberations that led to a more sustained interrogation of the system of marriage in the post-independence period. However, the age of consent for legal access to the female body has remained an explicit issue in the rape laws and an implicit question in marriages of choice in India even today. Moreover, both endogamous marriages that perpetuate the structures of production and reproduction as well as caste and its relationship to class and productive resources remain undisturbed by the constitutional and legal changes.