Restrained freedom? Widows, blended families and inheritance in eighteenth-century urban Sri Lanka

Abstract

ABSTRACT Challenging the optimistic thesis on female Asian agency in the early modern Dutch empire, this article studies widows’ socio-legal position in the cross-cultural setting of colonial Sri Lanka. Normative legislation and judicial records on stepfamilial feuds from eighteenth-century Dutch Sri Lanka allow us not only to understand how both litigating parties tried to work the Roman-Dutch legal system to get a favorable verdict, but also to unveil the underlying societal expectations of widows and stepchildren. Whereas in the Dutch Republic husbands often used prenuptial agreements or last wills to make their wives principal heirs or give them usufruct (thus increasing the customary half of ab intestato inheritances), Sri Lankan case-studies indicate that such legal documents were also used to reduce life choices of widows. Prenups and last wills drafted up and signed by their late husbands tied these women to their primary role as caretaker of both their own children as well as those of previous marriages. Further stipulations could even tie them quite literally to the parental house, which they were not allowed to leave for a longer period of time without losing their inheritance. These rules of engagement put additional strain on already fraught relationships between stepmothers and first-marriage children. The only structural solution for both parties was that the stepmother married another man, freeing both herself and the stepchildren of a difficult balancing act.