British Colonial Domains of South AsiaBritish colonial rule was imposed on most re-
gions of South Asia (with the notable exception of
present-day Afghanistan) from 1757 under the aus-
pices of the East India Company, though it was not
formalized until a century later when official
Mughal sovereignty was dissolved in favor of direct
rule by the British crown after the Indian rebellion
of 1857. As early as 1826, however, the centrality
of the Woman Question to Britain’s “civilizing mis-
sion” in India was established when James Mill
decreed in his influential History of British India:
“Among rude people, the women are generally de-
graded; among civilized people they are exalted.”
From his limited reading about Indian religions and
society, he concluded, “nothing can exceed the
habitual contempt which the Hindus entertain for
their women.” As this quotation indicates, it was
those customs defined specifically as “Hindu” that
were considered most objectionable by the British
in the course of the nineteenth century. Hence, the
colonial government introduced legislation (often
at the explicit encouragement of Indian reformers)
to prohibit sati or widow burning (1829), enable
Hindu widows to remarry (1856), and raise the age
of consent from the age of ten to twelve years
(1891). It was not until the early twentieth century
that the government of India responded to calls
within the Muslim community (consisting of ap-
proximately 20 percent of India’s population in the
colonial period) by passing a number of acts in-
tended to augment Muslim women’s legal rights.
The first of these acts was the Waqf Validating
Act of 1913, which sought to reinstate those en-
dowments (awqàf) that benefited surviving mem-
bers of a donor’s family (as opposed to funding
religious or charitable projects). By virtue of ties of
kinship, needy Muslim women were to receive sup-
port. The second was the Shariat Application Act
of 1937. As the title suggests, it aimed to replace
customary law in India with Muslim personal law,
which was deemed to be more advantageous to
women, though it had little actual effect after com-
promises were made on the issue of inheritance.
More influential was the Muslim Dissolution of
Marriage Act of 1939, which permitted women to
initiate divorce proceedings, primarily on grounds
accepted by the Màlikìschool of Islamic jurispru-
Colonialism and Imperialism
dence. The act that caused the greatest upheaval
among Muslims, however, was one that applied to
all religious communities, namely, the Child Mar-
riage Restraint Act of 1929. Raising the minimum
age of marriage to 14 for girls and 18 for boys, it
brought Muslim women into conflict with men of
their community as never before when they vigor-
ously endorsed it through women’s organizations,
while leading male reformers, politicians, and
≠ulamà±denounced it as irrelevant or “un-Islamic”
on account of its failure to recognize the jurisdic-
tion of Muslim judges.
Beyond this legislation, colonial rule in South
Asia had its most dramatic effects on women by
inspiring a process of self-examination within the
Muslim community itself. Having experienced a
loss of political power, Indian Muslims were forced
to recognize that the Islamic world had fallen
behind Europe in terms of intellectual, technologi-
cal, and material development. The question arose
as to how they could maintain their cultural iden-
tity in the face of European encroachment and the
numerical dominance of the Hindu community. By
the late nineteenth century, a response had come in
the form of socioreligious reform movements that
sprang up across India to restore a “pure” Islam
that was free of cultural accretions. A number of
variations existed, but, in general terms, this
process was understood to mean a return to scrip-
tural sources, including the Qur±àn and ™adìth, and
early Islamic history.
Early Muslim reformers, such as Sayyid A™mad
Khàn (1817–98), highlighted the significance of
women to this project of reform by dictating that
the real strength of Islam lay in a “private” domes-
tic sphere that was outside the purview of the
British government. As women were responsible
for maintaining the home as an oasis of tradition
and passing on religious knowledge to their chil-
dren, they were deemed to have a vital role to play
in the maintenance of Islamic culture. Yet, when
these male reformers turned their attention to
women, they discovered that many of them were
ignorant of scriptural Islam and even the basic
tenets of their religion. A particular complaint was
that they were dedicated to rituals and customs that
were expensive and unrelated to their faith, includ-
ing exorcism, vows to spirits, idol worship, and
life-cycle ceremonies. Their response was to advo-