(1820–91), a pan.d.it who was a close associate of Debendrana ̄th Tagore. Like
Rammohun’s against sahamaran.a, his arguments were both textual and human-
itarian; the outcome was the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856. I ̄s ́varcandra
was also among those who attacked polygyny, which was widely practiced by
Brahmans in Bengal; but this attack did not lead to legislation.
Another issue was child marriage, in particular the early marriage of girls.
This was common among upper castes in many parts of India, and was opposed
by the Bra ̄hmo Sama ̄j, the Pra ̄rthana ̄ Sama ̄j, Daya ̄nanda, I ̄s ́varcandra, and
others. In 1860 the first relevant legislation, affecting not marriage but con-
summation, set the age of consent for girls at ten. Renewed controversy, height-
ened by the death of a girl of eleven in Calcutta in 1890, led to the raising of the
age to 12 in 1891. The law was controversial but ineffective, as was the Child
Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which set the ages of marriage at 14 for brides
and 18 for bridegrooms (Forbes 1996: 83–90).
While the government was wary of prohibiting any Hindu custom, it was
more ready to pass permissive laws if there was demand for them, as shown
by the Widow Remarriage Act. Another example is the Marriage Act of 1872.
This was passed in response to demands from the Bra ̄hmo Sama ̄j for a legally
recognized form of marriage which disregarded caste, was monogamous and did
not involve idolatry; the bride had to be at least 14 and the bridegroom 18. To
avoid attempting to define Bra ̄hmos as a community, the legislators required the
participants to declare that they were not Hindus – nor Buddhists, Christians,
Jains, Muslims, or Parsis (Kopf 1979: 103–5). This law was part of the back-
ground to the Cooch Behar marriage (p. 518 above): although the marriage did
not contravene it, since the Act did not apply in a princely state, it betrayed the
principles underlying it.
These movements to improve the condition of women were the work of men,
and treated women as passive rather than active. They were partly prompted by
the view of James Mill and others that ill-treatment of women indicated a low
degree of civilization (Forbes 1996: 13). While the male reformers had genuine
regard for women as persons, they also thought of them in terms of their pro-
creative and nurturing roles: child marriage was condemned as pernicious to
the health of (male) offspring. Women’s education could be a way of furthering
the concerns of men, whose efforts at reform were hampered by the conser-
vatism of their wives and mothers. A Bengali wrote in 1848:
An educated native who is even at the head of his family is connected with poojah
[pu ̄ja ̄, worship of images] which he under the existing state of Society cannot
remedy and thinks it expedient for preserving domestic happiness to perpetuate it
so long as education is denied to our females. (Palit 1972: 67)It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that women themselves
became public champions of reform (Forbes 1996).
There was also a caste dimension to gender issues which the reformers tended
to ignore. As the Bengali preacher Swa ̄mi Viveka ̄nanda (1863–1902) put it,
modernity, reform, and revival 521