The Girl-Child in the Colonial Encounter: Northern India, c. 1815–75

Historians studying the South Asian familial domains have examined the analytic imprecision of the term ‘family', arriving at languages amplifying kinship structures, household arrangements, and issues of social and gender hierarchies differently. In this paper, I extend my earlier work on domestic relations in precolonial India, by focusing on ‘respectable' (sharif) Muslim families in northern India at the advent of colonialism. I do so by bringing to the center of my enquiry the idea of the girl-child, using this figure as a lens to probe contested notions of the familial and of appropriate domestic interaction. I ask, what does an increasing focus on the girl-child in accounts of the time tell us about the changing status of the familial space? From the early nineteenth century, and much more consistently from the later nineteenth century, it is the girl-child that becomes the center of Hindi, Urdu and English texts. My proposition is that the girl-child is a present/absent figure and that the woman is always already present in the girl-child and the girl-child is always already a woman. The function of the girl-child as it appears in the accounts of the time is to essentialize the woman so that even in the absence of the discussions of the girl-child, the ghost of this creature haunts all kinds of writings. This privileging of the girl-child does not imply an erasure of conduct requirements for a respectable boy: what we have now is an amplification of the figure of the girl-child. What is the significance of this development? What happens to the idea of the family when unusual figures such as the girl-child are inserted into it? How does an historian then consider matters of kinship, bonds of affiliation, and the larger cultural and community boundaries?