Suspect Bodies: Reproductive Crime and Widow Remarriage in Colonial India

My paper examines how colonial officials in India responded to infanticide and abortion among Indian women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike in Britain, where such practices were frequently associated with poverty, policemen, judges, and medical experts in India interpreted infanticide and abortion through the lens of “native sexual deviancy.” They primarily suspected young Hindu widows who were constrained by socio-religious expectations of lifelong celibacy. Within this context, my paper asks how colonial officials across hierarchies sought to criminalize and deter reproductive practices while simultaneously construing female suspects as both immoral transgressors and pitiable victims.

Drawing on trial records, police reports, missionary writings, medical jurisprudence manuals, and legislative debates, my paper shows how official discourse on infanticide and abortion became a critical site where the punitive and reformative impulses of the colonial state converged. Judges often exercised restraint in sentencing accused women influenced by prevailing notions of female vulnerability and social misery. At the same time, local colonial officials, including policemen and forensic experts, deployed expansive investigative procedures, underscoring the extent to which Indian women’s reproductive lives were treated as matters of public and administrative concern.

On a broader level, I argue that these everyday ambivalences animated larger debates on social and legal reform concerning the status of young Hindu widows. By the mid-nineteenth century, Indian liberal reformers and Christian missionaries leveraged official anxieties surrounding infanticide and abortion to advocate for the Widow Remarriage Act (1856), framing widow celibacy as a key moral and social cause of reproductive transgression.

Situating infanticide and abortion at the intersection of local governance and social reform, my paper contributes to scholarly debates on colonial histories of law and gender by showing how the regulation of reproduction became central to projects of both criminal justice and public life in colonial India.