Nineteenth‐Century Contexts

ISSN: 0890-5495 (Print) 1477-2663 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20

Gendered Spaces in Kamala: The Story of a Hindu

Child‐Wife

Ellen Brinks

To cite this article: Ellen Brinks (2008) Gendered Spaces in Kamala:�The�Story�of�a�Hindu

Child‐Wife , Nineteenth‐Century Contexts, 30:2, 147-165, DOI: 10.1080/08905490802212433

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905490802212433

Published online: 11 Jul 2008.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 146

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gncc20
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2008, pp. 147–165

Gendered Spaces in Kamala: The Story

of a Hindu Child-Wife
Ellen Brinks
Department of English, Colorado State University

I
Nineteenth-Century
10.1080/08905490802212433
GNCC_A_321410.sgm
0890-5495
Original
Taylor
202008
30
[email protected]
EllenBrinks
00000June
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1477-2663
Francis
2008 Contexts (online)

Colonialist accounts of the zenana (the women’s quarters where high caste/class Hindu
and Muslim women resided in seclusion) typically depict purdah in sensationalist fash-
ion.1 These narratives stress the misery of the “poor idolatrous females in bondage,”
their virtual imprisonment, in order to promote or justify governmental or missionary
intervention into forms of Hindu conjugality.2 The dark, confined, and limited physi-
cal spaces of Hindu and Muslim women’s lives serve as metaphors for the psychological
domination and entrapment resulting from “backward,” “barbaric” customs that deny
women an education or even a circumscribed public life. Extrapolating from the space
of the zenana to the condition of Indian women in general, missionaries sought to
reform the Hindu family by “uplifting” Hindu women.3 In contrast to these voyeuristic
views, Krupabai Satthianadhan’s novel Kamala: the Story of a Hindu Child-Wife (1894)
complicates colonialist geographies of high-caste Hindu women’s lives. Abandoning
sensationalism, it depicts the spaces of a Brahmin child-wife’s life as significantly more
extensive, varied, and nuanced than her exclusive confinement within the stereotypical
zenana of colonial writers.
By expanding Western readers’ understanding of the lived spaces of elite Hindu
women in the nineteenth century, the novel offers an implicit challenge to Victorian
spatial ideologies of a public-masculine sphere and a private-feminine one that colo-
nialist accounts brought to bear upon the zenana (an ideology whose explanatory
power is problematic in either context).4 This particular stereotypical discourse of
gendered space neglects to take into account the relativity of its own position, problem-
atically mapping Indian spaces and constricting Indian women within a decontextual-
ized western paradigm. If we think about space as the social “stretched out” (Massey 2),
as sets of “superimposed spatial frameworks, as many social spaces negotiated within
one geographical space and time” (Mills 693), we can see beyond the public-masculine/
private-feminine spatial framework that saturated the colonial texts of the time and

ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08905490802212433
148 E. Brinks
encouraged Indian women writers to protest against such culturally insensitive views.
In Kamala, three areas—domestic, gender-segregated public spaces, and wild nature—
contribute to an understanding of the economic, psychological, and social relations
and practices that govern marriage and the joint family system, while providing a basis
for the reform of child marriage, Hindu conjugality, and women’s solidarity across kin
and caste lines.
We get a sense of the uniqueness of Kamala as a novel of reform (it is also allegedly
the first novel in English by an Indian woman), if we attend to the reviewers in
diverse journals and newspapers who praised its ability to cross the plural divides of
religion, ethnicity, and gender that characterized reformist debates at this historical
moment. One reviewer in The Madras Mail confesses his prejudice before reading
Kamala against the author as a Christian: “We took up the book with a preconceived
prejudice that the daughter of Christian converts was the last person fitted to give a
true picture of the life of a Brahman household. We laid it down agreeably disap-
pointed” (qtd. in Satthianadhan, Miscellaneous 125).5 Seeing her as a liaison between
cultures, The Eastern Guardian calls attention to Satthianadhan’s capacity to repre-
sent both Hindu and Christian worlds in her writing: “To Europeans the life of the
higher classes of Hindus written by one of them is of great interest as there is so litte
[sic] of this to be met with, especially anything written by Hindu women. The
authoress is as capable of describing the Hindu woman of the period as well as the
Christian” (125) Other reviewers perceived the novel as promoting a more nuanced
yet broad-based reformist position focusing on the condition of women. The Madras
Standard finds that Kamala “cannot but find its way through the several vernaculars
of the country into the minds of the Hindu women of succeeding generations” (125).
The periodical Woman (London) writes that “Kamala takes us straight into a middle-
class Hindu Zenana … with a fullness of detail intensely instructive to a thoughtful
reader” (128).
Written by an Indian Christian woman in a companionate marriage who
supported women’s education and the restructuring of the joint family system yet
remained sensitive to Hindu fears of “deculturation,” Kamala underscores how
Satthianadhan’s own minority position within a Hindu, patriarchal, and colonial
culture could be a privileged site of reform.6 Since colonial reform movements coin-
cided historically with internal reform movements, and later with nationalist move-
ments, their paths, ideologies, and rhetoric frequently crisscrossed and overlapped, as
well as diverged. In the case of child marriage, for example, colonialist policies often
bolstered the dominance of patriarchal relations by adopting a position of strict non-
intervention in religious matters (broadly construed to include many customary
practices), in deference to conservative nationalist movements. Yet they could also
work together with internal reform movements promoting women’s education,
something that was at odds with the Hindu conservative agenda. It is not within the
scope of this essay to sketch the complex landscape of reform in the latter decades of
the nineteenth century. My focus will remain on the specificity of the novel’s reform-
ist agenda in the context of the debates of the 1880s and 1890s on the question of
child marriage and the Age of Consent controversy. As we will see, Kamala draws on
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 149
feminist, Christian, and Hindu discourse in its assessment of high-caste Hindu
women’s lives. Satthianadhan’s strategic flexibility helps us to understand the ways
that some commonly held ideological ends such as the reform of child marriage
allowed for unforeseen alliances between different groups as they critiqued patriar-
chal practices.
Kamala enhances our understanding not only of the differing discourses Indian
women adopted to articulate their own reformist agendas, but their at times vexed rela-
tionship to nationalist struggles, as well as the roles they played in public, political
action. Ania Loomba writes about the dearth of such accounts:
Even though the reform of women’s position seems to be a major concern within nation-
alist (and colonialist) discourses, and even though female power, energy and sexuality
haunt these discourses, women themselves, in any real sense, seem to ‘disappear’ from
these discussions about them. From colonial as well as nationalist records, we learn little
about how they felt or responded, and until recently, there was little attempt to locate them
as subjects within the colonial struggle. (Colonialism/Postcolonialism 221)

Far from a voyeuristic glimpse into the zenana or a record of disappearance, Kamala
attempts to represent the subjectivity of a young child wife within the diverse spaces of
her life. The mapping of differentiated spaces allows Satthianadhan to stake out her
own symbolic “site” in debates about Hindu conjugality, ones which preoccupied a
spectrum of groups at the time, including Hindu conservatives, reformists, and nation-
alists, as well as British feminists, missionaries, and Indian Christians.

II
Contemporaneous with Satthianadhan’s writing of Kamala was a strong public reac-
tion against the 1891 Age of Consent Act.7 This legislation amended the Indian Penal
Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure and raised the age of consent—the age at
which an individual was considered capable of consenting to sexual intercourse—
from ten to twelve years of age.8 The legislation followed a decade of debates on the
issue of child marriage: did child marriage damage women’s mental development, and
if so, how? Did it interfere with women’s education, or not? Did reforming the age of
consent constitute State interference in Hindu law and customary practices (prohib-
ited by the proclamation of 1858)? Was such legislation called for by Hindu law, since
the smritis and srutis (canons of Hindu religious scripture) did not authorize child
marriage?
Resistance to child marriage had been a key component of the intelligentsia’s
reformist agenda since its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Maheshchandra Deb’s 1839 paper criticized customary practices, foremost among
them child marriage, seclusion, arranged marriage, polygamy, and the ban on widow
remarriage.9 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the push for reform spear-
headed by upper-caste men was bolstered by British legislative initiatives and mission-
ary critiques; in addition, autonomous feminist movements within India focused on
calls for women’s education and the reform of conjugal and family relations, mainly
within the upper castes. In the years preceding the Act, one long “moment” stands out
150 E. Brinks
as particularly inflammatory. From the mid-to-late 1880s, the celebrated Rakhmabai
case heightened the sense of urgency in reforming child-marriage. Rakhmabai, an
educated Brahmin woman, was married at the age of eleven to Dadaji Bhikaji, who was
twenty years old. The marriage was not consummated (Rakhmabai had not reached
puberty at the time of her marriage), and she continued to live with her family. Ten
years later, when he demanded she move in with him (apparently after finding out she
had received a large inheritance), she refused, on the grounds of his “inability to earn
an honest livelihood, his immoral lifestyle, his refusal to educate himself and his ill-
health.”10 Four years and two legal battles later (including Queen Victoria’s interven-
tion), Rakhmabai was ordered to return to her husband and consummate her marital
obligations. She refused and was sent to prison. A major public debate followed the
1885 appearance of Rakhmabai’s four articles on child marriage and enforced widow-
hood in the Times of India, where she recounts her own misery, and that of her friends,
due to early marriage. In response, many Maharashtrian women, among them Pandita
Ramabai and Krupabai Satthianadhan, as well as British feminists in India and Great
Britain, became vocal in calling for state intervention to abolish child marriage, while
conservative nationalists blamed Rakhmabai’s obstinancy on her English education.
Satthianadhan’s “Female Education,” appearing in the Indian Magazine (the journal
of the National Indian Association), linked India’s regeneration with the liberation
of her women. Adopting Hindu reformist rhetoric, she invoked the “far more liberal
and generous ideas” of the ancient Hindus, who valued women’s conjugal rights,
higher learning, and contribution to public discourse. She attributed women’s degra-
dation to the “ascendancy of priestly power” and referred in particular to women’s loss
of the right to choose their spouse, enforced gender inequalities, and their lack of
education.11
In terms of Indian colonial and national history, the 1891 Age of Consent Act, which
followed on the heels of the Rakhmabai controversy, proved significant because it
aroused the public ire and won broad popular support for both the nationalist move-
ment and for orthodox Hindu ideology.12 Opponents of social reform who made
reform subordinate or secondary to the struggle for political independence, national-
ists such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, cast the legislation as an intrusion into the (patriar-
chal) household, where autonomy and self-rule had to be preserved. According to
conservative nationalists, the Act constituted an attack upon Indian traditions and the
authority of Indian men, both of which stood as a bulwark against imperialism. After
years of protest about the poor state of women’s education and the institution of child
marriage, however, countless Indian women became particularly vocal advocates of
the legislation, convening publicly to express their support for the Act. To counter
the massive conservative reaction to the bill, Indian women (in the urban areas of
Maharashtra) formed committees, sent petitions to Queen Victoria, held meetings and
passed differing resolutions on aspects of the bill. Members of different secular, caste,
and religious-affiliated organizations, they protested together, uniting across their
differences to support women’s rights. Padma Anagol-McGinn reports that the “agita-
tion against the Bill prompted women from differing faiths to unite on an issue which
they increasingly saw as a gendered one” (114).
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 151
III

In light of what Uma Chakravarti and Sumit Sarkar identify as the nationalists’ attempt
to sideline the “woman question” in favor of an aggressive cultural nationalism in the
1890s, Kamala’s appearance three years after the passage of the Act should be seen as
an attempt to keep reformist energies alive and to challenge the rhetoric of Hindu
marriage promoted by conservatives.13 The novel’s forays into the manifold social
spaces of the child-wife allow Satthianadhan to critique discourses of culturally conser-
vative nationalists. Although Kamala draws on some mythic archetypes of the Hindu
“golden age” and includes an idealized (child) wife loyal “unto death” (two features
shared with conservative discourses), the novel’s rhetorical intent in making use of
these archetypes differs. Indeed, the narrative stakes out an ideological position in
direct conflict with the platform of conservative reform movements of the time.14
While these movements stressed the customs and traditions of the joint family and the
“home-like” nature of the zenana, Kamala offers a withering critique of this extended
family system. Satthianadhan uncovers the fundamental contradiction of conservative
Hindu ideology: it insists that Hindu wives already possess a “happy home,” but
following certain shastras, it calls for their harsh discipline.
To achieve this effect, the narrative attends to the conjugal spaces of the young child
wife, specifically the arrangements devolving from exogamous marital practices,
whereby the young wife leaves her natal family to live with her husband’s family. The
setting of the joint-family system is explicitly contrasted with the natural setting and
the companionate arrangements of Kamala’s father and mother. With its penchant for
detailed realism, multiple perspectives, and an empathetic narrative voice, Kamala
investigates the institution of child marriage beyond the narrow provisions of the Age
of Consent Act, which, strictly speaking, legislated only the biological age of consensual
relations. Offering two differently organized conjugal/domestic spaces, the novel
directly and indirectly addresses issues such as hierarchized power within the house-
hold, the dowry system, women’s material insecurity, especially in their old age, as well
as pointing to the benefits of companionate marriage.
Customary practices generate the cruelties of Kamala’s existence as Ganesh’s young
wife. Although the opening does not specify Kamala’s age, she is a young girl when she
marries (her father-in-law calls her “little girl” [37]), and it is certainly before Kamala
has started to menstruate, in accordance with caste customs. The bride’s young age
virtually insures that she will be dependent, because she is too emotionally and physi-
cally immature either to possess specific skills, to resist maltreatment, or bear up under
the stresses of her new role. Kamala is given drudge work and made to shoulder the
blame whenever things go wrong. Here, Satthianadhan echoes the testimony of many
women in published newspapers and memoirs during the Age of Consent controversy,
where hierarchical relationships, a regimented life, and the absolute control wielded
by in-laws over young wives amounted to a version of institutionalized slavery.15
Reinforced by religious precept, Kamala’s diminished status within the household
increases her passivity, and she becomes “resigned to her lot” (58). Kamala’s learned
powerlessness renders her oppression acceptable (indeed, seem inevitable) to her as she
152 E. Brinks
grows older. The internalization of guilt for whatever goes wrong leads to pervasive self-
incrimination in her interactions with Ganesh. Paradoxically but predictably, this
happens especially when he is at fault because such moments threaten the status quo.
Thus, after he is unfaithful, Kamala blames herself: “She made herself miserable the
whole day, crying and thinking of all her words, and putting her conduct in the worst
possible light …” (135).
Another consequence of early marriage is the increased risk of conjugal incompati-
bility, something which the Rakmahbai case had also brought vividly to the fore.
Kamala exposes how early marriage damages conjugal relations, because spousal
choice is not based on character or compatibility, but on property and status; implicitly
the dowry system renders marriage a financial operation, as Rakhmabai had pointed
out in one of her letters to the Times of India.16 As the couple performs the marriage
rituals “unintelligible to both,” Kamala becomes “henceforth the wife and the property
of the man whoever he might be… . This was ordered by the shastras [treatises], and
the law was never to be broken” (37; italics mine). Ganesh leaves after the wedding
to continue his education, and Kamala’s memory of him fades to a “faint recollection
… . [S]he never thought of him or cared to see him again” (44).17 When the couple are
eventually reacquainted with one another years later, his tendency to regard Kamala as
his property is evidence of an already weak, indulgent character: “Everything was
subservient to his pleasure, and it is no wonder that he regarded Kamala as a sort of
chattel made to give him pleasure and minister to his wants” (99). According to the
narrative’s logic, the material imperative undergirding child marriage (the girl is attrac-
tive for the dowry her family gives over to the boy) fixes marital relations psychologi-
cally into one of persistent inequality.
Though her own interactions with Ganesh remain painfully unequal and unfulfill-
ing, Kamala intuits early on that the companionate model—where men and women’s
primary attachment and responsibility to the spouse is as an equal—offers a superior
fulfillment. In contemporary texts, male writers often disparaged the insufficiency of
illiterate wives to serve as their companions, attributing desires and needs to the
husband only.18 In Kamala, by contrast, Satthianadhan allows her female protagonist
to articulate the wife’s powerful desires for marital relations based on equality and
emotional intimacy. The expression of similar desires on Rakhmabai’s part made her
controversial, compounded by her public outspokenness. Satthianadhan creates in
Kamala a protagonist who, while expressing her desires for mutuality, remains suffi-
ciently “feminine” to forestall such criticism.
As the narrative suggests, however, exogamous marital systems, with the concomi-
tant hierarchical positioning of women within the extended household, make educa-
tion of the young wife almost impossible. In virtually all the writings of colonialist,
liberal, and conservative Indian reformers (whether male or female), efforts to alter the
status quo are sabotaged by duplicitous and exploited women within the household.19
When Kamala seeks out the company of her father-in-law, a shastri (learned man) like
her own father, and desires to help him in his studies (and indirectly extend her own,
begun by her father), she stirs the ire of the women by going “against all rules of deco-
rum … to be so very familiar with her father-in-law, and to be in such favor with him”
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 153
(43). Their resistance resurfaces when Ganesh, imbued with the “English idea … of
developing Kamala’s mind and so training her to be a real companion to him” (73),
takes to educating his young wife. Emboldened by Ganesh’s father’s ridicule of “the
new learning” (74), Kamala’s mother- and sisters-in-law express their displeasure by
criticizing her: Kamala goes against tradition, has ulterior motives, upsets gender
norms governing the husband and wife by trying to be an equal, and only cares about
the men of the household, not the women.
Perhaps the most compelling reason they articulate against her education, however,
relates to their need for material security within the extended family unit. Their fears
of being usurped from the father’s/brother’s/husband’s favor and losing influence
stem from their own economic dependence on the men of the household, as well as
on a system of household entitlements already in place. Kamala’s education will inter-
fere with the carefully articulated hierarchical power of women in the household,
whereby the young child-wife is typically at the bottom, compelled to do the most
menial work and the first from whom food is withheld. With an education and her
husband’s favor, Kamala’s workload will fall on the other, older women’s shoulders.
Further, a young wife with “inordinate” power, a power greater than the other
women in the household, threatens the security of their old age. As Kamala’s mother-
in-law says to her husband: “If our son also takes to her as you do, why, she will wean
away his heart from us and where shall we be? He won’t take the least notice of us”
(44). With the women of the family exerting the full force of their influence upon
Ganesh and Kamala’s father-in-law, Ganesh’s efforts to educate his child wife come to
naught.
By the time he relinquishes this project, Satthianadhan has revealed the scope of
the difficulties early marriage poses for those who advocate “reform from within.”
Many reformers proposed that the boy’s “age of consent” be raised.20 Ganesh’s
dependence on his family makes him unable to stand up to his female relations’ ener-
getic efforts to keep Kamala subordinate within the household.21 He finds his loyal-
ties constantly questioned by his family, his superstitious fears awakened, and his
affections played upon and divided between his sisters, his mother, and his wife. After
she marries, Kamala’s father has no more part in her life: “[A]s it was with Kamala, so
it usually is in Hindu families. Once given over, the daughter so lovingly brought up,
is no more the concern of her parents. It is improper for them to interfere in any way
with her new life” (75). Similarly, Kamala’s father-in-law gives in whenever the pres-
sure intensifies. Because the men in Kamala’s life seem incapable of intervening in
relations between women within the home, Kamala seems to align itself against that
segment of the reform movement which opposed legislation and argued that any
amelioration must come slowly from within the family unit.
Kamala suggests, then, that early marriage and the practice of exogamy (with the
joint household system it entails) present unacceptable burdens upon the fragile, emer-
gent relationship between the child-wife and her husband and upon any attempts
towards companionate marriage, a model, as Uma Chakravarti notes, that was still very
much “an abstraction, in construction” in India at this point in time (207). The child-
wife’s position within the household devolves into one of increasing isolation, misery,
154 E. Brinks
and stigmatization. The space she calls her own within the house is “the darkest corner”
of her mother-in-law’s room (57), the physical projection of a psyche taught to accept
her wifely burden:
[T]here was another kind of teaching … that … she … ought to accept it meekly, for it was
her fate. This gave her very little consolation. It only made her feeble in purpose and in will.
She lost even her simple interest in life; for life was a poor spiritless affair. (58)

Suicidal impulses in the form of fatalism and anorexia emerge either as coping mecha-
nisms or a “solution” to her loss of the desire to live.
The present-time of the text places Kamala as a child-wife in the home of her in-
laws, yet a secondary narrative (emerging after Kamala asks her father about her
long-dead mother) offers a model of companionate conjugality that dovetails with
nineteenth-century understandings of ancient Hindu practices and beliefs, aspects of
which were acceptable to Hindu reformers and traditionalists alike, although for
different reasons. Kamala’s parents’ narrative draws on fairy tale and myth to charac-
terize her parents’ love story, beginning with her mother Lakshmi being “immured in
the fortress with her old decrepit father” (117). Concern for wealth and power dictate
Lakshmi’s father’s spousal choice for his daughter, not his knowledge of the man. In
contrast to Lakshmi’s father, Narayan’s aunt Droupadai (who is also Lakshmi’s aunt/
foster mother) implicitly believes in ascertaining the couple’s compatibility before
they marry: “quite against all rules, [she, the aunt] allowed [Narayan] to talk to the
girl” (118), and under her auspices, they meet numerous times. The choice of the
name Droupadai can hardly be accidental; a version of Draupadi, it recalls the heroic
figure in the epic, The Mahabharata, renowned for choosing her own (five)
husbands. In essence, Droupadai extends an independence of mind, or the right to
choose one’s partner, to Lakshmi. Because it turns out to be such a successful choice,
the narrative affirms a restructuring of conjugal relations to include choice of part-
ners, a position that women reformers of Satthianadhan’s era worked hard to
promote.22 Secretly marrying, she and Narayan run away, Lakshmi “[looking] more
like a princess … than one who [is] stealing away from her father’s home” (118).
They attempt to reside at his family’s house, but Lakshmi is reviled by the women of
the household. Instead of bowing to family pressures, Narayan leaves with Lakshmi
on a pilgrimage, with Narayan’s friend’s son Ramchander accompanying them.
These actions overtly allude to Rama’s and Sita’s voluntary exile from Rama’s
own dysfunctional family and their forest exile and idyll in The Ramayana, a popular
Hindu epic:
Oh, my Kamala! How can I give you a glimpse of those happy days? It falls not to the lot of
mortals to enjoy happiness such as we had. We lived in rude leafy huts, drank of the cool
limpid streams; we rose with the birds, roamed through the echoing valleys and over far
distant hills… . (119–120)

Kamala’s parents’ subsequent happiness is based on a number of factors: Narayan’s

understanding that a husband’s loyalty is foremost to his wife, not to his natal family;
that their physical remove from that family is necessary for their happiness; and that
Lakshmi pursue an education, with Narayan’s encouragement.
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 155
Kamala suggests that the attainment of such an ideal requires both the husband’s
and wife’s resistance to powerfully rooted customs. In creating a companionate
conjugal relationship that draws strength from its allusions to religious texts and
myths, Kamala contributes to what Uma Chakravarti has called the “construction of
a particular kind of past and a particular kind of womanhood” to further its reformist
agenda (78). Further, the depiction of Lakshmi’s and Narayan’s ideal marriage refers
to a model of “Aryan” womanhood constructed by nineteenth-century Hindu male
and female writers such as R.C. Dutt, Bankim, Dayananda, and Kailashbhashini
Devi.23 Characteristics of “Aryan” womanhood include the following (most of which
are found within the Narayan/Lakshmi narrative in Kamala): women are educated
before their marriage, and education continues after marriage as well; women choose
their partners after getting to know them and if widowed, can contract second
marriages; women are co-equal in spiritual potential and are partners in religious
duties; marriages follow the companionate model; and according to Vedic religion,
there are no caste divisions, no idolatry, and no child marriage.24 The novel under-
scores the reforms needed to achieve this ideal within a modern context by making
them consistent with The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, texts both beloved and
familiar. In doing so, Kamala partakes of a common strategy by reformists who
gestured towards a “golden age” of Hindu womanhood, based on models of ideal
womanhood alluded to in Vedic texts, such as Maitreyi, Gargi, Sita, Savitri, and
Lakshmibai.25
Kamala’s desire to recreate her parents’ relationship with her husband Ganesh is one
way Satthianadhan seeks to convey the pull Kamala’s natal home retains over her. Her
early life distinguishes itself from that of other girls who live in town in other ways as
well. First, her father teaches her to abhor caste prejudice, a further connection of
Narayan’s beliefs to the Vedic past. Her favored playmate is Yeshi, identified as a Sudra
(lowest of the castes, here, peasants), and this cross-caste friendship seems possible
only in a remote setting, beyond the pressures to conform to strict caste rules charac-
teristic of village-life. Secondly, as he has with Lakshmi, Narayan devotes himself to
Kamala’s education, affirming the intellectual interests of even very young female chil-
dren: “The greater part of the day… she would nestle by his side and listen to his
learned talk” (24). Finally, Narayan also turns out to be a proponent of marriage at a
later age. Though he attempts to postpone Kamala’s marriage as long as possible, even-
tually he loses what he calls “the great struggle” (31) and complies with an arranged
marriage he is unhappy with, facing social and religious ostracism if he defers any
longer.26 Kamala thus suggests that even the most devoted Hindu father is incapable of
overriding the weight of customary practices and protecting his daughter from the toll
of exogamy on the immature psyche—the grief that underwrites the child-marriage
contract—since no compensatory love relationships offer themselves as genuine
substitutes. It also conveys to its British readers that certain ancient Hindu traditions,
in their contemporary articulation, promote the education of women, choice in
marriage, and a later age-of-consent. Compatible with the Western companionate
model, they provide Eastern and Western reformers, despite religious differences, with
a common ideological base.
156 E. Brinks
IV

In highlighting the physical and psychic toll due to patriarchal virilocal exogamy,
Satthianadhan reveals herself to be a strong opponent of child marriage. Although
Kamala foregrounds the power of the father-daughter bond, the imagined, unbroken
affective tie between the dead mother and living daughter also acts as a persistent and
significant refrain within the text. Associated with uncultivated nature or wilderness,
the mother’s ghostly presence testifies, simultaneously if paradoxically, to the relative
invisibility, as well as the enduring significance, of the mother-daughter relationship.
Within Hindu reformist discussions of child-marriage, this bond is something that is
not focused on, reflecting social structures that minimize its significance. Uniquely,
Kamala authorizes and permits the mother-daughter passion for each other, and it
creates separate spaces—wild or untamed nature—that enfold this particular relation-
ship. Satthianadhan thereby creates a fantasy of permanent mother-daughter connect-
edness in response to the actuality of separation. Although the dead mother cannot be
brought back physically, the psychic ongoingness of their love triumphs over two kinds
of death, the biological one and the “death” of the mother-daughter relationship that
early marriage signifies. Kamala’s longing for proximity to her mother is charted along
associative pathways wherein the maternal is aligned with nature; the imagery of diffuse
elements such as water, wind, and light connotes their psychic reunification.
The novel renders the maternal as one dominant aspect of the text’s association of
wild places with the feminine. Kamala is first represented as a solitary child, perched on
a “weird and desolate” hillock topped with a ruined temple dedicated to the goddess
Anjini, whose temple Kamala regards “as her own” (25). The novel opens with a local
women’s festival to this goddess aligned with the wind, rain, and sunshine, those
immaterial yet palpable phenomena. Kamala plays on this hill for one last time before
her marriage, and “with every gust of wind she felt the happy buoyancy of life which
made her forget she was a bride” (36). This wild landscape, swept by Anjini’s animating
wind, characterizes her existence as a daughter, before the gravitas of marriage.
Lakshmi too, in Kamala’s psyche, is associated with such intangible presences as wind
and light, including starlight and moonlight. When the wind on the hill moans a “sad,
sad dirge” (23), Kamala remembers mostly her mother’s “sad eyes … their soft sweet
light [shining] round her in dreams, and sometimes in the starlit evenings” (23–24).
Narayan first meets Lakshmi when the light of the “silver moon” bathes the fortress she
lives in, and her “full round face … [catches] the moonbeams” (116). Kamala’s face,
carrying the imprint of her mother, is described by Ganesh as “lit by a moonbeam”
(56); indeed, Kamala’s unconscious memories of her mother surface into conscious-
ness when she contemplates the moonlight: “‘Do you know, father … that whenever
I look over those silent moonlit plains, my thoughts wander far? I seem to see scenes
similar to these … and I feel some one near me soothing me… . Do you think it is
mother; my mother?’” (116). The strength of Lakshmi’s presence is measured both
through its dispersal and its ability to temper the landscape’s darkness.
Insofar as the spectral Lakshmi is a projection of Kamala’s own psyche, she articu-
lates Kamala’s fears of marriage’s sexual obligations; in this capacity, she “protects” her
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 157
daughter from a too early entry into adult heterosexuality. The episode of the pilgrim-
age to Dudhesthal, where traumatic experience and a sociosexual geography are
inscribed upon another wild landscape, illuminates this maternal function. An erotic
mythos governs this place: the name, Dudhesthal, means “milky spot,” due to the effect
created when the “masculine” river Ganga (associated with Shiva) shoots down to a
cavern and explodes within it, appearing to viewers as a white spray. Another feature of
the locale, “Seeta’s bath” (after Sita, the embodiment of the ideal faithful wife and
mother) is similarly suggestive. The “bath” is a rocky cave, “overgrown with creepers”
where the “drip drip of the water … wells out from the sides of the cave” (69). Even the
place of Seeta’s baby’s cradle evokes female genital/womb imagery: “the rude slab of
rock cut in the shape of a cot with moss-grown stones underneath and ferns springing
up on all sides is the cradle of her babe” (69). The erotic valence of the site is enhanced
by the sexual “call and respond” dialogues initiated between the young peasant men
and women, as Kamala proceeds there with her husband and female friends: “He [one
young peasant] asks her to turn round and taste of his water …. [she retorts] ‘my song
is locked in a box, thou long-tongued man’” (67–68). In this sacred place overscored
with a heterosexual topography, Kamala has a terrifying hallucinatory flashback: of
falling into the river and being near death. The significance of this memory is revealed
later. When very young, she fell into this same river, and her mother pulled her to
safety. As a young woman just reaching sexual maturity, Kamala’s flashback to that
particular moment dramatizes her fear of immersion (self-annihilation) in masculine,
sexually charged waters, coupled with a desire to be pulled back into life by/with the
mother (e.g., to a time before sexual maturation). Her “ghostly” reappearance at this
spot reintroduces the mother’s protective presence as Kamala reaches her difficult
negotiation of sexual maturation as a child wife.
Yet why does the novel symbolically associate the maternal with intangibility or
disembodiment, beyond the obvious answer that the dead mother is a lingering spirit?
On the one hand, it suggests that, despite the semi-consciousness of Kamala’s memo-
ries, the idea of her mother remains pervasive, literally everywhere for her, like wind
or light, an element of nature. Further, by casting the text’s mother figure as disem-
bodied, the text can express anxieties about embodied motherhood as a potentially
deadly, tragic, or traumatic situation for women, for various reasons. Most obvious is
the psychic difficulty for the daughter and mother to “survive” the inevitable loss of
their relationship, given exogamous child marriage. Further, if a wife’s value is
measured by her ability to provide a male heir, or if she doesn’t successfully bear a
male child, she can suffer a social “death” by expulsion from her husband’s home.
Finally, the bearing of children by very young wives represents a premature closure of
childhood, itself represented as a joyous period of life whose abrupt loss the novel
abundantly mourns. The mother as revenant is a way of staving off this loss that is
customarily viewed as a developmental advance. Kamala’s plotting of the daughter’s
progression to the social roles of wife and then mother refuses to mask the psychic
death upon which it is predicated. When the widowed Kamala is finally able to make
choices about her life, due to an unexpected inheritance, she reaffirms what one could
call “nonbiological” or “asexual” motherhood. With the ability to marry (and give
158 E. Brinks
birth) again, she chooses to step out of that generational matrix. Instead, she devotes
herself to the care of widows and orphans, a service made possible by her mother’s
dual legacy: the gift of an education and the jewels she bequeaths her daughter.
Kamala’s economic independence confers a measure of freedom from a procreative
paradigm.
Much loved by Kamala due to its early childhood associations, the natural world
seems to represent an escape from the misery she experiences as a child wife, a longing
for something that transcends the social altogether:
So Kamala … wondered why she ever felt happy at all, as she did when she looked on the
blue sky, the radiant sunset, or the swollen river—why she felt such longing to be lost in a
great, wild wilderness, where she might dream alone in silence and enjoy … the glory and
magnificence of earth and sky. (59)

By virtue of the text’s association of Lakshmi with natural phenomenon, and particu-
larly wild landscapes, however, it is tempting to read Kamala’s pleasure in the natural
world as her pleasure in recalling a psychic bond she has encrypted there. Thus, nature
is less a solution to social alienation than an arena replete with alternative social mean-
ings. The “spectral mother” thus comes to stand for the diversity of desires that exceed
sanctioned ones: her longing for an extension of childhood pleasures; her wish to
defer, cancel or abrogate female sexual reproduction; and her refusal to relinquish the
psychological primacy of the mother-daughter affective bond. Here is a place where
the “precocious and artificial childhood” of her friends in town need not end by enter-
ing into “a premature or forced womanhood … Just as the door of a city house leads
abruptly into the street where everything is open and glaring, so the threshold of [her
friends’] childhood opened suddenly into womanhood” (86). As Kamala meditates on
alternative possibilities for women, she looks up and sees a mother protecting her
child: “where was her own mother? How she would have liked to walk by her side, free
and happy, though going to a poor village hut!” (87). Reforms of child marriage,
Kamala intimates, depend upon a mother’s continued involvement and ability to
protect her daughter. The difference between the status quo and a utopian social
vision is figured through both a geographical and a temporal opposition: the contrast-
ing spaces of the town and nature, with their alternative social and familial values, and
the contrasting, noncontiguous periods of Kamala’s life. Behind both oppositions
presides her mother in the wilderness, a figure testifying to the intense desire for alter-
native sex-gender arrangements.

V
Unlike the documentation of oppression integral to polemical tracts, Kamala maps a
young wife’s lived social and psychological worlds in spaces that extend beyond domes-
tic interiors. Besides wild spaces, these include the banks of rivers, pathways and
hedges, wells, and local temples where women perform ritual offerings or participate
in festivities. Most of these spaces are behind the houses themselves, yet they create a
feeling of another world:
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 159
In front, the houses look insignificant and small; but behind each opens out into a court-
yard with out-houses and a small garden. The houses communicate with each other by
means of paths leading through hedges, and women while at work often keep up a running
conversation with their neighbours. The wells in the backyards are usually scenes of great
bustle, and around a well with exceptionally good water there gather groups of girls and
women who come from far and near with brass pots and other water vessels. (39)

Partially public, these sex-segregated spaces where men do not convene stand as exam-
ples of what Sarah Graham-Brown calls “separate women’s worlds not necessarily
confined to the four walls of the home, with their own culture—songs, stories, religious
practices” (518). They draw together women of all ages, and the novel accords them
particular significance as gathering points for Kamala’s age-peers, the other child-wives
of the village with whom she forms close attachments. Here they may come to work,
yet these venues also offer an important alternative to the disintegrative female inter-
relations within the joint family system.
One function of this communal space is socialization in gender and conjugal roles.
Six months after her marriage, much of the knowledge Kamala’s new friends impart to
her is based on their own experience within an extended family. They acquaint her with
physical abuse she can expect from her female in-laws and her husband, their withhold-
ing of food, and their tendency to regard her as an “evil influence” responsible for any
misfortune. Besides terrifying her, however, they also help her accommodate herself to
being the youngest, most subordinate female among her husband’s family. They do this
by offering “safe” forms of resistance to—and relief from—the tyranny exerted upon
her from within the household. For example, when Kamala’s sisters-in-law refuse to
allow her to accompany them to a festival, and further, take her pearl jewelry to adorn
themselves, Kamala’s friend Kashi admonishes her for allowing them to take her sole
source of wealth, her jewels, counsels her to be more cautious in the future, and takes
her to the festival herself. Later on, the (implied Western) reader learns the economic
significance these trinkets hold for young wives:
Blame not the poor Indian woman for her love of jewellery. … She knows well that they
are the only things that will not be taken away from her at her husband’s death or when
any trouble or calamity overtakes the family. She sees her future independence in them, or
at least has the consolation that she will have something to fall back upon in times of
distress. (114)

Besides educating Kamala in the value of her jewelry, Kashi temporarily gets her out
of her oppressive situation. Yet she also acknowledges her powerlessness before the
inherent injustice of Kamala’s exploitation: “The truth is, nobody loves you, and there
is something wrong somewhere, but come …” (47). Her actions undo the smaller
oppressions, but she admits defeat vis-à-vis the larger systemic one (“there is some-
thing wrong somewhere”). In doing so, she anticipates a situation occurring later
when, gathered by the river, Kamala’s close friends try to help another young wife,
Harni, cope with a mother-in-law who deprives her of food. Scheming to dress up as
witches who bring illness in order to scare and punish her mother-in-law for her
maltreatment, they choose cholera for their fantasized revenge, a disease Harni herself
is particularly susceptible to, due to her chronic undernourishment. Although they
160 E. Brinks
never carry out the prank, their joy in plotting freely against the seemingly limitless
power of her mother-in-law—she is reduced to fear and trembling in their skit—
constitutes an act of psychic resistance to her domination.
The advice and support these young women offer each other does not change
the status quo, but it does make its consequences much more bearable. Thus, when
Bhagirathi imagines running away from her unfaithful husband to be with another
man who genuinely loves her, Kamala pleads in favor of traditional norms of female
chastity (thereby reinforcing a sexual double-standard) because to reject them comes
at too high a price: loss of reputation, social ostracization, and perhaps eventual
suicide, should Bhagirathi flee with another man or have to return to her natal home.
In showing friendship among Hindu women, Satthianadhan refutes a popular stereo-
type of predominantly male traditionalists and reformers alike, who claimed that
women’s oppression of other women was too deeply engrained, and therefore conju-
gality could not be reformed.27 Instead, she delineates spaces where female bonding
already prevails. Women within the conjugal household may prove formidable obsta-
cles to reforms in women’s education and conjugality, but a tradition of powerful soli-
darity between women exists in these shared, extra-familial public spaces. Kamala, in
fact, depicts a larger community of women who are angered by the injustices faced by
Kamala, Harni, and Bhagirathi and who do what they can to support them (112).
That these public, gender-segregated places offer crucial insights into the text’s
reformist agenda is signaled by the narrator’s indication of her own spatial location,
the place where she claims to first have heard Kamala’s story and where she also writes
the novel:
It was thus I heard the story of Kamala narrated as I sat by the river banks under a clump
of trees. The rude rustic temple of Rohini was at my side. The same old Sivagunga was
there, and the same old river rolled on, unmindful of the joys and sorrows of the lives that
were lived by its side. Far in front were a shrine and a chuttram (monument) bearing the
name of Kamala. … Her unseen hands still relieve the poor and protect the unfortunate;
for she left her fortune for the sole benefit of widows and orphans. (156)

The space of writing occurs in relation to three specific landmarks: the Shivagunga
river, the temple of Rohini, and the shrine to Kamala. As the embodiment of the god
Shiva, the river is associated with male heterosexual desire, dangerous due to its poten-
tial to flood the village. Beside the river, positioned between it and the town, is the
temple of Rohini. Rohini is the name of a star who, in Hindu mythology, is the moon’s
favorite wife, and Rohini’s worship is important to the wedding ritual. On their
wedding eve, the bride and bridegroom search the night skies; finding her star is
believed to bestow happiness. As a goddess, Rohini stands for virtuous marital rela-
tions: she herself is a “good married woman” (97). Thus, when Kamala is distressed at
Ganesh’s behavior with another woman, she and her friends perform puja (worship) at
Rohini’s temple. Yet it is not the wife’s fidelity that is her sole concern, for she also
requires the worship of “clean men with good hearts” (98). Two stories in Kamala rein-
force her symbolic associations with male chastity. In one, Rohini saves the town from
“being washed away when floods came” (97) by setting up a barrier to keep back the
raging waters “unmindful of the joys and sorrows of the lives that were lived by its side”
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 161
(156). The barrier is a literalization of moral resistance, of a married couple’s virtue
working actively to keep a husband’s extramarital desires from dangerously “overrun-
ning” the social order. In another story, Rohini punishes a lascivious priest with death.
Kamala’s shrine, however, is not within or beside the temple of Rohini but “far in
front of it,” suggesting that it stands for something yet to be realized, something for or
from the future. Kamala’s story has revealed that however assiduous and good she may
be, the chaste wife might not be a bulwark capable of channeling her husband’s
wayward desires. Kamala’s shrine close beside this same river testifies to the social
significance of this spot as a gathering place for the young wives, where they often find
support in each other’s company. Protecting young widows and orphans, her memo-
rial is a necessary supplement to Rohini’s traditional one, providing comfort to those
for whom marriage does not afford either security or happiness (hence the need for the
agency of her “unseen hands”). Kamala comes out of her widow’s seclusion to help
fellow widows and orphans, demonstrating that India’s women, through their actions,
have a role to play in cultural reform. When the narrator constitutes herself as author
in relation to these three places (the Rohini temple, the Shivagunga river, and the
monument to Kamala), she uses a metaphorics of space to call attention to the larger
context for reform: one in which reform of Hindu husbands’ sexuality and obliteration
of a sexual double standard is a necessity; and one in which women act on behalf of
other women, whether that means cultivating gender solidarity across caste and
kinship lines or working to underscore and ameliorate discrimination against widows.

VI
The conservative rhetoric of the zenana as “happy home” proves to be an untruth for
most, though not all, wives in Kamala. Conditioning substitutes for love, self-surrender
derives more from coercion and dependence than self-fulfillment, and early integra-
tion does not guarantee security (her in-laws ultimately work to expel her from the
family). The vaunted chastity of Hindu wives, defined by conservatives as never think-
ing or looking at another man, is challenged by the novel as too naive, as Kamala and
Bhagirathi, each in a miserable marriage with a husband either disloyal or inferior in
character, experience strong sexual feelings for another man. The conservative view
would deny the naturalness of these women’s sexual desires, thereby negating the value
of Bhagirathi’s and Kamala’s choice to remain faithful nonetheless. For Satthianadhan,
women must know their own desires in order to be agents capable of controlling them;
a chastity based on strict seclusion and control means little, whereas chastity (male or
female) based on a “freely” chosen regulation of acknowledged desires signals a strong,
autonomous virtue as well as the consensual nature of the union. To create that
consensuality, Kamala imagines the necessity of a reformed masculinity. Whereas
conservatives emphasized patriarchal roles for men, the narrative suggests that the
strengths of men can be identified through their “feminine” qualities. Kamala’s father
becomes a surrogate mother; her husband Ganesh nurses her when she falls ill; and her
friend Ramchander is described as both “soft” and “firm” (65, 66). The wife wants a
mother in her father, husband, and friend.
162 E. Brinks
The novel, however, avoids weighing in directly on the issue of colonialist interven-
tion in conjugal matters. Presumably, this would have further limited the possibilities
for advancing women’s reform by tying it too closely to the “nationalist question” at a
time when nationalism, with its rejection of any colonial intervention into conjugal
matters, had broad popular support. Earlier, the slowness of Hindu reform movements
had made government intervention an option for indigenous female reformers, yet it
was becoming increasingly difficult to advocate women’s reform without seeming to
embrace colonialism and reject nationalism simultaneously. This may well be the
reason the colonial context all but disappears in the novel, aside from references to
Ganesh’s English education (something his father is opposed to) and his desire to
educate his wife, supposedly the result of that education. One can speculate that
Satthianadhan would likely favor legislative reform, since she focuses on the effects
stemming from customary exogamy and child-marriage and exposes the difficulty of
imagining “reform from within” the home, yet Kamala does not directly advocate any
particular political solution.
What it does do is keep the conversation about child marriage going and find over-
lapping ground between liberal Hindu reformers, Indian feminists, and zenana
missionaries. Female education had long been a colonial and an indigenous reformist
battlefield, as both shared a vision of an educated Indian womanhood with trans-
formed social roles through the alteration of family structures and sexual patterns,
eventually including the idea of companionate marriage. The uneducated child wife
was, like the burning widow before her, a signifier of a devoted, chaste femininity
within both colonial and Hindu fantasies, and these groups also saw her—in differing
degrees—as an oppressed victim, one needing “rescue.”28 Satthianadhan retains this
potent signifier: Kamala remains devoted to her husband despite the familial and spou-
sal abuse she suffers, and this substantiates the urgency of the need for reform. One
significant difference, however, between zenana missionary accounts of the zenana and
Kamala is that the novel does not foreground the low status of elite Hindu women in
order to demonstrate the moral inferiority of Hindus; indeed, Kamala, Ramchander,
Narayan, Lakhshmi, and many others exemplify courage and moral worth. This is not
to imply that Kamala’s criticisms of child marriage do not stem from Satthianadhan’s
Christian roots. Yet she also had a long tradition of indigenous criticism of conjugal
relations on which to draw, starting with Ram Mohun Roy and internal reform move-
ments.29 Her position, in fact, is compatible with Hindu reformers who insured
women’s education would not come at the cost of deculturation or significantly jeop-
ardize male authority.
Instead of one-upmanship along religious, cultural, or national lines, then,
Satthianadhan carefully avoids designating a single source of oppression. She figura-
tively cross-dresses as a Hindu child-wife in writing the novel, guaranteeing an
“authenticity” as she imaginatively creates the spaces of Kamala’s psychic and social life
in great detail, something substantiated by the reviews from all quarters. Kamala
encourages readers to see “already” organized spaces as susceptible to symbolic recon-
figuration, as always in the process of being inscribed and reinscribed with meaning,
based on the actions and practices that occur there.30 If, as Inderpal Grewal argues,
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 163
“home and harem [was a] useful spatial [trope] by which female subjects were
constructed in both England and India within a colonial context that linked patriarchal
practices” (56), Satthianadhan attempts to undo such constructions, reconfigure such
tropes, and thereby limit patriarchal control.

Notes
[1] By purdah, I mean the idea and/or institution of seclusion. For examples of various stereotyp-
1.

ical colonialist readings of the zenana as justification, see Nair (“Uncovering the Zenana”);
Mills (711–712); Singh (114–31); Kent (128).
[2] Priscilla Chapman in Hindoo Female Education (1839; qtd. in Singh 106). Mary Frances
2.

Billington wrote in 1885 that the women’s home was “architecturally and artistically its mean-
est part” (qtd. in Grewal 51).
[3] According to Kent, “the zenana missions were deeply invested in [a] vision of mature,
3.

educated Indian womanhood” (138).

[4] One confusion results from these writers’ tendency to use the term zenana to signify any prac-
4.

tices of female gender segregation. In actuality, the zenana was geographically limited to
north, northwestern, and eastern India and restricted to certain classes and castes (Rajan 15–
39; and Papanek 42–43). For critical work that unsettles facile assumptions of separate spheres
for middle-class men and women in Romantic and early Victorian England, see Davidoff and
Hall; Graham-Brown (515); and Mills (699).
[5] This review and the following ones are included in Satthianadhan’s Miscellaneous Writings.
5.

Another publication with a primarily Hindu audience, The Hindu, praises the novel’s reform-
ist impulses while remaining respectful of Hindu life: “The authoress, though a Christian,
shows a singularly accurate knowledge of the social and domestic customs of the Hindus, and
is free from any endeavour to present the moral and spiritual effect of the Hindu religion in an
unfavourable light….We cannot but consider [the premature death of the author] as a blow
to the progress of Indian women” (125).
[6] For the “centrality” of marginal social groups within India’s reform movement, see
6.

Viswanathan.
[7] For an excellent treatment of the Rakhmabai case and its relation to the 1891 Age of Consent
7.

Act, see Anagol-McGinn.

[8] As Tanika Sarkar notes, marital consent is tied to age (in other words, to biology, the age of
8.

sexual maturity), instead of to compatibility or choice (1875).

[9] See Sumit Sarkar (157–59).
9.

[10] Rakhmabai’s reply to her husband in 1887 published in The Bombay Gazette (qtd. in Anagol-
10.

McGinn 102).
[11] From “Female Education” in Miscellaneous Writings (16–21). The date of the article’s publica-
11.

tion is not known.

[12] See Natarajan (82–83); C.H. Heimsath (491–504); and Nair (Women and Law 72–79).
12.

[13] See Chakravarti (76) and Sarkar (162).

13.

[14] For an exposition of the conservative position, see T. Sarkar (1869–78).

14.

[15] I refer to the accounts of Rakhmabai, Yashodabai Joshi, Champubai Madhavrao Nadkarni,
15.

Dhakbai Trimbakram Desai, Ahalyabai Morevale, and Krishnabai and Lanibai Dhurandar
(see Anagol-McGinn 104).
[16] Rakhmabai, “Infant Marriage” (Anagol-McGinn 107).
16.

[17] One woman of the period testified in Arya Bhagini that child wives and their husbands were
17.

“too young to know the meaning of love”; Kashibai Kanitkar, a member of the reform group
Arya Mahila Samaj, believed almost all marriages were unhappy due to the practice of child
marriage (qtd. in Anagol-McGinn 110, 112–13).
[18] Chakravarti (214).
18.
164 E. Brinks
[19] Perhaps the most famous example occurs in Ramabai Ranade’s memoirs, where she outlines
19.

the power struggles between women in a multi-generational family.

[20] See Anagol-McGinn (108). A similar situation is recounted in works such as Ramabai
20.

Ranade’s autobiography and S.M. Nikambe’s Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste
Hindu Young Wife (1895).
[21] Anagol-McGinn notes how Indian women (including Rakhmabai and Pandita Ramabai) who
21.

desired reform turned to British feminists as they lost faith in the government’s and in Indian
male reformers’ commitment to real reform (109–110).
[22] See Anagol-McGinn (110).
22.

[23] The exclusionary, racist implications of this ideology of high-caste Hindus as descendents of
23.

Aryans (Indo-Europeans) are noted by Chakravarti (28–29, 40–41). Satthianadhan follows

this racialist mode of thinking by mentioning Kamala’s fairness many times, where it becomes
an index of her beauty and moral superiority.
[24] Chakravarti (50–61).
24.

[25] Chakravarti (79).

25.

[26] See Chandani Lokugé’s notes to Satthianadhan’s Kamala (159).

26.

[27] Anagol-McGinn (106). Reformers who were women, however, were less convinced that these
27.

women’s orthodoxy would prove inveterate. Instead, they saw them as the products of centu-
ries of conditioning that education alone could undo.
[28] In relation to the “burning widow,” Ania Loomba discusses the conjunction of chaste femi-
28.

ninity and oppressed victim in “Dead Women Tell No Tales” (242).

[29] One cannot assume a stable set of views held by Indian Christians, as there was no unified or
29.

single position. E.M. Jackson has described the Satthianadhan family as oscillating from
generation to generation between Westernization and Indianization (320, 322).
[30] See Moore (74, 81).
30.

Works Cited
Anagol-McGinn, Padma. “The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives and
Participation in the Child-Marriage Controversy in India.” South Asia Research 12.2 (1992):
100–118.
Chakravarti, Uma. “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?” Recasting Women: Essays in Indian
Colonial History. Ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989.
27–87.
Davidoff, Lenore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class,
1780–1850. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987.
Graham-Brown, Sarah. “The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined.” Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader. Ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003. 502–19.
Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel. Durham:
Duke UP, 1996.
Heimsath, C.H. “The Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill, 1891.” Journal of
Asian Studies 21.4 (1962): 491–504.
Jackson, E.M. “Glimpses of a Prominent Indian Christian Family of Tirunelveli and Madras, 1863–
1906: Perspectives on Caste, Culture, and Conversion.” Christians and Missionaries in India:
Cross-Cultural Communication since 1500. Ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg. Grand Rapids:
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003. 315–35.
Kent, Eliza F. Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. New
York: Oxford UP, 2004.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1998.
———. “Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity, Subaltern Agency and
Tradition in Colonial and Postcolonial Writings on Widow Immolation in India.” Feminist
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 165
Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003.
241–62.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity P, 1994.
Mills, Sara. “Gender and Colonial Space.” Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Ed. Reina Lewis
and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003. 692–719.
Moore, H.L. Space, Text and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Nair, Janaki. “Uncovering the Zenana: Visions of Indian Womanhood in Englishwomen’s Writings,
1813–1940.” Journal of Women’s History 2.1 (1990): 8–34.
———. Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996.
Natarajan, S. A Century of Social Reform in India. London: Asia Publishing House, 1959.
Papanek, Hannah. “Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter.” Separate Worlds. Ed. Hannah
Papanek and Gail Minnault. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1982. 3–53.
Rajan, R. Sunder. “The Subject of Sati.” Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Post-
Colonialism. Ed. R. Sunder Rajan. London: Routledge, 1993. 15–39.
Ranade, Ramabai. Himself, An Autobiography of a Hindu Lady. Trans. Katherine Van Akin Gates.
New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1938.
Sarkar, Sumit. “The Women’s Question in Nineteenth Century Bengal.” Working paper for Women
and Culture. Ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. Mumbai: SNDT Women’s University,
1985. 157–72.
Sarkar, Tanika. “Rhetoric Against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a
Child-Wife.” Economic and Political Weekly 28(24 September 1993): 1869–78.
Satthianadhan, Krupabai. Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Child-Wife. Ed. Chandani Lokugé. New
Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998.
———. Miscellaneous Writings of Krupabai Satthianadhan. Madras: Srinivasa, Varadachari & Co.,
1896.
Singh, Maina Chawla. Gender, Religion, and “Heathen Lands”: American Missionary Women in South
Asia (1860s–1940s). New York: Garland, 2000.
Viswanathan, Gauri. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1998.