Thread by @IndiaInkHistory

In India, widows find it very difficult to remarry. But at one point, widow remarriage was actually quite common among Hindus across the country - until 1856, when the British "legalised" it.

Confused? We'll try and make sense of this tangled tale for you in 12 tweets. Thread👇

1. The legal system established by the British in India was based on a promise that in matters such as marriage, inheritance, succession and adoption, Indians would be governed according to their own laws.

2. These laws were based on either religious laws derived from texts or the unwritten customs of castes. Over time, the British also gave themselves the right to create new laws.

3. In 1856, a Brahmin-led campaign to legalise widow remarriage resulted in the passing of the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act. This new law conflicted with existing customary law, which had always allowed lower caste widows to remarry.

4. The Remarriage Act required widows to give up any wealth inherited from their first husband before remarrying. For upper caste widows who had never been allowed to remarry before, this was a limited issue. For lower caste widows, it was a new restriction on long-held rights.

5. Although this law was supposed to promote social justice, its wording was very vague. Courts described it as “misleading” and “ambiguous”. There was constant disagreement between judges on the question of whether it applied to lower castes.

6. The Allahabad High Court gave importance to customary law. It ruled that if a particular caste permitted widow remarriage before the Act, then the Act did not apply to them and therefore it could not be used to take away a widow’s inheritance when she remarried.

7. The Calcutta High Court decided on the opposite conclusion. Instead of considering the customs of the caste in question, it relied on a strict reading of Hindu textual law, ruling that all Hindu widows had to be deprived of their inheritance upon remarriage.

8. The Bombay High Court also made it impossible for a widow to remarry while retaining her inheritance from a previous marriage. It argued that the Remarriage Act applied to all widows irrespective of custom, because it captured the “true principles of Hindu law”.

9. The Madras High Court sided with the Bombay precedent, ruling that custom could not override statutory law. Thus, all the other high courts apart from Allahabad prevented widows from retaining their inheritance upon remarriage.

10. This tussle over widow remarriage continued for an entire century. During this period, the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 had little positive impact on the lives of widows.

11. Thus on the whole, customary law was cast aside and replaced with Brahmanical values that insisted that the widow had to suffer some penalty if she chose to do anything other than live a miserable, prayerful life.

12. This was a part of the unintended, but inevitable process of Brahminisation of low castes and Hinduisation of tribals enforced by the British administration of Hindu textual law.

Source text: Law, custom, and statutory social reform: the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856
Author: Lucy Carroll

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