Thread by @Shirogane_Cali

How the British sought to improve the lives of Indian women under the British East India Company rule and then the British Raj. A thread:

British India is a broad term referring to the British colonial presence in India starting with trading posts established in the 17th...

...century by the British East India Company, which eventually led to increasing territorial control and influence by the Company, and then eventually the British Raj following the 1857 Indian Mutiny which saw all British East India Company posessions transferred to the Crown.

I will mainly cover two issues which the British authorities in India faced with regards to violence towards girls and women. The first is widow burning or "sati", which involved the burning of a woman in the event of her husband's death. In other words, if a married man...

...died his wife would potentially be killed with him. This was practiced by the Hindus and the Mughals (who were Muslim) and had ruled India prior to the British had outlawed the practice. The name originates in the Hindu deity "Sati", a wife of Shiva, who self-immolated.

This practice was primarily found in Bengal and the British wrote of its frequency. Between the years 1815 and 1826, approximately 7154 widow burnings occurred. Other statistics for other areas of India state 287 over 8 years in the Madras State, 248 over 8 years in the Bombay...

...State. So it seems to have been primarily a Bengali practice but was still practiced across India.

In 1829, after pushes made by activists, the Governor-General Lord William Bentinck passed the Bengal Sati Regulation, outlawing the practice.

The same year, in response to the Hindu practice of child marriage, the British

In 1889, a 10 year old girl named Phulmoni Dasi married 30 year Hari Mohan Maiti. In consumating the marriage, Phulmoni was brutally raped and subsequently died of her injuries. This caused Indian reformers to push the colonial authorities to raise the Indian age of consent...

...from ten to twelve which was made possible by the passing of the 1891 Age of Consent Act. The change from ten to twelve does not seem like a great change but the bill met considerable opposition from Hindu nationalists who argued the bill violated "garbhadhan", or the rite...

...in which a girl must have intercourse with her husband within the first 16 days of marriage.

Another newspaper by the name of Bangabashi also wrote of its opposition to the Age of Consent Act, citing a moral decline in India at the hands of British authorities:

"The Englishman now stands before us in his grim and hideous nakedness. How dreadful the attitude: ... Terror of the Universe, Englishmen: do you gnash your teeth, frown with your red eyes, laugh and yell... keeping time to the clang of bayonets ... and we ... the twenty...

...crores of Indians shall lose our fear and open
our forty crores of eyes."

As well as stating that the "Hindu family is ruined".

As debate over the proposed bill raged on, a number of female doctors working in India provided their own accounts of patients they had treated...

...who had been victims of child marriage. The accounts are incredibly graphic, but show the reality of what was going on:

As previously stated, the 1891 Age of Consent Act was passed regardless of the backlash from Indian cultural nationalists. This was largely thanks to the activists both British and Indian who had pushed for action against child marriage to be taken.

The change from 10 to 12...

...does not seem that significant to us but it really was an important law that would eventually be built upon in 1929 with the passing of the Child Marriage Restraint Act - which raised the age of consent in British India to 14 for girls, and 18 for boys. Though it could be...

...argued that the 1929 Act had little impact and enforcement compared to the 1891 Act as the British were hesitant to invoke the anger of the local populace.

Two decades prior to the 1891 Act was another important law for British India - the 1870 Female Infanticide Prevention Act. It was initially passed to target the Northern regions of India in which infanticide was believed to have been committed the most frequently, however the...

...law was applied to the entirety of the country.

I initially said I would cover two topics but I felt the mentioning of the Infanticide Prevention Act was worth putting in as a little extra to show that the British authorities of colonial India were very much involved in...

...attempting to curb the cruel practices which were widespread on the subcontinent at the time. It isn't a topic I know very much about but these are the sources I used if you want to do more reading:

"A Prehistory of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal"

"Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood
in Late Colonial India"

"India's Cries to British Humanity"

and "Mother India" by Katherine Mayo, which Mahatma Gandhi unsurprisingly said was libellous against Indians.

Note: Not sure what happened here, can't even remember that I was going to say. Might have been an edit I made before I put my computer on sleep and forgot about once I came back to the thread.