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Stolen Skin and Children Thrown: Governing sex and abortion in early modern South Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2021

DIVYA CHERIAN Open the ORCID record for DIVYA CHERIAN [Opens in a new window]
DIVYA CHERIAN*
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Abstract

What did women's bodies in pre-colonial South Asia have to do with the birth of capitalism? South Asia's pre-colonial integration into a globally emerging, early modern capitalist order reached deep into the hinterland to transform both state and society in eighteenth-century Marwar. Driving the change was an emergent elite, consisting largely of merchants, that channelled its energies towards reshaping caste. Merchants, in alliance with Brahmans, used their influence upon the state to adjudicate the boundary between the ‘illicit’ and the ‘licit,’ generating in the process a typology and an archive of deviant sex. In the legal framework that generated this archive, women were configured as passive recipients of sexual acts, lacking sexual personhood in law. Even as they escaped legal culpability for ‘illicit’ sex, women experienced, through this body of judgments, a strengthening of male proprietary controls over their bodies. Alongside, the criminalization of abortion served as a means of sexual disciplining. These findings suggest that post-Mughal, pre-colonial state formation in South Asia intersected with global economic transformations to generate new sex-caste orders and archival bodies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 5 , September 2021 , pp. 1461 - 1509
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the three anonymous readers and the editors of Modern Asian Studies as well as to Janaki Bakhle, Nicholas Dirks, Molly Greene, Sumit Guha, Gyan Prakash, and Wendy Warren for their excellent feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Audiences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's South Asia Center and at the University Seminar on South Asia at Columbia University asked helpful questions that have enriched this article. Finally, thanks are due to the American Institute of Indian Studies for supporting the archival research on which this article is based.

References

1 See, for example, Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990)Google Scholar; Roper, Lyndal, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E., Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Performing Practice (Routledge: New York, 2000)Google Scholar.

2 For later, colonial-era efforts to generate a typology of women's deviant sexuality, see Mitra, Durba, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 62–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 The attribution of passivity is not just a characteristic but an expectation of all those who belonged in a subordinated position in dyadic relations, such as husband-wife. Persianate discourse also reflected this framework (Chatterjee, Indrani, ‘Alienation, Intimacy, and Gender: Problems in the History of Love in South Asia’, in Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, (ed.) Vanita, Ruth (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 61–76Google Scholar; and Schofield, Katherine B., ‘The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles, c. 1556–1748’, Gender and History 24, 1 (2012), pp. 150–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar). These studies are limited to literary sources conveying ethical prescriptions. My findings here show that in parts of eighteenth-century India, such prescriptions extended beyond ethical ideals into state-enforced law and practice.

4 The contextual nature of personhood in law can also be observed in other parts of the world. For instance, until the late nineteenth century, under the doctrine of coverture, married women in England were not persons in civil disputes as they were in criminal cases. Stretton, Tim and Kesserling, Krista J., Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, Introduction, pp. 3–23. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article who drew this point to my attention.

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6 Caste too could serve to deny full personhood or exalt it in certain contexts. So it was that artisanal castes were considered ‘three-quarter’ persons (pūṇ) and highly respected male aristocrats could be ‘one-and-a-quarter’ (‘sawāī’) persons, even as men from both these categories could be full persons when it came to the law. On ‘three-quarter’ persons, see Sahai, Nandita P., ‘Artisans, the State, and the Politics of Wajabi in Eighteenth-Century Jodhpur’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 42, 1 (2005), p. 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The lexicographer Sitaram Lalas, however, suggests that when describing castes, ‘pūṇ’ derived from ‘pāvan’ or ‘wind’, but does not explain what connection this has with the castes or their status (Sitaram Lalas, Rājasthānī-Hindī Saṅkśipt Śabdakoś, Vol. II (Jodhpur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, n.d.), pp. 47, 93).

7 Sturman, Government of Social Life, pp. 11–14.

8 Stoler, Ann, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 2Google Scholar, 14, 60, 97, 252; Arondekar, Anjali, On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

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12 Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization’, p. 92.

13 Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 33–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Jodhpur Sanad Parwana Bahi (henceforth, JSPB) 17, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 43a. The JSPB are housed in the Rajasthan State Archives (RSA), Bikaner, Rajasthan. In the notes below, references to these records list the bahi or register number (as assigned by the RSA and written on each bahi), the Vikram Samvat (‘VS’) year and the year in ce of its inscription, and the folio number (‘f’) and side (‘a’ or ‘b’) within the bahi on which the information being cited is written. When an issuing office is listed with an order, I have identified the officer occupying it by consulting published lists of Rathor office bearers, for example, in R. K. Saksena, The Apparatus of the Rathors (A Study of Marwar): Assignment of Jagirs, Award of Offices, Titles and Honours to the Rathor Nobility (1764 to 1858 V.S.), Vol. 1 (Jodhpur: Maharaja Mansingh Pustak Prakash Research Centre, 2006), pp. xlviii–liii; and in Hukamsimh Bhati, Mārvāḍ ke ohdedāroṁ kā itihās meṁ yogdān [Historical Contributions of the Officers of Marwar] (Jodhpur: Maharaja Mansingh Pustak Prakash Shodh Kendra, 2013).

15 I sometimes use the term ‘province’ to translate ‘pargana’. Parganas were the primary administrative units into which the Rathors divided their kingdom.

16 See Alam, Muzaffar, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1986])CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Kumkum, ‘Scribal Elites in Sultanate and Mughal Period Bengal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, 4 (2010), pp. 445–472CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmins, Kāyasthas, and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, 4 (2010), pp. 563–595CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rao, V. Narayana and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ‘Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern India’, Modern Asian Studies 43, 1 (2009), pp. 175–210CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Peabody, Norbert, Hindu Kingship and Polity in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

18 Sharma, G. D., Rajput Polity: A Study of Politics and Administration of the State of Marwar, 1638–1749 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977)Google Scholar.

19 On the changing form of the Rathor polity, see Ziegler, Norman P., ‘Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal Period’, in The Mughal State, 1526–1707, (eds) Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 169–210Google Scholar.

20 Parihar, G. R., Marwar and the Marathas (1724–1843 AD) (Jodhpur: Hindi Sahitya Mandir, 1968)Google Scholar. On the basis of amounts listed in Parihar's study, I calculated that the total amount that Vijai Singh paid to the Maratha general, Mahadji Sindhia, came to roughly Rs 2.5 million (pp. 89, 96, 97, 100, 103, 104, 130).

21 Ibid., p. 103.

22 Ibid., p. 108.

23 ‘Ohda’ means ‘office’. The Rathor Ohda Bahis are today in the Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. I have consulted it through scholarly transcriptions into modern Hindi in published form. The lists pertaining to Vijai Singh's reign are in Ohdā Bahi No. 1.

24 Saxena, R. K., The Apparatus of the Rathors (Jodhpur: Maharaja Man Singh Pustak Prakash Research Centre, 2006), Part 1, pp. xlviii–liiiGoogle Scholar; Bhati, Mārvāḍ ke ohdedāroṁ; Jitendrasimh Bhati, Rājasthān kī praśāsanik vyavasthā [The Administrative Organization of Rajasthan] (Jodhpur: Rajasthani Granthagar, 2011), pp. 66–67, 77–78; and Richard D. Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, The Meṛtīyo Rāṭhoṛs of Meṛto, Rājasthān: Select Translations Bearing on the History of a Rājpūt Family, 1462–1660, Vol. 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 449.

25 Claude Markovits suggests that Marwari merchants’ pre-eminence as capitalists starting in the eighteenth century can be attributed to the authority they enjoyed within the state (Claude Markovits, ‘Merchant Circulation in South Asia (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries): The Rise of Pan-Indian Merchant Networks’, in Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950, (eds) Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 132–134).

26 For instances of hereditary tax-free grants to Brahmans and Charans, see JSPB 5, VS 1823/1766 CE, f 71a and 274a; JSPB 14, VS 1831/1774 CE, f 98b; JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 309b; JSPB 24, VS 1837/1780 CE, f 23a, 28b, 29a, 77b and 77b–78a; JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, 314a; JSPB 45, VS 1850/1793 CE, f 114a, 376b–377a and 556a–b; and JSPB 71, VS 1876/1819 CE, f 3a.

27 V. S. Bhatnagar, ‘Attempts at Revivalism or Reassertion of Vedic and “Shastriya” Traditions through Open Debate in the 18th Century’, in Religious Movements in Rajasthan: Ideas and Antiquities, (ed.) S. N. Dube (Jaipur: Centre for Rajasthan Studies, 1996); and Monika Horstmann, Visions of Kingship in the Twilight of Mughal Rule, 13th Gonda Lecture (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2006).

28 On the role of Brahmans in Rathor administration, see Bhati, Rājasthān kī praśāsanik vyavasthā, pp. 100–103.

29 O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Contested Conjunctures: Brahman Communities and “Early Modernity” in India’, American Historical Review 118, 3 (2013), pp. 765–787CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosalind O'Hanlon, ‘Disciplining the Brahman Household: The Moral Mission of Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Maratha State’, in Looking Within, Looking Without: Exploring Households in the Subcontinent through Time. Essays in Memory of Nandita Prasad Sahai, (ed.) Kumkum Chatterjee (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015), pp. 367–388.

30 Faisal Chaudhry, ‘Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights, and Law across the Early Modern/Modern Divide. Introduction’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, 5–6 (2018), p. 780.

31 For Brahman participation in global trade, albeit from the Konkan coast, see O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Letters Home: Banaras Pandits and the Maratha Regions in Early Modern India’, Modern Asian Studies 44, 2 (2010), p. 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Trivellato, Francesca, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 177–193Google Scholar.

32 Sheikh, Samira, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 51–52Google Scholar, 86, 141–147; Dale, Stephen F., Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 60, 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subrahmanyam, Sanjay and Bayly, C. A., ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 25, 4 (1988), pp. 414–415CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Timberg, Thomas A., The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), p. 42Google Scholar.

33 Habib, Irfan, ‘The System of Bills of Exchange (Hundis) in the Mughal Empire’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 33 (1971), pp. 290–303Google Scholar; Richards, J. F., ‘Mughal State Finance and the Pre-Modern World Economy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, 2 (1981), p. 290CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Subrahmanyam and Bayly, ‘Portfolio Capitalists’, p. 414. For the widespread influence of Vaishnav bhakti (loosely, devotion), particularly that of the Brahman-led Vallabhite sect, on the merchants of western India, see Saha, Shandip, ‘The Movement of Bhakti along a North-West Axis: Tracing the History of the Puṣṭīmarg between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, 3 (2007), p. 304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shandip Saha, ‘Creating a Community of Grace: A History of the Puṣṭi Mārga in Northern and Western India (1493–1905)’, PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 2004, pp. 115–118.

35 Mumhta Nainsi, Muṁhtā naiṇsī rī likhī mārvāṛ rā parganāṁ rī vigat, Vols 1–3, (ed.) Narayansimh Bhati (Jodhpur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, 1968); and Mumhta Nainsi, Muṁhtā naiṇsī rī khyāt, Vols 1–4, (ed.) Badriprasad Sakariya (Jodhpur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, 1984–2006). The most in-depth studies of these two texts can be found in Norman P. Ziegler, ‘Action, Power, and Service in Rajasthani Culture’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1973; and Richard D. Saran, ‘Conquest and Colonization: Rajputs and Vasis in Middle Period Marvar’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1978.

36 Sharma, Rajput Polity.

37 Ziegler, ‘Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties’.

38 Joshi, Varsha, Polygamy and Purdah: Women and Society among Rajputs (Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications, 1995), pp. 120–122Google Scholar; Sreenivasan, Ramya, ‘Honoring the Family: Narratives and Politics of Kinship in Pre-colonial Rajasthan’, in Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, (ed.) Chatterjee, Indrani (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 46–72Google Scholar; and Sreenivasan, R., ‘Drudges, Dancing Girls, Concubines: Female Slaves in Rajput Polity, 1500–1850’, in Slavery and South Asian History, (eds) Chatterjee, Indrani and Eaton, Richard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 144, 154Google Scholar.

39 Brajesh Kumar Singh (ed.), Mahārājā śri vijai singhjī rī khyāt [The Chronicle of Maharaja Vijai Singh] (Jodhpur: Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute, 1997), pp. 152–158.

40 Schofield, ‘The Courtesan Tale’.

41 The Rathor administration included news reporters—uvākā naves (a vernacularization of the Persian ‘waqi'a navis’ or ‘news writer’)—who provided local news directly to the capital, paralleling the information flows through regular bureaucratic channels.

42 Chatterjee, Nandini, Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sanads, the other kind of document gestured to in the name given to these records, were confirmatory orders.

43 Despite Kayasth Pancholis appearing as occasional holders of high office in the Rathor administration, I have not engaged with them in this article because they rarely showed up as petitioners or defendants in the records I studied. This may have been because Kayasths were not numerous in Marwar and it appears that Kayasth authority in Marwar administration was on the wane in the eighteenth century (Saxena, Apparatus of the Rathors, Part 1, p. xxxv).

44 Bhati, Rājasthān kī praśasanik vyavasthā, p. 100.

45 Byav ri Bahi 1, VS 1776/1719 CE, f 214, cited in ibid., p. 99.

46 Bhati, Rājasthān kī praśasanik vyavasthā, pp. 101–102.

47 Chatterjee, Nandini, ‘Mahzar-namas in the Mughal and British Empires: The Uses of an Indo-Islamic Legal Form’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, 2 (2016), pp. 379–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law, pp. 158–162, 186; Guha, Sumit, History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019), pp. 91–93Google Scholar, 100; Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’, pp. 862–870.

48 Even in courtly and aristocratic contexts, in which relationships with courtesans and marriages outside of accepted kinship circles were common and tolerated, such marriages were ritually marked off as distinct (Joshi, Polygamy and Purdah, p. 120; Schofield, ‘Courtesan Tale’; Sreenivasan, ‘Honoring the Family’; and Sreenivasan, ‘Drudges’).

49 Sahai (‘Crossing the Golden Gate? Sunars, Social Mobility, and Disciplining the Household in Early Modern Rajasthan’, in Looking Within, Looking Without, p. 402) has translated ‘ghar maiṁ ghālnā’ as another term for remarriage. The usage of this term in the JSPB records, however, suggests that ghar maiṁ ghālnā arrangements were more casual than remarriage, in that they did not involve a wedding ceremony nor the participation of the woman's guardians. The term ‘ghar maiṁ ghālnā’ is even used in these documents to label households set up with married women and by incestuous couples, that is, couples who would certainly not have been allowed to marry. In the case of Marwar then it seems that ‘ghar maiṁ ghālnā’ was distinct from remarriage (nātā).

50 JSPB 5, VS 1823/1766 CE, f 87b. This record does not name an issuing authority.

51 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 75a.

52 JSPB 24, VS 1837/1780 CE, f 102a.

53 JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 155b. This order does not mention who issued it.

54 JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 318a.

55 This use of the term ‘adālat’ is rare in the Bahis, nor is it described in scholarly studies of Rathor administration in the eighteenth century.

56 Of the 31 cases of non-marital cohabitation that I found, 26 involved men and women of peasant, artisanal, or service castes. The tolerance towards ghar maiṁ ghālnā relationships as long as they conformed to rules governing marital ties is also upheld in all these cases involving peasants, artisans, and service castes: JSPB 6, VS 1824/1767 CE, f 110a; JSPB 8, VS 1825/1768 CE, f 118b; JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 203b; JSPB 24, VS 1837/1780, f 5b, f 12a, f 69a–b, and f 106b; JSPB 26, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 71a; JSPB 28, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 287a–b; JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, 210a; JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, 155b; JSPB 33, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 73b; JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 34a; JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 113a–b, f 212b–213a, f 264a–b, f 290a, f 318a; JSPB 38, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 63b and f 124a; JSPB 40, VS 1846/1789 CE, f 226b–227a, f 310a, and f 311a–b; JSPB 47, VS 1852/1795 CE, f 343a–b; and JSPB 57, VS 1860/1803 CE, f 128a.

57 Sen, Samita, ‘Offences Against Marriage: Negotiating Custom in Colonial Bengal’, in A Question of Silence? Sexual Economies of Modern India, (eds) John, Mary and Nair, Janaki (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 84–85Google Scholar.

58 Sahai, ‘Artisans, the State’.

59 It is possible in the Bahis to glean the procedures through which petitions and disputes were resolved. This spanned a range. Disputes over property could entail proof in the form of written documents or the word of trusted local informants. If a quarrel was within a caste, then the crown would order the pargana authorities to turn it over to the concerned caste's local council (nyāt). Crime such as theft, murder, and the cases of illicit sex discussed here could also involve an inquiry among local notables and the questioning of those who claimed to be witnesses. Other crimes, such as accusations of witchcraft, could entail verification through ordeals (dhij). A large number of orders simply ask local officers to do what is ‘uvājabī’ (loosely, ‘correct’). (See Sahai, ‘Artisans, the State’.) References such as the ones above also show that local or supra-local caste councils, the office of the governor of the pargana, and the city magistrate were local nodes of authority with overlapping jurisdictions, particularly in disputes over property and custom. The crown in Jodhpur stood at a level above these local authorities and had the power to overturn their rulings. There was then a dynamic tension between local society and centralizing authority in Jodhpur. Merchant-bureaucrats, however, served as links between central authority and provincial administration, with some of them being transferred to different parganas and moving up the ranks over time.

60 Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law; Guha, History and Collective Memory in South Asia; Hasan, ‘Property and Social Relations’.

61 Sahai, Nandita P., ‘The “Other” Culture: Craft Societies and Widow Remarriage in Early Modern India’, Journal of Women's History 19, 2 (2007), p. 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sahai has cautioned that artisanal and peasant women's bodies and sexual relations were subject to a different order of policing, one that enforced remarriage upon them and dictated who their marital partners could be.

62 As already recognized for remarriage by Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, ‘Caste, Widow Remarriage and the Reform of Popular Culture in Colonial Bengal’, in From the Seams of History: Essays on Indian Women, (ed.) Ray, Bharati (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 8–36Google Scholar; and Sahai, ‘The “Other” Culture’. As a result, if a caste group sought upward mobility, it did so by suppressing widow remarriage by its members, as happened with the goldsmiths (sunars) of eighteenth-century Marwar (Sahai, ‘Crossing the Golden Gate?’, pp. 389–408).

63 Here I concur with Gayle Rubin's ideas about kinship and the sexual economies accompanying it as being significant for understanding the oppression of women. (Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’).

64 This perhaps is why the spread of hypergamy, or marrying one's daughter into a higher-ranked caste, was accompanied by an expansion of dowry in place of bridewealth.

65 For the Peshwa-ruled western Deccan, see Chakravarti, Uma, ‘Wifehood, Widowhood and Adultery: Female Sexuality, Surveillance and the State in 18th Century Maharashtra’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 29, 1–2 (1995), pp. 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and O'Hanlon, ‘Disciplining the Brahman Household’, pp. 381–382; and for early colonial Bengal, see Singha, Radhika, A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 112–113, 115Google Scholar.

66 JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 203b; JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 75a; JSPB 24, VS 1837/1780 CE, f 12a; JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 212b–213a.

67 JSPB 5, VS 1823/1766 CE, f 87b; JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 131b–132a; JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 160a; JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 155b; JSPB 33, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 73b; JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 290a.

68 Ibid.

69 I use the term ‘Untouchable’ following usage in Rathor records which use the word ‘achhep’ (literally, ‘untouchable’) to name a category of caste groups that explicitly included leatherworkers. See Divya Cherian, ‘Ordering Subjects: Merchants, the State, and Krishna Devotion in Eighteenth-Century Marwar’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2015, pp. 145–155.

70 JSPB 40, VS 1846/1789 CE, f 226b–227a.

71 Ibid.

72 JSPB 38, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 63b (in which the caste fellows of a Jat man began to speculate that the woman he had been living with and from whom he had fathered three children was of unknown social origin and was probably not a Jat. In the face of this social pressure, the Jat man then threw the woman out of his home.)

73 JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 282a.

74 See, for instance, the allegations against Bishnoi Pemla (JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 88b); Tikma, the widow of Sirvi (a peasant caste) (JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 210a), and the woman with whom clothprinter Chhimpa Isak had been living for over a decade (JSBB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 113a–b). When a Jat woman moved in with a Rajput man, her husband was killed (the killer was unspecified; JSPB 10, VS 1827/1770 CE, f 260a).

75 JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 236a.

76 JSPB 26, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 66a.

77 JSPB 37, VS 1844/1827 CE, f 180b–181a (a Rajput fined seven rupees for his lagvāḍ with a Brahman woman); and JSPB 57, VS 1860/1803 CE, f 111b–112a (a Rajput policeman of Sojhat dramatically caught trying to sneak out of the home of the married nai or barber woman he was involved with in the dead of the night. As punishment, his wages were withheld for four months and he was issued with a stern warning to refrain from such behaviour). With regard to the latter episode, it ought to be noted that men of elite castes could turn a blind eye to the bodily ‘lowness’ of ‘low’-caste women in order to have sexual relationships with them.

78 JSPB 14, VS 1831/1774, f 78a–b.

79 JSPB 16, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 56b–57a.

80 JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 325b.

81 See, for instance, JSPB 26, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 32b and 36a in which a man accused of incest took his own life by consuming a fatal dose of opium (amal).

82 Hasan, Farhat, ‘Property and Social Relations in Mughal India: Litigations and Disputes at the Qazi's Court in Urban Localities, 17th–18th Centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, 5–6 (2018), p. 852CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Roper, Lyndal, ‘Will and Honor: Sex, Words and Power in Augsburg Criminal Trials’, Radical History Review 43 (1989), pp. 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 See, for instance, Cohen, Elizabeth S., ‘The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31, 1 (2000), pp. 47–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Anne Greenfield (ed.), Interpreting Sexual Violence (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), Introduction, pp. 5–6; and Mary R. Block, ‘“For the Repressing of the Most Wicked and Felonious Rapes or Ravishments of Women”: Rape Law in England, 1660–1800’, in Interpreting Sexual Violence, pp. 23–25.

86 On the lack of a distinct term for rape vis-à-vis illicit sex in Xhosaland (South Africa), see Thornberry, Elizabeth, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Governance in South Africa's Eastern Cape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 12–14Google Scholar, 70–71. On the difficulty of conviction in rape cases in the eighteenth century, see, for England, Block, ‘For the Repressing’, p. 32; for Aleppo, Ottoman, Semerdjian, Elyse, ‘Off the Straight Path’: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 145–156Google Scholar; for Qing China, Ng, Vivien, ‘Ideology and Sexuality’, Journal of Asian Studies 46, 1 (1987), pp. 57–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Massachusetts, Lindemann, Barbara S., ‘To Ravish and Carnally Know’, Signs 10, 1 (1984), pp. 63–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For continuities in low rates of conviction, despite a move to new methods and law codes under the English colonial regime in Bengal, see Kolsky, Elizabeth ‘The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57’, Journal of Asian Studies 69, 4 (2010), pp. 1093–1117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Hina Azam's discussion of Maliki and Hanafi legal approaches to sexual violation testifies to ways in which rape—with or without a legal name—made its way into Islamic jurisprudence. See Azam, Hina, Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Semerdjian, ‘Off the Straight Path’, pp. 145–150.

89 The Hanafi school of law is one of four Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Abu Hanifa (d. 767) was its founder and the Abbasids favoured it. In the centuries that followed, the school became widely influential in Khorasan, Transoxiana, and Afghanistan, and eventually many other parts of the world, including much of South Asia.

90 A glimpse of which can be seen in the ghar maiṁ ghālnā dispute involving Balai Deva of Sojhat pargana discussed above.

91 On the loyalty-based attachment of vasīs in seventeenth-century sources, see Saran, ‘Conquest and Colonization’. On their reduction to bonded labour by the mid-eighteenth century, see the discussion of debt and agrestic servitude in Sahai, Nandita, Politics of Patronage and Protest: The State, Society, and Artisans in Early Modern Rajasthan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 144–152CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 On the growing power of moneylenders and the rise of indebtedness in Marwar, see Sahai, Politics of Patronage; and elsewhere in Rajasthan, see Singh, Dilbagh, ‘The Role of Mahājans in the Rural Economy of Eastern Rajasthan’, Social Scientist 2, 10 (1974), pp. 30–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the intensification of the exploitative power of Rathor state officers upon artisans, see Sahai, Politics of Patronage, pp. 202, 223–224.

93 JSPB 16, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 32b.

94 An office under the provincial governor's supervision, tasked with collecting non-agrarian cesses.

95 JSPB 38, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 172b.

96 JSPB 45, VS 1850/1793 CE, f 483a–b.

97 This was a woman from a baniya or trading family who was fined 450 rupees, later reduced to 212 rupees, in connection with chāmchorī, though how exactly she was guilty or involved is unspecified in the order (JSPB 34, VS 1843/1786 CE, f 196b–197a). The order is in response to her request for the fine to be reduced and offers no further detail. While it is hard to guess why only this woman was fined, a possibility is that she was answerable for a fine imposed upon her son and, in the absence of a male guardian, it was she who came before the crown asking for a discount.

98 In 1784, officer Singhvi Khubchand forwarded some of the proceeds that the Rathor state earned through fines on chāmchorī and other unspecified crimes to Sojhat's governor, asking him to use 400 rupees from those funds to desilt and repair the lake in Sojhat (JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 181a). The policing of subjects’ sexual activities then, along with the Rathor state's larger regime of fines, was also a revenue stream in and of itself.

99 Imam, Fatima A., ‘Decoding the Rhetoric of Morality in Eighteenth Century India: The Interventionist Nature of the Jaipur State’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21 (2014), p. 412CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Singh, Dilbagh, ‘Regulating the Domestic: Notes on the Pre-Colonial State and the Family’, Studies in History 19, 1 (2003), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Kumar, Nirmal, ‘Crime and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Rajasthan’, Indian Historical Review XXX 1, 2 (2003), p. 47Google Scholar, on the other hand, translates ‘chāmchorī’ and all other terms related to illicit sex as ‘adultery’ and reads them as consensual.

100 Sahai, ‘Crossing the Golden Gate?’, p. 399. However, she does not offer any examples of documents using the term ‘joravari chāmchorī’ to support her claim. See also Sahai, Politics of Patronage and Protest, pp. 92–94. While conceding the range of acts included under ‘chāmchorī’, Fatima Imam's analysis chooses to lean towards interpreting it as rape, which then permits her to view the eighteenth-century Jaipur state as adopting the stance of a paternalistic protector of women when it fined the men accused in chāmchorī cases (‘Decoding the Rhetoric’, pp. 412–415).

101 Dilbagh Singh, in his reading of eighteenth-century Jaipur court records, also tries to read into them a distinction between rape and adultery, suggesting that ‘jorāvarī’ (‘forced’) was sometimes prefixed to ‘chāmchorī’ to designate rape cases. But he also concedes that the absence of the ‘jorāvarī’ prefix did not always mean that the chāmchorī case under review was a consensual one (Singh, ‘Regulating the Domestic’, p. 74).

102 Ibid., p. 76; Kumar, ‘Crime and Gender’, p. 42.

103 Singh ‘Regulating the Domestic’, p. 74; Kumar, ‘Crime and Gender’, pp. 47–48.

104 Wagle, N. K., ‘Women in the Kotwāl's Papers, Puṇe, 1767–1791’, in Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society, (ed.) Feldhaus, Anne (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 16Google Scholar.

105 Stephanie Jamison, ‘Marriage and the Householder’, in The Oxford History of Hinduism: Hindu Law, a New History of Dharmaṡāstra, (eds) Patrick Olivelle and Donald R. Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 125–136.

106 P. V. Kane, ‘Strīsangrahaṇa (Adultery or Unlawful Intercourse with a Woman)’, in A History of the Dharmashastra, Vol. III, (ed.) P. V. Kane (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1973; 2nd edn), pp. 531–533.

107 Semerdjian, ‘Off the Straight Path’, pp. 145–156.

108 Ibid.

109 In addition to the studies on Rajasthan discussed above, studies of the Maratha Deccan also provide instances of cases of adultery and rape. See Wagle, ‘Women in the Koṭvāl's Papers’; Wagle, N. K., ‘The Government, the Jāti, and the Individual: Rights, Discipline, and Control in the Puṇe Kotwal Papers, 1766–94’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 34, 3 (2000), pp. 321–534CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sumit Guha, ‘An Indian Penal Regime: Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 147 (May) (1995), p. 117.

110 Singh, ‘Regulating the Domestic’, p. 75.

111 Chatterjee, Indrani, Gender, Slavery, and Law in Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Chatterjee, ‘Alienation, Intimacy, and Gender’; Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’, in Unfamiliar Relations, pp. 9–14; I. Chatterjee, ‘Renewed and Connected Histories: Slavery and the Historiography of South Asia’, in Slavery and South Asian History, pp. 17–43; Sumit Guha, ‘Slavery, Society, and the State in Western India, 1700–1800’, in Slavery and South Asian History, pp. 162–186; Arondekar, Anjali, ‘What More Remains? Slavery, Sexuality, South Asia’, History of the Present 6, 2 (2016), pp. 146–154CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, and Law, p. 27. Vis-à-vis eighteenth-century Marwar, Nandita Sahai too concludes that, on balance, the Rathor state was indifferent to the concerns of women, noting, for instance, the lack of consultation with women when it came to marriage and remarriage (Sahai, Politics of Patronage, p. 97).

113 But which in the command is described as ‘chūknā’ or to have sex. JSPB 40, VS 1848/1791 CE, f 310a.

114 JSPB 40, VS 1848/1791 CE, f 311a–b.

115 JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 81b.

116 Ibid.

117 ‘āgāṁ su īṇ tarai kaiī mol levai nahī nai likhat karai nahī’. JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 81b (the same folio as the previous order on this same case).

118 JSPB 35, VS 1843/1786 CE, f 410b–411a. The buyer was fined 300 rupees and the seller, the man who sold his wife, was fined 50 rupees.

119 Once more, I draw here on Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’.

120 Prakash, Gyan, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labour Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 As argued by Marilyn Strathern in her engagement with Gayle Rubin (The Gender of the Gift (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 330–331) and by Lucinda Ramberg, ‘When the Devi is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India’, Feminist Studies 37, 1 (2011), p. 49.

122 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 114b. The woman was the widow (raṇdol) of Mahajan Ladha Sarupa of Didwana.

123 An instance of the role of Jain semi-ordained monks of the Tapa Gachchh order of Shvetambar Jains, known as yatis, is in JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 137b. JSPB 37, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 231a mentions the role of a pātnī, a member of the Jain community, in executing multiple abortions in Pali. Among other pursuits, yatis immersed themselves in acquiring medical and ‘magical’ knowledge. In the mid-nineteenth century, reform efforts among the Shvetambar Jains saw the phasing out of the yati institution, indicating that yatis began to be seen as undesirable elements of the Jain community. This may have been because of their involvement in precisely the types of activities that I mention here. For the role of professional midwives, see JSPB 12, VS 1829/1772 CE, f 113b; JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 53a–b; and JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 55b. For references to the use of herbs to induce abortion, see JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 137b; JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 53a–b; and JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 55b.

124 This is suggested by episodes such as that which appeared in JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 120a–b, in which Agarval Binodiya's daughter-in-law called a nāī woman to examine her abdomen, paying her with bangles in exchange. Discretion was certainly an essential skill in their arsenal, since midwifery entailed the delivery of both wanted and unwanted children.

125 JSPB 35, VS 1843/1786 CE, f 243b and 244b (the crown heard through its news reporters that a Brahman widow in Didwana killed her newborn son. It ordered that her marital family be fined.) There are occasional references in Rathor orders to female infanticide among Rajputs, which too the state disapproved of, even as it did not launch the type of enforcement efforts that it did against abortion.

126 There was no specification in Rathor orders, nor is it clear from particular cases, if the criminalization of abortion made exceptions in situations such the mother's life being at risk. It does appear to me that all abortion, even in the early stages of pregnancy, was against the law. Kumar (‘Crime and Gender’, pp. 47, 50–51); Fatima A. Imam (‘Institutionalizing Rajadharma: Strategies of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Jaipur’, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2008, pp. 243–244); and Imam (‘Decoding the Rhetoric’, p. 409) have also noted, albeit briefly, the illegality of abortion in eighteenth-century Jodhpur and Jaipur respectively. Wagle (‘Women in the Kotwāl Papers’, pp. 42–51) discusses evidence demonstrating the illegality of abortion (poṭ pāḍne or ‘to knock down the stomach’) in eighteenth-century Pune, in the western Deccan. Here again, the evidence from Rajput-led polities in Rajasthan aligns with that from the Peshwa-ruled Deccan. In dharmashatric codes as well abortion was illegal unless the mother's life was at risk or the king permitted it (Julius Lipner, ‘The Classical Hindu View on Abortion and the Moral Status of the Unborn’, in Hindu Ethics: Purity, Abortion, and Euthanasia, (ed.) Harold G. Coward (Delhi: Indian Book Center, 1989), pp. 41–69. As with its adjudication of illicit sex, the Rathor state does not explicitly draw upon Brahmanical codes.

127 See, for instance, JSPB 12, VS 1829/1772 CE, f 114b; JSPB 28, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 321b; and JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 258a.

128 JSPB 32, VS 1841/1784, f 79a. This document does not identify the issuing officer.

129 The illegality of abortion in Marwar resonates with the treatment by church and secular authorities of abortion in early modern Europe, where increasingly invasive surveillance efforts were deployed to prevent and punish abortion (Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality). Qing China, on the other hand, did not have legal barriers to abortion but Mathew Sommers (‘Abortion in Late Imperial China: Routine Birth Control or Crisis Intervention?’, Late Imperial China 31, 2 (2010), pp. 119–190) suggests that it was not too common in early modern China since the procedure was expensive and difficult to access. While ethical and legal codes in early modern Japan and in Ottoman territories may have disapproved of abortion, it was common in practice. See Balsoy, Gulhan, The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), pp. 56–58Google Scholar for Ottoman laws; and for Japan, Eiko Saeki, ‘Abortion, Infanticide, and a Return to the Gods: Politics of Pregnancy in Early Modern Japan’, in Transcending Borders: Abortion in the Past and Present, (eds) Shannon Stettner et al. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 19–33.

130 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 53a–b and JSPB 37, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 144a–b.

131 JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 137b; JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 309b; JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 114b; JSPB 28, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 76a, 78a, 80a–b and 103a; JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 55b; JSPB 32, VS 1842/1785 CE, 82a and 133b; JSPB 33, VS 1842/1785 CE, f 11a; JSPB 35, VS 1843/1786 CE, f 57b–58a, 177a, 218a, and 243b; JSPB 37, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 144a–b; JSPB 39, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 168b and 169a; JSPB 45, VS 1850/1793 CE, f 521a–b; JSPB 46, VS 1851/1794 CE, f 86b–87a; JSPB 49, VS 1854/1797 CE, f 98b–99a; and JSPB 55, VS 1858/1801 CE, f 101a.

132 JSPB 39, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 169a.

133 JSPB 17, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 214b; JSPB 18, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 53a–b.

134 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 114b; JSPB 5, VS 1823/1766 CE, f 164a.

135 JSPB 28, 1839/1782 CE, 76a, 78a, and 80a–b.

136 For instance, in 1778, Kiki, a woman from the Brahman community of Nandwana Bohras, successfully petitioned the crown to permit her daughter, one of three women expelled from Nagaur for abortion, to return to the town. She cited her blindness and ailing health (‘monū phoḍā paḍai chhai’, or ‘I get boils’) and mentioned that one of the other exiled women had already made her way back to the town (JSPB 20, 1835/1778 CE, f 42b).

137 While the most common punishment was a monetary fine, occasionally, the man or the woman involved in the abortion and the illicit sex preceding it were expelled from the town in which they lived. See, for instance, JSPB 5, VS 1823/1766 CE, f 164a (in which cloth printer Isakh and the unmarried woman he was accused of impregnating and who then aborted the foetus were both thrown out of Sojhat town).

138 Cherian, ‘Ordering Subjects’, pp. 157–222.

139 As discussed above, while some orders name the issuing officer, others list him by name which allowed me to identify the officer from Rathor officer lists.

140 One order was issued by a Pancholi and one by a Rajput. Still others bear names whose caste identity I could not identify, such as Firayat Manakchand.

141 The caste of some of these women is unclear from the available information. For instance, it remains unclear which caste the Majiji or Daftari families belonged to. While the Majijis wielded enough influence to convince the local authorities of Didwana to drop the proceedings against them, the Daftari family's title indicates that they were associated with clerical practice and were thus at least of fair socio-economic standing. In addition, the Daftaris are a lineage among the Shvetambar Jains of Marwar so it is possible that this particular Daftari family was part of the largely mercantile community of Jains.

142 JSPB 15, VS 1832/1775 CE, f 309b; JSPB 28, VS 1839/1782 CE, f 76a; JSPB 49, VS 1854/1797 CE, f 98b–99a; JSPB 37, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 231a; and JSPB 39, VS 1845/1788 CE, f 22b.

143 In colonial Bengal, women's pilgrimage to Banaras was considered a euphemism for going away to get an abortion (Guha, Supriya, ‘The Unwanted Pregnancy in Colonial Bengal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 33 (1996), pp. 425, 429CrossRefGoogle Scholar). I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article who pointed me to this parallel.

144 JSPB 17, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 214b.

145 JSPB 55, VS 1958/1801 CE, f 101a.

146 Ranajit Guha notes the role of networks of solidarity against patriarchal oppression among ‘low’-caste Bagdi women in nineteenth-century Bengal (Guha, Ranajit, ‘Chandra's Death’, in Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 34–62Google Scholar.

147 JSPB 17, VS 1833/1776 CE, f 126a–b.

148 The Asavas are a subset of the Maheshwari community of merchants.

149 JSPB 30, VS 1841/1784 CE, f 55b.

150 ‘Binā mudai koi jāb nā karai nai oh mahājan hai īṇā ro nyāt maiṁ āchho lagai jyūṁ kījo’. JSPB 36, VS 1844/1787 CE, f 123b.

151 As in the case of Mayaram Daftari who had to pay a fine for his daughter's abortion (JSPB 11, VS 1828/1771 CE, f 137b).

152 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 114b.

153 While the document does not name the occupant of the magistrate's office, I was able to look up this detail in Bhati, Hukamsimh, Marvad ke ohdedarom ka itihas mem yogdan (Jodhpur: Maharaja Mansingh Pustak Prakash Shodh Kendra, 2013), p. 343Google Scholar.

154 I am unsure of what this measure would translate to in modern standardized units.

155 JSPB 18, VS 1834/1777 CE, f 114b.

156 See, for example, Aitken, Molly, ‘Pardah and Portrayal: Rajput Women as Subjects, Patrons, and Collectors’, Artibus Asiae 62, 2 (2002), pp. 247–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephen P. Blake, ‘Contributors to the Urban Landscape: Women Builders in Safavid Isfahan and Mughal Shahjahanabad’, in Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety, (ed.) Gavin R. G. Hambly (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998), pp. 407–428; Lal, Ruby, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Sheikh, Samira, ‘Jijabhu's Rights to Ghee: Land Control and Vernacular Capitalism in Gujarat, circa 1803–10’, Modern Asian Studies 51, 2 (2017), pp. 350–374CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

157 Chatterjee, Unfamiliar Relations, Introduction, pp. 1–45; Guha, Sumit, ‘Household Size and Household Structure in Western India, c. 1700–1950’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 35, 1 (1998), pp. 23–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lal, Domesticity and Power.

158 Sarkar, Tanika, ‘A Pre-History of Rights: The Age of Consent Debate in Colonial Bengal’, Feminist Studies 26, 3 (2000), pp. 601–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kolsky, Elizabeth, ‘The Rule of Colonial Indifference: Rape on Trial in Early Colonial India, 1805–57’, Journal of Asian Studies 69, 4 (2010), pp. 1093–1117CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, ‘Offences Against Marriage’; Pande, Ishita, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the colonial-era trajectory of the government regulation of abortion, see Guha, ‘The Unwanted Pregnancy’ (on the significance of whether the sex causing the aborted pregnancy was licit or not); Mitra, Indian Sex Life, pp. 99–132 (for the forced genital examination of women); and Mitra Sharafi, ‘Abortion in South Asia, 1860–1947: A Medico-Legal History’, Modern Asian Studies 55, 2 2021, pp. 1–58 (for the continued stigmatization of ‘illicit’ sex).