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Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

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Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

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ARCHIVING THE ABSENCE: FEMALE INFANTICIDE IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH INDIA

by
Pashmina Murthy

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Pashmina Murthy

Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Introduction: Defining the Arch of the Archive: Setting the Limits 1
Intro.1 Ordinary Murders 3
Intro.2 Archiving the Absence 15
Intro.3 Setting the Limits 29
Intro. Notes 37

Chapter 1 Observing Observances: the Ethnography of Infant-Murder 39
Chapter 1.1 Vagabondizing in India: the Unofficial Archives 51
Chapter 1.2 Sacred Missions: the Observance of Heathenism 60
Chapter 1.3 Colonel Walker makes his entry 70
Chapter 1 Notes 81

Chapter 2 Speaking in Tongues: Translating Native Speech and Silence 84
Chapter 2.1 Revisiting the Scene of the Crime 100
Chapter 2.2 “Save a daughter and earn my friendship:” Translating
Negotiations 110
Chapter 2.3 I, too, am British: the Case of the Mimic Men 117
Chapter 2 Notes 127

Chapter 3 Buried in the Arkheia: Writing the Female Infant into Being 132
Chapter 3.1 ‘In the beginning was the deed…:’ The origin of female
infanticide among the Rajputs 147
Chapter 3.2 Neither Mourning nor Melancholia: Female Infanticide as
Custom 160
Chapter 3.3 The Imperial Panopticon: The Search for the Absent Infant 171
Chapter 3 Notes 184

Chapter 4 Frailty, Thy Name is Woman? Archiving the Murderous Mother 191
Chapter 4.1 The Authorization of Voyeurism 201
Chapter 4.2 Woman – Victim or Murderer? 212
Chapter 4.3 Unruly Women 226
Chapter 4 Notes 237

Chapter 5 Vanished without a Trace: Female Infanticide in Post-Independence 242
India
Chapter 5.1 Emptying the Motherland of its Women 250
Chapter 5.2 The Absent Subject in a Global World 272
Chapter 5 Notes 289

Works Cited 293
iv

Abstract

The systemic murder of female infants, while formerly a feature of many
different cultures, is at the present moment a problem peculiar to India. Studies on
the practice of female infanticide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries point to
the barbarity of the Indians, especially of the martial group of Rajputs, as the main
cause and proof of the practice. Current socio-political discourse centres on the
cultural devaluation of women as the reason for the continued prevalence of the
crime. My work situates both these speculations in the historical and material reality
of the nineteenth century. Using archival texts, mainly legislative and judicial
documents from the British Raj, as well as a study of travel memoirs, films, and
news articles from the late eighteenth century to the present day, I explore the
practice of female infanticide by engaging with the question of “absence.”
The title, “Archiving the Absence” refers to the absence of the female infant
in the first ring of analysis. But, apart from alluding to the intangibility of the female
infant, it also refers to her absence in native discourse, where it is never her but her
“nothingness” that is evoked. Finally, the “absence” also points to the perceived
absence of affect towards the female infant, the absence of mourning following her
death, and the absence of sacredness of (female) life. My examination of particular
records from the archives thus engages with the way that British investment in
suppressing female infanticide sought to negate these different kinds of absences and
make them manifest or present. As a result, the investigation of female infanticide in
nineteenth-century British India, aimed at filling these absences, emphasized
v

discovery (of the female infant’s body and, hence, of the crime), iterative discourses
that drew the infant back from the silences into which she was confined, and suitable
forms of punishment. All three modes, if successful, would hopefully create an
emotional bond between the parents and their infant daughter, thereby abolishing
female infanticide as a practice. At the same time, the authorization of this kind of
power and demand for transparency from the colonized also marked a site of tension
and negotiation between the consolidation of British power in India and the threat to
that power. The absence of the female infant at the centre of all discursive space
mimicked and revealed a larger decentralization of power in the macrostructure of
colonial rule. Through this work and using the specific trope of the crime of female
infanticide, I hope to contribute to and complicate our understanding of colonial and
postcolonial power dynamics.

1

Defining the Arch of the Archive: Setting the Limits

Over the past few months, I have been greatly preoccupied with the question
of the archive: what is the archive? Where is the archive? What can be archived?
Who visits the archive? With these questions swirling around in my mind at all
levels of consciousness, I boarded an early morning flight to Philadelphia a few
months ago. Six hours later and still sleep-deprived, I discovered rather
serendipitously, as these literal and post-structural signs are sometimes wont to do,
that the soap, shampoo, conditioner, and lotion in my hotel bathroom were
individually and collectively labelled “Archive.”
The archive now took on a whole new dimension. Archive fever brought on
by dusty, musty documents that had been locked away a few centuries before you
peered through them now offered you a choice of scent and experience; as the
documents moved from an engagement with the visual and aural to the olfactory,
they came in a green tea scent that was “calming,” or in the soothing, floral fragrance
of rosehip and lavender. The archive was the fragrance that washed over you, but it
was also the plastic bottle that held it; to put it differently, it was the contained and
also the container. The archive was everywhere, in each and every room of the
hotel, and thus, nowhere in particular. Each day, it mysteriously replicated itself,
showing an infinite capacity for replenishment, never emptying out, never depleting
its resources. But this regenerative and restorative ability also raised the question:
was it in fact the same archive that had been reproduced yet again, or had it

2
undergone a process of temporal change? What, in other words, was the “truth” of
the archive? What did it set out to record and document?
These were some of the many questions that I explored, or inadvertently
encountered, in my examination of the legislative and judicial archival documents on
female infanticide of the colonial British Government in India in the nineteenth
century. In the course of that research, I discovered wholeness, cohesiveness, and
continuity that were punctuated with gaps in records, missing records, and silent
records. I was reading the British reading the absence of the female infant and was
alternately a critic, a bystander, a team-member, and the chief investigator of the
detective fiction that the search for the infant engendered. Each document, including
my own, renewed the search for the infant, but that didn’t obviate the danger of
falling into the trap of merely engaging, like our calming green tea archive, in a
discursive re-presentation. Each document used different modes of investigation –
observations, translations, statistics, pamphlets, and so on – only to repeat and
recount the absence of the infant. The purported goal of this unceasing recording
and documenting was to find the cause of the crime, put an end to it, and save the
lives of thousands of females who were yet to be born. But I argue that an implicit
goal of the discourse was also to make manifest all those infants who had allegedly
been murdered a few short hours after birth and their bodies secretly done away with.
It was the latter’s absence that concerned administrators and legislators; in addition
to saving generations of unborn female infants, the murdered infant had to somehow
be made present as well.

3
An examination of female infanticide across nearly two centuries can only
locate and fix the infant in her absence. It is that disembodiment that is being
archived, not the infant herself. To read the archive in relation to female infanticide
is also to read the female body as archive. The body now documents for its readers
signs of violence, apathy, misogyny, and greed. But it also denies full disclosure by
locating its own “truth” elsewhere except in its own invisible body. Because the
bodies of these infants were never recovered, the kind of violence that was wreaked
upon them might never be known. An infant that dies from being neglected
embodies proof that it was never wanted, but a new-born that was strangled or beaten
embodies some sort of evil that needs to be driven out. How might we account for
that violence?

Intro.1 Ordinary Murders
Infanticide was a familiar occurrence across different cultures and different
periods. Most “ancient” cultures were thought to have practiced infanticide as a
means to curb fragmentation of wealth and property. Female infants were targeted
more often, but that was by no means the rule. The two-pronged classification of
these murders generated either justificatory explanations centring on necessity,
impulse, and shame or culpable crimes that revolved on pride, greed, and
superstition. Administratively and judicially, the British took a more sympathetic
and lenient view of the first classification, especially as the perpetrators were usually

4
poor, single mothers who murdered their infants in a fit of shame and fear. This
paternalistic view played on essentialist assumptions of women as weak-willed and
modest individuals, who dreaded facing the reprobation of society and therefore
acted on impulse. Such acts motivated by fear of sullying their name and character
because of a transgression deserved to be judged with a pitying eye – the women
evidently needed to be protected, even from themselves.
i
The second category of
murders, however, was a testimony to the depravity and debasement of human
nature. It was planned, deliberate, and cold-hearted. The wilful snatching away of
an infant’s life because it was a cultural or financial liability demonstrated the
criminal excesses of whole nations of people. For instance, before the Prophet
Muhammed prohibited the practice, “pagan Arabs” were believed to bury their
female infants alive to eschew the adversities of either poverty or shame that were
almost certain to accompany the latter.
ii
Within this class of callous and remorseless
murderers – most of which had been relegated to the annals of history – the
continued murder of female infants was cause for shock and horror. India was one
of the only nations where female infants continued to be systemically murdered,
allowing the prevalence of female infanticide to reinscribe the murder of infants into
the category of barbarism.
Even in the late eighteenth century, the administrators of the East India
Company were cognizant of the prevalence of female infanticide. However, the rise
of evangelical influence and missionary activity in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, coupled with an increasing concern of the colonial official

5
regarding the decorum and position of the British as “ruler,” brought about an
increasing attentiveness and concern over what was perceived as a “practice” and a
“custom,” and to separate that from the presumed dictates of religion. Even though
infanticide didn’t enjoy the “official” sanction of any sacred Hindu texts or treatises
and was, thus, a domestic crime conducted in secrecy and silence, it was also
paradoxically represented as incorporating ceremonial elements into its praxis. The
disjuncture between religious textual authority and the enactment of a religiosity
automatically divorced the performance from any claim to tradition, so that the
officials of the East India Company could now safely demarcate infanticide as a
heinous custom alone. However, the British alacrity in disclaiming any tie that
demonstrated infanticide’s link to tradition was undermined by their anxiousness in
citing textual support against the practice. The colonizers were firmly convinced
that female infanticide owed its origins to the barbarity and callousness of the
parents, but in the course of the repeated encounters with violent rituals that had an
allegedly religious basis – sati, hookswinging, human sacrifices, and to some extent,
even thuggee – the epistemic divisions between religious practice and criminal
activity had become unstable and indeterminate.
From the British perspective, the murder of infants in India was at once a
familiar and strange phenomenon. The gender-victimization that encapsulated the
murders rendered the female infant not merely absent but also non-existent.
Evidence of the murder was never discovered, and all traces of the female infant
were obliterated physically and from public memory. It was only in and through the

6
archives that the female enjoyed any kind of presence. But there was almost no hint
or vestige of mourning for the loss of the infant in the native population. The little
value ascribed to female life became evident in the plethora of gendered crimes that
the indigenous population perpetrated. The absence of a conception of life per se as
sacred seemed to reify suspicions of the barbarity of the colonized peoples. It
moreover stood in striking contrast to the excess of feeling and mourning that
sometimes marked deaths in England.
iii
The visual symbols of mourning that were
entailed in funeral processions and other such ritual performances were indicative of
the prevailing contemporary cultural ethos surrounding conceptions of death and
dying.
Pat Jalland claims that the combined influences of Evangelicalism and
Romanticism on early and mid-Victorians supported and promoted the
externalization and displays of grief.
iv
In addition, literature from the Romantic and
Victorian periods contributed significantly in idealizing childhood deaths. The dead
child, or rather, the dying child, was invested with associations of innocence, virtue,
and purity to the extent that any kind of childhood death, even one after a long
illness, was seen as a cruel act of fate, which, nevertheless, had to be accepted with
submission.
v
But that submissiveness didn’t necessarily preclude an intense process
of grieving over the death. While deathbed scenes in novels might have added a
melodramatic, literary flair, the excess of sentiment resonated with the readers of the
period.
vi
One of the most dramatic and shocking literary deaths was that of little
Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. Readers eagerly anticipated the

7
last instalment of the serialized novel, waiting to read the fate of the beloved child
character. Her death in the novel resulted in, what can only be described as, public
mourning, reliving in this microcosm of readers the kind of outpouring of grief that
had characterized other public deaths.
Nell’s death took its place in a long line of other childhood, idealized, literary
deaths since the Romantic period. The character of little Nell follows the archetypal
pattern of conferring an ethereal presence on young girls. Nell, like Helen Burns in
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, incarnates an other-worldliness in her quiet
submission to authority and circumstance and her mute acceptance of punishment.
Both girls inspire reverence in others and motivate those around them to better
themselves. But their deaths are only significant in so far as they are constantly kept
alive in discourse and memory. In Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion, for example, the
very first page familiarizes us with the death of Sir Elliot’s son: “…a still-born son,
Nov. 5, 1789.”
vii
Although the absence of a son sets the tone for the rest of the
novel, the infant – sans corps, sans visage, sans nom – cannot be mourned because
he never existed. In contrast, we are always already mourning Nell and Helen
because we acknowledge the fragility of their lives and accept the inevitability of
their death. They are already on “the road to dying”
viii
at the incipit of the novels,
thereby heightening their tragedy.
While Nell’s death is memorable particularly for the intense mourning it
evoked, her death cannot be divorced from the imaginings and the workings of
empire. Analyzing the works of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Tennyson among

8
others, Deirdre David observes that Victorian constructs of race often intertwined
with those of gender, such that it becomes difficult, if not actually impossible, to
merely study the effects of one construct without understanding the implications on
or the underpinnings of the other. Through a close examination of the opposing
depiction of Quilp and Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, she claims: “In The
Old Curiosity Shop, eradication of male barbarism is accompanied by the forfeiture
of female life, or to suggest how Victorian ideas of gender get affiliated with
Victorian ideas of race, native savagery can be tamed only by the sacrifice of
Englishwomen.”
ix
More pointedly, the suffering and death of the Englishwoman –
or, in this case, the English child – usually occurs as a direct consequence of this
ominous presence of the native.
Nell’s continual suffering which culminates in her death is directly caused by
one “dark” figure, that of the ‘half devil half child’ Quilp. But her gradual decline to
her death simultaneously chronicles the rise to happiness of another ambiguous racial
figure: the Marchioness. Dubbed “a little devil” by her employer, Miss Brass, the
little servant girl is completely unknowing of her origins – she doesn’t know her
name, her age, or where she is from, and is rumored to be a “love child.” Dick
Swiveller, who names her “Marchioness,” testifies to her having a look of “infinite
cunning” and that her “natural cunning had been sharpened by necessity and
privation.” But despite the lack of proof of her origin, we are tempted to reclaim her
as a native figure because of the exoticism which Swiveller grants her. In the course
of his delusional fever, Swiveller believes that he is in Damascus or Cairo and that

9
the Marchioness is a “Genie.” Later, when she has reached adulthood, he
interpellates her as the exotic foreigner by giving her a new name: Sophronia
Sphynx. Her name thus cements the picture of a mysterious and enigmatic girl from
foreign locales. She succeeds admirably in the novel, her natural “sharp-wittedness”
enabling her to gain an education and an English husband. Her success, however,
can only come through the death of little Nell.
Against this set-up of rivalry and competition, where only one can emerge
ahead, infanticide brings about a semblance of parity. The murder of infants that the
British encountered in India was not without precedent. Infanticide in the
metropolitan areas referred pointedly to the murder of bastard infants and was
common, regrettable, but ultimately comprehensible. In her reading of infanticide in
mid-nineteenth century Britain, Josephine McDonagh points out that the writings of
figures as diverse as the Reverend Henry Humble and William Burke Ryan suggest
that Britain itself became a site of an “epidemic” of child murders in the 1850s and
1860s.
x
Unlike the complexity of the situation in India, insofar as it was enmeshed
with the mythico-cultural history of its peoples, the situation in Britain was reduced
to the murder of bastard infant life owing to a want of female chastity. As such, the
crime was relegated to the lower classes, but it nevertheless necessitated legislation.
People found “suspicious-looking bundles” along pavements, in the water, by the
canal, and generally left along the streets and feared that these bundles might contain
the mutilated and lifeless body of a newborn.
xi
Some doctors put the figure of

10
murdering mothers in Britain at 12,000, a number which others estimate was merely
used to sensationalize the issue.
xii
George Eliot’s 1859 novel, Adam Bede, was perhaps reflective of the surge in
the numbers of infanticides in the two decades around the time of publication of the
novel. Indeed, in many ways the events in the novel that culminated in Hetty Sorrel
being sentenced to death for the murder of her illegitimate infant are emblematic of
the personal accounts and narratives that were rehearsed in the courtroom trials of
women convicted of infanticide that also centred on fear and shame. A beautiful and
vain girl enjoying an illicit affair with a man far above her station, Hetty Sorrel’s
consequent pregnancy threatens to make her a social pariah in the quiet, pious village
of Hayslope and bring shame upon her extended family. In a bid to escape that harsh
sentence, she runs away, seeking to find her former lover, now a soldier posted in
Windsor. Having just missed him, the lonely and frightened girl wanders about until
she gives birth, and abandons her infant the next day. The fictional narrative does
differ from the conventional narrative of infanticide in that absence of impulsiveness.
Unlike the more common assumption that the mother murdered the infant
immediately after birth, Hetty keeps the infant with her, deciding to abandon it only
the next day. While that day’s pause could still be justified in the nineteenth century
as within the period characterized by ‘puerperal fever,’ Hetty’s later structured,
chronological recounting of the events of that day retroactively constructs the murder
as a cold-hearted decision for which she must be punished.

11
Although the novel itself is set in 1799, the social and religious values
inserted into the text, especially against the backdrop of the increase in the numbers
of infanticides in the mid-Victorian period, allow us to read aspects of Romantic and
Victorian morality into the denouement of the novel. The plight of the mother often
elicited sympathy especially if she was a first-time lapser or was coaxed into
believing that her lover would marry her. Undoubtedly, class introduced a different
gauge of morality as perceptions of promiscuous and hard-hearted working-class
women gained currency. As a respectable girl who might have well belonged to the
first category of naïve and foolish women, Hetty’s crime would have perhaps
received a lighter sentence than death, irrespective of her lover’s arrival at a
climactic moment that reduces that sentence to transportation for life. Readers
remarked the harshness of her treatment in the novel – a treatment that might not
have been as reflective of the judicial trends of the period as much as indicative of a
high moral barometer.
But can Hetty’s punishment be read as commensurate with the severity of her
crime? She must certainly be punished in the novel, but not simply for concealing
her pregnancy and then murdering her new-born baby. Her narcissism in itself,
coupled with pretensions to de-classment and an implicit refusal to submit her vanity
to a spiritual growth, all prime her as a candidate deserving reprimanding. The
explicit and direct invitation to punishment, however, as Bartle Massey points out to
Mr. Irwine and Adam, lie in her “denial” – of pregnancy, of childbirth, and of
murder.
xiii
The deliberate subterfuge in the face of evidence further condemns her as

12
a manipulative and obstinate suspect, thereby rejecting her as eligible for the mercy
of the jury. On the other hand, I suggest that Hetty also symbolizes a perverse figure
in the Romantic/Victorian cultural ethos in her rejection of motherhood and refusal
to mourn her infant, and that it is that perversity that necessitates her punishment. In
confessing her crime to the sympathetic Dinah, Hetty testifies to her inability to love
her own baby: “I seemed to hate it – it was like a heavy weight hanging round my
neck; and yet its crying went through me, and I daredn’t look at its little hands and
face.”
xiv
Her avowal at being moved when the infant cried seems to soften some of
that tentative hatred that she feels for it, but when juxtaposed against the metaphoric
albatross that the infant symbolized, its crying resuscitates perhaps a feeling of guilt
rather than the resurgence of maternal affection. As its crying follows her long after
she clumsily tries to bury it before finally abandoning it, the spectrality of the infant
haunts her into confessing her guilt. And even then, her confession arises not out of
remorse for her dead infant but out of a desperate desire to completely free herself
from the memory of the infant itself.
The ghastly spectre of child murders in Britain brought to the mind of its
public associations with the same crime in India. Britain became the “nation of
infanticides,” a term that closely paralleled the nomenclature of its Indian colony as a
“race of infanticides.”
xv
The mothers’ acts of desperation in murdering their own
infants, albeit illegitimate, were perceived by judicial authorities and the public with
a curious mix of sympathy and revulsion. Margaret L. Arnot points out, however,
that despite the acknowledgement in Britain that abject social conditions constituted

13
an important factor in the crime, “infanticide was something horrible, ‘other’ and
‘unnatural’, requiring action of some kind to eliminate it.”
xvi
However, not all the
murders in India centred on the effacement of illegitimate infants. Indeed, the
notoriety of the crime in the colony developed out of its cultural particularity as the
murder of female infants alone.
The British officials who investigated female infanticide believed it to be an
intricate part of a powerful and savage patriarchal social order itself; it was, thus, a
crime instigated and ordered by men, even though it might have demanded the
support or compliance of women. The ordinariness of the crime, as in the case of the
murder of illegitimate infants in India as well, made it a peculiarly domestic case. In
fact, women who murdered their bastard babies had to face tremendous social
disapproval, but it is possible that the censure surrounded the act of transgression
itself rather than the murder of the offspring. This appears to contrast sharply with
the perception that Dana Rabin claims was prevalent in the England of the
seventeenth-century, but which we might be able to extrapolate to nineteenth-century
England as well. Rabin observes that in the absence of the abysmal social conditions
that characterized the circumstances surrounding the murder of illegitimate children,
infanticide “by married women was considered so shocking and so unlikely that the
only motive assigned to it was insanity.”
xvii
Such cases, however, of married women
murdering their legitimate new-born babies were few and far between, which
undoubtedly heightened the unnaturalness of the crime when it did occur.

14
In India, on the other hand, the murders of female infants within certain
communities comprised the norm. The means of effecting death were simple,
uncomplicated, and – in an environment where the value of female life was not
accorded much importance – tolerated. The illegitimate infant – in England and,
after 1870, in India as well – was the visible and material object of discourse against
which the spectre of the female infant was now propped. It was the inevitable
discovery of murdered bastard babies that framed the urgency of detection in the
colony. But another contrast was at work along with the spectrality of infants: the
murder of bastard babies, usually by their young, frightened mothers, who worked as
domestic help, was comprehensible within a cultural logic of morality and
resignation. The systemic murder of legitimate female infants devoid of all affect
and reasonable motive thus becomes all the more heinous.

Intro.2 Archiving the absence
The archival records on female infanticide in the nineteenth-century that I am
examining are encased within a period of about seventy years, beginning with Col.
Walker’s estimate of the prevalence of infanticide among the Jahrejah Rajputs in
1808. The shift in rule, from the East India Company to the Crown, did not signal an
end to the investigative thrust of the discussion. However, the shift was marked by
an increasing attention to religious and cultural questions as a sign of difference and
administrative incommensurability. Undoubtedly, the alteration in the scope of the

15
discourse was related primarily to the Mutiny of 1857-58 than it was to the change in
power, which, in its own turn, was occasioned to a considerable extent by the Mutiny
itself. During this tumultuous period in mid-nineteenth century, the belligerence and
challenge of the colonized peoples caught the East India Company officials by
surprise and made them aware of the discontent that simmered among their subjects
and the Indian soldiers in their own army.
xviii
Cultural cognizance and knowledge of
the minutiae of the customs, traditions, and religious rituals of the people took
precedence over matters pertaining to revenue systems alone. As Nicholas Dirks has
eloquently suggested, “after 1857, anthropology supplanted history as the principal
colonial modality of knowledge and rule. By the late nineteenth century…the
colonial state in India can be characterized as the ethnographic state.”
xix

Undoubtedly, such a project of knowingness can only be effected by first
establishing the foreignness of that colonial encounter and then re-familiarizing
oneself with the customs and mores of a partially-familiar Other.
But how does one mitigate a comfortably familiar alterity, oxymoronic
though it may sound? The colonizers had to maintain a delicate balancing act
between knowing enough of the cultural praxis of the natives in the interests of a
hegemonic society to never repeat the mistakes that provoked the events of 1857,
while simultaneously distancing themselves from their subjects to uphold the self-
fashioning as imperial rulers. The investment in the decoding of the cultural
elements in no way suggests that there was a radical shift from an economic jargon
to a social one. Rather, the traditional was interwoven with the economic to now

16
authorize a new political discourse. Thus, if Col. Walker’s and his successors’ focus
on the “custom” of infanticide bemoaned the barbarity and inhumanity of the
perpetrators on the one hand, and initiated an intense round of negotiations over
questions of land ownership as leverage in the discussion, the new political
discourse, on the other hand, centred primarily on dowry as the culprit behind the
crime. The displacement of attention onto dowry signalled an interest in the cultural
basis of an economic crime, where earlier the British sought to find the economic
basis for a cultural crime. The marriage between the economic and the cultural was
still the same, but the focal point of that knowledge had shifted ever so slightly.
However, in ascribing greater consideration of the cultural over other factors, the
Crown rule that had just reiterated its commitment to non-interference into the
religious lives of its subjects had implicitly activated the panopticism of the empire.
The wheels of the surveilling drive of the administration had always been in
motion, as the frustration over the inability to “detect” the infant or evidence of her
murder revealed. In this respect, female infanticide was not a unique crime.
Thuggee embodied another challenge to epistemic and political control of the British
and thwarted attempts to be deciphered. The thugs operated at various levels of the
social order; on the surface, they comprised different groups, scattered across various
parts of the country, which looted rich native merchants and strangled the victims.
On a cultural plane, they paid obeisance to the goddess Bhawani, another form of
Kali, and placed a portion of their loot before her as an offering. At a political and
judicial level, they were skilful impersonators, leading double lives, part of a

17
secretive society that never let its identity be known. And while they were feared by
native travellers, the thugs were also supported by villagers. Very rarely did the
British discover the identity of a thug; for the most part, the thugs led very
respectable lives, and belonged to all strata of society, making it impossible to
typecast them and fix them into identifiable markers. In what can just as easily be
imbricated as characteristic of the discourse of female infanticide as well, Parama
Roy remarks that “the entire discourse of thuggee is troped by figures of darkness,
mystery, inscrutability, unpredictability, and unexpected menace…”
xx
The archives
on criminality seemed to employ the same tropes of inscrutability and absence. The
space of that absence or darkness marked the refusal of totalizing constructions of
the crimes, thereby testifying to the limits of knowledge. The fantasy of omniscience
could not be realized in these crimes that were necessarily shrouded in mystery.
Of course, not all highly publicized, notorious, and peculiarly Indian crimes
presented the same blocks to colonial ethnography. Perhaps the most high-profile
custom of the colonial era, Sati reversed the hurdles and inaccessibility that
exemplified the other two practices. The public burning of the widow along with her
deceased husband’s body was disturbingly voyeuristic and lurid, but it filled the gaps
in colonial knowledge by drawing the sordid elements of cultural praxis out into the
open. As the British watched the allegedly voluntary and religiously sanctioned
custom from the sidelines with a mixture of revulsion and admiration, the ritual of
widow-burning encapsulated native society at its most traditional and most heinous.
The popularity of the custom in certain parts of the country, such as in Bengal,

18
generated troubling questions of female agency, the fate of the orphans who would
be left behind, the authenticity of the religious sanction, and so on. The Company’s
policy of non-interference into the religious and cultural praxis of the natives had
initially placed them in the role of guards at the ceremonies, who were present only
to ensure that the ceremony was conducted in accordance to the wishes of the widow
and that she wasn’t coerced into ascending on to the pyre. However, the then
governor-general, William Bentinck, disregarded that policy and abolished sati in
1829. The motive behind abolition after years of tolerating the praxis might have
revolved around the increasingly vocal presence of the missionary, who exerted a
strong influence on some officials of the Company and pressed for the education of
natives to turn them away from their own heathenism. At the same time, however,
the British were gradually assuming their role as ruler over a vast body of subjects,
and the line demarcating permissibility of a practice now focused on what was
acceptable and sanctioned within British India.
In other words, the sanctioning of a custom was implicitly contingent upon a
division between the public and the private, whereby the British, for the moment,
had the power to control what could be a part of the public sphere. In that light,
thuggee inserted a greater indeterminacy into the exertion and demonstration of
colonial power. The invisibility of the crime and its perpetrators marked the limits of
colonial power. And yet, as a crime that took place in the public and yet enclosed
space of woods and fields across the country, the murders came under the
scrutinizing and juridical gaze of the British. Sati was manifestly different from the

19
crimes perpetrated by thugs, of course. The gendered and familial nature of the
ceremony relegated it strongly within the private realm. Nevertheless, the burning of
the widow itself was a public spectacle that drew crowds of curious onlookers to
witness the ritualistic moment. The private had become the public, and the
effacement of that boundary transformed into a site where voices raised in protest,
whether in favour of the practice or in opposition to it, could wage a public battle of
legitimacy and authority. The erasure of the boundary also allowed Bentinck to
justify his own intervention into the indigenous custom. But the practice of female
infanticide posed more of a conundrum: was it a public or private crime? The
murder of the infant always took place in secrecy, in the private quarters of the
women’s zenana where no outside member was allowed access. The normality of
the murder within a register of cultural dictates coded it as a natural, mundane
occurrence in the privacy of a native home. On the other hand, the female infant’s
inclusion in the archive, despite the parents’ and the community’s insistence on
inscribing her in absence, constituted a literal historicizing of the subject, and, in
fact, signified the emergence of the female infant into the symbolic order as a subject
of and in discourse. If the subject is always already constituted, then the murder of
the female infant enters squarely into the public domain. The British focus was
diverted from deciphering the perplexing inscrutability of the crime to saving the
female infant. The difficulty of the project, however, lay precisely in locating the
infant so that she could be saved.

20
In de-scribing the female in discourse and in referring to her as an absence, I
am, on the one hand, evoking the British perception of the female infant. The
“absent” figure of the female points immediately to a not-thereness in the normal,
balanced, and post-Enlightenment rational order of things. The ensuing search for
the infant, for her missing materiality now reconfigures her absence as a
displacement. The subtext underlying this displacement reads that she is not here,
where she should be, but is doubtless included in the discursive universe of a
colonial accounting. On the other hand, the absence of the infant is also an imposed,
rhetorical void that is emptied of any signification. Her absence does not constitute a
rupture in the colonizer’s fantasy of complete rule, especially since, as I suggest, that
catachrestic schism is already formed by the absence of epistemological control.
Neither does her absence insert a productive break in a totalizing dominance from
which counterhegemonic signs of agency now emerge. Instead, the absence of the
female infant occupies an invisible zone at the centre of all discursive space,
emptying out meaning, signification, and comprehension.
This decentralization forecloses absolute power, domination, and
knowingness in its refusal of occupation, control, and a simplistic correspondence of
meanings. The presence of this absence in the centre eschews a dual, agonistically
articulated dialectic of colonial power relations. Instead, as a mute, fixed site of
emptiness, it necessitates the multiple points of enunciation to circle around it,
refuting any access to the centre, rejecting the locatedness and fixity of “truth.” Such
a circular, circuitous, circulating, circumambulating, circumambient circuity also

21
denies the popular subaltern and postcolonial explorations of heterogeneities,
discontinuities, and ruptures as an explorative possibility. I am not denying the
useful and exhilarating potential of these enunciative modalities. The theorization of
these schismatic articulations has revolutionized the way we read colonialism and
colonial histories. That being said, I am wary of the ready availability of these
breaks that in authorizing a focus on the agency or resistance of the subaltern
inadvertently absolve imperial encounters of their pernicious and destructive
impetus.
My initial foray into the archival collections on female infanticide revealed
the same official discourse on the murder of the infants circulating between the
various departments of “Home,” “Judicial,” “Legislative,” “General,” and “Secret
and Political.” The various documents mimic each other in the scope and thrust of
their investigation. All abound with suspicions and presumptions of the crime, its
perpetrators, and the location of the victim’s body. But at the centre of each
document lies the glaring absence of the female infant that the government was
trying to make manifest. In the absence of a tangible victim, the narratives can only
circle around that non-presence, unable to enter into the vacuum that denies all
signification to only encapsulate a nothingness. Entering into a play with that
absence would subsequently engender a breakdown and loss of meaning, devoid of
purpose and intentionality. The various narratives in the course of two or three
centuries rise steadily in a moral crescendo despite the inability in finding physical
evidence of the murder or any trace of the infant’s body. Nevertheless, each

22
narrative begets yet another narrative thread, gradually increasing the furore
surrounding the practice, tracing a never-ending circle at the centre of which remains
the absence of the female. In the unceasing, moralizing, and repetitive discourse that
circles the absent infant, the force of the cacophony pulls other narratives into its
path. Thus, the discourse becomes all-inclusive, as it moves from the official voice
of the archives to also involve rumours, translations, suspicions, observations,
statistics, novels, films, and letters.
I have structured my chapter division to mimic this tornadic model; each
chapter thus represents the additional discourse that is engendered and built upon the
preceding narrative, increasing the size and strength of that discourse, but ultimately
unable to fill that void in the centre. The title, “Archiving the Absence” refers to the
absence of the female infant in the first ring of analysis. But, apart from alluding to
the intangibility of the female infant, it also refers to her absence in native discourse,
where it is never her but her “nothingness” that is evoked. Finally, the “absence”
also points to the perceived absence of affect towards the female infant, of mourning
her death, and of a belief in the sacredness of a female life. My examination of
particular records from the archives thus engages with the way that British
investment in suppressing female infanticide sought to negate these different kinds
of absences and make them present. As a result, the investigation of female
infanticide in nineteenth-century British India, aimed at filling these absences,
emphasized discovery (of the female infant’s body and, hence, of the crime),
iterative discourses that drew the infant back from the silences into which she was

23
confined, and suitable forms of punishment. All three modes, if successful, would
hopefully create an emotional bond between the parents and their infant daughter,
thereby abolishing female infanticide as a practice. But the authorization of this
kind of power and demand for transparency from the colonized also marked a site of
tension and negotiation between the consolidation of British power in India and the
threat to that power.
Chapter one contextualizes the nineteenth-century importance accorded to
detecting the crime and punishing its perpetrators through an analysis of British
observations of native customs. These observations were crucial to the construction
of the colony as an ethnographic state and provided the first uncertain and yet
confident steps in the construction of otherness that was knowable within a visual
register. The uneven political dynamics of the gaze ensured that all the British
settlers, and not just the officials, could participate in observing the native and fixing
him/her in writing. To that end, I am looking at representations from three
seemingly disparate groups – the traveller, the missionary, and the official. While
each of the groups deserves individual and extensive focus, my interest in this
chapter is to look at the ways the different narratives came together in constructing
and representing the sensationalized barbarous customs of the natives. While the
systemic murder of female infants can conceivably be included within the purview of
the sensational practices of the natives, it differed in its inaccessibility to the gaze.
Nevertheless, for the British to engage with infanticide at all, the savagery of the
native had to first be established. The discourses that I am touching upon in this

24
chapter are drawn largely from the first three decades of the nineteenth century. But
the play of “observing” the natives continued throughout the course of the century
and established itself as the baseline against which all other discourses could be
propped.
If the first chapter analyzes the initial, tentative look at native life and its
vagaries through the eyewitness accounts of the traveller and the disinterested
observer, chapter two continues where the first chapter ends – with Walker’s
observation on infanticide among the Jahrejah Rajputs. Using the English
translations of native texts and testimonials as a point of departure, the chapter looks
at the way translations functioned to the advantage of the apologists of colonialism.
The correspondence between the British and the Indians often included oral
testimonials, which was written down/recorded, and then finally translated. The
many-sided configuration of a conversation between two people entailed a cultural
translation from the idiom of one country to that of another. The interpretations as a
result of the (mis)translations led to inferences on the nature, method, and ubiquity of
the practice of infanticide. Finally, I look at the way members of the educated Indian
bourgeoisie inserted an indeterminacy into the divide between English and regional
languages by functioning as intermediaries and interpreters in their own right.
The steady increase in the concern, shock, and murmurings over the crime
of infanticide is traced through chapter two and also through chapter three, which
examines the archives of the British government in India through the specific lens of

25
archival memory and even archive-as-memory. In this chapter, I focus mainly on the
legislative documents and the secret and political diaries that are part of the archives
of the British government in India. The language of the archive vacillates between
threat and placation and between religious and political discourse. Through an
examination of history, memory, and the archive, I explore the way language
sustains the horror of female infanticide by looking into the relentless focus accorded
to the practice in the guise of surveillance, statistics, negotiations, and proposed
regulations. I focus especially on the way that mourning, or rather its absence, was
implicated in the presumed historicity of infanticide as well as in the semantic
nuances of the language used to articulate the crime itself. The absence of mourning
was also bound to the absent body of the female infant – the crime apparently existed
but there was no victim to be found. The difficulty in detecting the crime and
identifying the perpetrators mimicked the fear of unrest and the fragmentation of
power from within, both of which necessitated the panopticism of the Empire.
The discourse of archive was a gendered and androcentric one – it was
constituted by British officials and centred for the large part on native men as well.
The archive on female infanticide testifies to this relentless emphasis on the actions
and the perceived criminality of the Rajput men. In chapter four, I look into the
subtle but radical shift into considerations of female criminality as the archival
attention deviated from the focus on the murder of female infants alone to engage
with the private-public murders of illegitimate infants by their mothers. I look into

26
the varying construction of the native woman as passive victim, compliant
accomplice, and active perpetrator. Evaluating the post-1870 shift into a debate on
the murder of illegitimate infants, the chapter is at once an examination of the female
body – that of the infant as well as of the murdering/victimized mother – as a
channel through which androcentric discourse is articulated and of the curious and
sudden end to discussion on female infanticide. Sixty years after Col. Walker wrote
his report on the prevalence of the crime among a particular group of Rajputs, the
concern over the persistence of the crime had reached an indignant climax. The
resolution of the murder of these illegitimate infants served to assuage some of that
simmering tension, while simultaneously feeding the horror of native culture and the
brutality the latter gave rise to.
Chapter five reveals the noisy, uneven, and unclear build-up of two centuries
of discursive circulation through an analysis of cinematic and media narratives of
female infanticide in present-day India. The chapter broadens the scope of the
dissertation by engaging with narratives of female infanticide in contemporary India,
but also reveals the convergences in the discourses on the crime. The increasing
media and governmental attention accorded to the practice of female foeticide and
infanticide in the past couple of years stands testimony to the gravity of the situation.
The failure of legislations in stemming the practice has led to cinema and television
taking on the responsibility of education, awareness, and prevention. Hindi films
such as Matrubhoomi (A Nation without Women) and proposed soap operas dealing

27
with the gender preference that is ubiquitous in the country aim at redressing the
cultural devaluation of women. In this concluding chapter, I continue to explore
the culture of mourning in the twenty-first century and engage with the persistence of
that absence in the centre and the inability to make it manifest. The discursive
tornado continues to build up into a cacophony of discourses, but the female infant
continues to be conspicuous by her absence.
In proposing this tornadic model to read the discursive engagement with
female infanticide, I am not rejecting an alternate conception of the colonial
encounter. However, I believe that it might be reductive for us to appropriate
existing theoretical models for all examinations or analyses of imperialism.
Similarly, the circular formulation of narratives on female infanticide might not be a
productive way to reconceive the discourse surrounding other forms of violence such
as thuggee or even gendered one such as sati. But in proferring the circuit-ry of
colonial dynamics as opposed to the jagged lines of heterogeneous relations or linear
and hierarchical binaries, the availability of different models of analysis reveal
power relations to be even more complex. The myriad of ways of conceptualizing
colonial politics demonstrates in that multiplicity the impossibility of finding the
panacea to understanding and decoding the historical past and to unravel the fiction
of that encounter.
I am not seeking to prove or disprove the existence of the crime. In referring
to the fiction of colonialism or the fiction that the archives generate, my project

28
doesn’t attempt to demystify the discursive circuity to now reveal the “historical
truth” about female infanticide. Indeed, despite, perhaps falsely, having aligned my
work as yet another archival strand, I am not writing a history of infanticide in
nineteenth-century India. The discursive representations of infanticide that I
examined have interpellated me into different reader-positions. Through my own
acts of translation and interpretation of the different texts, I have entered into the
circular fray of the discursive tornado that I suggest characterizes the writing on
infanticide. My goal is not to fill the emptiness in the centre through the imposition
of a particular reading; in fact, in revealing my shifting enunciative positions vis-à-
vis the various forms of writing – positions that I have elsewhere delineated as those
of the bystander, team-member, and chief investigator – I hope I have succeeded in
eschewing a monist account of infanticide in India. What I am trying to engage with,
however, is what Homi Bhabha has already noticed in Frantz Fanon’s writing – that
the British encounter with infanticide was not characterized by the establishment of
the “truth,” whatever that may be, but through gossip, paranoia, disgust, rumour,
speculation, and rather imperfect statistics. Each of these hermeneutic strategies
substitutes for the truth of the practice, but when brought together into a cohesive,
albeit motley, archival collage, they immediately constitute their own evidence.

29
Intro.3 Setting the Limits
My own discursive analysis of the practice of infanticide is routed primarily
through the official archives of the East India Company and British government in
India, which gave primacy to the judicial and legislative voice of the British
administrator and his interactions with the vast body of native peoples. Within such
a reading, the discourse fashions particular constructions of the various colonized
peoples as “subject” and, in so doing, reveals the emergence of the British official –
whether deliberately or inadvertently – in his capacity as “ruler.”
xxi
The shifts
between homogeneity and heterogeneity, between sameness and difference collapse
the boundaries that might lie between them and thus often overlap or become
unclear. A clear delineation among indigenous groups, such as the particular
families suspected of committing infanticide is almost immediately complicated by a
reference to the need for surveillance over “castes,” “villages,” or “the Rajputs.” As
Veena Talwar Oldenburg shows in her examination of infanticide in Punjab, the
British focused on particular communities and ignored others based on a complex
network of political and economic exigencies. In the course of the next five
chapters, I hope to complicate the dichotomous understanding of “them” and “us” by
revealing its flimsiness and yet, persistence.
To engage with British colonialism in India through binary relations of power
is, of course, simplistic, reductive, and inaccurate. To reflect for a moment on the
lowest common denominators of identification, the heterogeneity of the indigenous
population was inflected to a great degree by questions of class, religion, and gender,

30
each of which influenced their opinions and outlook. In addition, other factors such
as urban versus rural populations, education, and the extent to which the British
presence penetrated or was felt in that area, all played a role in creating distinct
subjectivities. In the same vein, I have only occasionally engaged with the different
groups of natives as belonging to “elite” versus “subaltern” classes. The difficulty in
demarcating the boundary between the two arises out of the necessary porosity of
these categories. Very rarely does someone occupy a fixed position of “the
subaltern” or “the elite” – as relational performative categories, the allocation of
subjects into these two group identifications demands constant attention to even
slight changes in the boundaries of that category. Differences in caste played an
important role in demarcating perceptions, ideologies, and praxis. The archival use
of the term “caste” in relation to female infanticide is often confusing and is used
alternately with “tribe.” It seems doubtful whether the reference is to the varna
system, or if the British were alluding to sub-sects within a caste. Since the British
understanding of the term “caste” was polysemic and is peripheral to my analysis, I
will not be seeking to decipher those nuances.
xxii

Similarly, the colonizers were an equally motley group of settlers separated
by class, religious denomination, and gender, with varying and often contrasting
perceptions of the colony and its peoples, modes of administration, religious beliefs,
and so on. The role of the settler in his capacity as official of the East India
Company or the British government varied considerably from that of the spouse or
sibling of the official, and still further from the missionary or traveller in the country.

31
Indeed, the reader might find the almost complete absence of the missionary in this
work to be a glaring omission. The missionaries had an increasingly pervasive and
influential presence in India in the nineteenth century. The problem of female
infanticide and human sacrifice, especially child sacrifice, was fundamentally a
moral one. It furnished indisputable proof of the barbarism of the natives and
labeled them as heathen. The root of this savage behaviour lay in their religion, the
reasoning went, and the crimes would continue unabated save for a turn towards
Christianity. In a narrative which closely parallels that of Josephine Butler,
xxiii
a
British official, Mr. Campbell, describes the success story of Ootama, a potential
victim of sacrifice who was rescued by the British and who then turned to a life of
Christ. Her rejection of false idolatry and subsequent acceptance of Christ made her
disposition more “lovely and tractable” and she prayed, along with several of her
companions, for the “conversion of their school fellows and the heathen around.”
xxiv

J. W. Shank, a Mennonite missionary, encapsulated the worthy task of the
missionary:
He opposes slavery, polygamy, cannibalism, and infanticide. He teaches the
boys to be honest, sober, and thrifty; the girls to be pure, intelligent, and
industrious. He induces the natives to cover their nakedness, to build
houses…It is hard to overthrow the long established heathenism, but slowly it
yields to the new power and the beginning of civilized society gradually
appears. In every country where mission work has been done we find that the
first lasting changes for a higher social order began through missionary
effort.
xxv

32
The education of the natives was imperative with the penultimate aim being the
realization of their own heathenism and their acceptance of the true path of
Christianity. The missionaries’ approach to suppressing the crime was perhaps at
odds with the official measures to combat the crime and deserves to be studied
further but is currently outside the scope of this project.
My own focus begins at the point of the perceived failure of the missionary, a
point that also marked the prominent entry of the British official. The more
draconian and punitive measures of the British were couched – as with the
missionaries – in the language of “saving” the natives. The purported aim was to
uplift the people, to erase difference, and to fashion the natives their own likeness.
The efforts were widely commended, even by such critics of imperialism as Karl
Marx who called the dissolution of an entire community of artisans the “only social
revolution in Asia” because although seemingly innocuous, these communities were
the foundation of “Oriental despotism.”
xxvi
The native represented the “degradation
of man” in his “brutalizing worship of nature,”
xxvii
in his belief in superstition, and in
his blind faith in an external locus of control. He prostrated himself before deities in
the form of monkeys and cows and turned wilfully away from reason and rational
thought. Although detractors like Marx and Engels disapproved of colonialism as a
form of bourgeois control, they nevertheless considered it beneficial in ameliorating
society and social conditions. India’s history, even in Marx’s view, was a history of
colonialisms from which it could not emerge. However, British imperialism held out
the promise of bringing the colony into a European linear historical trajectory.

33
Liberation was possible after all, but only through the modernizing presence of the
British.
The British presence in India comprised of English, Scottish, Irish, and
Welsh soldiers, administrators, and missionaries. For the most part, however, I have
subsumed all differences under the larger rubric of “British.” My focus in this
dissertation has remained on the complex relations between colonizer and colonized,
and, as such, I have not engaged with the differences in belief and approaches of the
different nations in Britain. I have occasionally made reference to the settlers and
rulers as “English,” but this is reflective of their own reference to and acceptance of
that categorization, to distinguish themselves from the people over whom they
ruled.
xxviii
Another conflation in my work is that between the East India Company
and the Crown rule. I have not signalled the change of power from the hands of the
East India Company and have generally referred to it as the British government in
India. Only while drawing a distinction between the policies and practices of the
Company with those of the government in England, or with those of the later
government in India, have I actually specified the difference between the two. As I
have already mentioned, the change in rule did not have a significant impact on the
kind of discourse that female infanticide generated. I have attributed any perceptible
change to the mutinous events of 1857; for the most part, however, the archive
maintained a semblance of continuity in terms of the direction and impetus of its
investigation.

34
While referring to the events of 1857, I have used the colonialist term,
“Mutiny of 1857,” rather than the nationalist “First War of Indian Independence,” or
other terms in usage like the “Great Rebellion”
xxix
since my analysis focuses
specifically on colonial discourse. The shift in policy post-1857/58 reflected a
perception of that tumultuous time as a “mutiny” – an insubordination of and
challenge to British rule. For the same reason, I am also not referring to it as “Sepoy
Mutiny” alone, even though that is how many documents from the period referred to
it. The events of 1857 are incidental in my work – I am not engaging with the events
per se, but with the aftermath of that rebellion and with the effects they generated,
specifically in the reification of castes, construction of the subject, and so on. As I
hope to show, the British paranoia in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny that
such a challenge would resurface and the urgency to remain prepared for that
unhoped-for event created a vocabulary of surveillance and omniscience. The need
of the hour was the accessibility of the native as a transparent object of knowledge.
Since I am engaging with colonialist rhetoric, to refer to that pivotal time as the
“First War of Indian Independence” would, I believe, require explanation. My
choice of term is not necessarily a reflection of my own personal or political
investment in the term, but it does relate to an investment in historical and stylistic
continuity. I hope this disclaimer here also justifies not encasing the term within
quotes, which are understood to be implicit.

35
A holistic picture of the colonial encounter, if such a picture can even exist,
would engage with the perspectives of the heterogeneous populations on all sides
and from all factions of that imperial contact. My work doesn’t claim to take into
account the nuances and complexities of the interactions between the groups of
British settlers/rulers and Indians populations. Indeed, it doesn’t do so even in the
context of female infanticide. As Dirks has pointed out in the coda to his work on
castes in colonial India, historical examinations of the colonial archive in recent
years have revealed the extent to which England didn’t actually manage to “conquer”
India as much as gain control through a fortuitous mixture of disturbances on the
political scene and the support of some dominant groups of Indians. In addition, just
as the Brahmin pundits comprised an influential presence at the level of
administrative understandings of tradition,
xxx
there was a concomitant presence of
native traders and capitalists who played a supporting, though important, role in
consolidating British presence in India. A historical account of female infanticide
would have to take into account questions of property, land revenue, and taxation.
But in focusing solely on the archival narratives of infanticide, I have thus chosen to
limit my analysis to that discourse and the construction, history, and suppression of
the crime that it provides.

36

Notes:

i
This paternalistic and charitable view was not shared by everyone or towards all women, for that
matter. The rhetoric of the “fallen woman” often included perceptions of sexual irresponsibility,
disregard for human life, and an absence of maternal feelings.

ii
Extract from Sales Koran Preliminary discourse Page 174 Edition 1801 by T.Maiden Sherbourne
Lane. Secret and Political Department. Diary no. 228, 1808, dated Bombay Castle, 31
st
March 1808.
Post Scriptum to Major Walker’s letter of the 15
th
March 1808 on Infanticide.

iii
Queen Victoria’s nine-year observance of mourning after the death of her husband can well be
characterized as excessive. There was a similarly considerable outpouring of grief at the death of
Princess Charlotte in 1817, though one might justify the grief at the death of a public figure,
especially that of a princess and of her infant, as also encasing the grief at the loss of a future leader.

iv
In what might be construed as the particular legacy of Romanticism and Evangelicalism, Jalland
adds, “They [the early and mid-Victorians] were able to give full scope to their expression. They
were able to talk and write freely of their sorrow as well as their joy and their love, with a simple
sincerity. They were not shy about expressing the depth of their suffering in tears and in words, with
varying degrees of restraint depending on family circumstances […] There was an acceptable range of
expressive behaviour, which could include public displays of extreme grief.” Death in the Victorian
Family (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 4-5.

v
The acceptance of death as part of “divine providence” (Jalland, 51) was especially true of early and
mid-Victorians, who still subscribed to an evangelical model of “good death” (ibid., 8). At the same
time, “Victorian parents sometimes idealized the deaths of grown-up children because children over
ten were expected to live out their natural life-span and parents’ emotional investment in them was
great” (ibid., 39).

vi
Ibid., 24

vii
Jane Eyre, Persuasion (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2006).

viii
James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York and London:
Routledge, 1994).

ix
Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca and London: Cornell
UP, 1995), 63.

x
Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder & British Culture: 1720-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
UP, 2006), 123.

xi
Ibid., 124.

xii
Ibid., 123.

xiii
George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 394, 404.

xiv
Ibid., 425.

37

xv
McDonagh, 143.

xvi
Margaret L. Arnot, “The murder of Thomas Sandles: meanings of a mid-nineteenth-century
infanticide.” Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000
(England and Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002), p.160.

xvii
Dana Rabin, “Bodies of Evidence, states of mind: infanticide, emotion and sensibility in
eighteenth-century England.” Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and
Concealment, 1550-2000 (England and Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002), p.76.

xviii
The Company’s and particularly the then Governor-General’s, Lord Dalhousie’s, expansionist
policies and rapid conquest or acquisition of territories was thought to be the underlying cause behind
the discontent. Kingdoms were annexed on some pretext or the other; for instance, those princely
states where the King and Queen didn’t have a child of their own were stopped from adopting an heir
to the throne, and their kingdom was immediately brought under the rule of the British. The
annexation of Oudh (Awadh) caused the greatest dissatisfaction. The immediate cause, however, of
the “Sepoy Mutiny” had to do with the religious and cultural debasement of the native soldiers. The
cartridges of the Enfield rifles were covered in a combination of grease, pig fat, and cow fat that the
soldiers had to remove with their hands and teeth. Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike revolted against
this practice that went against the dictates of their respective religions.

xix
Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
UP, 2001), 43. Dirks adds, “The colonial state believed that the reasons behind the revolt were less
political than they were anthropological, and that the primary basis of its rule had now to be found in
a comprehensive ethnographic knowledge of custom, religion, caste, and character” (143).

xx
Parama Roy, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Los
Angeles: UC Press, 1998), 54.

xxi
In choosing to read the narratives of female infanticide in nineteenth-century India through the lens
of discourse analysis, I am particularly cognizant of Lata Mani’s definition of the term. In the
introduction to her important work on Sati in colonial India, Mani outlines the work within colonial
discourse analysis as having “documented how particular conceptions of history, community, identity,
labor, and sexuality emerged under colonial domination, how colonial policy was shaped by them,
and the shifts they represented from precolonial forms […] The object of colonial discourse analysis
has not, however, solely been the ‘Other’ of the West. Part of what was at stake in the production of
the colonized Other was the simultaneous construction of the Western Self, to whom the Other was
variously an alter ego, underground self, and repository of irreducible cultural and/or racial
difference.” Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: UC Press, 1998), 3.

xxii
For more information on this topic, refer to Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the
Making of Modern India; Ronald Inden, Imagining India.

xxiii
Butler brought home “ruined” young women and saved them from dying in disgrace by turning
them towards Christ. In her sketches of these young women, “Marion,” “Emma” and others, all the
women gain spiritual insight and evince hope of salvation. They never return to their previous sordid
lives, but continue to remain with Butler, dying, ultimately, in a state of grace.

xxiv
General Baptist Missionary Society Report, 1860, p.30.

38

xxv
Quoted in Saurabh Dube, Stitches on Time: Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles (Durham
and London: Duke UP, 2004), 32-33.

xxvi
Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, On the National and Colonial Questions: Selected Writings (Ed.
Aijaz Ahmad. New Delhi: LeftWord, 2001), 65.

xxvii
Ibid.

xxviii
In the editor’s introduction to James Mill’s The History of British India (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 1975), William Thomas points out that in the text, James Mill
always “calls the servants of the East India Company English, though many were Scots, especially
when the company’s fortunes were presided over by their countryman, Henry Dundas” (xvi).

xxix
In his masterful analysis of caste in India, Nicholas Dirks refers to the battles of 1857 as the Great
Rebellion. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.

xxx
In the nineteenth-century, Brahmin pundits were often called upon – such as in judging the validity
of the delineation of sati as religious praxis – to interpret scriptures and codify religion, leading to,
what some scholars have called, a Sanskritization of traditions and religious customs.

39

Observing Observances: the Ethnography of Infant-Murder
The earliest knowledge of Indians, their customs, and religions that the
British had access to preceded the famed Orientalist translations of the late
eighteenth-century writers by a few centuries. Fantastic tales of despotic kings,
exotic women, and barbarous practices had infiltrated popular European imagination
and constructed an undeniable disidentification with the Indian. Even when British
scholars of native languages confessed to a strong fascination with Sanskrit and
Persian literary, religious, and political thought, it was almost always an ontological
characteristic of that difference that was being exoticized. The writers’ entry into the
discursive practices of the Indians – specifically, of the Hindus – was nevertheless
conducted from the relatively firm vantage-point of European rationality and an
equally secure faith in the superiority of Christian principles. At the same time, as
P.J. Marshall points out, such stability of faith in reason and religion might have
been made possible by a perceived disjuncture between “popular Hinduism,”
comprising of innumerable cults that didn’t perform the letter of the religious law,
and “philosophical Hinduism,” which included a few sound “metaphysical
assumptions and ethical doctrines” that shared some similarity with Western
presumptions.
i

But it was the Hindu conflation of mythology with reality and the belief in
the historical authenticity of these extraordinary tales – almost in complete contrast
to the scriptural assertion of a single divine will or consciousness – that allowed
40

British translators to co-opt this intellectual interest within the fold of imperial
curiosity. Of course, this in no way suggests a uniform perception and reception of
texts demarcated as constituting some of the many sacred texts of the Hindu religious
tradition. Different writers approached the texts with varying degrees of scepticism,
admiration, revulsion, and incredulity. If some writers cautioned the readers of the
preposterous nature of some of the claims and fables, others, such as Warren
Hastings, realized that the imposition of a European standard of rationality, morality,
and reality would not translate in the reading of a starkly different cultural text.
ii

These prefatory disclaimers by Sanskrit and Persian scholars in the East India
Company were aimed at creating a deeper understanding of the colony and its
peoples, albeit in the interests of better efficiency of government. This was
especially true once the evangelical mission started gaining increasing influence
among the Board of Company Directors. Under the watchful eyes of Charles Grant
and William Wilberforce, and the seemingly differing groups of evangelicals and
utilitarians, translations of native texts continued – but it was perhaps more in the
service of critiquing false idolatry rather than of developing a complex understanding
of it.
An inadvertent result of the translations of these texts on religious precepts,
administration, and governance that purported to shed light on “Hindu” beliefs was
that they subsumed the various sub-sects, communities, and tribes under the
monolithic religious and cultural umbrella of “the Hindu” and helped establish the
41

predominance of Sanskrit texts and Brahminical rites. The unified conception of
“the Hindu” or “Hinduism” in the British imagination was viewed through the lens
of a dominant textuality that promulgated immutable dictates and which enforced a
particular identity on its practitioners. Writings from missionary tracts in the early
decades of the nineteenth-century confirming this sense of coherence only fuelled
this perception; incredible mythological tales and Brahminic value-systems of
judgment suddenly appeared to exert a totalizing influence on all Hindus.
Superstition and prejudice became a characteristic feature of the Hindu mind, and a
barbarous practice was evidence of criminality that was endemic within religious
structures. But all these opinions enjoyed an air of authenticity since they arose out
of observations of native life at close quarters. Even translations of Sanskrit texts
were rarely completed in isolation. In fact, the Brahmin pundit became an
indispensable tool in delineating the boundaries of “Hinduism;” indeed, during
moments of doubt, it was to the pundit that the translators turned for clarification on
specific transliterations and interpretive paradigms.
Much of the work of translations were produced and circulated towards the
end of the eighteenth-century, but it was in keeping with the overall imperial desire
of constituting the native subject as knowable. In his work on the interconnections
between the reification of caste and the British governmental archives, Nicholas
Dirks argues that “The history of the nineteenth century in India is the history of
desperate attempts to fix an inchoate and uncolonizable place in textual form: texts
42

of propriety title, legal procedure, customary tradition, ultimately of claims to
political sovereignty itself.”
iii
The early vestiges of that history became evident at
the turn of the nineteenth-century itself, whereby the later attempts to fix the colony
in text were complemented in the Orientalist attempt to constitute and fix the colony
through text. The corpus of knowledge on Indians and their culture was mediated
primarily through a textual route such that the interactions with the colonized
peoples were often restricted to those natives belong to the upper strata of indigenous
society. Again, since the reading and interpretation of these texts comprised an
esoteric knowledge that could only circulate within the strongly defined boundaries
of Brahminism,
iv
it was with these men of letters that the British scholars chose to
communicate.
The privilege accorded to the Brahmins stemmed from the hierarchical social
order of caste divisions that was peculiar to India. As I have already mentioned in
the introduction, the definition of “caste” and the demarcation of its boundaries was
a disputed category and became a repository of meanings concerning any kind of
community-based divisions among the natives. Thus, “caste” as a descriptive
category of difference was often used interchangeably with tribe, sub-sect, clan, race,
and so on. Most historians now agree that there was a tremendous importance
accorded to caste divisions in the nineteenth-century and the entrenchment of those
divisions might well have been affiliated with a similar reification of principles,
attitudes, rituals, and customs under the rubric of “Hinduism.” My interest in this
43

section in questions of caste relate more generally to its relation to female
infanticide, and the particular way that the mythic origin of infanticide drew upon
this hierarchy to put forth an apology for the prevalence of the crime.
To present a quick, schematic, and grossly oversimplified delineation of caste
in accordance with the principles of the varna system, I would like to point out its
characterization in colonial discourse as a social hierarchy that also doubled within a
structural framework of labour. Accordingly, the four main caste divisions
comprised of the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, and the Shudras. The
Brahmins, comfortably placed at the apex of the social pole, technically comprised
the priestly class, although they could perform any occupation except menial labour,
which was reserved for the Shudras alone. The Kshatriyas, to which the infanticidal
Rajputs belonged, were the martial caste, and the Vaishyas were the merchants and
traders. Caste members had choice in the kind of occupation they were placed in or
performed as long as it didn’t fall within the traditional scope of the higher caste.
Only the Shudras were thought to be condemned to live out their lowly existence
with no possibility of social mobility. The respect that each of the castes
commanded also varied, with the Brahmins alleged to be the most revered group and
the Shudras the most reviled.
v

Mythically, all four castes were said to have originated from Brahma – the
Creator in the Hindu Trinity – and the division of labour corresponded to the part of
his body that each sprung from. Thus, the Shudras were forced to engage in menial
44

labour alone and live a life of servitude since they sprung forth from his feet. The
Vaishyas came forth from his belly (or thigh, in some versions), the Kshatriyas from
his arms (or heart, both parts representing strength and courage respectively), and the
Brahmins from his head (or mouth, and thus associated with speech and learning).
The Brahmins, associated indelibly with learning and knowledge, were also thus
entrusted with the task of guarding that knowledge and serving as the intermediaries
or mediators who guarded the metaphysical truths contained in the religious texts
and who disseminated a performative Hinduism for the mass of people in terms of
prescription of rituals, customs, and praxis.
The distrust of the Brahmin was related directly to the position of power that
he enjoyed by virtue of belonging to the highest caste alone. Though he might have
been a despised figure among the natives, the Brahmin priest was indispensable in
the ritualistic praxis of Hinduism. The records of the nineteenth-century construct a
much more complex figure of the Brahmin priest as alternately scholarly,
obsequious, deceptive, religious, gentle, and so on. The caste system was a relic of a
barbarous culture that freely allowed upper castes to exploit their position and power
and forced others to a life of servitude. David Cannadine, on the other hand,
suggests that the nineteenth-century stratification of Indian society through the caste
system was an “attractive” one for the British since it corresponded so closely to the
“carefully ranked domestic status hierarchy” of their own, thus rendering Indian
society that much more familiar.
vi
Cannadine’s view resonates to a greater extent
45

with that of British scholars in the second half of the late eighteenth-century, who
seemed to have had a generally favourable impression of Brahmin pundits and who
were, in fact, in awe of the latter’s prowess and learning, not the least of which was
because many of the pundits gave instruction to the writers in Sanskrit.
One might speculate that the diminishing respect for the learning of the
Brahmin pundit in nineteenth-century British India had to do with a dismissal of
Hindu treatises as a legitimate object of knowledge and with a lessening interest in
gaining a textual knowledge of the natives as opposed to an ethnographic one.
Viewed from another perspective, there was greater pressure on the government in
the nineteenth-century to append the ameliorative project of civilizing the natives to
an extant system of governance. The focus that had to now be accorded to civilizing
the colonized brought into sharp relief the rhetoric of “saving” the natives from the
barbarous customs that indigenous society had mandated. While Brahminic
authority was still invoked in matters pertaining to religious injunctions, the attention
was increasingly diverted to the violence inflicted on or specific to subaltern groups;
the practices of sati, hook-swinging, infanticide, thuggee, and human sacrifices,
which were already a subject of interest among the British officials, now became a
matter of legislative priority. It was this focus that was missing in the eighteenth-
century. In that Orientalist fascination and admiration for the learning of the native
peoples, the subaltern peoples evaded the interest and intellectual enquiry of the
administration.
46

At the same time, there was a different construction of knowledge-structures
called into play in the privileging of writing over a visual ethnography. Both forms
of understanding the universe of the local hinged on an observational field, where the
native was place squarely as an object of knowledge to be studied. In emphasizing
writing as the mode of accessing that knowledge, the Orientalists – and
paradoxically, utilitarians like James Mill – positioned the national, collective past as
the lens of observation through which one could study the present. In other words,
the past became the formative enterprise, which, through the reifying process of
internalization of religious maxims and precepts, could shed light on the present of a
people. Writing, as a medium and as a legacy of the past, thus sufficed in providing
a composite and accurate picture of the colonized. James Mill, whose highly
influential The History of British India confessed to the ambitious task of charting a
history of an entire people, had never visited India prior to the publication of the
book. In a move that appears to anticipate criticism on his pretensions to write a
history without having visited the place, Mill avers:
Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India, can be expressed in writing. As
soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly
qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in
England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use
of his eyes and his ears in India. As soon as the testimony is received of a
sufficient number of witnesses, to leave no room for mistake from the partial
or the erroneous statements which they may have separately made, it is
hardly doubtful, that a man, other circumstances being equal, is really better
qualified for forming a correct judgment on the whole, if his information is
totally derived from the testimony, than if some little portion of it is derived
from the senses.
vii

47

Mill’s conviction that India could be adequately represented through writing
alone conveys a certain fixedness of the colony. By that, I mean on the one hand that
a certain temporal fixity was assumed about India – whatever was “worth” knowing
about the country could be gleaned from its past itself and the past alone. Naturally,
this suggested either that the values and customs of the past still held sway in the
contemporary moment, or that contemporary practices all arose from the same
reservoir of the collective past. But I am also using fixedness to refer to finitude of
thought. The vastness, inscrutability, and complexity of “ancient” thought, praxis,
and life could be contained within the concise bounds of Mill’s writing. It is
significant and reflective of the rise of a certain annoyance with the Orientalist
excitement that Mill’s History became required reading for the India-bound
employee of the East India Company. Armed with the knowledge that Mill
provided, the newly-minted officials of the Company perhaps felt that they had now
obtained sufficient knowledge about the colony over which they were to govern. But
Mill wasn’t merely alluding to writing as the ideal inroad into knowing a culture; the
efficacy of writing as a medium was contrasted with the untrustworthiness of
observation as a mode of epistemological construction. Or perhaps he was hinting at
an artifice or exoticism that cloaked the country, rendering any idea formed through
sensory reception to therefore be inaccurate and deceptive. Irrespective of how one
chooses to read his words, Mill’s text appears to advocate distance between the
officials and the country whose governing they oversaw.
48

Like Mill, the Orientalists in the late eighteenth-century also preferred the
textual route in attempting to understand native culture, but they viewed that
textuality as much more than a means to a pragmatic end. In casting an enthusiastic
glance towards the rich literature that emerged out of an ancient past, the Orientalists
accepted the splendour of ancient Indian civilization as a culture that had been so
advanced as to leave an extensive record of its presence in writing. To continue with
that line of thought, an acceptance of the literature as proof of civilization also meant
that the British would have to grant Indians a developed and nuanced conception of
history, which – especially when seen in light of its quality of thought and its claims
to antiquity – not only preceded western civilization but was far superior to it. Such
a proposition of advancement, however, was strikingly at odds with the state of
affairs during the advent of the British and the ease with which the Bengalis
capitulated to and accepted British rule. Despite boasting of a literature that had
captured the Romantic European imagination, the Indians didn’t truly evince a sense
of collective history. They weren’t initiated into a European ideal of the nation as
yet; in fact, the “Indianness” of Indians as a marker of collective identity was largely
a nineteenth-century British conferral and interpellation. “India” existed as a colony
before it did as a nation.
In the eighteenth-century, the colony comprised of numerous princely
kingdoms, and regional, linguistic, and cultural differences that created markedly
different socio-economic and political conditions. Britain’s own pattern of
49

expansion in the colony was uneven – where some princely states easily conceded
power and others resisted – though it steadily brought much of the country under its
power, helped in no small measure by political disturbances signalled by infighting
and an absence of collective nationalism and national identity. These political
circumstances belied the wealth of thought contained in its historical texts. British
administrators – Orientalists, evangelicals, utilitarians, and liberals alike – reached
the common conclusion that regardless of the merit of the texts themselves, India
was in a state of decline, and its golden age was relegated to the past. The country
had to be rescued from this downward spiral, and that task of rescue and restoration
fell upon the British. But where the eighteenth-century Orientalists might have
assumed that as a responsibility to revert to the golden age, albeit a renewed one that
fit the parameters of European progress, the same task viewed a century later was
resignified as the civilizing mission.
In opposition to the historical development or decline of the country was the
emphasis on the contemporary performance of the people’s identity. In conferring
pre-eminence to the ‘now’ of the praxis of the colonized, the nineteenth-century
emphasis on census returns, observations, testimonies, and negotiations refigured the
past as an unstable marker of continuity. This still drew upon Mill’s surreptitious
allusion to, what I have referred to as, a fixedness of the past, to the extent that the
current practices that people coded as “custom” all drew upon an origin or sanction –
whether real or mythic – in the collective past of the community. At the same time,
50

in light of the emphasis placed on the barbarous customs of the present, the past as a
relational category was signified as a series of episodic sequentialities, such that the
present merely continued in that repetitious vein rather than following a trajectory of
development and change. In other words, irrespective of whether the overarching
narrative of the British granted the natives their claim to historicity, the past as
teleological trajectory or episodic sequentialities both necessitated the intervention of
a language of civilizing.
An observation on the barbarity of the natives often hinged on the latter’s
observance of a savage custom. The idea of “observation” itself was pulled from the
domain of the visual to also include within its increasing scope opinion, gossip,
translations of testimonies, and so on. All these different voices came together in
“observing” native customs, beliefs, and practices, and – more importantly – fixing
these observations in writing, thereby encasing the words in a neat category marked
the “truth” of the Other. Some of these observations were subsumed within official
discourse, such as Mills History, Grant’s “Observations,” or even Walker’s letter. In
addition, however, other narratives outside that of the British government in India
augmented particular perceptions, including the travel journals of some settlers and
the missionary tracts aimed at seeking conversion of the natives. All of these
narratives, at once independent and parallel discourses, nevertheless echo one
another in the simultaneous construction of “the native” or of life in the colony. In
the following sections, I will be engaging briefly with each of these narratives; these
51

“unofficial” archives of the traveller or of the missionary will then set the stage for
my engagement with the official documents of the British government in India on
female infanticide.

Chapter 1.1 Vagabondizing in India: the Unofficial Archives
The “Indianness” of the colony, in the sense of a perceived cohesiveness
among the various regions of the land and its people, was perhaps most evident
through the travel writing of the period. The settlers’ accounts of life and travel in
India – especially the narratives of English women who accompanied their husbands,
brothers, or fathers around the country – formed in many ways the unofficial, but
still gendered, archive of the British experience in the country.
viii
The record of the
experiences was maintained in some cases as a daily journal entry or as letters to
relatives and friends in England. However, in others, such as in Harriet Tytler’s
memoirs penned in the early twentieth-century, the recording was a reconstruction of
the past and was thus not only subject to errors in recollections and lacunae in
memory, but it was also a significant re-creation of the past in the questionable
veracity of details that filled gaps in memory, nostalgia, and the literary heightening
of a sense of adventure.
Regardless of when the narratives were written, however, accounts of travel
entailed a significant repackaging of the contemporary moment by subsuming it
52

within a literary mode of narrativizing. It wasn’t merely an account of one’s
experiences in a foreign land; these unofficial archival narratives were written for a
specific audience in mind – one that had presumably never been to the East. Much
of the first impressions of the country therefore focus on the contrasts with England:
we read page upon descriptive page of the oppressive heat, the muggy climes that
made one sluggish, the laziness of the Indian servants, and the tropical insects and
lizards that were a fixture in most houses. India was being represented for an
unknowing, unfamiliar, albeit curious British reader. To maintain the freshness of
that description, the strangeness and foreignness of India had to be sustained. The
representation of the colony for an English audience necessitated the representation
of difference, of an alterity that was irreconcilable and therefore, shocking.
The narratives on travel cover the gamut in terms of the experience of the
travellers, the perception of the natives – in those instances where they were a part of
the narrative – the appreciation for the countryside, and the construction of their own
identity as colonizers. In the narratives of some of the travellers, observations of the
colony and its peoples are merely incidental to the lives and interactions of the
writers. To the extent that it is mentioned at all, the colony itself often forms the
exotic backdrop against which the metropole is re-created. Isabella Fane’s journal,
which also doubled as letters to her paternal aunt, regaled with gossip about the
microsocial and imitative world of the English in India, modelled on a nostalgic
longing for the vibrant social world of London. The colony itself appears but
53

fleetingly in her writing. The differing social worlds in her case were firmly
enclosed with defined boundaries. When the natives did make their way into her
narrative, they were represented as faceless and, therefore, substitutable. In one of
her letters to her aunt – in many ways emblematic of her writing itself – the natives
seem to be included to merely embellish the bleak surroundings:
Today we reached a small station called Mynpoorie […] At four o’clock my
father inspected the handful of troop. Christine and I, and Captain Campbell,
went on an elephant to see it. I believe we must have got tipsy at dinner, we
were all three much too frolicsome for our years. The poor dear blackies
acquitted themselves beautifully, and the Europe major who commanded
them made us laugh immoderately, he had such an odd noddle of the head
every time he gave the word of command. I dare say you are surprised and
disappointed that I never mention the face of the country to you, but you must
understand there is nothing to mention. You cannot conceive anything so flat
and hideous as every particle we have up to this time travelled through. The
villages even are not worthy of mention, but consist of the most wretched-
looking mud huts, worse even, they say, than an Irish cabin, all huddled
together and most unpicturesque.
ix
[emphasis mine]

The natives in their alterity perform a negative textuality to the British presence.
Their blackness opposes the white skin of the English, and their mute presence forms
the baseline against which the gaiety of the English can now take shape. The
natives’ appearance in the textual world of the observer can only be made possible
through their exclusion from the discursive space itself. Turning the tables on the
settler observing the native, this particular narrative highlights the seemingly
empowering position of spectatorship that the Other occupies and enjoys. The
natives are present to witness the fashioning of the foreign figures as “British.”
54

Within this uncharacteristically politically scopophilic space, the native is called
upon to witness the social performance of the empire.
The discursive space of the colonial traveller, replete with descriptions of the
Indian towns and countryside as well as of the people, immediately conjures up
questions of spectatorship and witnessing. But these writings form an interesting
counterpoint to the official discourses in the archives of the Empire that would also
employ the surveilling tropes of witnessing, as we will see in the next few chapters.
A reading of the travellers’ journals summons an immediacy and present-ness to the
colonial encounter. By bringing together the settler and the native within the same
visual sphere, each reading recreates the simplicity and tensions inherent in that
encounter and relives the ordinariness of the empire. It is no longer a historical
opposition that is called into focus, but the momentary and daily transaction of a
transcultural meeting.
Undoubtedly, this coming together of colonial oppositions also reflects the
uneven allocation of power; after all, it is still the traveller’s memory and his/her
perception of that event that is being privileged. Even if the native speaks, that voice
is only heard and is only made available to the reader through the ventriloquism of
imperial discourse. The double articulation of the settler still speaks for the native.
In other words, the colonized can and does speak but only in the language of the
colonizer. At the same time, in so far as the narrative brings together antithetical
nodes of subjectivity within the same field of vision, it creates a semblance of parity
55

by allowing each subject to appropriate the gaze in his/her own turn. We might be
tempted to reach for a closed reading in this instance, especially since the only vision
afforded to us as readers who are spatio-temporally displaced from that moment, is
that of the narrator, but the seemingly disproportionate power of the gaze conceals in
its directness the reflected gaze of the Other. Thus, we not only see the native
through the eyes of the traveller, but we are also witness to the settler’s self-
construction as “British” through that pivotal return of the native’s gaze. The
narrator’s voice, rhetoric, and demeanour enact the gaze of the Other. While we are
still deprived of that directed vision of the native, we are nevertheless witness to the
displaced movement of the settler gazing at the native gazing at the settler. It is
through this exchange of the gaze – unequal though that exchange might be – that the
different subjective enunciations come to light: settler as colonizer, paternalistic
missionary, native mimic, hyperreal British, and so on.
For the most part, however, Isabella Fane’s journal documents her as the
disinterested observer, controlling the gaze and denying speech and subjectivity to
the native. In her recreation of a largely English world, the native is allowed very
few points of entry, and in general only as an embodiment of a totalizing difference.
In recounting the otherness that the British came across, the most heightened sense
of this difference attached itself to a description of native customs, especially the
more lurid, shocking ones that had already penetrated the British imagination as a
peculiarly barbarous invention and tradition of the mysterious East. Rather than
56

sensationalizing the shock of this witnessing, however, Fane and other writers, such
as Fanny Parkes, depict its naturalness in the context of the cultural ethos. This
apparent seamlessness of savagery with its placid surroundings only augmented the
horror that India incarnated – promising death or debility to the unfamiliar English
body, and murdering its own people with little or no compunction. But unlike the
missionary or the Company official, the traveller often evinced little or no surprise at
some of the more savage practices of the natives. In fact, as Fane’s journal entry
below clarifies, the rumours of such practices and the actual witnessing of the
customs provided the occasional excitement to the English official’s hostess who
had, otherwise, little to amuse herself in the colony:
We left Barrackpore today at 12 o’clock in the same nice boat in tow of the
steamer, only ourselves, and reached Calcutta about half-past three. I amused
myself both going and coming by watching for pieces of dead bodies floating
by us. I need not tell you, who read so much, of the sacred nature of the river
and how throwing their dead into it is the native means of disposing of them,
either burnt to ashes or whole and entire. My curiosity (laudable!!) was
satisfied, for I saw many good specimens – particularly on our return, for one
fine whole man floated past the window of the cabin at which I was standing,
within half a yard. We regretted much our visit was so short, but we were
obliged to return on this day as we had a large dinner – twenty-two we had,
and it went off very well. We were glad when they all said good-bye,
notwithstanding its success.
x

I have quoted this journal entry (also part of a letter) in its entirety to
highlight the flawless interlacing of the sensational with the mundane, the strange
with the familiar, and the macabre with the celebratory. The easy coexistence
between the otherwise jarring contradictions draws the entire narrative itself into the
space of the ordinary. Indeed, the entry closes with the same sense of boredom that
57

requires, during the course of a three and a half hour boat ride, a diversionary tactic
in the form of seeing cadavers in the river. The almost startling absence of a sense of
horror, misery, or sympathy is as shocking, if not more, than the floating corpses in
the water. Given that Fane travelled in India with her father – the Commander-in-
Chief – at the incipit of the Victorian period from 1835-1838, when the sensibilities
of Romantic and evangelical sentimentalism still enjoyed tremendous popularity
among the English, her clinical satisfaction at seeing “many good specimens” is
almost incredulous. The grating sequentiality of the corpse of “one fine whole man”
followed shortly afterwards by a large dinner, refutes a moralizing rhetoric and
distinctions in cultural sensibilities.
Of course, what might facilitate the absence of any horror at witnessing the
hideous transformations of death is a possible dehumanization of the native or at
least his/her depersonification. The native, in life and in death, becomes merely an
object of curiosity, but not necessarily one of enduring interest. And yet, in not
demonstrating the customary disgust or revulsion at the sight of “pieces of dead
bodies” because such occurrences were to be expected in a culture that held its rivers
to be sacred, Fane ironically reveals a lessening of the divide between the British and
the Indians in terms of a cultural translation. I say “ironically” here because the site
of the sensational doubled as the imperialist cue for asserting difference between the
Europeans and the “blackies.” Her calm acceptance and slight excitement at seeing
fine specimens of cadavers that floated past her, while still not interpellating her as
58

an Indianized Englishwoman, certainly placed her consciously in the interstitial
movement between being identified as “essentially” British and one who had been
corrupted by repeated and significant contact with the Other’s culture.
In that regard, Fane allies herself more strongly to a traveller like Fanny
Parkes, an indefatigable traveller whose husband and father both worked for the
Company, and who evinced a joy and delight in discovering more about India.
While Parkes’ narratives about India and its people also covers a spectrum of
attitudes that shift among the patronizing, exoticizing, and accepting positions of the
foreigner, she often described horrible discoveries and strange practices with perfect
equanimity. Thus, she could mention as an aside in the course of one of her journal
entries from 1836 that “When crocodiles are cut open, silver and gold ornaments are
sometimes found in the interior; the body of a child – the whole body – was found in
a crocodile, a short time ago at Cawnpore.”
xi
Or this other anecdote about a festival
honouring the goddess Kali: “Men are pointed out amongst other animals as a proper
sacrifice to K ālee: the blood of a tiger pleases her for one hundred years; the blood of
a lion, a reindeer, or a man, for one thousand years. By the sacrifice of three men
she is pleased for one hundred thousand years.”
xii
Both accounts, which might just as
well have drifted into an unrecuperable sensationalism, have a clinical, report-like
quality to them. The focus on the lurid, however desensationalized the account itself
might be, still interpellates the writer as outside the boundaries of the cultural
definitions of the mundane.
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Nevertheless, the inside-outside dichotomy might itself be redundant within a
transcultural exploration. The ideational circulation of cultural norms, mores, and
practices outside of its autochthonous geographical space rejects an enclosed,
naturally distinctive notion of “culture.” To the extent that ideas or myths
concerning Kali are already present in a people’s consciousness and they are aware –
as Isabella Fane believes of her aunt – because they “read so much, of the sacred
nature of the river and how throwing their dead into it is the native means of
disposing of them, either burnt to ashes or whole and entire,” it becomes impossible
to speak from the untainted position of the “outsider.” The traveller, then, not only
writes from a vantage-point of familiarity but also writes for an audience that is
always already familiar with that scope of violence and morbidity. The familiarity is
never the same – with each successive repetition of the image or the representation,
there is a corresponding reinforcement of that representation as “truth,” whereby
what was merely familiar before is now known. The textual creates an
acquaintanceship, and the transmission of the aural testimonial through gossip or
rumour creates a space for the familiar, but it is the eyewitness account that now
establishes the conditions that render a certain belief in knowingness possible.
The term, “observations,” encapsulates the appearance of impartiality and
objectivity. One observes what is already there, but they still demand to be recorded.
Observations are always accompanied by a form of recording, in this case, a journal.
But the recording immediately draws attention to the transience or flimsiness of that
60

observation – it must be recorded before it disappears or is replaced by another
memory. At every stage of the archiving process – observations, translations,
narratives, statistics, and so on – there is a resistance to a complete accountability
and record, which frustrates any attempt to circle the “truth” of the practice; thereby
necessitating the continuation of the recording. Each method of archiving holds out
the promise of fulfilling the fantasy of complete knowingness. But it also denies
development, evolution, and change in its object of study. One might argue, for
instance, that the nationwide decennial census returns, commenced from 1871/1872,
indicated an awareness of fluctuation, change, and movement in the conditions
surrounding the colonial peoples, but the very idea of a record suggests that the
object under investigation can be fixed as a periodic, accurate, and “true”
representation of particular time.

Chapter 1.2 Sacred Missions: the Observance of Heathenism
Although digging through the colonial past has unearthed several memoirs
and journals from the period, not all these observations paralleled the kind of
acceptance, or at least tolerance, that the writings of Fanny Parkes, Isabella Fane,
Dean Mahomet, and Harriet Tytler bore towards difference. Some of the writings
were openly antagonistic, and occasionally positively hostile, and sought to inscribe
the native in a congealed perception of otherness. The labelling of these practices of
61

knowledge under the rubric of “observations” as opposed to, say, “interactions,”
continued the fiction of distance and, therefore, difference. Even in the course of
conversations and interpersonal interactions with the various classes of Indians,
travel writers faithfully recorded their “observations” of their interlocuters. There is
a self-alienation at work here that splits the individual into two active subjects – the
speaker and the observer, whereby the former exists but only to be in the service of,
and to facilitate the work of, the latter. In engaging with that alterity and
complicating the boundaries of that zone of contact, the British writer was
nevertheless able to maintain a strangeness to the encounter by distancing the writer
from the speaker.
The travel memoir, within the private sphere, became the writing of
difference. It entailed writing an otherness into being; the act of writing was what
made the other, in his sameness and difference, ‘Other’. The same text, circulated
within the public sphere, however, at once became part of a community of texts
whose very existence presumed that there was an a priori otherness to be read, a
difference to be reiterated even in and while familiarizing the strange. The traveller,
always a Subject-in-motion, fixes his/her gaze on a moment in history. I am not
using the term “fixing one’s gaze” lightly here. The juxtaposition of the traveller –
always moving and imbibing the sensory delights of a cultural experience – and the
culture that s/he documents, inevitably forces him/her to fix on a particular moment
62

or aspect of the culture – a fixed moment, whose disjuncture from history within the
traveller’s tale creates the fiction of a land without historical precedence.
Between the British officials, who worked in the service of the East India
Company, and their family members, many of whom journeyed across the vast
terrain of the colony and noted down their impressions of the British colony, stood
the uneasy figure of the British missionary. Neither an official nor a traveller, the
missionary was an unwelcome and/because imposed figure in India’s body polity,
who apprehensively inserted a religious quotient into the lives of the officials and the
natives despite the overt policy of non-interference in the religio-cultural lives of the
subjects. His role, however unwanted, was borne out of a concern for the salvation
of non-Christian Indian souls and the overall ubiquity of heathenism that the British
were apparently having a tough time containing and ameliorating. The rise to
prominence of several evangelicals in the upper echelons of the Company meant that
missionaries were allowed to enter India in the early decades of the nineteenth-
century to aid in the civilizing mission, despite the discomfort that other officials felt.
The entry of the missionary into the political gambit of civilizing countermanded the
sole religious authority of the Brahmin pundits. More importantly, the presence of
the missionary now justified granting additional impetus to a cultural mode of
accounting for heathenism. The inauguration of the ethnographic state in India was
thus helped to a considerable degree by the provocative presence of the missionary.
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While much of the missionary zeal in writing can be discerned through the
publication of tracts and pamphlets that lamented the unrelenting heathenism of the
masses, a few instances attempted to engage with that entrenched difference from
another position of enunciation. Bishop Heber’s travel narratives, which also
doubled as letters to his wife, provide a moderate and conciliatory perspective on
native life and practices, which, while not condoning the practices, don’t always
condemn them either. Although Bishop Heber is far more generous in his views on
the Hindus, for example, than his predecessors, he shares the missionary wariness of
Hinduism itself.
xiii
His travels permit him to gain first-hand information about the
country through an observational modality of epistemological formation. But even
that knowingness has to be disavowed in the face of resistance from the native
interpreter:
…the first object which met my eyes was a pool of blood on the pavement,
by which a naked man stood with a bloody sword in his hand. The scenes
through which we had passed were so romantic, that my fancy had almost
been wound up to expect an adventure, and I felt, I confess, for an instant my
hand instinctively clench more firmly a heavy Hindoostanee whip I had with
me, the butt end of which would, as a last resource, have been no despicable
weapon. The guide, however, at the same instant, cautioned me against
treading in the blood, and told me that a goat was sacrificed here every
morning. In fact a second glance shewed me the headless body of the poor
animal lying before the steps of a small shrine, apparently of Kali. The
Brahmin was officiating and tinkling his bell, but it was plain to see, from the
embarrassment of our guide, that we had intruded at an unlucky moment, and
we therefore merely cast our eyes round the court without going nearer to the
altar and its mysteries.
xiv

The narrative moves from the watchfulness of a curious traveller to a palpable
homoeroticism to a moment of cultural otherness, which then continues with the
64

translation into another idiom, the construction of its meaning and finally a return to
the original state of curiosity. But with the awareness brought on by the construction
of a schematic framework of meaning, the return to an originary state of innocent
curiosity, if it ever existed, now becomes impossible. The truth-production of an
eyewitness testimony is itself negated in the disavowal of what was seen. The
intrusion into the private space of sacrifice must be undone to preserve the
sacredness of the ritual itself; moreover, because the ritual takes place within the
secret confines of the private realm, it is seemingly not available to the criticisms of
the missionary. In “cast(ing) [their] eyes round the court,” Heber and his guide not
only attempt to return to the now-impossible state of the innocent curiosity of the
traveller, but the avoidance of the gaze from the altar also becomes a necessary
strategy for forgetting by displacing the gaze onto another object and recording a
new impression over the erased memory trace.
The heterogeneous articulations of the British traveller in India denied
primacy to any unified conception of the British as “observer.” On the other hand,
there was comparatively more cohesion in the range of subject-positions available to
and occupied by different missionary societies in the colony. The missionary did not
enjoy unmediated access to natives even in public spaces; in attempting to turn the
natives from their own heathenism, the missionaries faced ridicule, indifference, and
hostile resistance from the natives, for which they blamed the strength of the caste
system in India. But there was a different kind of witnessing called into play in the
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missionary’s assumption of the role of “observer,” one that was denied to the judicial
official in the government and that passed by almost unnoticed in the accounts of the
traveller – the barbarous practices of the natives that were committed in the secrecy
of their apartments, such as infanticide.
One of the most powerful and condemnatory books on perceptions of native
life was the two-volume, ambitiously titled A View of the History, Literature, and
Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of their Manners and
Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works by William Ward. The
vituperative attack on Hinduism was effected by a rough translation of some of the
ideas from a motley selection of texts, and an equally condemning as well as
emotional engagement with the abusive practices of Hindus, as gleaned from his own
observations and other testimonials. Such was the popularity of his observations and
attacks that James Mill relied to a considerable extent on Ward’s analyses of Hindu
culture and tradition in publishing his own History.
xv
The overall thrust of Ward’s
discrediting of Hindu religious structures and beliefs was in keeping with the
reactionary atmosphere against an Orientalist enthusiasm for Hindu scriptures. In
that regard, it forms part of the civilizing impetus of the nineteenth-century and takes
its place with Charles Grant’s eighteenth-century publication of his “Observations on
the state of society among the Asiatic subject of Great Britain” and James Mill’s
History.
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The proof of the practice of barbarous customs like infanticide lies in Ward’s
observations and those of allegedly reputable sources. But as with Heber’s
disavowal of complete witnessing, Ward also stops short of articulating his
observations in and through language. Speaking about the awfulness of customs that
form a part of the Hindu religion and that he has personally seen, Ward exclaims,
“The author has witnessed scenes of impurity in Hindoo worship which he can never
commit to writing. The allusions which he now considers it his duty to make to this
disgusting subject will, he fears, expose him to the censure of some readers.”
xvi
The
horror of female infanticide, as with other general “scenes of impurity,” renders it
too heinous to be witnessed in its entirety, and even if it is witnessed, the act of
witnessing cannot enter into language. Its proof can only be constructed through a
mosaic comprising partial narratives of the custom. Language fails at the moment
that the scopic drive constructs its own evidence of the crime through the
performance of witnessing.
As he continues to bemoan the savagery encapsulated within Hinduism,
however, one is slowly made aware that no one is actually privy to the unfolding of
the scene of the crime of infanticide. The proof of infanticide is established through
hearsay and the low numbers of sati (since most females are already murdered at the
time of their birth), discovery, and rumour. The popularity of a story of violence and
murder within the structural narrative of infanticide allows Ward, mistakenly
perhaps, to ascribe two different sources to the same narrative. In the first instance,
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Ward claims in the preface that “he was informed in India, by a respectable
brahm ŭn” of the tale of a Rajput father, who, despite having decided to bring up his
daughter, “took a hatchet and cut his child to pieces” because he wasn’t able to get
her married and was fearful lest she bring dishonour the family through improper
conduct. Ward assures the readers, however, that the father was “no doubt in a state
of mental agony and frenzy,” which undeniably served as a catalyst in him
committing the crime.
xvii
The very same tale is repeated in his elucidation on
infanticide, albeit with some embellishments. In his renewed narration, now brought
to light through “A friend at Ludhiana, in a letter written in the year 1812,” the
father,
“feared she might bring disgrace upon the family, and resolved to prevent it
by putting the girl to death. Shortly after forming this atrocious design, he
overheard, or pretended to have overheard, some of his neighbours speak of
his daughter in a way that tended to increase his fears; when, becoming
outrageous, he rushed upon the poor girl, and cut her head off. The native
magistrate confined him for a year, and seized all his property. But this was
only because the girl was marriageable; infants are murdered with perfect
impunity.”
xviii
[emphasis mine]

The “mental agony” of the father is replaced by a resolve to murder her. The fear, in
the first tale, that she might engage in improper conduct that might bring shame on
the family is almost realized in the second narrative. The mode of violence differs,
although both tales posit a similar kind of violence. These differences in the finer
details of the narratives can reasonably and justifiably allow us to classify them as
two separate instances that now exemplify the brutality of the practice. But even if
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we decide to pursue that explanation for the divergences in the two narratives, we are
left with the same genus of barbarism. Moreover, within the larger framework of the
practice, the murder of all female infants can be reduced to the same skeletal
narrativized structure – as with Isabella Fane’s “blackies,” the female infants who are
murdered all become faceless, indistinct, and substitutable. The dreadfulness of the
crime is perhaps mitigated in that easy substitutability of nameless violence and the
inability of each individual narrative to carve its own space of shock in a people’s
consciousness.
But, if my suspicion is right, and it is, in fact, the same story that is being re-
narrated, it poses yet again questions of the custom’s refusal of complete disclosure.
The trauma and revulsion of the practice is concealed within the recreation of
violence through the act of narration, such that the details only reveal themselves
slowly and over time. But in drawing upon the same story in order to emphasize his
point about the barbarism of the natives, Ward is able to manoeuvre his way around
the literary crevices of that tale and re-establish a new paradigm of paternal cruelty.
As Brian K. Pennington’s reading of Ward’s observations clarifies, “Ward returned
repeatedly to deeds of violence and acts of eroticism as fundamental to the practice
of Hinduism. Neither aberrations nor anomalies, sati, infanticide, and human
sacrifice were central practices dictated by the Hindu faith.”
xix
If the first tale
centres on the savagery of society itself that categorizes unmarried women as a mark
of shame on and burden to their fathers leading the latter to a desperate crime, the
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second tale emphasizes paternal rage and barbarism, which, in conjunction with a
cruel societal system, rejects any space for the development of the feminine. The
terrible nature of the crime itself is augmented with each re-telling, but, even with
the addition of details and the heightening of the dramatic features, it forecloses
complete disclosure in that promise of yet another narration.
Missionary opinion and publications rarely existed independently of the
political narratives that were in high circulation and whose perspectives had gained
tremendous currency among the British settled in India. Ward refers to the
resumption of infanticide among those communities that were believed to have
abstained from the crime owing largely to the exhortative efforts of Col. Walker.
James Peggs’ influential Cries to British Humanity that exposed the terrible crimes
of sati, infanticide, and thuggee was cobbled together from various political
discourses. Pennington argues that the publication of this book was part of a trend
generated by the debate on sati, where “evangelicals and missionaries were eager to
collect and publish eyewitness accounts of the practice”
xx
But in the absence of
most eyewitness accounts of female infanticide, Peggs relied on political discourse
based on an ethnographic observation of a presumably infanticidal community. Col.
Walker’s letter written in 1808 – which I will be examining in greater detail in the
course of the remaining chapters – forms, in many ways, the foundational discourse
of female infanticide in India. Perceived as insightful, exquisitely detailed, and
accurate, or perhaps accurate because it is so detailed, his letter constitutes the basis
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for the two volumes of Parliamentary Papers tabled in England in 1824 and 1828.
James Peggs, in his exposé on the heinous practice of infanticide, relies largely upon
a verbatim regurgitation of Walker’s letter, the Parliamentary Papers, and a triply
reiterated citing of the Parliamentary Papers citing Walker. The building blocks of
already extant narratives in Peggs’ book are evocative of the reiteration of Ward’s
horrific story of daughter-murder. The awfulness of the custom is repeated and
enhanced with each subsequent narrative, but the “truth” of the practice is displaced
from the cyclical reinforcement of an existing perception.

Chapter 1.3 Colonel Walker makes his entry
One of the first comprehensive official documents on female infanticide in
India was an epistolary communication by Col. Walker, the Resident of Baroda, in
1808. While there had been some official enquiry into the matter in the late
eighteenth century, Walker’s document was among the first official communiqués to
merit serious attention on the subject. Structured as an exposé of the crime among a
particular group of Rajputs, the Jahrejahs, he set out to uncover evidence of the
crime within the group. The existence of the crime itself was not in doubt. In his
opening sentences of the letter, where he establishes the aim of the work, Walker
declares, “I shall endeavour to ascertain the Origin and History of a Practice, the
most barbarous that ever owed its existence either to the Wickedness, or Weakness
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of human nature.” The subtext of this sweeping declaration appears to state that the
practice exists and has a discernible origin as well as history, but merely needs
someone to uncover it and bring it all together into a cohesive narrative. His
conclusions, drawn as they are from observations, occasional interactions, and even
more occasional native testimonies, mark the incipit of an archival investigation into
the crime.
At its very outset, however, his report does not discuss female infanticide
alone. Rather, in its magisterial sweep, it includes the right to delve into the customs
and history of the natives in general. And yet, as Walker clarifies early on in his
writing, he doesn’t necessarily know the motives of the Jahrejahs despite his
meticulous detailing of all the motives that they may entertain – religious, political,
economic, and cultural. He does, nevertheless, draw an important conclusion in
terms of the possibility of British intervention: infanticide has little or nothing to do
with religion.
Whatever may have been the motives that led the Jahrejas to [employ] the
extraordinary practice of destroying their daughters, conveniency and policy
have contributed to continue and extend it.
The scruples of religion and conscience were lulled quieted, by the idea of
security of another race, being responsible for the crime.
xxi

The mythic origin and history of the practice that the Jahrejahs furnish, in itself an
“inadequate and unsatisfactory account,” become immaterial in light of the current
motives of “conveniency and policy”
xxii
behind the practice. In fact, he appears to
implicitly advocate a disregard for the establishment of the actual motives behind the
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crime, thereby suggesting the impossibility of tracing the historical development, or
the presence of one, of the “custom.”
Walker’s depiction of the Jahrejahs’ history of infanticide constructs it as
unfamiliar, strange, non-teleological, and – within a European framework of
historical understanding – completely unrecognizable. Multiple rhetorical accounts
deny primacy to any one conception of the “true” origin of the heinous crime, but
they also reject the focused, stagist strand of historical development; instead, the
parallel narratives throw the past into a chaotic mixture of diverse origins. The
various facets of human existence – the religious, the economic, the political, the
cultural – don’t coalesce in the furthering of a single, narrativizable understanding
but exist as independent histories, each asserting its own sway and weaving its own
reality. If at all the different strands fuse together into a cohesive narrative in
colonial India, it is only in the notion and performance of criminality that they can
blend together. The question of “criminality” and of the “criminal” becomes
complicated in the nineteenth-century examination of female infanticide. While
female infanticide was referred to as a “crime,” especially in the documents on the
matter after the Mutiny, there is significantly more hesitation in describing the
criminality of the crime, paradoxical though it may sound. The establishment of an
act as a crime would necessitate a retributive and judicial form of punishment, which
the British shied away from until the 1860s. It appears rather that references to
female infanticide as a “crime” were used interchangeably with “custom” or
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“practice.” Depending on the perspective with which one analyzes this conflation,
we might be able to point to the criminalizing of native customs and practices. But
we can just as well circle the mitigation of the crime as it was folded into a more
sedate conception of “practice.” Either way, this raises questions into how one
formulates the boundaries of a “crime” versus those of a barbarous “custom.” Does
a crime revolve specifically on an act? And if so, does it fall outside the boundaries
of historical continuation? In other words, to what extent might the alleged mythic
origin of female infanticide complicate the boundaries between crime and tradition?
Walker himself, in his reports of the different accounts, is unable to entirely
dismiss the mythic origins of the crime, wherein the Jahrejah Rajputs – in
accordance with the dictates of the family priest of one of their early Chieftains –
must murder their female infants in order to avoid incurring a future misfortune.
While evincing strong disbelief at the purported divine origin of the crime, he avers
that “many whimsical, and absurd institutions like this, are dependent less on reason,
than on particular circumstances; which in the course of many ages, give them
importance and influence.” The supranatural quotient of the priest’s injunction is
kept aside as the focus of the official centres not on the misfortune itself but on the
Rajputs’ belief in it. Moreover, the temporal passing of centuries between the
committing of the sanction to memory and Walker’s recording of that tale are
marked by a suspension of change or progression. The strength of the ominous
prophecy lies in the act of murder itself, which, in its turn, reifies the originary tale as
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the collective fate of the group. Each murder contributes to the forestalling of that
fate, and reason itself is debarred from the macro-cosmic praxis of cultural pasts.
At the same time, contrary to the rational and teleological rules of historical
reality, he prefaces his account of this history by stating that “the early customs and
History of every people are obscure and fabulous.” Although his sceptical rationality
leads him to reject the popular mythic explanation in favour of a more pragmatic
political or economic justification, the multiplicity of the narratives per se reject any
monist conception of reality. The truth of the practice resides not only in the
performance itself, but also in the discursive denouement of each of these (hi)stories.
Walker’s mediation of the competing accounts leads him to chart the origin and
ensuing adherence to the practice through a history of affect. To the plethora of
historical narratives, his own counter-narrative of history traces a single and singular
“origin” and “practice” through “avarice,” “pride,” “superstition,” and so on. The
affective history is a non-history, the negative trace of an imposed historical model.
It at once relegates the colonized within the bounds of emotionality alone and
reserves the promulgation of rational judgment for the British observer. In addition,
the persistence of the affective composition over a number of centuries fixes the
subject-peoples in a recurring temporality through the denial of chronological
sequentiality. Their practices remain congealed in time, still reflecting the “early
customs of every people.” Colonialist intervention thus confers the gift of
temporality, of progress, of development, indeed, of history.
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Imperialist discourse recasts a sense of history in the European post-
Enlightenment understanding of the term. But can the circular peg fit into a linear
crevice? The rearrangement of a cultural praxis into an already existing
methodological and interpretive paradigm is not necessarily available for a complete
translation. The gaps in attempting to establish seamless historical continuity from
the origins of the practice to its contemporary enactment are indicative of a larger
failure in recasting cultural particularities within a universal idiom. In that
(mis)translation that also gets recapitulated into the realm of the untranslatable, the
Rajput in his alterity is divested of any claims to History, except that which the
British official can allot to him through the literal inscription of his-story into
writing.
The association of meanings and the seemingly neat division into
British/rational/writing on the one hand and Indian/affective/oral on the other is
scrambled with the emergence of various contradictions in Walker’s narrative. In
offering merely a plethora of motives behind the crime of infanticide without
revealing the historical trajectory of the practice, Walker appears to intimate the
ahistoricality of the Jahrejah Rajputs, an inference he soon retracts, however, in
alluding to their “Ancient History” in Sind.
The History of the Jahrejas also since they arrived in Kutch and Guzerat,
bears evidence of their incapacity for Government, and of their capricious
and imprudent conduct.
It is necessary to mention these traits in the characters of the Jahrejas, as they
would operate to maintain the practice of Infanticide, after their settlement in
the Country; and when the original pretence for its origin ceased to exist.
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The History of the Jahrejah Rajputs as a race doesn’t extend to their cultural
practices as a nation. Any historical claim that the practice of infanticide generates is
a false one since it can only be constitutive of an immutable, unchanging “trait.” At
the same time, in writing the history of infanticide, Walker’s imposition of linearity
is itself marred by similar discontinuities. Unable to translate the praxis into a
seamless and continual narrative, the ruptures in the testimonies and observations
and the silences that the gaps in memory embody penetrate into Walker’s writing as
he vacillates between acknowledging the history of the Jahrejahs and denying any
historical tradition of infanticide.
The alternating and antithetical movements of conferral of history and its
denial don’t appear to collide in the violence of epistemic confrontations, whereby
the other narratives of the origin dissolve at the point of collision to reveal the single,
and therefore true, historical thread alone. Rather, the dual paradoxical movements
slide on top of one another in an epiphytic coexistence, irreconcilable though they
may be. With each movement there is a concomitant process of disavowal linked to
a split narcissistic desire for/of alterity (‘you are nothing like me’) and its denial
(‘everyone identifies with me’). Neither of the positions can exist without the
symbiotic presence of its agonistic double, and it is the uneasy nexus of the two
mutually inconstitutive positions that produces the colonial body as an object of
knowledge. The writing of history thus entails larger ramifications for questions of
identity, identification, and even indemnification.
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Fraught though it might be with the tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of
dualities, Walker’s report, in many ways, symbolizes an ideal for later
administrators. The engagement with the question of infanticide assumes changing
modes of knowingness that in rendering the native visible and transparent,
nevertheless covers its own panopticistic and voyeuristic tracks. The narrative shifts
from an intellectual and historical contemplation (“I shall endeavour to ascertain the
Origin and History of a Practice…”) to a voyeuristic witnessing (“Curiosity will
naturally be excited to learn the forms, and methods, observed in committing these
Infanticides…”), while also including in its gamut translations of native perceptions,
Sanskrit verses condemning the practice, confessions (“…the Jahrejahs spoke freely
of the custom of putting their daughters to death, and without delicacy and without
any pain…”), and a general and inexplicable knowingness. The gaze of the official
moves beyond the limited scope of an eyewitness account alone to also penetrate the
psyche of the native. He observes even that which is concealed from the curious and
prying eyes of the traveller. But by occupying this more privileged position,
Walker’s report functions as the bridge that links the visual, scopic, and active
narrative of the traveller with the aural, passive transcription of a confession or
translation. His mediation of these two modalities of recording inflects the vectorial
thrust of the nineteenth-century archive.
As one of the first British officials engaging with the practice of infanticide,
Walker might have been faced with the onerous task of transcribing decades of
78

translated native testimonials and quasi-religious thought that had presumably
modulated the custom of infanticide. In contrast to the perceived benefits that
committing sati would reap,
xxiii
the refusal to perform which would only result in the
otherwise expected alternative of a life of penury and self-abnegation, the legend of
the origin of female infanticide was imbued with the threat of destruction. The
unknown and unseen signs of violence that may have been inflicted on the new-born
daughter were transferred and manifested in the life of the Raj-gor.
The Jahrejahs will sometimes remark, that their Gors are poor, and despised,
which they make…no scruple of attributing to the sin of Infanticide, and from
the wrath of God for having placed the weight of that crime on their heads.
This singular opinion which I have expressed nearly in their own words,
instead of producing any abhorrence in the Jahrejahs against the act, has
saved to confirm their idea that they have nothing to do with its responsibility
and punishment.

As the originary murderer of the Chief’s daughter, who assumed the consequences of
the sin of murder upon himself, the visible signs of that sin serve to maintain the
extant social order and exonerate the infant’s parents from culpability. The mildness
and meekness of the Hindu native is suddenly reversed in a vengeful tale of the cult
of murder.
Col. Walker’s report, then, is as much about a production of knowledge(s)
about Hinduism – in terms of the proliferation of various discursive constructions of
“Hinduism” – as it is about the murderous practices of Hindu communities as well.
The voyeuristic trope of observation is employed not only to observe instances or
evidence of female infanticide, but also to observe the observance of the custom.
79

Hinduism is constructed as being both monotheistic and polytheistic, with superior
moral principles that coexist with debased ritualistic practices. It is at once a
uniform religion, reified in the textual scriptures that tie it to antiquity, as it is an
inchoate faith with variegated practices of its diverse practitioners. But, as Walker’s
reading of the Rajput understanding of responsibility makes it clear, the performance
of Hinduism can be based just as validly on the authority of a Brahmin – despised
though he may be – as on an ancient written text, which is also open to the
hermeneutic authority of the Brahmin pundit. The emphasis lies on the awesome
force of the Raj-Gor’s pronouncement and not on the question of the pre-eminence
of speech versus writing. In fact, in according dominance to the conte(n/x)tual
strength of the severe diktat – where the artificial barrier between “content” and
“context” only arbitrarily distinguishes the declared negation (the murder of the
Chieftain’s daughter) from the performative interdiction (the murder of all
daughters)
xxiv
– the formative bar between the hierarchical modalities of speech and
writing dissolve to render them indistinct and, for the moment, unimportant.
The dissolution of the bar between speech and writing also occurs at the
register of the visual. The Raj-Gor’s power leads to his own decline and that of
generations of priests to follow. The internalization of the sin creates a fragmented
subjectivity where the normative function of the priest as a figure of power is
lacerated by the haunting awareness of that primordial moment of transgressive
power. But the visual sign of the fragmentation also becomes a continual reminder
80

of transferability of sin within a religious structural framework of performance. In
other words, the poverty and misfortune of the Raj-Gors implicate not only the
consequences of past actions but, from the perspective of the Jahrejah, also personify
the menace of abstaining from the enactment of that moment of daughter-murder.
To not murder one’s daughter would ensure that the Jahrejahs incurred the “wrath of
God” and that misfortune would now attach itself to them.
The particular testimonial of the Rajputs allowed Walker to construct a dual
image of a barbaric peoples and their vengeful God. Regardless of whether a
Jahrejah parent murdered the infant, punishment was exacted – either through the
hardship of the priest or the adversity that would visit the parent. But was the
retribution associated with the murder of the daughter or the Raj-Gor’s verbal
assumption of divine authority? In other words, was it a just God who punished
those responsible for the murder of the infant, or a petty God angered by the priest’s
usurpation of authority? That question remained unanswered and, presumably,
unimportant. Col. Walker’s cursory glance towards the strange and occasionally
shocking practices of the Hindus seemed to be geared less towards a compiling of
information out of curiosity – an intellectual endeavour that British scholars of
Sanskrit and Persian had already made available in the eighteenth-century – than a
desire to witness these practices in performance, a desire that would manifest itself in
the guise of translations of native testimonials.

81

Notes:
i
P.J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Cambridge
UP, 1970), 20.

ii
Warren Hastings sent Charles Wilkins’ translation of “The Bh ǎgv ǎt-G ēēt ā” to the then Chairman of
the East India Company, Nathaniel Smith. In his letter to Smith, Hastings outlined what, in his view,
was the correct approach and attitude to reading material from a different textual tradition.
“Might I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should
exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern
literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of
propriety for opinion and action in our own modes of life, and equally appeals to our revealed tenets
of religion, and moral duty. I should exclude them, as by no means applicable to the language,
sentiments, manners, or morality appertaining to a system of society with which we have been for
ages unconnected, and of an antiquity preceding even the first efforts of civilization in our own
quarter of the globe, which, in respect to the general diffusion and common participation of arts and
sciences, may be now considered as one community.
I would exact from every reader the allowance of obscurity, absurdity, barbarous habits, and
a perverted morality. Where the reverse appears, I would have him receive it (to use a familiar
phrase) as so much clear gain, and allow it a merit proportioned to the disappointment of a different
expectation.
[…] Many passages will be found obscure, many will seem redundant; others will be found
cloathed with ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and some elevated to a track of sublimit into
which our habits of judgment will find it difficult to pursue them; but few which will shock either our
religious faith or moral sentiments. Something too must be allowed to the subject itself, which is
highly metaphysical, to the extreme difficulty of rendering abstract terms by others exactly
corresponding with them in another language, to the arbitrary combination of ideas, in words
expressing unsubstantial qualities, and more, to the errors of interpretation.” (“Warren Hastings,
‘Letter to Nathaniel Smith’, from The Bh ǎgv ǎt-G ēēt ā.” The British Discovery of Hinduism in the
Eighteenth Century, 185-186).

iii
Dirks, 196.

iv
The seeming reluctance to impart knowledge of Hindu texts might have suggested to the curious
British scholar that there was a mystical and metaphysical principles concealed therein that contained
tremendous power. As Alexander Dow stated, “Excuses…may be formed for our ignorance
concerning the learning, religion and philosophy of the Brahmins […] The few who have a turn for
researches of that kind, are discouraged by the very great difficulty in acquiring that language, in
which the learning of the Hindoos is contained; or by that impenetrable veil of mystery with which the
Brahmins industriously cover their religious tenets and philosophy.” The British Discovery of
Hinduism, 107. As Warren Hastings obliquely suggested later, the reluctance of the Brahmins in
initiating the British scholar into the reading of these texts might have been related more to the
negative reception of these texts during the Mughal empire.

82

v
I am by no means drawing out the “truth” of the caste system, but I am engaging with popular
perceptions and stereotypes of caste divisions, especially as they played out in colonial discourse and
played a subtle part in affecting policy decisions. For instance, most of the Jahrejah Rajputs
suspected of committing infanticide comprised a land-owning, propertied class. Nevertheless,
legislative documents are replete with reference to them as a “martial race.” Similarly, as I show in
chapter 3, the Brahmins were viewed alternately as men who commanded respect because of their
mastery over ancient learning, as well as figures of ridicule who were simultaneously officious and
sycophantic. Caste as a strict and meaningful division of society was unstable and unreliable, but it
nevertheless gained more importance in the nineteenth-century colonial imagination. As Nicholas
Dirks has shown, caste was used as a rubric in the census compilations, though not without numerous
problems. He observes, “The British enumerators were manifestly aware of the limits of varna as a
broad classificatory rubric, even as they came to recognize large regional differences across India.
Brahmans held singular, and singularly uncontested, positions in Bombay and Madras presidencies
(or so it seemed, given the extraordinary reliance on Brahmans in the civil service). Brahmans had a
less preeminent position in Bengal, where a cluster of high castes made up the upper echelons of the
social order, and an even more peculiar status in parts of northern and northwest India, where Rajputs
and other Ksatriya castes appeared to be dominant.” Castes of Mind, 204-205.

vi
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire (London: Penguin Books,
2001), 42.

vii
Preface to The History of British India, 13.

viii
We get a rich account and perspective of the English official’s life in India through journals and
letters as well. However, for the large part, much of this writing centred on the army and
administrative issues. In addition, the higher-ranking the official was, the less likely it was that he (or
his family that travelled with him) would write with complete candour.

ix
John Pemble, ed., Miss Fane in India (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1985), 155.

x
Ibid., 53.

xi
Fanny Parkes, Begums, Thugs and Englishment: The Journals of Fanny Parkes, ed. William
Dalrymple (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2003), 282.

xii
Ibid., 91.

xiii
Revealing his prejudices, Heber claims, “Of the natural disposition of the Hindoo, I still see
abundant reason to think highly,and Mr. Bayley and Mr. Melville both agreed with me, that they are
constitutionally kind-hearted, industrious, sober, and peaceable, a manly and courageous people. All
that is bad about them appears to arise either from the defective motives which their religion supplies,
or the wicked actions which it records of their gods, or encourages in their own practice.” M.A. Laird,
ed., Bishop Heber in Northern India: Selections from Heber’s Journal by Bishop Heber (Cambridge:
Cambrdige UP, 1971), 128.

xiv
Ibid., 265-266.

xv
Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of
Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 85.

83

xvi
William Ward, A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including A
Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works (In
Three Volumes. Port Washington, New York and London: Kennikat Press, 1970), xxxvii.

xvii
Ibid., xlii.

xviii
Ibid., Volume III, 340-341.

xix
Pennington, 83-84.

xx
Ibid., 97.

xxi
Colonel Walker’s report on infanticide in Baroda state and measures adopted by the Baroda state
(pp. 3940-4146) [written in Baroda on 15
th
March 1808]. Secret and Political Department. Diary no.
228, 1808, dated Bombay Castle, 31
st
March 1808.

xxii
Ibid.

xxiii
While the familial demand that the widow commit sati was primarily interwoven with questions of
property, the overarching narrative behind the demand centred on the religious rewards that the
widow and her husband would accrue through her performance of the act. Becoming Sati was
supposed to deliver the deceased husband from the fires of hell, thereby ensuring that the couple
would be reunited in heaven for all eternity. In addition, the psychological reward of becoming a
virtual saint through the approbation of the community might have also exerted a relatively powerful
influence on the widow’s decision to immolate herself on the pyre along with her dead husband.

xxiv
The Raj-Gor, in Walker’s recounting of the myth, doesn’t actually prohibit the future generations
from raising their daughters. The strength of the custom, to use Walker’s reasoning, would doubtless
follow from the emulative nature of the practice itself. However, as I discuss in chapter 3, other
documents include testimonials from natives revealing the prohibition that the Raj-Gor lays down for
the Rajputs in general.

84
Speaking in Tongues: Translating Native Speech and Silence
The importance that the British accorded to learning Indian languages and
reading native literatures in the eighteenth century declined slowly and gradually in
the first couple decades of the nineteenth century. Where once the British thought it
imperative to learn the language of administration – Persian – or other regional
languages and dialects to facilitate the daily management of civil society, they now
looked to native agents to serve as intermediaries and interpreters and could
consequently eschew that learning. The goal, however, did not alter; their purpose,
especially in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century was the epistemological
construction of India through categorization, facts, and surveys. Bernard S. Cohn
describes this need to locate the country in fixity as constituting part of their
“officializing procedures”, allowing them to gain control in different areas.
i
The
nineteenth-century insistence on “difference” as explicatory of the seemingly stable
roles of ruler-ruled or colonizer-colonized could only be made possible by the earlier
desire to know the people and the country. Cohn suggests that while India
represented an “epistemological space” with which the British could not identify,
they nonetheless believed that “they could explore and conquer this space through
translation: establishing correspondence could make the unknown and strange
knowable.”
ii
The East India Company’s focus on translation thus entailed fixing and
essentializing the knowable in some sort of specificity. The foreignness of the Other

85
had to first be mitigated through knowingness before it could be acknowledged and
reified as different and, therefore, as inalienable.
Translations of sacred Hindu texts and of the mystical poetry of Sufi saints
afforded the British a glimpse not only into the Indian treatises of law and
governance but also into their social mores and habits. While the movement against
“barbaric” practices of the natives was undoubtedly couched in moralizing rhetoric, I
believe that the earlier suspicions of such practices might perhaps have been viewed
with more curiosity than alarm. Into this category, I am placing not only the
sensational and lurid cases of Sati, but also those of polygamy, child marriage, and
female infanticide. Indeed, the process of empire-building did not append the
“civilizing” part of the mission to its larger purpose until the Charter Act of 1813,
when missionary work was allowed in India and the Evangelicals exerted increasing
influence, both in the official circles in India and in the domestic circuits in England.
Until the advent of the missionaries, however, the emphasis lay more on observation
and knowingness than civilizing.
The first half of the nineteenth century thus witnessed increasing attention to
educating the natives, turning them away from their barbarity and savagery, and
“saving” their “heathen souls.”
iii
This moral project naturally included the question
of infanticide, a practice that had first aroused the curiosity and attention of the
British in the last couple decades of the eighteenth century and which slowly
gathered momentum and increasing condemnation in the course of the nineteenth

86
century. Assuming the guise of an investigative fiction, the discourse on the
prevention, detection, and punishment of the crime of infant murder sees the British
officials donning the mantle of sleuths, as they seek to uncover instances of the crime
among wary Rajput families and other Indian communities. The voice that speaks,
that critiques, that records, and that emerges from the archives is that of the British
official. The native voice, the voice of the perpetrator, is heard but in an echo –
through synopsis or translation alone. The native male presence is always felt, either
through his stoic silence on the subject, his quiet and plaintive defence of the
practice, his stubborn and unfeeling adherence to caste tradition, or contrarily in his
vociferous condemnation of the practice. But the virile Rajput male does not exist in
discourse to the same extent that the bourgeois male does; while the latter’s opinion
was often elicited, albeit in a parody of the British voice, the Rajput male was often
not a speaking subject but was spoken for. He represented primarily a form, an
otherness that British and native bourgeois writings on the subject continued giving
shape to. His representation in discourse was thus a re-presentation, an additional
superimposed narrative that highlighted his actions and his behaviour but only to cast
him once more as an enigmatic and dangerous figure.
If much of the cross-cultural impulse of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century can be characterized as and through the recording of the customs of a strange
and unfamiliar people through observation, a cursory glance through the nineteenth-
century archive pertaining to female infanticide reveals the concomitant process of

87
effacing and reinforcing difference through intimate contact with the minority
subject. Resident at Baroda in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Colonel
Walker’s treatise on the subject
iv
exemplifies this tension between sameness, or
rather parity, and difference. His voluminous letter on the intimate lives of the
Jahrejah Rajputs provides one of the earliest official discourses on female
infanticide. The primary purpose of the letter was to ascertain the indubitable
existence of female infanticide as a systemic practice among a particular “tribe” of
Rajputs – the Jahrejahs. However, Walker’s own personal account of his interaction
with the members of the group shed more light on caste structure and hierarchy
within the Rajputs than it did on the practice itself. While the ostensible reason for
his report was to “ascertain the Origin and History” of the practice, the account
gained an additional layer of authority by detailing the admissions and confessions of
the Rajput infant-murderers. The practice of female infanticide, hitherto confined to
suspicions and rumour, conjured a web of intrigue as Walker divulged the avarice,
pride, barbarity, and desperation that sustained the practice. He succeeded in
underlining the strength of a custom that derived its force merely through repetition.
The narrative anticipated judicial discourse by laying the foundation for a much-
desired access into some of the violence that characterized the “East.” Walker’s
letter parodied earlier travel memoirs as it threw open the doors to an inscrutable
otherness and sought to voice the silence surrounding the alleged murder of infants.
Just as the birth of a daughter was met with stony silence on the part of the parents

88
and the community at large, the infant’s death also took place furtively, cloaked in
the silent veil of the zenana or women’s quarters.
The secrecy with which the crime was committed insinuated a certain degree
of guilt and suggested that the members of the family realized that they were acting
in opposition to religious and social dictates. But the quiet is also indicative of the
shame surrounding the birth of a daughter. James Peggs, a missionary in Cuttack,
quotes from the first volume of Parliamentary Papers in England in 1824 on the
subject, contrasting the silence at the daughter’s birth with the joy and enthusiasm to
mark the birth of a son:
Should any inquisitive person ask a Jahrejah the result of the pregnancy of his
wife, if it were a female, he would answer ‘nothing’; and this expression, in
the idiom of the country, is sufficiently significant. […] The death of a
daughter is generally viewed by a Jahrejah as an infallible consequence after
its birth; and it is considered to be an event of such insignificance that he is
seldom apprized of it! The occurrence excites neither surprise nor enquiry:
and is never made a subject even of conversation. It is attended by no
ceremony, and publicity is avoided.
v

The oral testimonials quoted in the Parliamentary Papers – which are, in turn, taken
from Walker’s report – allude to shame at the birth of a daughter: a shame that
warrants absence of publicity and discussion. Giving birth to a female is equated
with giving birth to a still-born; the father needn’t be notified because the birth of a
daughter was considered a non-birth – it was “nothing.” Peggs does not provide
insight into the tone in which the Jahrejah answers or the manner in which that
answer is received by the “inquisitive” person. The Jahrejah man’s “nothing” uttered

89
in a quiet, disapproving tone paints a different picture than if he says it in a
nonchalant manner. My own reading and interpretation of that “nothing” follows
from Lacan’s reference to the Sanskrit poetic theory of dhvani,
vi
which, among its
different meanings like “sound” and “tone,” also signifies “suggestion” or “allusion.”
The metaphoric and metonymic layers of connotation here also insinuate the other
negative meanings of “nobody,” “still-born,” “neither a birth nor a death,” “not a
son.” Nevertheless, the “insignificance” of the birth implicates the commonality of
the crime, while simultaneously disbanding any notion of guilt or shame on the part
of the parent.
The absence of the infant, as encapsulated in the “nothing,” paradoxically
emphasizes her presence in discourse and underlines the practice as the taking away
of life, rather than negating the violence through nothingness. Peggs’ claim that the
father was rarely informed of the birth thus reveals a hidden belief that one cannot
kill what never existed: the Rajputs don’t conceive of the practice as murder since a
non-birth can only engender a non-death. The absence of the female infant is figured
as a void. Our very allusion to her death and to her negation suggests a presence that
is then obliterated. But if she never existed to begin with – if her birth was a “non-
birth” – she cannot be constituted as an a priori presence. Her non-existence does
not bring into focus what was once alive and now is not. On the contrary, the
visibility of the adults and of young boys, the presence of her “others” raises
questions about what is missing from the picture and should be there. The non-birth

90
that results in a non-death signifies the presence of the infant only as a negative
presence. It is a performative negation that fills the void and personifies itself
through various dichotomies: the play of visibility-invisibility; the hushed silence of
the women and the nonchalance of the men; the quantifying, querying zeal of the
British officials and the secrecy and subterfuge of the Rajput men.
But the casual nature of that utterance, “nothing,” also points to the mundane
and quotidian nature of the crime, which is highlighted in Peggs referring to “the
idiom of the country.” What is perhaps more intriguing is the implication that the
women of the house committed the murder. The accusatory finger was, often
rightly, pointed at the male parent, as it was under his orders that the female infant
was murdered. However, Peggs’ allegation that the father was “seldom apprized” of
the birth insinuates the alacrity and facility with which the women probably disposed
of the infant themselves. While suggestive of fear, this obedience to the implicit
codes of conduct within the caste might also suggest the comparative absence of
reluctance and opposition. The death of the daughter marked a moment of familial
and communal togetherness, seemingly without a sole voice raised in protest.
Col. Walker’s report reinforces this sense of the widespread acceptance of the
murder: “The common expressions for Infanticide are ‘Deekree Marne Chal’ or ‘the
custom of killing Daughters’ and ‘nanee Deekree marne ne chal’ or ‘the custom of
killing young Daughters.’” Walker’s translation, however, of the Gujarati phrase is
founded on a fundamental mistranslation. By translating it as “the custom of killing

91
young daughters,” Walker inadvertently ritualizes the act, almost implying that it is a
solemn rite analogous to the rites and ceremony involved in Sati. The phrase
“Deekree Marne Chal” is, however, much more casual and colloquial in tone. It can
more accurately be translated as “Come, let’s kill the daughter” or “Let’s go kill the
daughter.” Again, the semantic nuances of the verb “marna” allow for a wider
interpretation of violence than perceptions of the crime might take into account.
Where other crimes against women, like Sati, hinged on the spectacle, where the
people could see the body being mutilated as it was consumed by flames, female
infanticide often entailed killing the infant while preserving its body – purportedly to
make it appear that the infant was still-born. The infant’s life could be taken away
without the violence leaving a trace on its frail body. However, “marna” is
suggestive of various degrees of violence as it encapsulates not just the idea of
killing, but also of hitting, of beating. The absence of the corpus delecti becomes
much more sinister in this light.
vii

What is perhaps most interesting in the (mis)translation is that while
“deekree” has been rightly interpreted as “daughter,” the familial relationship has
been negated by omitting the possessive adjective. The perpetrators of the act,
presumably the parents, reject any relationship with the infant. As opposed to killing
their own daughter, they are now merely participating in killing a daughter, allowing
them to feel further removed from any sense of guilt. Regardless of how the specific
words are transliterated, they still allude to the murder of an infant being a sport that

92
everyone can participate in, rather than a covert operation that must be conducted in
the still of the night to avoid suspicion. However, what Walker neglects to mention
is among whom these “common expressions” have currency. Moreover, the
depiction of the ritualistic killing as participatory and routine deviates from most of
the British understanding of the practice. The professed commonality of expressions
like “deekree marne chal” belie the hierarchical nature of commands issued. The
patriarchal chain of command necessitated the father, in most cases, making the final
decision concerning the “preservation” or death of the female infant. The complete
absence of any female voice in this communal sport is indicative of a larger
dismissal from the archives. The wife, in these narratives, is generally and
unproblematically depicted as passive and/or a compliant participant. In fact, despite
occasional references to the mother’s support of the practice and her active role in
effacing her newborn’s life, her supposed invisibility from public life and
inaccessibility to the British ensured that she was also kept out of the official
records.
viii
Regardless of who uttered these words, the circulation of such
expressions is useful in highlighting the customary and unceremonial nature of infant
murder.
But despite the absence of ceremony, the similarity in representations of the
tradition implies the presence of an unspoken, if learnt, ritual. Most descriptions
locate the scene of the crime in the private space of the women’s room, away from
the prying eyes of the public. More importantly, because the practice also has the

93
weight of tradition behind it, the community members are always already aware of
the implicit codes, eschewing the need for instruction and consultation. Col. Walker
furnishes a paradigmatic exemplar of the scene of the crime:
The following is the translate [sic] of the Memorandum from Wassonjee
Eswarjee, a Nagur Braman, who attended the camp in the quality of Vakeel
from the Gondul Chief.
‘When the wives of the Jahrejah RajPutes are delivered of Daughters, the
women who may be with the Mother repair to the Oldest man in the House,
this person desires them to go to him, who is the father of the Infant, and do
as he directs.
On this the women go to the father, who desires them to do as is customary,
and so to inform the Mother.
The women then repair to the Mother, and tell her to act in conformity to
their usages. The Mother next puts opium on the Nipple of her Breast, which
the child inhaling with its Milk, dies.
The above is one custom and the following is another. When the child is
born, they place the Navel string on its Mouth, when it expires.’

The testimonial derives its authority precisely from the multiple layers of
translation, as well as from the doubling of the listener/speaker. Wassonjee
Eswarjee’s dual positionality allows him at once to be privy to the intimate lives of
the natives while simultaneously allying him closer to the British by virtue of his
being Brahmin (“Nagur Braman”) and a trusted agent (“vakeel”
ix
). In the daily
exercise of colonial power, the endurance of this record/memorandum/confession
demonstrates the epistemological effacement of the originary voice in favour of
linguistic and discursive interpretation. The exercise of hermeneutic authority,
however, constitutes its own limitations; each mode of translation and interpretation
diminishes and effaces its own authenticity by subsequently necessitating and

94
engendering yet another interpretation. The historical “truth” of the practice thus
falls in the interstitial crevice of multiple translations, constantly distorting and
mutating its own reality to never reveal truly itself but in the performative. The
practice of female infanticide appears to need no clarification; Eswarjee’s elliptical
elucidation sheds no new light on the subject apart from adding yet another voice to
the unisonance against the practice. Why do the women pay deference to seniority
by first going to the oldest man in the house only to be directed, in turn, to the father
of the infant? What is the “customary” practice that the father commands? What
does acting “in conformity” entail? Indeed, why do the Jahrejah families undergo
this elaborate performance if the final scene is always already scripted and if the
“customary” practice forms part of a well-established tradition?
The apparent silence of the performance is crucial; the conversation between
the natives is mentioned but not heard. The reader must decode the dhvani and fill in
the tone, the allusion, and the suggestiveness of the gestures. The gravity of the
ritual, in stark contrast to the supposed currency of phrases like ‘deekree marne
chal,’ inserts the ellipses and silences in Eswarjee’s account. The paternal
interdiction that denies the infant her life and forecloses her entry into language by
relegating her to a “nothing” also imposes a discursive limitation – the commands
issued by the eldest male in the family or by the father cannot be repeated. The
words thus seem to attain an almost terrifying, even sacred, stature, whereby the
iterability of the words resides in the performance alone. The silence in Eswarjee’s

95
account devours language into the circuitry of gestures, so that the reader is only left
with the suggestion of speech and not speech itself. The Sanskrit noun for “word,”
śabdah, also refers to “sound” or “noise.” Within this linguistic frame, the complete
absence of transcription of oral communication in Eswarjee’s report becomes clearer.
Since the act of infanticide takes place in silence, in the absence of sound, it literally
cannot be evoked in language. At the same time, the play of gestures and the script
of re-tracing the hierarchy contain within them the fiction of verbal communication.
The importance attributed to that performance as an archetypal illustration of the
practice, as opposed to the “what” of the communication, thus displaces meaning
from the word. Because the play is always already scripted, the British curiosity to
unravel and decipher the scenes reveals only the vacuity of the word as signifier.
The signified traces a circular path and signifies not another practice but itself. And
it is perhaps this redoubling of the signified that the British are attempting to fix and
decipher through the written word.
Walker’s own addendum to Eswarjee’s memorandum reveals his familiarity
with the modus operandi of the act. The untrustworthiness of the mediatory or the
intermediary is brought to light as Walker fills the gaps in Eswarjee’s narrative.
Thus, he adds that the infant inhaling the opium while drinking milk conflates an
actual method of murdering the infant – feeding it opium – with a misperception that
Eswarjee’s faulty narrative might have given rise to: that the Jahrejahs drowned their
daughters into a vat of milk. He is able to refute the idea of daughters being

96
drowned into a “vessel of Milk,” believing the myth to have arisen “in the idea of the
Infant imbibing poisoned Milk or from an expression which is ascribed to the Father,
who when the birth of the Daughter is announced, with brutal equivocation, says to
the attendant ‘Dhood Palaunoo.’” Through systematic consideration and elimination
of each method of crime, he finally arrives at the “true manner” in which the act is
committed. The anticipation of reaching the “truth” of the matter is rewarded
through the reiteration of the earlier hypothesis: the father commands and the mother
obeys her husband’s wishes. Walker methodically enumerates the different ways of
ensuring the infant’s death:
They appear to have several methods of destroying the Infanticide but two
are prevalent.
Immediately after the birth of a female they put into its mouth some opium,
or draw the umbilical Cord over its face, which prevents respiration.
But the destruction of so tender and young a subject is not difficult, and it is
effected without a struggle, and probably without pain.
The natural weakness and debility of the Infant, when neglected and left
uncleaned, sometimes causes its death, without the necessity of actual
violence and sometimes it is laid on the ground or on a plank, and left to
expire.
These accounts I learn in conversation with Jahrejahs, and prefer them to the
information of the translated Memorandum.
The Infant after it is destroyed is placed in a small Basket entirely naked, &
in this state carried out and interred. In Kattywar any of the female
attendants of the family perform this office; but in Kutch it is done by the
domestic RajGor.

Wassonjee Eswarjee’s memorandum is now summarily dismissed as
furnishing any “true” representation of the practice among the Jahrejahs. The
unreliability of the native informant is thereby reinforced, and the dismissal also

97
exposes the undependability and flimsiness of translations. However, the written
record of these translations / transliterations is essential in soliciting the “authentic”
native perception and in understanding the native’s ontological construction of
himself. The euphemistic command of the father – when he derisively orders the
women to “feed milk” (“dhood palaunoo”) to the infant – and Eswarjee’s
memorandum are crucial in this quest for knowingness. Both narratives are
indispensable to, what Hayden White refers to as, the “emplotment”
x
of the Rajput
male as brutal and unfeeling. Half a decade later, the frenzy and fear surrounding the
Mutiny would capitalize on these particular images of violent hypermasculinity. But
the thrust of Walker’s inquiry is aimed more at the discovery of the crime and its
methods.
xi
He rejects Eswarjee’s cultural translation of Jahrejah practices in favour
of his own quest for the “true” or originary voice. It is now his doubling as
listener/speaker that is cast as more trustworthy. Within that contextual framework,
Walker mimics the Derridean archon as he embodies the force of religious and
judicial order, albeit at an interpersonal and intersubjective level. The seamlessness
with which he shifts positionalities and modalities – between observer and
interpreter, or between transcription and translation – grants his narrative the stature
of “truth” and “reality.”
Walker implicitly acknowledges the oral testimony to be more authentic than
the written one. For Col. Walker, the “truth” of infant murder resides in speech more
than in silence and even more than in the written word, which allows him to now

98
dismiss Eswarjee’s account of the elaborate, albeit silent, ritual performance. His
own account of infanticide masquerades as the more authoritative version of the
practice; while both Eswarjee’s and Walker’s narratives have the force of
observation that is fixed in writing, Walker’s description contains the added sheen of
an oral testimony that is present in the text even without being transcribed. At the
same time, the Jahrejahs’ presumed avowal of the practice itself becomes authentic
because it now has the weight of the British official’s cultural translation that can
vouch for it. Indeed, for their admission to even be considered as such, it can exist
only in translation. Walter Benjamin defines the “task” of the translator as arriving
at the “intended effect [Intention] upon the language into which he is translating
which produces in it the echo of the original.”
xii
In drawing our attention to the vivid
skeletal framework of Eswarjee’s memorandum and to the shocking and alienating
command of the Jahrejah father, the translation succeeds in maintaining the
foreignness of form and of content. However, the various seams of narratives
interweave here to demystify the search for an “original” voice or narrative. By
omitting his source(s), Walker becomes both the author and the narrator. The
testimonial thus gets an additional layer of legitimacy. The authority of the native
voice is assembled from the superimposition of narratives – in this case, those of the
Jahrejah Rajputs and Eswarjee. The similarity in the epistemological construction of
the crime across “all” Jahrejah families implicates consensus through the trope of
synechdochal proof. The narrative turns the spotlight to the enactment of the

99
unfeeling moment, with the result that the conversations that transpire within the
Jahrejah family prior to the murder being committed seem almost unimportant.
In addition, however, the testimonials also have to assert their difference,
their foreignness in order to lay claim to a “true representation” or “historical fact.”
Lawrence Venuti observes that translation as a medium is often implicated in
subject-formation, in so far as it involves a process of familiarizing domestic subjects
with a foreign text by emphasizing values in that text that also enjoy “authority” in
the domestic culture, by the choice of the text, and by specific discursive
mechanisms. He adds that a text can, thus, successfully engage in the task of
forming subjecthood through, using Goethe’s term, “mirroring” or a more
narcissistic “self-recognition.”
xiii
Archival translations, however, have to fulfil a
different project because they are meant specifically for a particular demographic
within the domestic audience – the British Parliament – but are geared
predominantly towards an expatriate, biased, and invested reader. The narrative
structure, the values evoked, and the particular issues dealt with are thus engineered
to reify the foreignness and unfamiliarity while simultaneously rendering the text
intelligible.
xiv
By having the focus on the intermediary and not on the speaker, the
translation deliberately constructs the speaker as a faceless entity, whose anonymity
implies a certain unisonance. His own secret confession echoes that of the
community as a whole. In constructing the perpetrator of the crime as “the Jahrejah
male,” the British reify caste boundaries, characteristics, identifications, and identity.

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We are not aware of the speaker’s name, age, or position in the family (father, son,
brother, unmarried, etc.), nor are we aware of his motivations in divulging the secret
to the British or the truth of his words. The authority of the translation resides in the
British having secured a testimonial and the authority of the intermediary, rather than
actual observation of the practice. The problem automatically shifts from a question
of finding individual perpetrators to now become a question of guilty tribes, castes,
or communities.

Chapter 2.1 Revisiting the Scene of the Crime
Nearly a decade after Colonel Walker signed agreements with the Jahrejah
chiefs eliciting their condemnation and renunciation of the practice, Captain
Ballantine visited Kathiawad to gauge the success or failure of those initial
agreements.
xv
He reports with cautious enthusiasm that sixty-three girls have been
“preserved” in the past decade, tracing the kind of computational logic and
categorization that has led Cohn to describe female infanticide as a “statistical
crime.”
xvi
The focus on Kathiawad represented the nascent stages of official inquiry
into the practice of female infanticide, a look into the practice avant la lettre. The
failure in rooting out the practice entirely would provide further incentive in the
coming years in seeking juridical action; the condemnation of the practice as
inhumane would reach a moralizing crescendo in the immediate aftermath of the

101
Mutiny of 1857, when legislative interdiction colluded in the political construction of
the barbarity of the virile Rajput men.
Suppression of female infanticide was a task with strong moral
underpinnings, especially in light of the tremendous momentum accorded to the
civilizing mission. The barbarism of the act was all the more unbelievable because it
went against the natural affections of a parent towards his/her child, against the
dictates of religion, and against the basic assumptions of human dignity. Felix Padel
suggests, however, that far from being a moral crusade to avenge the deaths of
innocent children from blood-thirsty barbarians, the British suppression of the
practice of human sacrifice and female infanticide was a battle for authority.
xvii
The
primary impetus governing the legislation of punitive measures revolved around the
perceived monopoly for taking human life. Padel’s theory is in keeping with notions
of such draconian measures merely being a form of colonial control.
xviii
The Indians
struggled to continue with the traditional rituals, beliefs, and practices in the face of
the erosionary effects of foreign invasion; inevitably, persisting with tradition – of
which female infanticide could, allegedly, be a part – signified reasserting the
dominance of patriarchy.
The British zeal in condemning and suppressing the practice of female
infanticide masks perhaps a deeper fear: that one of the dangers of the continuation
of systemic and systematic female infanticide would be the creation of a community
of single men.
xix
The rising number of adult, unmarried Rajput men without any

102
constricting ties to family or social mores would create a virile warrior class – the
masculine counterpart to the mythical Amazons.
xx
But although the murder of these
infants placed itself squarely in the hierarchy of oppression along with crimes against
native women and men alike, female infanticide, ironically, was ultimately
compatible with the nearly exclusive male universe created through the British
presence in India. It permitted the native men to recreate that dominant British world
in their own social stratum. Where they were controlled by virtue of belonging to an
‘inferior’ race, they sought to impose control over other bodies because the latter
belonged to an ‘inferior sex.’ If the British emasculated native men by denying them
political access to the public realm, the native men attempted to become more
powerful by asserting control over the domestic sphere and over the bodies of
children, thereby wresting authority away from the British.
xxi
The battle between
tradition and modernity and between habit and morality was, thus, waged over the
absent body of the female infant.
The British interaction with the virile and martial Rajput males reflected the
struggle in protecting the empire and maintaining authority in the face of defiance.
Lurking beneath the surface of the colonial interaction was the threat of
insubordination, of native revolt, and of the overthrow of British power. This
apprehension crystallized into a fear that native men wanted to sully the purity of
white women – an alarm that became construed as the “Black Peril.”
xxii
The panic
grew so strong that during the mutiny of 1857, unfounded and unverified “atrocity

103
rumors”
xxiii
of European women raped and mutilated and their babies murdered took
on a life of their own. The frenzy surrounding the issue of female infanticide in
India in the nineteenth century was related to the vilification of the Indian colony as
a place of evil. Josephine McDonagh shows how the British public perceived the
“barbaric” Indians as not only having murdered their own children, but also having
slaughtered innocent British infants during the Mutiny of 1857. Regular reports
were published in the British press of the latest attacks of the insurgents, including
graphic accounts of the dismemberment of young children while their mothers
watched on helplessly.
xxiv
Thus, within the larger political framework, the British translated the absence
of the female infant as a threat to subjection and subjectification. The recalcitrance
of the Rajputs in 1808 and 1817 portended a refusal to cede to the authority of the
British. Col. Walker’s letter and Capt. Ballantine’s report, which frame a decade-
long interest in the practice of female infanticide, encase an early glimpse into the
British desire to discipline the native subjects through chastisement and persuasion
alternately. Revealing the limited success that Col. Walker’s measures enjoyed,
Ballantine inadvertently makes a candid confession of the actual purpose behind
soliciting the Jahrejahs’ written renunciation of the practice: “Indeed I too much fear
the objects of our interference for the suppression of this singular custom has too
generally failed, for us to select any individual party for the just vengeance of
Government and the offended nature” (emphasis mine). The search for a scapegoat

104
on whom the punitive measures of the government might descend proves elusive in
the purported diffusion of the crime among entire communities. My use of the term
“scapegoat” here does not refer to Girard’s definitions of and distinction between the
biblical, anthropological, or psychosocial use of the term.
xxv
It approaches his use of
the concept in so far as the scapegoat embodies all the negativity, jealousies, and
evils in the community. Sacrificing the scapegoat through ritual killing – or, in this
case, punishment – thus symbolically rids the community of that negativity and
restores harmony among its members.
However, my appropriation of the term moves away from Girard’s stipulation
that “in order to exist as a social reality, as a stabilized viewpoint on some act of
collective violence, scapegoating must remain nonconscious.”
xxvi
As Girard himself
astutely observes, the choice of a scapegoat is, in some sense, always a displacement.
Each scapegoat is usually “inadequate”
xxvii
in some way, such that the motives
behind and the very process of scapegoating is often not a premeditated decision.
Ballantine’s search for an “individual party,” on the other hand, belies a structuring
of Indian society in hierarchical terms, which opposes a decentralized chain of
command. The pursuit is not only for the guilty party who defies the binding nature
of the written agreement, but is also for an insight into the workings of command
among the Rajputs and into the dissemination of power structures. Significantly, the
East India Company’s quest for further entrenchment as a colonial power in the
political establishment allies their hunt for the perpetrator to Padel’s theory of the

105
battle for authority. The “just vengeance of Government” is at once a sign of the
paternalistic, moral strength of the British government and its superior power and
reach to which other authoritative figures cede their dominance.
The British perception of the practice of female infanticide vacillated
between regarding it as an economic crime
xxviii
and a custom motivated by barbarity
or absence of feeling. As such, their rhetoric against the practice also mediated
between righteous, didactic denunciation and providing financial help. In the district
of Drafa, for instance, Ballantine reports on the complete absence of female children
among the total population of four hundred families, and “as if visited by the just
vengeance of heaven,” the district is also “at the last stage of poverty and distress.”
The economic impoverishment of the district is correlated with its own barbaric
practices, but the virtuous retribution conceals the connection of the female with
economic prosperity. The message was clear: murdering one’s female infants would
invoke the “just vengeance” of God or the Government. The metonymic substitution
of authority endows the British with moral purpose and divine strength in combating
the evil. The seemingly paradoxical but symbiotic nexus between the economic and
the moral serves the dual inter-related purpose of silencing the critics of colonialism
while simultaneously creating dependent subjects, whose very subjecthood is
contingent upon being subjected to structures of power. In fact, as we will see later
in the chapter, the Jahrejah Rajputs occupy the site of subjection through their
introduction and establishment in language, and specifically, in the written word.

106
In the Foucauldian mechanics of power, an individual can only become a
subject after being subjected or undergoing “subjectivation” (assujettissement). The
conceptual framework of subjectivation contains within it an inherent paradox - we
can allow for the more celebratory ideal of resistance to the system, but in order for
resistance to manifest itself, the individual must first be subjected to the power
within the system, and therefore, be dependent on it. The individual and the system
thus become mutually constitutive. Foucault’s model of subjectivation is reified in
the functioning of prison systems, and indeed, in the very idea of imprisonment:
“The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the
effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and
brings him into existence…the soul is the prison of the body.”
xxix
The imprisonment
of the body, both literally and figuratively, doesn’t allow for much scope of
resistance as it produces docile bodies. The panopticism contains the body because
the body is made visible and is therefore potentially always under surveillance,
which leads to a form of self-regulation and self-discipline on the part of the
prisoner.
xxx
However, the “soul” as the “prison of the body” confines the body only
externally, leaving the interior – the psyche, the unconscious – malleable and also
outside the domain of that power.
Offering her own reading of subjection and resistance, “between Freud and
Foucault,” Judith Butler sees the unconscious as resisting totalization and
normalization by suggesting that the “psychic, unsocialized remainder” signifies the

107
limits of normalization;
xxxi
even if the body is confined, the unconscious has free
rein over itself. A division is hereby created delimiting the effects of power and
revealing the divide in its reach. While the soul is the prison of the body, it
nevertheless also brings the man, the subject, into existence. Butler emphasizes,
“The body is not a site on which a construction takes place; it is a destruction on the
occasion of which a subject is formed.”
xxxii
Butler’s reading of “destruction” as
leading to the formation of the subject reinforces the Foucauldian paradox of
assujettissement. Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power it is
said to oppose; in this way, power is self-subverting.
This understanding of the complexities of power relations might explain the
British reluctance to criminalize and punish the Rajputs. The inability to detect the
crime and identify the perpetrators reveals a reluctance to antagonize the martial and
virile “race” of people as well. To imprison the Rajputs, even after eliciting a
confession from them, would be tantamount to subjecting them to a draconian
power. Reversing Ranajit Guha’s influential paradigm of the colonial state’s
“dominance without hegemony,” I suggest that in the particular instance of
suppressing female infanticide among the Rajputs, the British attempted to secure a
hegemonic position through persuasion without the appearance of the coercion
entailed in dominance. Corporal punishment, as opposed to a pecuniary one, would
engender the very resistance the British were trying to avoid. The success of
effacing the practice from the communities of Rajputs could only be accomplished

108
through a domestication of the perceived hypermasculinity of the Rajput men.
“Preserving” the girl child became a way of creating a feminized space that would
assuage some of the bellicosity produced within a predominantly masculine domain.
And it is here that the engagement with mourning becomes crucial. The
“saving” of only sixty-three girls in a period of ten years constitutes a resistance that
thwarts the effective legislation of power. Commenting on the Jahrejahs’ overt
flippancy and indifference to honouring the principles behind the agreements,
Ballantine reports that the elder brother among the Thacoors of Drafa declared “with
the greatest sang froid, that he had himself certainly murdered two daughters, but of
course that is [sic] was previous to Colonel Walker’s engagements and that I should
no doubt be surprised that in the intermediate period of 10 years, not one female
Child had been borne [sic] to any of the numerous Byaad” (emphasis mine). The
refusal to bind with grief, to represent the absence of the female infant as a loss and
to acknowledge that loss testifies to the limits of power. The elder brother’s
confession that he had “murdered two daughters” points to a recognition of the
absence of the infant as murder or the taking away of life. But there is an immediate
shift in register and implication contained in the ominous “not one female Child had
been borne.” The murder of the two daughters moves away from being recorded as a
crime to now entering the catalogue of “non-births.” By structuring the death of the
infant as a non-birth, the very conception of loss resists signification. Each death
enacts the mythic origin of infanticide; it becomes a representation and a re-

109
presentation of that originary loss, thereby entering the ritual performance of a
rehearsed, albeit unscripted, play and distancing itself from the violence and horror
of the act.
The virility of the Rajput men, by virtue of them belonging to the kshatriya or
warrior class, allowed them to be perceived as dangerous, which accounts for the
intense scrutiny that the practice demanded. Given that the furore around Sati and
female infanticide started around the same time, viz., late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, why was there a schism in the manner in which the two issues
were resolved? Sati was formally abolished in 1829, but an act suppressing female
infanticide wasn’t passed until 1870. The excess of mourning that Sati characterizes
is the articulation of a prefigured loss. The wife ceases to exist at the moment of her
husband’s death. The horrific excess of grief leaves its mark on the burnt body of
the widow. In accounting for the prevalence of the practice of infanticide across
various cultures, James Peggs confirms that in New Zealand in 1824, missionaries
discovered the practice of killing female infants through the method of ro-mea
(squeezing the nose). The mother, who was the willing and active perpetrator of the
crime, would then cut herself with shells and lament her dead child. The physical
scarring of the body – of the sati and of the infanticidal mother in New Zealand –
becomes the visible proof of grief, and the absence of the physical mark of sorrow
among “infanticidal clans” in India consequently implicates the absence of sorrow

110
itself. The psychic, feminized space thus had to be created through language and
through education.
The witnessing of death in Sati enters the practice into the cultural register of
repetition, where the ritual is always already scripted. In female infanticide,
however, the deliberate invisibility of the female body effaces the practice from
scopic and cultural memory. Within the infanticidal logic that Walker seeks to
explore, the infant was never murdered because it never existed. To see the victim is
to bear testimony to its life and, consequently, to its death. And herein lies perhaps
the unstated subliminal requirement. Did the witness, the testis, to the child’s birth
have to be male, or was that a complication derived from the difficulty in speaking to
the women? If only the women of the household can “testify” to the birth of the
infant, while the father testifies only to its death, does the testimony still allude to
infanticide?

Chapter 2.2 “Save a daughter and earn my friendship:” Translating Negotiations
One of the problems with establishing the degree to which female infanticide
was a widespread practice, with gaining an accurate insight into the rituals and
ceremonies inherent in daily life, and with identifying the “true perpetrator” was that
government officials did not have access to Rajput women. The women formed an
invisible group, hidden largely behind the protective veil of the zenana. Not only

111
were the British officials not allowed to talk to them, but they had to rely on Rajput
males to furnish figures on the number of women and females in the house. While
the first census was taken in the North-Western Provinces in 1853, Rajput males
were reluctant to divulge the number of wives, daughters, female servants, and
concubines in the zenana. Complex kinship structures called “joint families” where
several brothers and their families would live in the same hearth, further complicated
matters. In addition, between 1870, when the Act VIII for the suppression of female
infanticide was passed, and 1912, it became nearly impossible to glean an accurate
census; Rajput men would send their wives and daughters to neighbouring villages
or to their maternal homes and would present previous census figures which they
would have learnt by rote. Thus, although one came across villages like Ghetouli in
Mainpuri consisting of upper-caste Rajput Chauhans where there would be 40 boys
to 2 girls, it was impossible to gauge the true reason for the absence of
daughters.
xxxiii
Given the confining and inaccessible nature of the women’s quarters and the
extent to which the Rajput women lived an existence invisible to the British officials,
one of the rare insights into the woman’s perspective on female infanticide is that of
the mother of Jahrejah Jehajee of Moorbee. Col. Walker kept a steady
correspondence with several petty Jahrejah Rajput chiefs between 1807 and 1808 in
an attempt to persuade them to renounce the practice of female infanticide.
Unsuccessful in persuading Jehajee to consent to preserving his daughters and

112
mindful of the regard and deference the matriarch commands in the Indian
household, Walker penned a letter to Jehajee’s mother. Hoping to arouse her
sympathy and empathy for the fate of females in the community, Walker centred his
argument on the maternal solicitude that would seemingly obviate the practice
among women: “I hope you will labour in this affairs [sic] for it is very unnatural for
a mother to allow her own offspring to be put to death; your father and your mother
have nursed and brought you up wherefore then should it hurt you to rear up your
daughters?” The mother’s reply, on the other hand, is indicative of the deep-rooted
conditioning and the preference for caste identification over gendered one. Her terse
reply to Walker shows the disjuncture between the moral and ideological rhetoric of
the British and the performative impetus of the Rajputs. “You have called up Coer
Jehajee to rear up his daughters but it is so, that for many years past none of the
Jahreja tribes have ever reared their female offspring [;] further particulars of this
concern you will learn from Coer Jehaee’s writing and you must excuse him on this
score, as Coer Jehajee has attached himself to you. Let his Jummabundy be so
settled that his credit will be preserved.” It is possible for us to read this translation
as containing the practice of female infanticide between the male members of the
family and the female infant, which is a charge that Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu
Dube and Reena Dube have levelled against colonial narratives.
xxxiv
However, the
repetition in performance reifies the strength of the practice, such that committing
infanticide becomes, inadvertently, a signifier of caste adherence and caste

113
identification. The female voice resonates with the collective, and the violence
against the female infant is subsumed within a larger community-building ritual.
More significantly, the allusion to the taxation in the last sentence implies a
linking of the practice with monetary punishment. Despite the Jahrejahs admitting to
the custom, the punishment meted out to them consisted not of imprisonment but of
seizing their villages or imposing a fine. The honourable principles that the British
claimed to adhere to and the ethical overtones of their rhetoric appear, thus, to mask
the material transactions in building an empire. The confiscation of villages and
property might have had as much to do with the growing fear of the rise of an
independent, virile warrior class as with the desire to expand the empire. The
accounts of infanticide contained in the archives work as a form of imperialist
discourse. These letters and negotiations all demonstrate recognition of abuse of
power by parents and the patriarchal community at large in India and the ability to
identify the victims of the abuse – the children. Having acknowledged the
discrepancy in power, the British officials of the East India Company, in the form of
the benevolent Protector, marshalled power to protect the children. The economic
nature of imperialism is thereby softened and shrouded by the ideology of the
civilizing mission. Stripped of any claims to selfhood, the female infant –
consciously and necessarily entrusted with associations of fragility and innocence –
was transformed into the indispensable conduit through which colonial discourse
took place.

114
The British did not directly impose punitive measures on the Rajput tribes
suspected of engaging in the willful murder of female infants. Instead, most of the
correspondence takes the guise of negotiations. Col. Walker claims that the Jahrejah
chiefs will have the “friendship and favor” of the East India company if they start
preserving their female infants. Conversely, the Jahrejah chiefs promise to preserve
their infants provided the East India Company restores their control over their
villages. Those who preserved their infants were rewarded; some monetary help was
also proposed by the English to defray their wedding expenses. Those who didn’t
save their female infants, however, were never imprisoned – there was simply never
enough proof. Even the absence of female children only served to arouse suspicion,
not establish crime.
A subtext of male homosociality courses through the negotiations between
Col. Walker and the Jahrejah Rajput chiefs. Obtaining the “friendship and favour”
of the East India Company signified bridging the distance between colonizer and
colonized. The strict division between ruler and subject assumed importance in the
Victorian era; however, the era of the nabob and the Orientalist scholar was drawing
to a close. These negotiations form, perhaps, among the last few vestiges of colonial
identification. In a letter dated 21
st
September 1807, Jahrejah Jehajee confesses to
Col. Walker his appreciation in being asked to put an end to the custom of
infanticide because it provides proof of comfort and parity in relations: “…I am
convinced you looke [sic] upon me as your own when you desire me to do this…”

115
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the discussions on female infanticide
were confined within the realm of interpersonal communication alone, where the
very fact of negotiation was accorded more importance than a firm outcome. Each
side seemed unwilling to compromise, waiting for the other to concede before
returning the favour. Acquiescing to British requests would mean losing face in the
community and potentially being shunned by the caste for deviating from the norm.
For Walker and the East India Company, on the contrary, having their demands met
would further entrench their authority in the capacity of ruler and administrator.
These negotiations would gradually be replaced with a more self-righteous and
moralizing thrust in the 1820s and 1830s, steadily rising in fervour and crescendo
until the 1860s when it would perhaps reach its voluminous zeal in the guise of
legislations.
The negotiations comprise an intriguing collage of voices and denote a
collaborative effort. Each letter was not a private communication between Col.
Walker and the Jahrejah chief in question. Instead, each correspondent would have
his own translator to transliterate and interpret the idioms peculiar to the various
dialects and languages. In addition, Walker employed the services of Brahmins or
other Rajputs to serve as intermediaries between him and the chiefs suspected of
engaging in infanticidal practices. The triangular model of correspondence thus
weaves a rich tapestry of communication that includes conversations, written
communication, and translations. Often, the letter would include the opinions of

116
more than simply the writer. Walker complains, for instance, that the letters he
receives from Futteh Mohammed, a petty Muslim chief, are often written in the
inflated style of a Brahmin since Futteh Mohammed is illiterate. The importance
that the British attached to the written word was thus compromised in the differential
native voices whose collage formed the written correspondence. Nevertheless, the
maintenance of this network of communication facilitated observation of the other’s
culture, the limits of tolerance, and the extent of coercion. The limited success that
Walker encountered when several chiefs decided to discontinue the tradition of
female infanticide might have been motivated by the desire to end a heinous practice.
However, in the context of the overall struggle for political power, I argue that it was
meant less to ensure the triumph of morality than to test the possibility of ending one
tradition by supplanting it with another. The year-long negotiations with the
Jahrejah chiefs not only revealed the forms of persuasion and coercion that worked
most effectively with the natives, but it also facilitated the rise of a new class of
natives who would prove instrumental in the push for legislation – the intermediaries
whom, a quarter of a century later, Thomas Macaulay would give shape to and
articulate in his infamous Minute on Indian education.

117
Chapter 2.3 I, too, am British: The case of the Mimic Men
The interaction between the British and the natives on the question of female
infanticide constituted two distinct subjects. Romanticized as a noble and virile
martial class of people, the cruel practice of female infanticide represented the
Rajputs in a more dangerous light. They were portrayed in some of the official
reports on infanticide as embodying all that was problematic about the colony: they
were irrational, illiterate, intractable, prone to violence in a moment of passion, and
disjointed from a sense of history through their fixation on tradition and myth. On
the other hand, the first few decades of the nineteenth century also witnessed the
emergence of the Indian bourgeoisie, who sought to distance themselves from the
mass of the Indian populace through identification with the British. The processes of
subjection and subjectivation received a boost with the Charter Act of 1813, which,
among other clauses related to trade, allowed the admission of missionaries in the
colony and consequently, as the next two decades would disclose, wrought a greater
emphasis on educating the natives in English. Encapsulated in Macaulay’s oft-
quoted hope for India, the native bourgeoisie would, in the course of the nineteenth
century, metamorphose into a “class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but
English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”
xxxv
But prior to the ruling
class of natives assuming the role of “interpreters” between the British and the
“millions” whom the latter governed, there were already several noticeable voices
among the native population that adopted a position of in-betweenness within the

118
binary distinction of settler-native. The precursors to the bourgeois mimic men,
these voices served as mediators in the negotiations between Walker and the Rajputs,
and provided further momentum to the East India Company’s desire to expand the
empire.
While the tactic of employing persuasion with the Jahrejahs as opposed to
coercion or force did not reap the rewards that the British had hoped, the plaintive
correspondence and entreaties on both sides establishes a familial relationship
between them. Nevertheless, Jahrejah Jehajee’s acknowledgment that Walker
undoubtedly looks upon him as his own in asking the former to relinquish the
practice and his subsequent refusal to set an example by bringing up his daughters
suggest the impossibility of the British acceding to a hegemonic position in the
colonial state. As recent settlers in India and as non-Hindus, the British would
always be placed outside of the caste system, and the deference that was due to the
upper castes would thus be denied them. At the same time, the familiarity and
familiality of the correspondences implied parity in relations that rejected any
hegemonic aspirations among the British. Within such a framework, the main
recourse for the British seemed to lie in the legislation
xxxvi
of dominance.
The East India Company’s wish to solidify their standing as “rulers” finds a
resonance in the middlemen and translators who express their conviction on the
matter to Col. Walker. In an extract of a letter to Walker, Sunderjee Sewjee conveys
the difficulty of eliciting a firm answer from the Jehajee without the use of threats.

119
He finally proclaims that “if the relinquishment of Infanticide is a question assuredly
to be effected by the Company, its accomplishment must be effected by force which
would be but advisable and proper…” Elsewhere in his report, Walker himself
complains about the insurmountable difficulties frustrating his attempt at gaining an
accurate insight into the practice and at suppressing it, “which few of [the natives]
thought could be overcome, but by the company making a conquest of the country.”
The failure of his endeavour in getting the Rajputs to renounce the practice is thus
attributed to the limited powers of the British, rather than to the measures employed.
What is of particular interest in this case is the blending of the voice and its
echo. In a critique of the educational system, Gauri Viswanathan cites several essays
by Indian school children, many of which function as apologies for colonialism. She
asserts that the essays show “the extent to which the objectives of British instruction
have been internalized” by the children, irrespective of personal conviction.
Viswanathan makes the point that while some students might, in fact, have bought
into the ideology propagated through the study of English literature and thought, “the
pressure to compete for promotion and awards and prizes” complicates the issue
from being a personal belief of the student to “the degree of correspondence between
the objectives of instruction and the internalization of what students clearly sensed as
desirable responses to the content of instruction.”
xxxvii
One could conceivably make
a similar argument in relation to the comments of Sunderjee Sewjee and other
natives who believe that only a complete conquest of the country and the use of force

120
that the conquest would legitimate could lead to the suppression of female
infanticide. To what extent was the difference and hierarchy of the dichotomy of
settler-native internalized by those natives opposed to the practice or in favour of
conquest? To what extent is that internalization a result of cyclical patterns of
colonialism and subjugation, culminating in, what Albert Memmi has referred to as,
a “dependency complex?” Intriguingly, the desire for conquest, the plea to “save us
from ourselves,” as it were, is at once an admission of difference and of parity
through convergence of belief. It is at this historic precipice, when the Company has
yet to cement its claim as ruler of an empire that we are able to glimpse one of the
final instances of sameness. In the decades that follow, the voices can be
distinguished between propagation and internalization; however, at this stage of the
empire, the movement of mimicry is yet indistinguishable.
Bhabha’s conception of colonial mimicry is foundational in understanding
much of colonial culture; the desire to fix otherness “as a subject of a difference that
is almost the same, but not quite” forms part of a shifting indeterminacy, an
“ambivalence” that is the sign of a dual articulation.
xxxviii
At the same time, by
fixing colonial mimicry within the confines of discourse, Bhabha not only elides
questions of class but also reifies a unidirectional movement of power. His mimic
men are the mimic men dreamed of by Macaulay, the native ruling class who
function as intermediaries between the administration and the people it governs. But
what happens when mimicry moves from the level of discourse into that of

121
performance? What about the Englishman who “goes native”? Where does the
slippage lie?
One of the factors that insert an uneasiness in the conception of mimicry is
the degree to which it interacts with and is distinguishable from the Althusserian
understanding of interpellation in subject-formation. Foucault’s paradigm allows for
us to see clearly the workings of power and how that power not only uses the body as
an instrument of production, but also, contrarily, leads to the formation of the
subject. In the Althusserian framework, however, the individual is always already a
subject who must formally perform an instance of ideological recognition. These
rites ensure that each subject is distinct, distinguishable, and according to Althusser,
irreplaceable. The policeman hailing an individual announces the latter as a subject
because the individual realizes that the policeman is really hailing him.
xxxix

Recognition in this scenario could very well work as a misrecognition (‘it wasn’t me
but somebody else who was being hailed’), but as Judith Butler has pointed out, the
“subject” is not an individual but a linguistic category, although it is individuals who
occupy the site of a subject.
xl
Both exemplars, Foucault’s and Althusser’s, necessitate submission to power
in the constitution of subjecthood. On the other hand, the ambivalence of mimicry,
as Bhabha refers to it, would seem to play a role once the native enters into the
colonizer’s language. At the time of Walker’s correspondence with the natives in
Baroda, Sunderjee Sewjee has not yet enacted the repetition inherent in the variable

122
“almost the same, but not quite,” nor does his positionality perform the menace of a
difference that is “almost total but not quite.”
xli
Rather, I believe that the desire for
conquest reflects, at this stage, the inability to separate hegemony from dominance.
It endorses the idea of a dependency complex that rejects self-rule and sees
betterment only through colonial occupation. It accepts being subject to a power as
long as it is also constituted as a subject by it.
Macaulay’s impassioned plea for the teaching of English language and
literature parodied the native desire for subjecthood through language. But it also
articulated a “restructuring of native thinking”
xlii
through a pedagogy that would
emphasize the learning of a western, teleological model of history and science. The
“absurd history” and “absurd geography” of the Indians conflated “true” events from
mythic ones, disbanded conventional understandings of temporality with fantastic
tales of kings who ruled for thousands of years, and allegorized mythology to
articulate the historical moment. Training eager Indian students in the western ways
of thinking would facilitate administrative efficiency and progress and turn them
away from the sloth and decadence characteristic of much of the literature from the
East. Moreover, Macaulay claimed that even the Orientalists conceded that “the
dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India…are…so poor and
rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to
translate any valuable work into them.”
xliii
Macaulay’s diatribe against Indian
languages contains an attack on the medium of translation itself. Veena Naregal’s

123
argument opposes Macaulay’s in so far as she believes the dissemination of “the
authority of Western norms and notions of cultures…impels us to think of translation
as endemic to the construction of colonial discourse…”
xliv
To a certain extent,
translation does assist in the project of colonialist propaganda and in the perpetuation
of stereotypes. Missionary accounts of Indians who begged for conversion and, thus,
salvation after reading a translation of the Bible do confirm Naregal’s belief in the
importance of translation. Similarly, as Tejaswini Niranjana has pointed out, the
educated Indian’s access to his own past would often be mediated through European
translations of Sanskrit texts.
xlv
Nevertheless, these examples represent but a
fraction of the material made available in the Indian market. I suggest, rather, that
the shift to an education in English and the corresponding absence of translations
aided the insignificance slowly attached to the study of native languages. The
absence of translations did not refer to an absence of readers but to the perceived
inferiority of Indian languages. Thus, in due course of time, the upper classes and
castes in India chose to study in English as a medium of instruction.
According to Gauri Viswanathan, the Indian students were being taught a
curriculum that was created for the ruling elite in England, engineered to inculcate
moral ideals and leadership qualities.
xlvi
At the same time, until the latter half of the
nineteenth century, Indians were only given subordinate jobs and bureaucratic work
that were not commensurate with the kind of education they had received. As
Viswanathan argues, “Indians receiving Western education were reading texts that

124
taught them to be independent thinkers and leaders, but they had neither the
independence nor the opportunity to lead.”
xlvii
The Arnoldian curriculum – which
incorporated the Classical and Romantic strains of thought – was integrated into the
Indian educational context, but the objectives of that education were modified.
Rather than train a ruling elite for positions of leadership, the curriculum produced
men who sublimated their independent thoughts and intellectual endeavours to social
reform. It would be these Indians who would take up the cause of fighting for
women’s rights and would be among the most vociferous in condemning the
practices of Sati and female infanticide.
Until the rise of this educated class of Indians, the only native support the
British would rely on in their campaign against female infanticide would be
translations of various Sanskrit texts. By using the religious precepts of the Hindus
as proof that infanticide was, in fact, a sin, the British testified also to the
authenticity of the text qua religion and qua history. However, this reliance on the
past was characteristic of the Orientalist way of thinking, which believed India’s
ancient history to have been part of a golden age, and which had, since then, been in
decline, as evidenced in the barbarity of its customs. The most well-known verse
that was repeatedly invoked to demonstrate the sanctions against infanticide was
translated as:
To kill one Brahmun is equal to one hundred cows
To kill one woman is equal to one hundred Brahmuns
To kill one child is equal to one hundred women
To kill one hundred children is an offence too heinous for comparison
xlviii

125
The endurance of both the “original” verse and its translation points to the ability of
a text to “live on” – the Derridean sur-vit. The survival of the verse and its
continuation in discourse can only be effected if, as Derrida claims, the text is both
translatable and untranslatable. An act of recording information is inscribed in
absence, but it also circumvents the question of presence/absence of the reader;
translations of oral narrative which double as written memory turn the focus on
posterity rather than on communication alone. The untranslatability of a text
indicates its inability to articulate a satisfactory response to the particular historical
moment. It is the untranslatability that displaces meaning from the text as “sign” to
leave the remainder – the translated and the translatable – as encompassing only the
promise of closure and stability.
The reaching back to the past, the search for censure in the Sanskrit verse is
the search for grief and mourning in a culture that does not acknowledge its loss.
The diachronic culmination of meaning is always already in an act of displacement,
which refutes change and evolution in a teleological model to unceasingly trace a
circle around itself. The instability of meaning ensures that it slips through the
fingers just as you are about to close in on it, always doubling back on itself but
never retracing its own steps. It seemingly tumbles upon the synchronic moment
only to sidestep it at the last second. The text always casts an oblique glance towards
that synchronic reading, allowing the reading to resonate with the contemporary
moment without necessarily corresponding to it. The return of mourning to an

126
economy of loss occurs only with the Anglicization of the bourgeoisie. Mourning,
then, is learnt, and for the community to engage in a ritual of mourning, the absence
of the female infant must first be constituted as a loss. The incorporation of grief,
anger, and sorrow into the structures of loss creates a psychic space of wounding,
which is made possible through the trope of mimicry.

127

Notes:
i
Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton UP, 1996), 3.

ii
Ibid., 4-5, emphasis mine.

iii
The policies and practices of the East India Company formed a site of tension. There were
competing interests at work: trade vs. territorial conquest, non-interference in the religious life of the
natives vs. the advent of missionary activity, and so on.

iv
Col. Walker’s report on infanticide in Baroda state and measures adopted by the Baroda state
(written in Baroda, 15
th
March 1808). Secret and Political Department, Diary No. 228, 1808, dated
Bombay Castle, 31
st
March 1808, 3940-4146.

v
James Peggs, Cries of Agony: An Historical Account of Suttee, Infanticide, Ghat Murders and
Slavery in India (Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 1984), 138-141.

vi
Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans.
Anthony Wilden (New York: Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1968), 58.

vii
In the course of his correspondences, Col. Walker receives a communication from Jahrejah
Dadajee, the Chief of Rajcote, who, on being asked about the different methods of murdering an
infant, retorts: “What difficulty is there in blasting a flower?” While only the translation was
provided in the communication, the reference to “blasting” again connotes a form of violence that
might involve mutilation.

viii
For a more detailed analysis of the conflicting perceptions of the native woman, refer to chapter 4.

ix
Bernard S. Cohn describes “vakeels” as “confidential agents who, like the Akhunds, were frequently
involved in negotiations with Indian officials on courses of action in relation to the Company’s
continuing need to negotiate various legal and commercial matters with the Mughal state” (17).

x
Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins UP, 1987), 83.

xi
In a detailed analysis of the British ploy of using dowry as the cause of a variety of crimes against
women, Veena Talwar Oldenburg has shown how Walker was cautious about not “antagonizing
powerful Rajput chieftains” (48). Keen to root out the truth while simultaneously maintaining
political harmony, he sought instead to shame them into renouncing the practice. Dowry Murder: The
Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (New York: Oxford UP, 2002).

xii
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed., Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 76.

xiii
Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998), 77.

128

xiv
As I write this, I am only too conscious of Tejaswini Niranjana’s indictment of the “post-colonial
desire to re-translate” as “linked to the desire to re-write history” (172). And while my reading of
19
th
century India is, in fact, mediated through the lens of British writing of the period, I also believe
that any reading of the past involves a re-visiting and – to cite Bhabha’s use of the term – re-
membering that is crucial in order to avoid a teleological conception of history. One can only “re-
write” what has already been written and is now being erased and written over. My conception of
history, however, mimics how I see translations at work in the archives: each “re-writing” of history
adds yet another story, where it is the complex interplay of various synchronic layers articulated
within a historical moment that necessitates the postcolonialist’s engagement with the past, rather than
the diachronicity of a particular narrative. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the
Colonial Context (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: UC Press, 1992).

xv
To Capt. J.R. Carnac, Resident, Baroda. Capt. Ballantine’s report on Female Infanticide in
Kathiawad. Diary no. 437 of 24
th
Sept. 1817. Secret and Political Dept., Bombay Castle.

xvi
Cohn, 10.

xvii
Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being: British Rule and the Konds of Orissa (New Delhi:
Oxford UP, 2000).

xviii
Ref. to Meenakshi Bharat, The Ultimate Colony: The Child in Postcolonial Fiction. On the one
hand, the native himself was figured as a “recalcitrant child” (110), a position which, analogous to
Kipling’s ‘half devil half child’, also denied him claims to subjecthood. In addition, the child itself
became a battleground over whom an ideological war would be waged between the colonizer and the
native. Not only was the mind of the child more permeable and malleable, but it also ensured the
“psychological subservience of the entire race” (17).

xix
The predominantly androcentric enterprise of colonialism would perhaps get an additional fillip
with this fantasy of an all-male bastion. Interestingly, it is just such an idea that is explored in the
film Matrubhoomi: a Nation without Women (refer to the chapter 5). However, I would like to shift
the focus away from the homoerotic component suggested in such a fantasy to highlight the use of the
female infant as a conduit in the economic transactions and material negotiations of maintaining an
empire. Through the murder of the hapless infants, the Jahrejahs imitated the potency of the British
rulers, thereby strengthening that homosocial bond already born out of the colonial encounter. For a
more detailed reading of the homoerotics of that encounter and of the negotiations in masculinity, ref.
to Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race,
Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793-1905; Ashis
Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, to name a few.

xx
In a separate letter to the Court of Directors in 1819, Col. Walker refers to their military profession
as being a possible reason for the practice of infanticide. “Among a people devoted to war, and
peculiarly exposed to danger, the rearing of their daughters may have been an object of great
difficulty, and in some situations they may have proved an impediment to the profession of arms.
They may therefore have made this sacrifice on some emergency, to their convenience and even to
their safety; or, if we choose to ascribe it to a dreadful superstition very prevalent in ancient times, as
the means of appeasing the wrath or of propitiating the favor of the gods.” Interestingly, this
possibility is never alluded to in any other document.

129

xxi
The degree to which the disjuncture between the public and private space impacted the
understanding of masculinity has been treated at some length by Revathi Krishnaswamy in
Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998).
She contends, “…the colonial construction of the Indian male as effeminate actually led to an
intensification of indigenous patriarchal structures […] On the one hand, it pushed Indian women ever
more deeply into the privatized domain of the home over which Indian men were assured complete
and unqualified control. On the other hand, it effeminized Indian men by mystifying and
essentializing the newly constituted private domain as the true site of Hindu/Indian identity, which
was nevertheless defined in feminine terms as excessive, passive, inert, conservative, dependent, and
irrational” (48-9).

xxii
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
(Berkeley: UC Press, 2002), 58.

xxiii
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of
Crime (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 138.

xxiv
Charles Ball, The History of the Indian Mutiny (1858), quoted in McDonagh.

xxv
Ref. to René Girard, “Generative Scapegoating,” Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural
Formation, ed., Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987), 73-105.

xxvi
Ibid., p.78.

xxvii
Ibid.

xxviii
Around mid-19
th
century, the discourse on the crime shifts register with little or no explanation.
In the documents of the 1860s and 1870s, the British believed the cause of female infanticide among
the Rajputs to be the “ruinous expenses” that the bride’s father had to undertake for the wedding.
Around the same time, the practice of infanticide among the Punjabis was thought to arise from the
demands of dowry or liquid assets that the father had to provide. For a more detailed account of the
ramifications of the economic imperative, refer to chapter 3, “Buried in the Arkheia: Writing the
Female Infant into Being.”

xxix
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), 30.

xxx
Based on Jeremy Bentham’s architectural construction of the Panopticon, Foucault’s theory of
panopticism details the automatic functioning of power. In order to ensure the successful workings of
power, two criteria must be made certain: visibility and unverifiability. The prisoner has to be visible
all the time so that he may be seen. At the same time, power itself remains unverifiable. The prisoner
doesn’t know whether he is being seen or inspected at a particular moment, but he must believe that
he may very well be (ibid., 200). It is primarily in this way that power functions without necessarily
being imposed or enforced.

xxxi
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997),
88.

xxxii
Ibid., 92, emphasis mine.

130

xxxiii
Malavika Kasturi, Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth-
Century India (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2002), 99-101. The above statistics from the district of
Mainpuri are from 1871. In my own archival research, I came across statistics furnished by British
officials that in districts like Pertabghur, which consisted of 611 Rajput villages, they counted 6,012
boys to 2,081 girls below the age of five.

xxxiv
Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube, Reena Dube, Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist
Cultural History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 53.

xxxv
“Minute on Indian Education (2 February 1835).” Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Selected by
G.M. Young, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1970), 729.

xxxvi
Here I am referring not only to the way in which dominance would intertwine with the law to
cement the power of the colonial state, but also to the various meanings encapsulated in the Latin verb
legere: to pick, to choose, to bind.

xxxvii
Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, (NY: Columbia
UP, 1989),136-140.

xxxviii
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 86.

xxxix
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation.”
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1971), 174.

xl
Butler, 10-11.

xli
Bhabha, 91.

xlii
Veena Naregal, Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under
Colonialism, (London: Anthem Press, 2001), 55.

xliii
Macaulay, 721.

xliv
Naregal, 103.

xlv
Niranjana, 31. Lawrence Venuti concurs with Niranjana’s analysis, claiming “Colonial
governments strengthened their hegemony through translations that were inscribed with the
colonizer’s image of the colonized, an ethnic or racial stereotype that rationalized domination” (166).

xlvi
Viswanathan adds that in English public schools, it was the Arnoldian curriculum that
predominanted, which included an amalgam of the classical (classical language, literature, and history
that instructed in law, government, and society) and Romantic (Romantic poetry was thought to teach
deeper relations between nature and the human soul). This formed the Victorian ideal of morality and
good learning and was also well-suited for the ruling elite (55-57).

xlvii
Viswanathan, 56.

131

xlviii
Quoted in Parliamentary Papers, 1824, p.42; Walker’s letter. Also in James Peggs, Cries of
Agony: An Historical Account of Suttee, Infanticide, Ghat Murders and Slavery in India, (Delhi:
Discovery Publishing House, 1984), 143.

132
Buried in the Arkheia: Writing the Female Infant into Being
As we have already seen with the translations of oral testimonies, European
translations of Indian texts – including ancient Hindu treatises on law, jurisprudence,
religion, and society – maintained the foreignness of the original text and, thus,
didn’t really succeed in making aspects of native culture more comprehensible or
palatable to the British official in nineteenth-century India. In fact, James Mill’s
History of British India, which was approved as the official textbook in the colleges
of the East India Company, perhaps enjoyed greater success in mediating the British
administrator’s understanding of the colony.
i
Anticipating Macaulay’s dismissal of
native literature and learning, Mill’s writing centred on the fabulous aspects of native
thought and belief, which were construed as devoid of reason, logic, and order.
Revealing a deep-rooted suspicion of the Orientalist enthusiasm for Sanskrit and
Persian texts and poetry, Mill systematically discredited their viewpoint, a move that
would be echoed in the attitude and policy of the East India Company after the
1830s, when the missionaries had made their presence felt in the colony.
ii
In a
period that had already seen the high profile impeachment of Warren Hastings, he
questioned the authority of these scholars further and claimed, “Some of the most
enlightened of the Europeans who have made inquiries concerning the ideas and
institutions of the Hindus, have been induced, from the lofty epithets occasionally
applied to the gods, to believe and to assert that this people had a refined and
elevated religion. Nothing is more certain than that such language is far from proof
of such a religion.”
iii
The disbelief in Hinduism’s claim to authenticity as a

133
prominent religion was deepened by also bringing into question the intellectual
quality of its European translators and interpreters.
Co-existent with the dismissal of the opinions of Sir William Jones, Warren
Hastings, and other Orientalist scholars in this period was the derision that
accompanied the persona of the nabob. An East India Company servant who
returned to England after having amassed a large personal fortune in India, the nabob
became a figure of ridicule in England in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
He represented the allure and thus the dangers of the East in his imitation of the
luxurious lifestyle of the Muslim nobility, including the latter’s manner of bathing
and dressing.
iv
Reversing the exemplar of who would eventually become a ‘mimic
man,’ the nabob embodied the degeneration of the Englishman who had ‘gone
native,’ a representation that did not become the rulers of the vast land. The
emergence of a more pragmatic Utilitarian approach combined with the missionary
disapproval of lassitude and decadence heralded a backlash against this process of
Indianization; as such, the nineteenth-century witnessed the East India Company
government move into an active construction of a more Anglicized image of the
ruler.
v
But the British soldiers and administrators were not solely responsible for
this conscious embodiment of a “British” persona. E. M. Collingham comments that
the increasing gulf between the settlers and the natives received an additional fillip
from the Indians’ religious and cultural concerns over pollution, the gradual and
deliberate cultural and political exclusion of Eurasians, and the arrival of British

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women in the colony, which essentially put an end to the fears of miscegenation by
simultaneously closing the door on the practice of keeping native mistresses.
vi
The result of these divisive practices was a literal estrangement of the British
officials from the natives. As the British consolidated their power in the political
sphere, they became further alienated socially and culturally from the people they
governed. Translations of ancient texts failed to communicate the quotidian bustle of
native life. William Bentinck, who would become Governor-General of India in
1828 and be immortalized in history for having abolished Sati, commented on this
sense of remove from the natives:
We are all acquainted with some prominent marks and facts, which all who
run may read: but their manner of thinking; their domestic habits and
ceremonies, in which circumstances a knowledge of the people consists, is I
fear in great part wanting to us […] We do not, we cannot, associate with the
natives. We cannot see them in their houses, and their families. We are
necessarily very much confined to our houses by the heat. All our wants and
business, which would create a greater intercourse with the natives, is done
for us; and we are in fact strangers in the land.
vii

Bentinck was infamous for his projects of Westernization and his disregard of
native religious and cultural beliefs. His desire for knowingness was perhaps
motivated to a greater extent by a Utilitarian desire for efficiency in rule rather than
an Orientalist curiosity of esoteric knowledge. The inability and even unwillingness
to know the Other would resonate with the British legislators in the immediate
aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857. For the moment, however, the loss of knowingness
was normalized in the reactionary atmosphere that saw the figures of the Orientalist
and nabob recede into the background. Barred from the privacy of the natives’

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homes, the epistemic construction of the native as a subject of discourse – in which
the native often colluded – was through the categorization of ideational constructions
that fixed and marked the behaviours as “other” or “foreign.” The reliance on
stereotype as a sign of difference is at once a denial of the complexity of thought or
culture and an awareness of that complexity, which has to be reduced and simplified
to a false essence in order to maintain the difference between “them” and “us.”
The perpetuation of the Other in and through stereotype was greatly
facilitated with the publication of influential works such as James Mills’ History,
travel narratives, and pamphlets like James Peggs’ Cries of Agony. But native
informants often actively participated in sustaining the perceptions that the British
held of them. This is not to suggest that the balance of power was redressed in the
native male’s opinion being solicited; his opinion was often used to merely verify
and reify an existing stereotype, such as the natives’ belief in superstition or the
barbarism of their practices. Nevertheless, that his voice was elicited in the records
of the British government complicates our understanding of the power dynamics by
moving it beyond the simplistic binary of dominant-submissive and discloses the
heterogeneity of native peoples in terms of their standing with the East India
Company. If the Indian bourgeoisie was judged authoritative and praised for being
the reasonable and progressive voice of the people, the village elders and “tribe
chiefs” were roped in to showcase an “authentic” voice by virtue of its foreignness.
Translators, local officials, and petty bureaucrats completed the stratification by
occupying transitional spaces between the various positionalities. This multi-tiered

136
organization reveals the motley and intricate web of interests, motives, influences,
confessions, and fabrications that are woven in the construction of any stereotype.
Articulating neither agonistically nor harmoniously, each group typifies a different
enunciative modality that parodies the other, while simultaneously shifting the focus
elsewhere.
Documents pertaining to female infanticide exemplify this tendency of the
different groups to speak past each other, each using a different register to focus on
its own vested interest. The Rajput chiefs repeatedly invoked “custom” as
justification for the crime. The British initially echoed and validated the Rajputs’
position: Walker’s letter contains numerous references to the “custom” of
infanticide, marking it as the culprit behind the crime, as a mundane and quotidian
practice, and as having the weight of a ritual. But around mid-century, the purported
cause of the practice mutated into the greed of the people, with dowry and exorbitant
wedding expenses being viewed as the true motivator.
viii
From being denoted a
cultural praxis alone, female infanticide had suddenly metamorphosed into an
economic one. Legislative documents in the 1850s and 1860s focused almost
exclusively on ways of addressing this underlying economic imperative.
ix
What
rendered this shift imperceptible was that not only were expenses related to
weddings translated as greed, but that this greed was, in turn, signified as a
“custom.” Religious and cultural conventions were thus subtly constructed as
predominantly economic in nature. The mid-century impetus accorded to the crime
as economic divested the practice from its mythical and religious connotations. Far

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from mitigating the foreignness of the crime, however, the monetary connotations
that devalued the life of the female infant augmented the barbarity of the
perpetrators. Where once they might have been thought of as gullible and
impressionable practitioners of a custom, they were now perceived to be calculating
and ruthless.
The stereotype of the illiterate, barbaric Indian male was also upheld and
reinforced by his educated and bourgeois counterpart. The conscious and purposeful
creation of the “mimic man” doubled as the deliberate interpellation of the colonized
native as subject. But Macaulay’s authorization of this instance of cultural
hybridization masked an insecure and uncertain notion of authenticity for the natives.
Homi Bhabha’s model of the “interstitial passage” that “prevents identities at either
end of it from settling into primordial polarities” and that “opens up the possibility of
a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed
hierarchy,”
x
might not account for the desire for subjecthood and fixity in identity.
If, on the one hand, the privilege accorded to the mimic men opened up a space for
fluidity in identification, it also simultaneously established a contention for an
“authentic” and “true” subjectivity. The bourgeois denigration of the barbarity of
infant-murderers is not the desire to mimic the British perspective to the extent that it
is the desire to constitute oneself as the more worthy subject. By relegating the
perpetrators to a criminal minority, the bourgeois Indian commentators achieved the
dual purpose of separating themselves from the Rajput offenders and marking the
Others as undeserving of British diplomacy, leniency, and subjecthood.

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The discourse on female infanticide thus assumes the form of the Hydra, with
each head enunciating a different positionality – custom, greed, and illiteracy.
Nevertheless, the seemingly disparate perspectives – of custom, of greed, of
illiteracy – all coalesced to indict the barbarity of the native male, which now had the
force of a stereotype. The stereotype, however, was not without its advantages.
From the British perspective, it cemented the need for continuation of the civilizing
mission; at the same time, it also helped to distinguish among various groups of
Indians, revealing an ambivalence in the very perception of Otherness as cohesive.
The lines distinguishing those who condoned the practice and those who condemned
it were never fixed: many Hindus, including some Rajputs, were against the practice,
while some Muslims with political and economic ties to the Jahrejah Rajputs
remained non-committal, and still others – including matriarchs in the Rajput
community – condoned the tradition. The instability of these boundaries testifies to
the difficulty the British faced in passing legislation on the subject. A successful
legislation would ideally favour a generalizing scope of the populace and subject
everyone, the guilty and the innocent alike, to the same surveillance.
But the generalizations also marked the precariousness of epistemological
constructions of the natives. Reducing complex constructions of knowledge and
history to an essence – traits, customs, nature – betrayed the settlers’ ignorance and
insecurity of their “subjects.” The perception or female infanticide as a custom
motivated by pride and greed secured the mask of knowingness and served to include
whole races of people in its sweep. Similar to the branding of the thuggee “cults”

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and the labelling of “castes” that practiced Sati, the tag “infanticidal clans” or
“infanticidal tribes” obviated the search for the elusive perpetrators. Entire tribes
could now be implicated in the crime, which eschewed having to confess that the
victimless crime – in so far as the victim was conspicuous by her absence – had an
unseen perpetrator. But the all-inclusive, generalizing sweep also pointed to the
incapacity to distinguish among the people, to nuance the classification of the
crime,
xi
and to sift through the mythic history of “customs.” In his discussion on the
reiteration of stereotypes in colonial discourse, Bhabha states that the “objective of
colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on
the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of
administration and instruction.”
xii
Bhabha’s analysis echoes a popular reading of
colonial discourse, revealing the currency that the idea of the civilizing mission held
for apologists of colonialism. However, the ambivalence of the stereotype that
Bhabha so aptly articulates, necessitates the repetition of the stereotype because
collapsing the domains of difference threatens the unity of the identity of the self.
The “sense” of self is at stake, both in terms of the conception of self as well as the
logic or reason of that unity.
To isolate colonial discourse as a marker of the construction and
representation of otherness is to dismiss the collusion of the Other in creating those
stereotypes about it-selves. The play of cohesion and fragmentation within the
subject population inserts an indeterminacy in colonial discourse. The “Other” as a
fixed sign of difference now vacillates between the “him,” “her,” “them,” “unlike

140
them,” “almost like us” positions of sameness. The multiplicity of the “it-selves” or
the “them-self” throws into relief the heterogeneity of the dominant group itself. The
fear, thus, of decentralization, of the unknowability, of the divisibility of that identity
necessitates the reification of identification and, consequently, the shift from
thinking of the settlers/colonizers as “our-selves” to a less amorphous “we,” “us,”
“our-self.” The dissolution of the sense of self relegates all identities to a position of
marginality. The discourse is thus articulated from the periphery leaving the centre a
mute site of enunciation. Power is no longer located within defined dialectical
relations, but is scattered unequally and unselfconsciously. It is no longer conferred
or assumed, but promiscuously changes partners within various differential
synchronic spaces. The preoccupation with female infanticide over other practices
of subjectification thus becomes clearer. The paranoia of the absence of power in the
centre is parodied here in the absent body of the female infant. The
faceless/nameless perpetrator keeps changing his identity, his position, his modus
operandi. The relentless search for the perpetrators provides the panacea for a
disempowered rule and administration. Identifying the murderer, imprisoning him in
a cage, and holding him up to scrutiny would contain the fear of unrest, the threat of
revolt, the disquiet and fragmentation within.
The British might have had a dual motive or imperative in wanting to abolish
female infanticide. At a time when the East India Company was trying to further
entrench its political gains in the colony, not only did it have to worry about possible
discontent among its subjects, but it also found itself answerable and accountable to

141
the British Parliament. While the Charter Act of 1813 had given it a new lease on
life, the Company was also pushed to take charge of the education of natives. Faced
with that responsibility and being forced to assume the “White man’s burden,” the
continuation of the civilizing mission necessitated civilizing not merely the
uncivilized but also, and especially, the uncivilizable. Both groups were equally
important to the success of the project. In the early decades of the nineteenth
century, the educated member of the bourgeoisie echoed and translated the Western
ideals as progressive and necessary for India’s escape from a vicious past of
decadent colonialisms. This internalization was complemented, however, by the
intractability of the orthodox masses, many of whom believed in strictly following
tradition and were seemingly resistant to change. If the educated class showcased
the possibility of progress and charted the rise of a people through the ameliorative
and transformative powers of instruction, this latter group underlined the need for
continued efforts at education. The natives thus had to be reduced to a position of
primitive instincts and innate barbarity, whereby change could be effected only once
this tabula rasa had been established.
This insistence on custom provided the perfect impetus for the civilizing
project. The very idea of a custom was necessarily intertwined with the legendary
origins of the practice. Various groups and entire castes suspected of practising
female infanticide drew upon a particular story, which subsequently generated the
emulative practice. Tracing, what Talwar has noted as, a Kiplingesque “just-so”
story for its direct cause-and-effect pattern, the legends detailing the origin of the

142
practice differ from one another in plot, protagonists, and denouement, but they all
revolve around the axis of a wedding crisis. If one of the stories ends with the
daughter’s murder because of the inability in finding her a groom, another story finds
her murdered en route to her wedding. In still a third variation, the girl does succeed
in getting married, albeit in an atmosphere of mutual hostility and ill-feeling between
the wedding parties. Interestingly, the ubiquity of the wedding crisis is juxtaposed
with an injury, be it real or imagined, to the father’s pride. Unlike the crimes of Sati,
for instance, which directed the spectator’s attention to the tragic figure of the
woman, the crime of infanticide – judging by the popularity and persistence of these
stories in the nineteenth century – displaced the focus to an injured masculinity.
British legislations on suppressing the practice were thus directed mostly to reducing
wedding expenses or reducing the financial burden of the dowry on the father.
Categorizing female infanticide a crime punishable by law would perhaps save the
life of many a female infant who would not otherwise have lived beyond a few
hours, but it would also create more opportunities for the father’s pride – of race and
of purse – to be offended, as well as openly wrest authority over his daughter’s life
away from him. Since the groups suspected of infanticide were also the more martial
ones in the country who could pose a strong challenge to any military might, the
British took pains to assuage these factions and tried to adopt those measures that
would be inoffensive to the Rajputs, while simultaneously fulfilling the demands of
the civilizing mission.

143
The official governmental discourse on female infanticide occupied positions
of disjuncture that were mutually inconstitutive. The archival Hydra reveals the
shape-shifting discourse on female infanticide. The emphasis on the practice as a
“custom,” which was prominent in texts ranging from Col. Walker’s letter in 1808
and James Peggs’ book in 1832, gave way inexplicably in the documents of the
1860s and 1870s to the ruinous effect of wedding expenses for daughters. Even
beyond speculations of the cause of the crime, the same incohesion is evident in
questions related to abolishing the practice. While opinions and suggestions of
various officials entailed surveillance, fines, and imprisonment, the legislation
aiming to suppress the practice focuses less on punishment and more on detection.
Motivated perhaps in large part by the unexpected rebellion of 1857, the focus
shifted dramatically from negotiating with suspected infanticidal families and castes
and educating them on the evils of the murderous practice to collecting census
figures, relentlessly counting the number of female children to the overall
population, having the midwife report every pregnancy in those villages where girls
comprised less than 25 percent of the non-adult population, and collecting a register
of all births and deaths in the “proclaimed families or clans” as well as of marriages,
arrivals into the village and “removals” from the village.
xiii
The movement of
pregnant women came under special scrutiny and their leaving a village or entering
another village had to be notified to the Police Station. Where only men were once
held liable or thought responsible for the death of the infant, women were now
included in the list of suspicious people. To that end, midwives and any other

144
women with the mother at the moment of childbirth had to be registered at the Police
Station.
Various forms of surveillance gained special urgency in the latter half of the
nineteenth century as fissures in the system of governance and resistance to the
system were constituted. India’s accession to the Empire became complete through
the paradoxical mode of rebellion. A year after the Mutiny, Queen Victoria became
Empress of India and the East India Company lost its exclusive stronghold. And in
that handing over was signified the rupture and shifts in conceptions of the practice
of infanticide. The narrative discontinuity signalled a re-coding of female infanticide
as extraneous to the native character and the reinvention of the British as adjudicator
and Protector. From the erstwhile antagonistic position vis-à-vis the natives,
whereby the Indians were constructed as a barbaric race who had to be educated,
moulded, and given moral instruction, the British now held the culture itself at fault;
the construction of female infanticide as an economic crime consequently portrayed
its practitioners as helpless and gullible victims of a barbaric custom.
The discourse on female infanticide traced its own circular path continually,
inviting other narratives to join in the play and widen the circle, at the centre of
which was an absence – the absence of the female. The dissimulation of information
and knowledge on female infanticide, the play and negotiation between those who
practiced the custom and those who railed against it centred precisely on the absence
of the female infant, on the lack of centre. The moral verbosity of official rhetoric
against the custom hinged necessarily on the silence and secrecy of those in favour

145
of the practice. Language alone was required to bring the infant into being; her birth
otherwise was considered a non-birth. Nevertheless, the absence of the female infant
is shrouded in discursive layers and multiple narratives – official documents, letters,
oral testimonials, written records, translations, essays – all of which demonstrate
Spivak’s idea of “palimpsestic narratives of imperialism.” Gayatri Spivak reads the
archival records of the soldiers and officials of the East India Company as the
“construction of a fiction…and that the ‘misreading’ of this ‘fiction’ produced the
proper name ‘India’.”
xiv
Following Spivak’s work, I do see the archives as
construction of a representation that would then be reified as “India.” However,
unlike her, I also think there is a constant slippage between fiction and
representation. Dominick LaCapra has cautioned against the tendency in literary
theory and criticism to use history as an “abstract” and “intemporal” category. At
the same time, he has also cautioned against “fetishizing” the archive as the “reality
of the past,”
xv
a criticism that echoes Hayden White’s critique of historians who
write “when all the facts are known” and they have finally “got the story straight.”
xvi

My own reading of the archives mediates between archives-as-historical
“truths” and archives-as-fiction. The correspondence between the English and the
Jahrejahs include oral testimonials by the often illiterate Jahrejah chiefs, which then
gets written down/recorded, and then finally translated into English. And as we saw
with Col. Walker’s translation of the Gujarati phrase, the correspondence is based
not only on translations, but also on mistranslations. The archive thus moves
between the representation and the “fiction” of that representation, which is the

146
mistranslation. The truth that the archive reveals is that there is no originary truth
but only the palimpsestic layers of (mis)translations. These narratives all build upon
each other. Various paragraphs from Walker’s report and the correspondence
between him and the Jahrejah chiefs resurface in the Parliamentary Papers in
England two decades later. Four years after that, James Peggs draws upon both
sources in his own book. With each discursive layer there is an ongoing process of
reorganization, translation, interpretation, and mistranslation. Through repetition
and successive narrations, Col. Walker’s personal opinion now bears the weight of
historical “truth.”
I am thus looking into how language creates and sustains the monster of
female infanticide and the concomitant notions of devalued femininity and male
homosociality, thereby conferring upon them an objective reality that is reified in the
performance of daily life. The archive on female infanticide, as I have already
mentioned in the introduction, focuses on the three-pronged absence of the female
infant’s body, of the female infant in discourse, and of affect and mourning. To that
end, my focus in this chapter will touch upon all three absences, which allowed for
the panopticistic thrust of the empire. My analysis will centre largely on the
language used to describe female infanticide, particularly in terms of negotiating the
choice of “custom” over “tradition.” With the denial of a historical trajectory that is
implicated in the conception of a “tradition,” it is only fitting that I first engage with
the presumed historicity of the origin of infanticide.

147
Chapter 3.1. ‘In the beginning was the deed…:’ The origin of female infanticide
among the Rajputs
In Archive Fever, his contemplation on memory, psychoanalysis, history, and
beginnings, Derrida speaks of the question of the archive as “a question of the future,
the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a
responsibility for tomorrow.”
xvii
Elsewhere, Carolyn Steedman has read the “desire
for the archive” in Archive Fever as part of the “desire to find, or locate, or possess
that moment of origin, as the beginning of things.”
xviii
What gets elided in this
simultaneous forward and backward meditation is the relation of the archive to the
present. Cognizant of the tensions inherent in this temporality, Derrida adds that “it
is a question of this performative to come whose archive no longer has any relation
to the record of what is, to the record of the presence of what is or will have been
actually present.”
xix
The absence of any relation to the record of “what is” is
contingent upon the unknowability of the future. However, the archive of the
colonial government seemingly moves away or resolves this tension by not only
recording information but also anticipating the future through it. The record is as
much an account of the present as it is an indicator of the future.
J.R. Carnac, Resident at Baroda in 1817 and Capt. Ballantine’s superior,
rejects the latter’s suggestions for the suppression of infanticide as inapplicable but
claims nonetheless that the register of Jahrejahs – meticulously compiled by
Ballantine, comprising the names, families, villages, and districts of all the Jahrejahs
in Kathiawar, along with the age and number of their female offspring saved or now

148
living since the previous decade – “is a useful Document for future reference, and I
conclude it must be correct from the pains taken to acquire the information.” I am
intrigued by the preserving of a record for “future reference,” betraying not only an
implication of the present in the future but also an awareness of the future implied in
the present. It is an awareness of the narrative thread of female infanticide that
exceeds the given historical moment to a beyond that is as yet unknowable, but
visible nonetheless. But the record also serves as a reference for the imagined
reader, for whom the narrative is preserved. The meticulously compiled note of
sixty-three girls saved in a decade provides testimony to the early and limited
success of suppressing female infanticide in an overall dismal picture of the
ubiquitous crime. The future becomes knowable through the very act of inscription
and writing. The archival records of female infanticide thus expose a re-cording of
history as well, imposing a teleological cord of historical continuity upon the colony
and writing that historicality into being. Significantly, this re-cording also
corroborates the colonial rejection of native historical consciousness as absent.
But the Victorian reaction to Indian history occupied two different positions
and faced two different directions at once. There was an implicit acknowledgement
of an historical past, albeit one that was decadent and in decline, that was
inextricably intertwined with the successive cycles of colonialisms that predated the
British presence. The East India Company’s contribution was thus to deliver the
colony from that decadent mire and set it on the path to progress and evolution.
Simultaneous with this assertion of a disreputable historical past, however, was the

149
belief in the ahistoricity of a Hindu and, by generalization, of an Indian past. Hindu
beliefs in the circularity of time, in the importance ascribed to the teachings of the
guru rather than to the divine word itself, and the seamless synonymic interchange
between ‘divinity’ and ‘morality’ were seen to contribute to their inability in
differentiating myth from reality and the historical from the mythological.
xx

The resolution of the present with the future and, consequently, of the future
with the past contrasted sharply with the various co-existing and contradicting
narratives of the origin of the practice. The refusal to search for the historical origin
or “truth” – encapsulated in a microcosm in Walker’s own preference to engage with
the present customs and behaviour of the Jahrejahs despite his averred claim to trace
the “origin and history” of the practice – is a refusal of legend as history, or orality as
history, of speech as history, and of the performative moment as history. History
here does become the record of the British official, “hi(s)tory,” which dismisses
other narratives and other voices to continue marking out its own pattern or cord.
But his juxtaposition of “origin” and “history” can also be seen as an attempt to
resolve the tension between the etiological and the ahistorical. The seeming absence
of linear history competes with the iterative performances of female infanticide, all
of which purportedly trace their source in one historico-mythical act. It is not the
status of the legend qua myth that is in question, but rather its permanence and its
accessibility to memory which characterizes the past or the origin as threatening.
The presence of the past, its disguise as “present” through performance further

150
contributes to the supposed rejection of linearity in favour of the repetitious,
unchanging moment.
The practice of female infanticide traces its origin to a legend relating to one
of the earliest Rajput leaders.
xxi
Walker provides a more political explanation for the
origin of infanticide among the Jahrejah Rajputs, suggesting that they began
murdering their infant daughters to avoid the humiliation of marrying them with
those Rajputs in Sind who had converted to Islam and, thus, the humiliation of
having them remain celibate, or to avoid the risk of sending their daughters to other
countries where they might marry Rajputs of “proper descent.”
xxii
At some point, he
adds, the “policy of their chief may have either concurred in, or invented, the
delusive responsibility of the Raj-Gor.” It is this ‘invention’ of the “delusive
responsibility of the Raj-Gor” that is of interest to me. According to the legend, a
Jahrejah chieftain asked his Raj-gor or family Brahmin to find suitable husbands for
his daughters. The Raj-gor searched far and wide but was unable to find anyone
worthy enough to become the Chieftain’s son-in-law. The inability to find a
“worthy” groom forms the defining moment of the story and sets into motion the
chain of events that culminates in the death of the infant. James Peggs quotes a
“native of Mandavee” who furnishes the tale of the origin of the practice. In the
native’s narration, the Raj-gor claims that
“since to retain these, your female offspring, in the family house, after their
arriving at the age of womanhood, is contrary to the rules of religion, I will
take them with me, and will burn them in the fire, on condition that it be
stipulated on your part, to destroy, at their birth, all issue of the same sex that
shall be born in your family. I now lay my solemn malediction, both here

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and hereafter, on you and yours, if you fail to perform the same; in such
manner, that if you shall preserve any of your future daughters, they shall
pass their lives in penury and want; nor shall good attend the father or mother
of such children. It is further reported that…whenever a daughter is born,
they [the Jahrejah tribes] put these helpless babes, without compassion, to
death; without allowing their surviving for the shortest space […] from the
effect of the malediction pronounced, no good ensures from their
preservation; insomuch that if any daughters of this tribe get married into
other houses, the grain in such houses becomes less plentiful; nor do such
women produce sons, but are the occasion of feuds arising in the families into
which they are thus transplanted!”
xxiii

The oral transmission of the legend from one generation to the next, within and
among the communities of Rajputs confers a certain immediacy and newness to the
practice. If, on the one hand, the practice of female infanticide gains the status of a
ritual by virtue of its ancient origins, its immediate availability to memory allows it
to masquerade as a testimonial – the narrator testifies to the authenticity of the tale
because the act of narration itself makes him a witness. Through his recounting of
the legend, the narrator becomes the Raj-gor and assumes the authority of laying the
“solemn malediction” on the Chieftain. He moves seamlessly between the imagined
past and the present moment of testimony. And it is in that moment of revivification
of the past that the differential temporal spaces of the past and the present fuse
together and become indistinct.
The circulation of the same testimony among all raconteurs now suspends the
community itself from linear time to relegate it within a pattern of ceaseless
circularity. The unending and unchanging nature of the practice traces the cyclical
pattern of life and death itself. The refusal of the past to remain in the past

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challenges the success of the civilizing project. The avowed impetus of social and
political reform – such as the abolition of sati in 1829 – must respond to the flagrant
disregard from the persistence of female infanticide among the Rajputs and from the
strength of tradition in the face of the prohibitory force of law. However, by
recording the narrative in the archive only to reject the importance of the origin in
formulating explications of contemporary motives for the practice, the archive,
through the very act of writing and preserving a custom, reveals a schism between
what is and what is thought to be. The smooth interplay of the past with the present,
as evidenced in the above narration, is thus called into question.
The mythic and mythical features of the origin of the crime constitutes an
indirect challenge to any attempt to fix the crime in the gap between the struggle for
territorial domination and the consequent injury to masculine pride. Through an
almost deliberative forgetting, the legend also marks the substitution of a feared
possibility – giving away their daughters to the Muslim invaders – with an event –
the murder of the daughters because of the want of grooms. My description of the
origin of female infanticide as an “event” follows from Ricœur’s emphasis on the
‘event’ as the “actual referent of testimony taken as the first category of archived
memory.”
xxiv
Evading a debate about whether the event actually took place or was
constructed in the collective imagination, I am pointing rather to its persistence in
collective memory as indicative of historicity. To concur with Ricœur, “the event in
its most primitive sense is that about which someone testifies.”
xxv
The boundaries of
reality and of “what actually happened” are intimately entwined with remembering

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the event as it happened. The reconstruction of the moments leading to the crime
and the unchanging roles of the dramatis personae ensure a reliving of the crime.
The Raj-gor’s presence, especially, is an ominous reminder of the adversity that the
birth of a daughter portends. The fear of the strength of his utterance seems to
outweigh any indictment at the hands of the British judiciary system. The Brahmin,
until the mid-nineteenth century, was thus the only figure capable of challenging
British perception of its own authority in relation to the subject-peoples.
Even in writing the history of their subjects, the British believed perhaps that
only the Brahmins might pose a threat to the authenticity and authority of the
colonial historiography. To eschew this possibility, the Brahmins had to be
discredited. Their learning was deemed unworthy because it was in the service of a
false, idolatrous, and fabulous knowledge. They were also denigrated for being
duplicitous and lazy. At the same time, however, the “superiority” of the Brahmins
was often called upon, especially in support of legislative policies or political
opinions, and to help codify and interpret Hindu scriptures and laws. In the strict
stratification of the caste system that the British helped reify and then decry, they
nuanced the categories for their own purposes, which perhaps reflects the flexibility
within the castes themselves. While a upper-class Brahmin male was respected for
being educated, progressive, and above corruption, a Brahmin priest was thought to
be superstitious, corrupted, and snivelling.
xxvi
The contradictory picture that
emerges of the Brahmin extends to the family Raj-gor as well. Walker claims that
the Raj-gor was reviled by other Brahmins as well as by the Jahrejahs, owing

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perhaps to his performing mainly funerary ceremonies. In addition, the belief among
some of the Jahrejahs that the Raj-gor literally takes upon himself and thus embodies
the sin of committing infanticide seems to contaminate him, making him unclean,
lowly, and reviled.
Nevertheless, the Raj-gor is still one of the principal players in the drama of
infanticide because the decision to murder the infant in all versions of the Rajput
legends of the crime was generally that of the Raj-gor and not of the Chieftain. The
British attempt to wean Jahrejah Rajputs away from practising infanticide hinged on
the authority of the written word – the purported injunctions against infanticide in
sacred texts. Indeed, writing itself signifies prohibition and restriction through a
literal inscribing of the law in language. However, the written word competes with
the authority of the spoken word – that of the Raj-gor and of the Chieftain – where
tradition itself becomes a pre-text that authorizes the murder of female infants. In
the dialectic between the spoken word and the written form, between orality and
transcription, translation intervenes to create a third discourse. It constructs the
invisible speaking subject who does not speak by attributing words to him that are
not his own. At the same time, it levels the imbalance of power such that the
disdained figure of the Raj-gor is now endowed with the words – la parole – that put
him on an even interactional field with the British.
The invocation of the origin, in so far as it shows the willingness to divest
oneself of agency and ascribe it to an outside force, underlines the importance of
exteriorization in the performance of the ritual, and, in this case, in the ritual of the

155
performance as well. The daughter is murdered not because she is reviled, but
because there is no groom worthy of her. She is murdered because the Raj-gor said
it must be so and because the Raj-gor agrees to assume the consequences of the act.
And she continues to be murdered because the Raj-gor has deemed it to always be
so. The belief in that exteriority – the Raj-gor’s malediction, the misfortune that
would befall them if the girl is allowed to live – empties out intent, barbarity, and
agency from the Jahrejah Rajputs. The participatory sport that the murder allows for
through the currency of phrases like “deekree marne chal” now morphs instead into a
blind following of ritual.
The ritualization of the act allies the practice uncomfortably close with the
notion of sacrifice. In his introduction on religion and rituals, Burton Mack
discusses René Girard’s use of the term “sacrifice” and describes it as “a term that
can be used to refer to the complex phenomenon of the collective killing of a human
victim, its mythic rationalization, and its ritualization.”
xxvii
The practice of female
infanticide in India would appear to fulfil all three categories. The repetitive and
performative nature of the act, along with the ominous threat of misfortune, deny the
practice the larger bracket of “violence” to now be coded specifically as a “violent
ritual.” In Walker’s recounting of the story, the father abhors the idea of putting his
daughter to death, not only because he recognizes the act as a sin but also from
parental feelings of affection.
xxviii
He eventually acquiesces but not before the Raj-
gor agrees to assume the responsibility for and repercussions of the crime. The
version that James Peggs quotes, however, incorporates a more sinister dimension.

156
Not only does the Brahmin not take upon himself the consequences of the act, but he
also effectively forbids the Jahrejahs from ever rearing their daughters. His
pronouncement, that the rearing of daughters henceforth would invoke misfortune
alone, raises the narrative from its status as legend to now incorporate a dimension of
divinity. The murder that was committed to couch the shame in view of the religious
injunction of having an unmarried daughter in the house would now move beyond
the particular to become prescriptive. The daughter must now be murdered to
prevent any misfortune befalling her family.
The transitive gap between the murder of an unmarried daughter and the
murder of all daughters invites various readings and interpretations to complete the
missing piece of the puzzle. The focus on the absence of the infants in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries suggests that the command to not rear a single daughter can
be explained by the shame that an unmarried daughter brings to her father and
consequently, the shame that all daughters can potentially bring upon their families.
The mere presence of the girl embodies a potent threat to the family’s honour, to the
patriarch’s honour, to masculine honour, and, thus, a threat to virility itself.
xxix
Her
birth is a defiance of the religious/paternal interdiction that sanctions only her death,
not her birth. The misfortune that characterizes the moment of her birth follows her
through life as she brings ruin not only upon her own family but on that of her
husband as well. She does not “save” the community through her death but
contaminates it with her birth. The Rajputs manage to avert misfortune through the
murder of the infant because she incarnates the possibility of ruin. In order to save

157
the community then, the female must be punished. Female infanticide – along with
other forms of violence against women – is, thus, located squarely within a larger
cultural devaluation of women.
But does the devaluation of women authorize violence against them, or do
acts of violence give rise to a culture of apathy and denigration? Does the refusal to
“preserve” the daughters even point to the threat of shaming that they incarnate?
The selective process of the practice, which entails a predetermined choice of how
many daughters to raise and which daughters to murder, shows the complex
intertwining of economic and political constraints with religio-cultural prejudices.
xxx

Indeed, the carefully planned and widely practiced gender selection – where more
male progeny meant the ability to accrue greater wealth and increased political and
martial strength – might be sufficiently explained away as an economic or political
imperative alone. But it is the desire for and persistence of a supra-natural
explanation, one that is also located in historicity, which emphasizes the importance
of female infanticide as a ritual.
The supra-natural quotient of the practice, where the daughter must be
murdered in order to avert hardship, focuses attention away from the infant to now
throw the spotlight on the Raj-gor. At the risk of effacing the female yet again from
discourse, I believe that the ritual of infanticide functions more as a ritual of
remembering and of commemorating the myth of the origin and of the escape from
disaster. The low esteem in which women are held furnishes an atmosphere
conducive to the free sanction of acts of gendered violence and explains the

158
pervasiveness and persistence of the practice across centuries, but it does not account
for the signification of the practice as ritual. The literal murder of the infant might
have been symbolic of identification with the group and suggested adherence to
norms or traditions – which, perhaps, gave rise to the popularity of “caste pride” as
the motivator – but the repetitiveness of the ritual alludes also to an active
construction of the caste qua community, thereby serving as a rite of passage that
marks the boundaries of the group.
The redefining of the community with every successive infant murder is
entrenched in the collective fear of supernatural wrath. As with Sati and thuggee,
there was an element of religiosity interwoven into the fabric of the practice. But,
whereas the British tolerated the practice of Sati for quite some time, believing it to
be sanctioned and, indeed, advocated in the religious texts of the Hindus, there was
no corresponding textual sanction for the practice of infanticide. The British were
apparently aware of this absence of textual support even as early as 1808, as Walker
claimed in his report that the “forms and maxims and all the religious tenets of the
Hindus are strongly opposed to the crime of Infanticide.” Nonetheless, my
deliberate use of the term “ritual” as opposed to “practice” in relation to female
infanticide is meant to showcase the construction of the systemic murder as a quasi-
religious rite. Even though the murder of infants does not enter into the religious
praxis of the peoples, the Raj-gor as the interpreter of the text engraves his own law
on the palimpsest of the presumably religious precept. To the sin of bringing up an
unmarried daughter in the home – the consequence of which we are not aware – he

159
now elaborates on the repercussions of raising any daughter: adversity and penury.
With each successive infant murder then, the refracted conception of the religious
injunction against rearing unmarried daughters shifts from construal to reification by
virtue of an iterative force. Repetition and reassertion facilitate the renewal of the
word as law and, more pertinently, of command as religious law.
It might be possible for us to conjecture that the community of infanticidal
Rajputs perhaps perceive the female infant, whose death prevents any misfortune on
her family, to embody sacredness. Her death eschews calamity not only for her
family, but for the community at large. Within an economy of ritual sacrifice then,
the unwillingness to “preserve” the infant becomes a question of the very survival of
the group rather than a matter of caste pride. However, the marginalization of the
female infant from the ideologies dictating her own death, or rather non-birth, resists
any easy association of the ritual with the notion of the sacred and denies a
correspondence between female infanticide and other, lesser known and perhaps
more uncommon, practices of child sacrifice. The infant cannot be a sacrificial
victim because she is consciously divested from any claim to sacredness, either
before the ritual or after it.
xxxi
Her accession to a stature of the ‘sacred’ would imply
and necessitate the people’s engagement with a sense of loss, which is, in its own
turn, bound up with a process of grieving. The “nothingness” of the infant, the
silence that shrouds the family at the moment of her death, however, points to the
absence or the impossibility of mourning.

160
Chapter 3.2 Neither Mourning Nor Melancholia: Female Infanticide as Custom
The reactions to female infanticide within the groups that practise it
complicate accepted norms of instinctual affective responses. There is a temporal
displacement of grief at work here, which opposes the prevailing culture of mourning
in the colony around the same period. The period of mourning that attends the death
of a family member or loved one, paradoxically characterizes the birth of the female
infant. But if the birth of the infant demands mourning, then it would suggest that
the birth must now portrayed as loss. And yet, can the birth or death of the female
constitute loss if it is also simultaneously a “nothing”? If the infant does not
represent loss, she cannot be mourned. On the other hand, to complicate an
otherwise smooth causality, I suggest that it is mourning that confers a sense of loss,
and the absence of mourning now implies the inability to identify the death as loss.
Since the birth of the female is intimately entwined with her death, the event itself
becomes a non-event. The birth/death, however, is also a chilling sign of the
woman’s fertility. In most cases of infanticide, a daughter was killed shortly after
her birth, so that the mother would not be able to or would not be allowed to breast-
feed her, thereby allowing her to conceive another child soon after.
xxxii
The death of
the daughter encapsulates the hope of a son within a year. The ritual violence now
takes on an added dimension: the murder not only symbolizes having averted the
inevitable misfortune, but, more importantly, it also extends an invitation to fortune.
The ritual of mourning is banished from the performative mode of enacting
the origin of infanticide. The twelve days of ritual bereavement after the death of a

161
family member is conspicuous by its absence here. The infant is disposed of
moments after her birth, and any grief that might be felt by the mother or other
members of the family is buried and subsumed into the bustle of daily routines.
Interestingly, the twelve days also signify pollution for the grieving family and the
family becomes cleansed and purified only at the end of the twelve days. According
to the Manusmriti, the number of days that a family remains “polluted” varies in the
case of the death of a child under the age of two or three depending on whether he
has had his ceremonial haircut and whether he has any teeth.
xxxiii
The prescriptions
for cleansing seem to attach only to the death of male children, and it is unclear if
there are corresponding prescriptions for the death of female children or whether the
death of female children even counts as a pollution. Bhatnagar et al cite an
observation from Col. Sleeman’s journal, where he claims that the Rajputs in Oudh
would bury their female infants beneath the house.
xxxiv
On the thirteenth day, the
priest would then cook and eat his food in that room where the infant was murdered
and cleanse the family from the death by eating and literally taking the sin into
himself.
xxxv
The infant is destroyed in the room where it is born, and there buried. The
floor is then plastered over with cow dung; and, on the thirteenth day, the
village or family priest must cook and eat his food in that room…by eating it
in that place, the priest is supposed to take the whole huttea, or sin, upon
himself, and to cleanse the family from it…after the expiation, the parents
again occupy the room, and there receive the visits of their family and
friends, and gossip as usual!
Rajah Bukhtawar Singh tells me, that he has heard the whole process
frequently described in this way by the midwives who have attended the
birth. These midwives are, however, generally sent out of the room, with the
mother, when the infant is found to be a girl.

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It remains doubtful whether any or all Rajputs – and, for our purposes, the
Jahrejahs specifically – actually buried their infants beneath their houses.
xxxvi

Brahminic textual practices dictated that male children who died before the age of
two were supposed to be buried outside the village, although no ceremony was ever
performed.
xxxvii
Female children might have merited a rather different treatment in
death as in life, and consequently, might have been buried within the premises itself.
While I will be engaging with the notion of burial beneath the house later in the
chapter, I want to focus, for the moment, on the partial adherence of the Hindu rites
of death as evinced in the observance of the twelve day ritual mourning. The
narrative is constructed in a way that highlights the perfunctory nature of the ritual
and the vacuity of grief itself. Mourning is displaced from its association with loss
to become merely a symbol of death. Death itself now bears a stronger connection to
pollution and contamination than it does to any affective externalization of grief.
More importantly, death, mourning, and pollution are now located within and
confined to the room, to the scene of the crime. Mourning is, thus, what takes place
there, in the room where the infant lived and where she died. It is not internalized
but is left stagnant in that room. By taking the sin upon himself with the thirteenth
day ceremony then, the priest not only exculpates the family from any blame in the
death of the infant, but he also cleanses the space of any memory of that event.
Is the memory of the infant’s murder also tied to the ritual of expiation and
purification? Is that what now reduces the infant to “nothing,” a death-in-birth, an
empty space that opens the gap between presence and absence? The “nothingness”

163
of the infant stands testimony to the refusal to constitute the death of the infant as
loss. Subsequently, the refusal of loss per se is suggestive of a forgetting that is
foundational and originary to the act of infanticide itself. The “forgetting” here
parodies what Jean-Louis Chrétien terms the “immemorial” – “what is so ancient,
that it leaves no memory.”
xxxviii
Referring at once to Plato’s meditation on
anamnèsis and Heidegger’s analysis of complete forgetting, which is “forgetting the
forgetting,”
xxxix
Chrétien’s examination of forgetting and memory includes the
Platonic forgetting at birth of a pre-human, or inhuman, essential knowledge, such
that all learning is merely recollection and all discovery is merely re-discovery. In
the case of the Jahrejah Rajputs, however, the forgetting pre-dates the particular
instance of infanticide in a family to be inscribed in the very history of the group.
Each act of infanticide is a re-enactment of the originary, legendary moment of
infanticide, where it is the performative alone that suggests remembering or
recollection. The memory of each new act of murder, however, is erased with the
death and burial of the infant. The “nothing” of the birth thus alludes not only to the
absence of the infant but also to the absence of memory, to a forgetting that
forecloses the structure of loss. To remember the event would be to mourn the
female infant, and to mourn the infant would be to recognize the death as loss.
When Chrétien asks, “Can one truly lose in any other way than by forgetting, where
we no longer retain even the fact of having lost and where we no longer even mourn
the loss?,”
xl
he is referring perhaps to a Heideggerian complete forgetting or even to
a forgetting in spite of oneself. On the contrary, the forgetting of the female infant is

164
deliberate because to remember the infant is to keep alive a sense of loss and, thus, to
engage with it. Sleeman points to this forgetting through the seemingly grotesque
laughter and merriment that fills the room once it has been literally emptied of any
trace of the female infant. The gaiety that characterizes the space of murder lies in
stark contrast to the narratives of Walker or of Eswarjee, which evoke primarily the
silence encasing the event.
Both narratives paint a vivid picture of barbarity and horror, but while
Sleeman’s account makes that awfulness explicit through his portrayal of the family
that can now receive visitors and “gossip as usual,” Walker’s letter, written nearly
half a century before, invites a dual reading: the Jahrejahs are a barbarous people
with none of the natural feelings and affections of a parent and/or the Jahrejahs are
slaves to a barbarous custom. The vacillating representations over the course of the
century reject any composite picture of the Rajputs or of female infanticide. By
constantly shifting the motive behind the practice and the modus operandi of the
practice, the archival narratives themselves move gradually away from the
oxymoronic discovery of the absence of girls in various Rajput villages, hoping,
instead, to now discover the one explanation that will provide the clue and panacea
to the heinous custom.
Each meditation on the practice of infanticide, from the early considerations
in the eighteenth century to literary, anthropological, and ethnographic appraisals in
the present moment are drawn inevitably to filling that transitive gap between the
murder of a daughter and the subsequent murder of all daughters. Each assessment

165
resolves part of the quandary only to put forth new questions. However, the
transitive gap, like the silence surrounding the birth and death of the female infant,
represents the space of the untranslatable. It resists signification and any seamless
continuity between the particular and the general. The plethora of explanations
proffered by the British in the nineteenth century betrays their uneasiness over that
gap. The untranslatable also suggests the refusal of absolute knowingness, the
inability of the British to read the Other and to know the Other in his/its Otherness.
The inability to ‘know’ the Rajputs was a testament to the limits of absolute or
complete rule and domination and reveals the fissures in the interpellation and
constitution of colonial subjectivity. Faced with the ontological unwillingness of the
native as colonized subject to remain obedient and subservient, the British had to
conceal the unstable categories of dominant-submissive and colonizer-colonized
with a relatively unyielding epistemological construction of the suspected
infanticidal Rajput.
The myriad and fluctuating representations of female infanticide were never
actually reduced to its criminality, even though it was often referred to as the “crime
of Female Infanticide,”
xli
and evoked as a sin or horror. Part of the reason was that
infanticide was constructed by the British and the Rajputs themselves as a communal
practice, bereft of individual agency. Female infanticide belonged to a corpus of
statistical crimes; its discovery and detection lay in the numbers of absent girls. The
victims had to be numerous and alike – faceless, nameless, and unidentifiable –
because to identify even one murdered infant would be to recast the murder as a

166
crime involving a criminal parent or family, as opposed to a practice to which the
whole community consented and thus, in which it participated. At the same time,
any moral overtones of ‘saving’ the female infant had to be tempered so as not to
enervate and alienate an entire community, especially one that was known for its
martial strength and valour.
I have already argued in the previous chapter that the proposed punishment of
fines and imprisonment showcases the materiality of the Empire, and it reduces the
crime and the punishment alike to an economic infraction. The steady rise of
governmental opposition to the practice might well point to a gradual erosion
between the public and private spheres. From the earlier focus on the cruelty of the
parents and of the community at large, the British focused progressively on changing
the customs of the people through education and, finally, on proposing measures to
curb wedding expenses in particular communities. From trying merely to weed out
the guilty parties, the discourse on female infanticide had made its way into the
daily, ritual affairs of the Rajputs. Rather than antagonizing the Rajputs by labelling
them criminals or murderers, the attention on dowry, customs, and related wedding
expenses seemingly divulged commiseration, whereby the guilty party was the
custom and not the person following it.
Col. Walker’s letter informs us that the prevalence of female infanticide
among the Jahrejah Rajputs was a “practice” and a “custom” that had persisted
unchecked for centuries. Even when, in later legislative documents, the murder of
female infants is referred to as a “crime,” the notion of criminality was still rooted

167
strongly in its genus as a “custom” and a norm and could not be dissociated from
those moorings. In fact, Walker prefaces his discussion of infanticide among the
Rajputs with a subtle distinction between innocuous customs and noxious or criminal
ones:
Where the customs and rites of any people are harmless, whatever form they
assume, and from whatever source they may be derived, they are entitled to
toleration; but they ought to be punished or amended, when their evident
tendency is to diminish population, and to alienate the natural affections of
mankind. Of this description is the Custom of female Infanticide, which
prevails among the Rajputes, denominated Jahrejas.

The binarism that Walker presents encapsulates, albeit simplistically, much of the
thrust of the civilizing mission and the impetus behind abolishing female infanticide.
The customs themselves are to blame for the ostensibly savage behaviour and rituals
of the Indians, for alienating “the natural affections of mankind.” To follow this
train of thought a little further, changing or doing away with the customs would then
automatically effectuate a change in the demeanour and comportment of the peoples.
In that regard, I believe that Walker’s proclamation above is prophetic in establishing
“custom” as the prism through which all other explanations of the crime are viewed.
The repetition of the crime, hypergamous marriages, dowry, wedding expenses, etc.
can all be traced to the understanding of infanticide as a custom. Even the
potentially unrelated hypotheses, such as caste pride and the cultural devaluation of
females, don’t arise in a vacuum but are interlocked with the other explanations.
Each head of our discursive Hydra seemed like yet another novel explanation that
differed from the others put forth, but each head also grew out of the same body –

168
and the monster’s body still bespoke of custom. Steering clear of any overt charges
or accusations of murder, the British were able to unassumingly intervene in
domestic affairs through the deceptive insistence on custom.
And yet, despite the criminalizing of “custom” rather than its practitioners, a
subtext of collective barbarity and cruelty runs through the apparent exoneration of
the infanticidal Rajputs from guilt. By designating female infanticide as a “custom,”
the British, whether consciously or not, allude to the murder of infants as a habit
xlii

and divorce it from its historical development. In thinking of the killing of newborn
infants as a custom or a practice, the narratives surreptitiously underline the callous
nature of both the murder and the murderers. Moreover, they also depict the natives
as slaves to habit, blindly engaging in a repetitious cycle of murder because they are
accustomed to it, and incapable of initiating change in the pattern or, rather, lacking
the will to initiate change. When viewed in conjunction with Walker’s dismissal of
the legendary origins of the crime, the tag “custom” or “practice” has the impact of
dehistoricizing the group and relegates them once again in a ceaseless circularity.
More strategically, perhaps, it reaffirms the merciless and cruel nature of the murder,
while simultaneously allowing the British to refrain from directly accusing the
Rajputs of murder. In the years leading up to the mutiny of 1857 and in its
immediate aftermath, the British use of the trope “custom” allowed them to code the
Rajputs as dangerous even as they mollified and cosseted the community using
negotiations and reprimands.

169
In teasing out the semantic nuance of the word “custom” as “habit” rather
than “tradition,” I want to draw attention to the layers of meaning that a particular
choice of word hides or reveals. Despite occasional and stray references, female
infanticide is almost never stated as a “ritual” or “tradition.” Might that have been a
deliberate omission on the part of the British? What is at stake when we refuse to
acknowledge the ritualistic aspects and origins of a tradition? Indeed, what is at
stake when we refuse to examine an event as part of a larger tradition?
The strength and the frequency of infanticide finds its source, as I have
already suggested, in the mythic element that allows it to be approached as a ritual.
The “tradition” of infanticide comprises of a mimicking which circulates within a
culture of orality and enters into the performative sphere. The availability of the
legend to memory and the acceptability of infant murder is carried across from one
generation to the next. Female infanticide as ritual is transmitted through imitation,
and it is this play-upon-a-play that Eswarjee’s evocative and visual, though silent,
exemplar highlights. But the act escapes parodying itself by moving beyond a
repetition-in-stasis or mere duplication. The aporia between the historical teleology
inherent in a tradition and the cyclical repetition of the act of murder itself is
resolved through a process of translation. In that sense, female infanticide is not
simply a tr āditi ō or a transmittal through a lineage. Instead, it might be more
productively structured in terms of the German übersetzen, where the tradition is not
only carried across but also undergoes an act of translation and interpretation. The
retelling of the myth and the performance of the ritual entail a decoding and recoding

170
of the tradition where it has to be contextualized within a different emplotment. This
übersetzung destabilizes meaning by displacing it from the centre and repackaging it
in each successive generation. Identities, plots, and scenarios are in constant flux,
which hinders any easy identification of cause or culprit. The origin of female
infanticide shifts form in the narrations of its different raconteurs; the method of the
crime refuses to be constant as it incorporates various degrees of violence and
secrecry; the parents, servants, and midwives all seem to play the role of the
murderer; the motive for murder is never the same, not only among the different
families in the community but within a family itself.
It appears more dangerous to construct the crime as a “tradition” with all its
shape-shifting connotations than as a barbarous custom, which is itself a metonymic
slide into a more unidimensional portrayal. To accept it as a tradition would have
meant not only having to concede the historicity of the ritual, but also to accept it as
ritual, which, in turn, would require the British to engage with its quasi-religious
dimensions. The preference for the term “custom,” on the other hand, afforded the
British to test the viability of the moral pedagogy on a barbaric peoples and encroach
on the private lives of the natives. Crucially, the association of ‘custom’ with ‘habit’
suggested, using an inverse reasoning, that there were missing girls waiting to be
found and, thus, customs to be broken, thereby proving the predominance of the
habit. Since the British believed that female infanticide could be traced to the often
unaffordable wedding expenses, that became their priority. The intervention,

171
however, especially in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny, provided its own
justification for surveillance and detection.

Chapter 3.3 The Imperial Panopticon: The Search for the Absent Infant
In an analysis of the way the language of “discovery” was deployed in
presenting suspicions of female infanticide, Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube have named
the official documents pertaining to female infanticide “the post-Enlightenment
administrative travelogue” in so far as it mimics the eighteenth-century travel
narratives in discovering a new peoples and their habits or mores.
xliii
The rhetorical
strategy of “discovering” a crime, as opposed to “rediscovering” it, works in
conjunction with the dismissal of a historical tradition in favour of a delineation of
practices. The repeated discovery of female infanticide locates each murder in its
own lived moment, preserving the “newness” of the custom. The horror of the act is
renewed with each discovery. In addition, the rhetorical strategy of exposing the
crime allows for the absence of female infants or girls to be continually inscribed as
a loss – a loss that, moreover, demands mourning.
The absence of girls and the absence of mourning creates an androcentric,
hypermasculine space that is emptied of affect, creating a blank slate on which the
investigative fictions of the British can now take shape. The absence of female
children is reconfigured as an invisibility: the girls are there waiting to be
discovered, waiting, literally, to be unearthed. Around mid-century, however, the
probing and scrutinizing gaze of the British officials began to recast the “discovery”

172
of female infanticide into its “detection.” The subtle change in the semantics of the
gaze captured British self-perception and their relations with the natives. Casting
aside the traveller’s curiosity at the discovery of a strange land and its peoples, the
British focus on detection suggested a familiarization with the people and their
customs; the subtext read that female infanticide was undoubtedly practised in a
given region, but it merely needed to be ‘detected.’ The newness and horror at the
discovery of the practice was tempered and gave way to a satisfaction and relief at
detection. Corresponding with the growing familiarity of the complexities and
nuances of social mores was the ascendancy of the British government in India into
its role as ruler of the natives and protector of its subjects. That ascendancy
separated itself from the more cultural trope of discovery to authorize a political
discourse of detection, surveillance, and scrutiny.
Various proposals from magistrates, secretaries to the local governments, and
other officials in the different districts emphasized the necessity of greater and more
effective forms of surveillance. One of the earliest measures suggested to keep a
check on rising incidence of female infanticide was the employment of a special or
extra police in those villages where it was suspected that the crime prevailed, the
maintenance for which the villages could be charged. The idea was to keep a
watchful eye over the natives, to let them know that the government construed the
practice as a crime and was proactively taking steps to abolish it. Behind that
rationale, however, lurked a more surreptitious desire; within the political framework
of the mutiny – or “the first war of independence” – where the British were caught

173
completely unaware by rebellion in scattered areas around the country, surveillance
would help prevent the rise of another threat of insubordination. The presence of a
repressive state apparatus, to use an Althusserian term, at once projected an image of
the government as law-maker and as the keeper of order and would function as a
daily reminder of the British as ruler of the peoples. Some of the proposed measures,
such as that of E.P. Arthur, went a step ahead in the kind of surveillance that would
be required to curb the crime: “The crimes of kidnapping for prostitution, infanticide,
procuring abortion and such like can only be prevented by the adoption of the most
skilful detective science which must be felt, not seen. Prevention can only be
ensured by the certainty of detection through an unseen agency which, from its very
secrecy, inspires dread, and its certainty attended with awe” (emphasis mine).
xliv

The increasing calls for the need for detection resonated with an awareness of
the lacunae in ‘knowing’ the natives and became amplified in the years surrounding
the mutiny of 1857. But the recognition of the gaps in knowledge often competed
with the belief in a deep-rooted familiarization of the natives. The space of the
epistemological intersects with that of the ontological, whereby the claim to
knowingness informs ways of being and vice-versa. The metamorphosis of the
British presence into a class of rulers was shaped in great measure by its mastery,
real or feigned, over an epistemological construction of the self and the Other. The
tension between absolute knowledge and its concomitant absence was often played
out in official documents relating to the detection of the crime. Within each
presidency, secretaries to the government would solicit reports from the magistrates

174
of the various zillahs or districts, who would in turn have to attest to the prevalence
or absence of the crime of female infanticide and suggest measures to curb the
practice in the event that it was rife in that particular district. One such report
exemplifies the subtleties of a discourse of detection and also reveals the tensions in
constructions of knowledge. In a collection of documents pertaining to the detection
of infanticide in the Ahmedabad and Kaira collectorates, J. M. Davies, the magistrate
of Broach, offers his perspective on the crime in his district, building his opinion on
the strength of previous narratives:
The doubts impressed in my letter to your address No. 314 of the 17
th

November last touching the existence of this revolting crime were founded
principally on the absence of all notice of the subject by Colonel (then Major)
Monier Williams in his valuable statistical memoirs on Broach and partly on
the best information which I could procure from intelligent people on the
spot. To the first named source I trusted much more than to the latter,
knowing how little attention is bestowed by the generality of natives upon
subjects not immediately connected with their own interests, and being
indisposed to rely upon information elicited from members of those castes
among which the practise is commonly said to obtain. It appeared to me that
to an officer so intelligent and of so enquiring a turn of mind as Colonel
Williams, aided by the prolonged opportunities he possessed of acquiring
minute information on all points of national character…the existence of so
terrible a custom could hardly have remained undetected particularly when it
is had in remembrance that the striking efforts of Colonel Walker in 1808; of
Major Carmac in 1815; of Captain Ballantine in 1817; and of the Hon’ble M.
Elphinstone in 1821 to eradicate the practice in Cutch and throughout
Kattiawar must not only have made Colonel Williams aware of its wide-
spread existence, but of the importance of tracing it to our own Provinces.
Opposed to the conclusions thus derived I confess to having approached the
subject with no knowledge of my own. Nor did the Records of this Magistry
in any way assist me; they were absolutely silent upon the subject.
xlv
[italics
mine]

I have quoted this rather long paragraph – which introduces his report – to
demonstrate the wavering but simultaneous construction and disavowal of

175
knowledge. Davies presents the reader with sets of binary oppositions that hinge on
the way knowledge is produced and circulated. The British image of and
information on the natives portrays, in his opinion, a truer picture of native life than
that furnished by the natives. The ‘truth’ of a native account can only reside in the
testimonial, in the first-hand report of lived experience; despite the purported
“intelligence” of his native informants, knowledge wavers and becomes inauthentic
once it enters out of the realm of an eyewitness declaration – the I/eye of the narrator.
Col. Williams’ report, however, which stood up to the threat of an authentic native
report, became questionable in relation to other British voices. By writing against an
established stratification of voices and layering of narratives, Williams’ perceived
dissidence threatened the projection of the unified “our-self.” Davies’ own lack of
knowledge notwithstanding, Col. Williams’ intelligence, “enquiring” “turn of mind,”
“valuable statistical memoirs,” and “prolonged opportunities” to collect “minute
information on all aspects of national character” are all shown to be illusory because
his statistical summary denies continuity and logic. In defying expectations, he cast
doubt on the veracity of the reports of earlier authorities and, hence, inserted an
element of randomness and chaos in an otherwise structured and smooth
administrative order.
One of the earliest assumptions about the practice of female infanticide was
that it was based on caste or tribe pride. But the supposed fixity of caste boundaries
that was used as justification for the ritual of infanticide – what I have elsewhere
referred to as a sort of rite de passage – collapsed and became fluid and posed a

176
threat of contamination. Other tribes or castes could perhaps emulate the heinous
practice. The two stable markers of detection thus became tribe affiliation and
geographical proximity to an infanticidal tribe. By deviating from the norm that
Walker had initially established in 1808 and which appeared to remain undisputed
until his “statistical memoir,” Williams had shaken the foundations on which those
presumptions were based. It is not the accuracy of Williams’ report that is in
question here, but whether it can be classified as valuable or invaluable. Just as
Carnac had found Ballantine’s meticulous compilation of information on the
Jahrejahs “a useful Document for future reference,” Williams’ statistical survey was
measured in terms of its usefulness. In disproving the existence of female infanticide
in Broach, Williams had failed to ‘detect’ the crime that was not only present but that
also undoubtedly enjoyed a “wide-spread existence.”
The certainty with which Davies could claim that female infanticide existed
in Broach, even though he declared that he had no knowledge on the matter and even
though the official records were “silent” on the subject, adds an accent of complexity
to the language of detection. Davies’ emphasis on the “importance of tracing it to
our own Provinces” suggests that it wasn’t the proof of infanticide that needed to be
uncovered, since the practice indisputably always already existed. One could merely
detect that which was already present, and in rejecting a language of discovery in
favour of a language of detection, the British assumed a politico-judicial discourse
that sought to locate the practice in a register of crime and criminality. Female
infanticide could enter consciousness through language alone, through the narratives

177
that the succession of British officials provided, through the testimonies of the
natives, and through the statistical surveys of the populace. The detection itself
centred not on the visibility of the girls but on their invisibility; they could only be
registered in census returns as an unaccountable fissure in the population. But where
that hole was filled – as Williams’ report ostensibly demonstrated – with the
presence and visibility of the girls, a new gap had to be fashioned. Davies’ own
inability to detect the crime found its source in a lack of knowledge, but knowledge-
production per se was dependent on a language through which to articulate it and
make it explicit. Intriguingly, Davies frames his want of knowledge in relation to the
silence of the records of the Magistry on the subject. The records were there, intact,
complete, and informative, but were “silent on the subject.” Silence, as Jean-Paul
Sartre had already pointed out, indicates a refusal of speech and not its absence, and
it is this refusal to make that detection explicit that paradoxically creates a gap in
Williams’ statistical memoirs. Through his own dearth of knowledge and the silence
of the records, and in spite of Williams’ study to the contrary, Davies had already
succeeded in detecting the crime of infanticide in Broach.
But while the insistence on detection insinuated an already established
existence of the crime among particular communities or within particular districts, it
also concealed a growing anxiety of the British, viz., the inability to locate the
corpses of the infants. Female infanticide was perhaps the only horrific practice
whose horror had to be imagined and constructed from a ubiquitous absence or
emptiness. Even though there were few witnesses to the act of infanticide and the

178
practice necessitated an absence of spectacle, descriptions of the means of killing the
infant abound in the records of the British government. The female infant was never
simply murdered but strangled or suffocated with the umbilical cord, given opium,
left alone to cry herself to death, after which she was finally put into an earthen pot
and buried, or “thrown into the river or jungle, where the jackals and vermin soon
destroy[ed] all trace of the corpus delecti.”
xlvi
The death, the violence, the corpse
were all simultaneously sucked into and drawn out of a black hole of nothingness
and of signification. Sleeman’s conviction, that the murdered infant was buried
beneath the house, might have arisen out of this dual movement of construction and
negation. The colonial epistemological construction of the practice was an ongoing
and unending process, and its continuation became a marker for the failure in making
the infant visible. In many ways, the female infant came to be the poster-child for
the necessity for governmental intervention. A successful search for her corpse
could only augment the stature of the British as ruler, protector, and keeper of order.
The urgency to detect the crime crystallized into the motif of the infant’s
cadaver buried beneath the same room where she was born. A fantasy of
containment becomes operational here as Sleeman conjures the graphic visuals of the
dead daughter buried ignominiously under the house. The locatedness of the infant
within the household premises compensated for the failure of detection and
countered the fear and/or paranoia of ubiquitous murder and unseen violence. The
invisibility of the girl was mitigated in the materiality of the body beneath the house,
which opposed her disembodiment through multiple forms of disposal. In

179
materializing the body, the burial disavows the phantom, ephemeral presence of the
female infant. The infant lies there, in that space and in no other. Fortuitously for
the British, the fantasy of containment now extended to also include the priest, who
cooks in that room; the parents, who gossip merrily with their visitors; and the
pollution, with which the birth and the death of the infant contaminates the family,
within the perimeters of the scene of the crime. The multiple heads of the Hydra
fuse to become one, and it can now be decapitated in one fell swoop.
At the same time, the seamless cohesiveness – where the murder, the victim,
the murderer, and the accomplices are all contained within an identifiable place – is
always threatened by its own self-constituted resistance. The native’s house plays
out the fantasy of containment, but it also represents a space of prohibition; it is
perhaps this prohibitory aspect that allowed Sleeman and other British officials in
Oudh to create the fantasy in the first place. The private lives of the natives were
shrouded in mystery and the British were unable to gain access to or a knowledge of
the intimate lives of the natives.
xlvii
The unfolding of the scene of the crime,
however, is related with the authority that can only be granted by testimony, much
like an other narrative I have already engaged with – the account offered by
Wassonjee Eswarjee and attested to by Walker. Both Sleeman’s account of native
life and Eswarjee’s narrative of the method of murder derive their authenticity from
the successive layering of stories, gossip, and hearsay, all of which are unconfirmed.
But while Eswarjee’s account of the scene in a Jahrejah household portrays a rigid
and hierarchical chain of command, gendered spatial divisions, and the silence in

180
which the infant girl is murdered, Sleeman’s depiction reverses those constructions
as the parents gossip and entertain their guests in the same room where two weeks
earlier their infant was murdered and buried. The contrasts in the two illustrations,
in spite of the different questions that they raise, nonetheless lead to a similar
epistemological conclusion. Eswarjee’s narration of the ritualistic performance
evokes a callous and cruel atmosphere, where the unfeeling father’s decision is
paramount and the women follow his orders meekly. The silence in which the event
transpires loudly proclaims the barbaric temperament that thinks nothing of
murdering one’s own infant. Sleeman’s account, on the other hand, proposes a
similar reading through the juxtaposition of contrasts and through the substitution of
mourning with merriment. The reconciliation of the antithetical – the gaiety and
jollity of the parents with the murder of the infant – becomes grotesque and furthers
the sense of barbarism. The violence done to the infant is continued even after her
death, as the parents literally walk and trample over the infant’s dead body on a daily
basis. But a complete grasp of this barbarism remained unavailable to the British
since the home of the native symbolized a literal and symbolic threshold that they
could not cross. More pertinently, the threshold of the native’s home also signified
the limits of knowledge. Once again, the attempt to fully detect the crime of
infanticide was thwarted by the impossibility of complete knowingness.
The fiction of detection emerged out of the incessant information-collecting
that seemed more interested in knowing the native and his customs, and then doing
away with the practices, than it did in simply saving the female infant. The measures

181
proposed to curb the crime of infanticide within particular communities hinged on
increasing the accountability of the natives by making the girls visible.
xlviii
Census
returns, unreliable because the officials did not have access to native women, served
as the yardstick to gauge the prevalence of the crime.
xlix
The primary means of
establishing the suspicion of infanticide within a given community or neighbourhood
was a disparity in the number of girls to that of the total child population, but even
the demarcation of disproportion was arbitrary. Various population estimates in a
particular village or district would yield considerably different results, owing largely
to the fallacious information provided by the native males and other factors. But the
statistical returns were never actually read for their accuracy; instead, they were
merely read for establishing the probability that infanticide was practised in a
particular area. Walker alludes to as much when he furnishes different estimates of
infanticide in different districts: “The disagreement of the estimates would probably
defeat any attempt to reconcile them, but they are sufficient to establish the enormity
and magnitude of the crime.” Despite the irreconcilable discrepancy, each of the
statistical summaries provided had undoubtedly succeeded in ‘detecting’ the crime.
As with Carnac’s assessment of Ballantine’s report that it must have been “correct
from the pains taken to acquire the information,” Walker similarly conflates detail
with accuracy. None of the reports, all of which were well detailed, were inaccurate;
indeed, seen another way, all the reports were accurate precisely because each served
to underline the “enormity and magnitude of the crime.” The capriciousness of
numbers was also reflected in the changing ratio of girls to boys which would

182
provide indisputable proof of infanticide. The proportion of girls to the total
population of children was initially proposed to be less than 50 per cent, but this
underwent further revision as it was brought down to 40 per cent, 35 per cent, and
finally to 25 per cent. The ratio was never fixed and differed from one district to
another. The Governor General himself seemed to favour 35 per cent as the
proportion below which infanticide could be presumed to exist. Even then, the
imposition of these ratios extended only to those villages or districts that had been
proclaimed guilty.
l
Other variables complicated the picture: in some of the districts,
even a 10 or 11 year old girl would be entered in the census as an adult if she was
already married, but a boy of the same age might be counted as a boy and not as an
adult male.
li

The official, governmental discourse on female infanticide was thus marked
by an intense acquiring, transcribing, and compiling of information. It was perhaps
to counter or cover over those gaps in knowledge that the British sought to fix the
crime through statistics, testimonials, translations, hearsay, and essays. All
information collected afforded the British government an additional glimpse into a
hidden and secret world, a world to which they were not privy. The minute detailing
of the various methods of crime, the specific performative aspects of the moments
preceding the infant’s murder, and the language that a particular community used to
speak of the event were fashioned to promulgate the fiction of complete awareness
and familiarity. The desire for knowingness manifested itself through a cultural
voyeurism in so far as it drew a narrative, such as Walker’s enumeration on the

183
means of effecting death, from the aural or textual into the visual and showed its
primacy in imagination. The details of the crime furnish an immediacy to the act of
infanticide and augment the violence. Moreover, it serves to redress the absence of
knowledge that Bentinck had lamented: like the Mandavee native’s narration of the
origin of the crime, Walker’s discovery of the methods of killing the infant allowed
him to masquerade as an eyewitness. This form of voyeurism, facilitated through a
network of informants and a layering of voices, echoes E.P. Arthur’s suggestion of
panopticism. Walker and Sleeman function as detectives in their own right, who see
into the natives’ lives without being seen and who furthered the detection of
infanticide from within the cloak of secrecy.

184

Notes:
i
James Mill, xii.

ii
This does not suggest, however, that there were two distinct groups of British administrators in India
with starkly contrasting views of the colony, its peoples, and its thought. Indeed, while many of the
early administrators did appreciate Sanskrit and Persian poetry, they also believed that India had, after
that golden age, been continuously in decline. Betty Joseph, in her analysis of the intersection of
gender and the eighteenth-century archive, points out that in the 1770s, “the governor-general of
India, Warren Hastings, commissioned Orientalist scholars like Nathaniel Halhed and William Jones
to systematically week out native agents like banyans, replacing them with English civil servants
trained in native languages and law” (14).

iii
In continuing his thinly-veiled attack on the Orientalists, Mill remarked, “Yet ingenious men, from
some of whom we have largely derived instruction, appear to have thought that no other proof was
requisite; and, as on this evidence they adopted the opinion themselves, that others ought to receive it
on the same foundation” (149-150).

iv
For an excellent analysis of the image of the nabob in England, refer to E.M. Collingham, Imperial
Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800-1947. Collingham claims that the “nabob as a
hybrid of East and West was primarily the product of cultural miscegenation, but, according to the
environmental doctrine, the adaptation of the European constitution to the Indian climate could be
interpreted as a process of degeneration into a state of physical miscegenation” (34). The
“indianization” of the body as evinced through the mimicking of the “morning routine of bathing and
dressing” was feared to induce an “emasculating level of indolence in its subject” (22).

v
Eve Sedgwick echoes Collingham’s analysis of this sort of mimicry being a form of pollution. She
adds, “Colonials…can “go” native: there is a taint of climate, morale, or ethos that, while most readily
described in racial terms, is actually seen as contagious.” Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire, p. 183.

vi
In an interesting and incisive reading of various paintings or “conversation pieces” authorized by
upper-class Europeans living in India in the late eighteenth century, Betty Joseph highlights the fine
balancing act that reflected perhaps a preferred compromise – the Englishman married to an Indian
woman (or women) who is “comfortable in an Indian setting, although it [the painting] arefully
maintains that he has not gone native” (96).

vii
Quoted in Mills, p. 20-21. Lata Mani observes that “the emergence of an interpretive apparatus for
apprehending India…acquired specific kinds of force with the shift of the East India Company in the
latter half of the eighteenth century from a mercantilist to a territorial power. The increasing
assumption by the East India Company of such state functions as revenue collection and the
administration of law necessitated an intensification of its knowledge of its new subjects” (4).

viii
Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime engages with
the issue of dowry in 19
th
and 20
th
century Punjab at length (New York: Oxford UP 2002).

185

ix
An examination of the reason behind the shift in conception of the crime is perhaps out of the scope
of this work. However, it is possible that fearing to fuel the discontent that was already brewing in
relation to British interference in cultural practices and customs, the British government chose to
pursue the project of the civilizing mission from a more administrative and secular perspective that
would also be palatable to the natives. A more tentative hypothesis might explore the crippling effect
that economic sanctions impose on martial pride and political strength, thereby effectively quelling
any resistance borne out of feeling personally offended. Veena Oldenburg’s work, while not
specifically addressing the shift itself, sets up a more forthright perspective of the British government
zeroing in on dowry as the culprit. Contrasting the custom of dowry with the practice of bride-price,
Oldenburg suggests that the system of dowry among some communities allowed the British to
“retroactively justify” (11) having fought “unsanctioned wars” (ibid.) and annexed territories.

x
Bhabha, 4.

xi
A cursory glance at the archival documents reveals that the term “female infanticide” could also
include child murder. Crude statistics furnished by local officials and the officials resident in a given
district would entail a tabulation of the number of females under the ages of 1 and of 4 who were
alive. After the act suppressing female infanticide was passed in 1870, documents detailing the
intense scrutiny of the murder of illegitimate children (ranging from infants a day old to children
around 4 or 5 years old, male and female) are nevertheless classified under the rubric of “female
infanticide.” By and large, however, the documents pertaining to female infanticide until 1870 relate
specifically to the systemic murder of legitimate female infants. Victims of child sacrifice (thought to
have been practised by the Konds of Orissa and in some parts of Bengal), murder of male infants or of
children born out of wedlock, have been left out of this purview.

xii
Bhabha, 70.

xiii
From C.A. Elliott, Esq., Officiating Secretary to Government, North-Western Provinces to The
Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department. Infanticide Rules, North-
Western Provinces (Proposed Rules for the Suppression of Infanticide under Section 2, Act VIII of
1870). Legislative Department Proceedings, January 1871.

xiv
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History
and Theory Vol. 24. No.3 (Oct., 1985): 249.

xv
Dominick LaCapra. History and Criticism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985), 92.

xvi
White, 126.

xvii
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 36.

xviii
Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers UP, 2002), 3.

xix
Derrida, 72.

186

xx
Gauri Viswanathan refers to this inability of separating myth from reality through her focus on
Alexander Duff, a Scottish missionary and Anglicist sympathizer, who was also an outspoken critic of
secular education in India. She adds, “Duff categorically dismissed any comparison of the study of
Indian literature with the study of Western literature on the grounds that classical literature was read
in Europe as literary production and not as divine authority, as it was in India. Duff persistently
discriminated between mental capabilities as proof that the Western orientation to literary study
permitted myth to be read as fable without any practical influence, whereas in India the principles and
facts of myth were taught and believed in as truth” (109). Jacques LeGoff makes a similar point in
relation to Louis Dumont’s analysis of modern India, deeming India to be “aberrant with respect to
the problem of modernization.” Referring to the post-World War II and post-decolonization
association of modernization with westernization and, thus, its opposition to tradition or “antique,”
LeGoff remarks, “If Louis Dumont is right, the sense of time and history in India has so far remained
untouched by the notion of progress. In India ‘people discussed the respective merits of the ancients
and the moderns,’ but on a single level, so to speak, comparing them without any idea of progress (or
regression) […] If Dumont is correct, there would thus be an important segment of humanity that has
up to now escaped the dynamic dialectic of the pair antique (ancient) / modern” (History and
Memory, 40).

xxi
There are various legends circulating among the different groups suspected of engaging in the
practice, and it would be beyond the scope of this dissertation to account for the different
narratological strands. Continuing with the focus on the Jahrejahs, I will be examining the legends of
interest to and concerning the Rajputs, especially since these legends received greater attention from
Col. Walker and other officials who used his letter as the point of departure for their own
speculations. Veena Talwar Oldenburg’s analysis of female infanticide in colonial Punjab includes
the following legend that the British believed was the origin of the crime among a sub-caste of the
Khatris called the Bedis and that is quoted in the reports of Major Edwardes (Dowry Murder 50):
“Dharam Chand Bedi, the grandson of Guru Nanak (1469-1538, the founder of the Sikh
faith), had two sons and a daughter. The latter was betrothed to a Khatri boy, but on the day of the
nuptials the bride’s family suffered a deep affront by the groom’s family. The groom’s party insisted
that the doorway of the house be widened, and destroyed it by force to allow the groom’s litter to pass
through. ‘The incensed Bedee prayed ‘that the threshold of the Khuttree tribe might in like manner be
ruined’’ and the nuptial rites were celebrated amid mutual ill-feeling. Finally, when the bride’s
brothers accompanied the groom’s party to bid their sister farewell, ‘the weather was hot and the party
took a malicious pleasure in taking the young Bedees further than etiquette required.’ The boys
returned, footsore and weary, and it was then that the enraged Dharam Chand,
indignant at all the insults that the bridal of his daughter had drawn upon him from an
inferior class, laid the inhuman injunction on his descendents, that ‘in future no Bedee
should let a daughter live.’ The boys were horro-stricken at so un-natural a law, and with
clasped hands represented to their father, that to take the life of a child was one of the
greatest sins in the shastras. But Dhurm Chund replied, ‘that if the Bedees remained true to
their faith and abstained from lies and strong drink, providence would reward them with
none but male children. But at any rate, let the burden of the crime be upon his neck, and no
one else’s,’ and from that time forth Dhurm Chund’s head fell forward upon his chest and he
evermore walked like one who bore an awful weight upon his shoulders.
[…] With ‘consciences thus relieved,’ the ‘race’ of Bedis ‘continued for 300 years to murder their
infant daughters, and if any Bedee out of natural feeling, preserved a girl, he was excommunicated by
the rest, and treated as a common sweeper.’”

187

xxii
Walker’s hypothesis has already been dismissed by Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, who point out that
intermarriage between Jahreja Rajputs and Muslims was not uncommon in Kutch and Kathiawar (67).

xxiii
Quoted in Peggs, 133-135.

xxiv
Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago
and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 180. Paul Ricœur discusses the “event” as the
“ultimate referent” of “historical discourse,” and brings a distinction between “the fact as ‘something
said,’ the ‘what’ of historical discourse, from the event as ‘what one talks about,’ the ‘subject of…’
that makes up historical discourse” (179).

xxv
Ibid., 180.

xxvi
The Janus-faced Brahmin priest was indeed notorious for his duplicity. In some of the Sanskrit
dramas, like Mrichchakatika or The Little Toy-Cart by Sudraka, which was written in the sixth
century, the Brahmin becomes a figure of ridicule, and this characterization has been viewed by some
as a reversal of the established social power dynamic. Travellers in eighteenth and nineteenth century
India also provide some insight into the perception of Brahmins. While Bishop Heber extrapolates
from his interaction with a Brahmin student to warn about the hypocrisy of the students who might
“play the part of Christians with us, and with their own people of zealous followers of Brahma” (137),
Fanny Parkes brings a further distinction between the Vaisnava Brahmins who were lazy and
duplicitous and the Saivite Brahmins who were morally superior. James Mill waxes eloquent about
the power that the Brahmins command in the colony by virtue of the caste system, such that no man
could verbally or physically abuse a Brahmin without risking severe punishment. The stature of the
Brahmins was negligible during Mughal rule, but the British found it necessary to defer to the
Brahmins for translations of religious texts (although many of the Orientalists often learned the native
languages themselves, since the Brahmins could not be trusted). Despite British reservations about
the Brahmins, the latter grew in power as a social and political class in the course of the nineteenth-
century.

xxvii
Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z Smith, Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural
Formation (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1987), 8.
xxviii
It was perhaps to obviate any feelings of love and attachment to the female infant that she was put
to death immediately and no allowed to live more than a few hours at the most.

xxix
Here, I am referring to the economic burden, social exclusion, and cultural shame that her birth
appears to embody. While an argument can undoubtedly be put forth that the greatest threat of
emasculation lies in her sexuality and that the above three factors are reducible to the perception of
her sexuality as dangerous or deviant, I am more interested in engaging with the vacillations and the
substitutions between the economic and the social and their relationship to the sacred. For an
exploration of the perceptions of female sexuality, refer to Sarah Caldwell, Oh Terrifying Mother:
Sexuality, Violence and Worship of the Goddess Kali; The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger and
Brian K. Smith; T.G. Vaidyanathan and Jeffrey J. Kripal (eds.), Vishnu on Freud’s Desk: A Reader in
Psychoanalysis and Hinduism etc.

xxx
Oldenburg, 72.

xxxi
I am referring here to the ambivalence between the sacred and its sacrifice that René Girard
articulates. Is the infant sacred and therefore sacrificed, or does she become sacred by virtue of being
sacrificed?

188

xxxii
Oldenburg, 172.

xxxiii
The Laws of Manu, 105-109.

xxxiv
Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, 34.

xxxv
As the authors have pointed out, the priest’s consuming of sin has an almost cannibalistic image
attached to it, although they believe this to be Sleeman’s “rhetorical strategy” (35) rather than their
reading of the rite itself. While such analysis would be out of the scope of this project, the image
brings us back once again to the idea of sacrifice where the priest is literally able to feast on the
sacrificial offering. In other words, the death of the female infant now also provides sustenance.

xxxvi
It appears that burial rather than cremation was the norm for children below the age of two (refer
to footnote xxxiii below). Walker’s own information seems to reinforce the pervasiveness of burial;
however, the infant is always buried elsewhere and not in the courtyard or beneath the room. Walker
adds, “The Infant after it is destroyed is placed in a small Basket entirely naked, & in this state carried
out and interred. In Kattywar any of the female attendants of the family perform this office; but in
Kutch it is done by the domestic RajGor.”

xxxvii
According to the Laws of Manu, “when a child dies before he is two years old, his maternal
relatives should adorn him and deposit him outside (the village) on unpolluted ground, without
gathering up the bones (afterwards). No transformative ritual of fire should be performed for him, nor
any rite of libation, but they should leave him in the wilderness like a piece of wood and fast for three
days. When a child dies before he is three years old, his maternal relatives should not perform any
rite of libation for him, but if he has his teeth or has been ceremonially given a name, (such a libation)
may be performed” (106-107).
The extent to which the Laws of Manu exerted an influence on the daily lives of all Hindus is
questionable, but it certainly appears in many cultures that childhood deaths were treated considerably
differently from adult deaths; this was true especially of infants who died before being baptised. On
the other hand, some archaeological evidence suggests that prior to the nineteenth-century, in some
parts of Europe at least, even still-borns, abortives, and other infants who died prematurely were given
a proper burial treatment. For more information in this regard, refer to Vanessa Harding’s “Burial on
the Margin: Distance and Discrimination in Early Modern London,” in Grave Concerns: Death and
Burial in England, 1700-1850.

xxxviii
Chrétien is using the definition from the Littré French dictionary. The Unforgettable and the
Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York: Fordham UP, 2002), 11.

xxxix
Ibid., 2.

xl
Ibid., 41.

xli
To cite merely one example -- Home (Legislative). From Sir George Couper, Baronet and C.B.,
Secretary to the Government of the North Western Provinces, to G.C. Bayley, Esquire, Secretary to
the Government of India, - No. 775A, dated Nynee Tal, the 16
th
October 1862.

xlii
I am referring here to the etymology of the term “custom” from the Latin consu ēscere – to grow
accustomed to or to become accustomed.

189

xliii
Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, 38-39. They add, “The administrators’ repetitive discoveries are not
objective facts but are textual conventions by which the official document constitutes its object of
study – the domestic crime of murdering female babies at birth among certain propertied landholding
social groups in north-west India. To call the official document a travelogue is not to denigrate it, but
rather to call attention to the rhetorical construction of the text” (39).

xliv
From E.P.Arthur, Political Superintendent of Pahlunpore to the Secretary to the Government of
Bombay. Home-Judicial, dated the 15
th
February 1868, No. 67. Not all officials, however, suggested
surveillance as the ideal method to prevent infanticide. In fact, many were sensible to the dangers of
imposing draconian measures that invaded one’s privacy on an already disgruntled population and felt
that a return to a non-coercive approach, such as Walker’s use of negotiations, might be more
appropriate. In his report dated 26
th
February, 1872 to A. Shakespear, Esq., Commissioner of the
Benares Division, W. Oldham, Esquire, Late Offg. Collector of Ghazeepore declared, “A law passed
in accordance with this principle, securing to ex-zemindars the perpetual occupancy of their seer land
at a moderate rent, would, I think, do more for the suppression of infanticide than any direct measure
of repression, and would, furthermore, change into loyal subjects tens of thousands of brave men now
disloyal, discontented, and seeing no way for escape from ultimate extirpation save the downfall of
our Government.” Oldham’s comment is also reflective of the belief in economic constraints as the
motive behind female infanticide.

xlv
To M. Larken, Esq., Register to the Suder Adawlat, Bombay, No. 237 of 1849, from J.M. Davies,
Magistrate, Broach, 17
th
June 1849. Judicial Department: No. 406, 1851 (Vol. 15).

xlvi
Home-Judicial. From W. Robinson, Esquire, C.S.I., Acting Third Member of the Board of
Revenue, to the Hon’ble R.S.Ellis, C.B. Chief Secretary to the Government of Madras, dated
Chingleput, the 10
th
Febrary 1868, No.66.

xlvii
Some of the Englishwomen were able to penetrate this barrier and were admitted to the zenana or
the women’s quarters. But such visits were not frequent and, when they did take place, they were
almost always confined to the nobility and to the upper-classes. Ref. Begums, Thugs and Englishmen:
The journals of Fanny Parkes.

xlviii
In her discussion of female infanticide, Radhika Singha adds, “The Infanticide Act VIII of
1870…integrated the monitoring of suspect communities to an aspect of collective liability. The
‘proclaimed’ village could be made to supply regular information of pregnancies, births, deaths, and
the arrival and departure of women, submit to a census every three years, even every year, and pay for
this policing. The census thus became both the means of establishing the crime and imposing
punishment.” A Despotism of Law: Crime and Justice in Early Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford UP,
1998.

xlix
J.M. Davies, in his letter to M. Larken, claimed that “Hindoos very generally except the girls who
are either betrothed or married to men of other villages. Secondly, they do not enumerate the son’s
[sic] wives who may chance to be in the house, but have not arrived at the age of puberty. On being
questioned as to their motives for making these exceptions, the common reply is that the females in
question are not regarded as belonging to their own number – the one is no longer one of the family
and the other has not yet become as one.” The officials would not be able to verify the information
provided by the head of the family, and the women continued to remain invisible.

190

l
From H.L. Dampier, Esquire, Offg. Secretary to the Government of India to The Secretary to the
Government of the North-Western Provinces. Home Department. Simla, the 12
th
August 1872. “In
the 2
nd
paragraph of the letter from this Office, No. 12 of the 3
rd
January last, the Governor General in
Council (with reference to the proposal then before him to include in the proclamation all villages
occupied by Rajpoots and Aheers, but to act only against those which should be proved to be guilty)
wrote – ‘the fact of proclamation is in itself a condemnation; it gives a good many innocent people to
understand that they are made liable to an interference with their privacy and domestic life which
cannot be justified, except on the strongest ground for presuming individual guilt’[…] Rather,
therefore, than apply the law to entire tribes, the Governor General in Council would prefer that the
proclamation should if possible specify the villages to which it is extended, so that villages against
which there is no presumption of guilt may be excluded.” The importance of establishing or
proclaiming guilt is indicative of the waning of the earlier notion that strength of caste pride or caste
adherence was the motive for the crime. Formerly, the divisions between urban/rural, rich/poor, and
town/village seemed to implode as “tribes” were viewed as defining or drawing the boundaries of
guilt. Indeed, the conviction that caste was a more accurate measure of judging guilt never truly lost
force. Less than two months before Dampier conveyed the Governor-General’s views, the Secretary
to the Government of the North-Western Provinces paraphrased the views of the Lieutenant-Governor
of the N-W Provinces to claim, “he would make no distinction between doubtful and admitted
Rajpoot tribes. The proportion of girls, not the denomination or purity of the clans, is the main point
to be regarded.” (to The Commissioner of the Benares Division. Dated Allahabad, the 20
th
June, 1872.
No. 16 of 1872) Belonging to the Rajput community itself merited greater scrutiny.

li
From W. Oldham, Esquire, Late Offg. Collector of Ghazeepore, to A. Shakespear, Esquire,
Commissioner of the Benares Division. Dated 26
th
February, 1872.
191

Frailty, Thy Name is Woman? Archiving the Murderous Mother
In 1867, the Literary society in Lahore, the Lahore Anjuman, invited essays
from the general public on the possible ways to ensure the suppression of infanticide.
The Punjab Government, which presumably had conceived of this idea, offered
monetary prizes to those essays that were “deemed worthy of the reward.”
i
In the
course of the next two years, two essays were selected, neither of which – to the
surprise and, perhaps, dismay of the Punjab Government – was by a Hindu. In a
move that seemed designed to counter that imbalance, the Government directed
Pandit Moti Lal, the Extra Assistant Commissioner and Mir Munshi
ii
of the Punjab
Secretariat – who also happened to be Hindu – to write a précis of the two winning
essays. In his memorandum, Pandit Moti Lal provided not only a summary but also
a critique of the measures proposed in the two essays of successfully combating the
prevalence of female infanticide. His own proposed measures met with such favour
that Sir D.F. McLeod, the then Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, decided that the
highest monetary reward should be awarded to Moti Lal himself, even though his
opinion was solicited and not voluntarily aired. In an interesting coincidence to
which Veena Talwar Oldenburg alludes as well, many of the measures that Moti Lal
proposed were echoed in the legislation of 1870.
The essay competition signifies a definitive moment in the discourse on
female infanticide because it is, to my knowledge, the only time in the course of the
discovery of the crime and their attempts to abolish it that the British sought to elicit
the vox populi in an official capacity.
iii
In the sixty years since Walker had first
192

penned his document attesting to the “origin and history” of the practice of
infanticide among the Jahrejahs, precious little had been achieved in and despite the
avowed attempts to curb the crime. It is thus significant, that the British now felt
compelled to engage with the general public and elicit the latter’s opinion and
perceptions of the crime. Undoubtedly, this might have merely reflected the shift in
policy in the aftermath of the Mutiny, a battle that revealed the precariousness of the
hegemonic hold that the British Government in India exerted over the natives. But
the inclusion of the native voice did not simply demonstrate the necessity of securing
the Indian perspective on matters pertaining to indigenous life. It was foremost an
implicit acknowledgement of the flimsiness of dominance and of power, and a
realization that that vulnerability needed to be addressed as well as redressed through
the consent and validation of the populace. In addition, eliciting the native opinion
was also tantamount to admitting the glaring lacunae in knowledge and the naiveté in
the construction of the native as fully “knowable.” The native was thus invited, not
to help in the formulation of legislation on the subject, but to serve yet again as
translator and interpreter to the British on the vast body of people over whom the
latter ruled. In so doing, the native male – in this case, Pandit Moti Lal, specifically
– was consciously placed in the interstitial position of writing about the Other who
was almost the same but not quite for a ruler who was almost different but not quite.
Indeed, Pandit Moti Lal embodied that dual rule of being the one and the
other simultaneously but not fitting either subject position entirely. In his Minute,
McLeod describes Moti Lal’s memorandum as having “a very special interest, as
193

being the production of a Hindu gentleman of liberal views, yet unhesitatingly
asserts that our policy in this matter has been mistaken and ineffectual, if not
positively injurious, and urges in forcible and earnest terms the necessity for its
entire reversal.” A cursory reading of McLeod’s estimation might allow us to place
Moti Lal as Macaulay’s archetypal mimic man. He appears poised on that fine
threshold that visualizes him inexorably as racially Indian and intellectually a British
subject. However, the seamless confluence between being “Indian in blood and
colour” and “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”
iv
is ruptured as
a new speaking subject comes into being, who is neither Indian nor British and not
even both, but who can nevertheless be interpellated discursively into one or the
other subject positions. Mimicry, in this instance, does not pose the menace against
which Homi Bhabha cautions despite the threat of “a difference that is almost total
but not quite”
v
because racial binaries continue to serve as a stable marker of
difference within the power differential. Thus, even as Pandit Moti Lal’s opinion
actively interpellates him as a British subject, his critique of the inadequacies and
failings of colonial policy do not subvert or challenge colonial authority but reassign
him to the label of a desired and authentically foreign “Other.” The intemporal
nature of hybridity is called into question as the in-betweenness of the mimic man
forgoes any fixity to engage alternately with perceived essentialisms. It is at the
intersection of the performative and essentialist categories of representation that the
discursive figure of the moral, Anglicized Indian male subject emerges.
194

My discussion of subjectivity perhaps needs to be clarified here. To the
political, involuntary interpellation as “subject” that Althusser refers to, I am
inserting a porosity that can be construed as even more political. In their
introduction to the collection of essays Violence and Subjectivity, Veena Das and
Arthur Kleinman define subjectivity as “the felt interior experience of the person that
includes his or her positions in a field of relational power.”
vi
To add another layer to
that definition, I am not only defining subjectivity as a position that one occupies,
but in the case of our paradigmatic mimic man, I am also disbanding any pretence to
hybridity as a tertiary space for subjectivity, opposed to an antithetical identification
and yet emerging out of the intersection of the binaries. The triptych constitution of
the mimic man – the articulation of the dichotomies and their collusion – complicates
a singular, monolithic conception of subjectivity. As Pandit Moti Lal’s
memorandum reveals, the tension between the socio-cultural, political, and personal
resists his accession or interpellation into one subject-position alone. Rather, he can
only resolve the tension by alternating between the various nodes of enunciation: as
the British subject on the outside who favours an increase in the power of the
Government, as the native male speaking from the inside against any change in
tradition and against British measures, and as the disinterested observer.
vii
Moti Lal represents a “true” liberal, native perspective and also functions as
the authoritative figure that helps the British in discriminating between a “real”
Indianness and a false, artificially constructed masquerade.
viii
But his own alienation
from the behaviour, tradition, and practices of the tribes suspected of practising
195

infanticide makes him a credible and authoritative commentator. Unlike Fanon’s
decolonized “Negro of the Antilles” who becomes “proportionately whiter…in direct
ratio to his mastery of the French language”
ix
– in other words, of the colonizer’s
language – the native informant in nineteenth century India does not succeed in de-
racializing himself. Nonetheless, it is through a recuperative gesture that posits him
as the prototype of the native male only for him to disavow it that he can assume his
place as a worthy British subject. In commenting on the two essays submitted for
consideration, he argues, “Some few of the measures seem to me to be positively
injurious; all are of a nature which leaves their working entirely in the hands of the
people and places the Government in a powerless attitude, entirely dependent on the
action of the people themselves – a most unenviable situation, and one unworthy of a
powerful and humane Government.” The humanity of the British government is set
in contrast with the presumed inhumanity of all previous governments, and any
suggestion of the powerlessness of the government immediately gives rise to a fear
of chaos of a newly powerful people. His critique of the essays is punctuated with
implicit analogies that in engaging with the specificities of the proposed measures
nevertheless resonate with the larger preoccupations of the British themselves and
their rule in India. In decrying any suggestion that would reverse or upturn the status
quo, Moti Lal demonstrates to McLeod an awareness of and an ability to discern
between right and wrong, as well as foresight, rationality, and morality. He thus
embodies the promise of the civilizing mission and is also a reflection of its
presumed success.
196

Indeed, by demarcating the boundaries of civilized and uncivilized (albeit
civilizable) native behaviour, his memorandum functions as proof of the ameliorative
powers of the British presence in India. Moti Lal as a paradigmatic interstitial
subject is significant and even necessary because his voice constructs colonial rule as
hegemonic, not despotic, and sanctions even punitive measures as part of a just law.
The impetus for detection receives an additional fillip as he recommends, among
other measures, an increased surveillance of suspected communities. None of the
other purported reasons for the crime matter any longer; regardless of whether the
justification is economic, political, cultural, or personal, the only effective means for
combating it, in Moti Lal’s opinion, is through watchfulness and vigilance. In fact,
in concluding his diatribe against the perpetrators, he anticipates and refutes any
objection to the proposed intense and invasive surveillance:
Is their domestic privacy interfered with? – they have to thank themselves for
it; the crime they practice is perpetrated in the secret apartments of their
houses, which must be penetrated to divert their cowardly blows from the
heads of their innocent and unoffending victims. Are they subjected to
annoyance? – the pain is not keener than that caused by the mortal wound
which they inflicted on their helpless prey. Are their purses rifled? – the
object is to reclaim them from sin, to make them honest members of society,
to teach them a better mode of employing their money.

The various strands of judicial, religious, and economic rhetoric all coalesce
into one seamless narrative to indict the infanticidal communities. In so far as he
relegates the suspected perpetrators to an alienating “they,” Moti Lal takes his place
among the archons, commanding from a position of authority. It is through this
assumption of the ruler’s language, tone, and demeanour – a demeanour, moreover,
197

from which most British officials shied away – that Moti Lal enacts a hyperbolic
Britishness that must, in its own turn, interpellate the British administrator as ruler.
Reversing the postulation of antithetical essentialisms, the government official’s
relational subject-position of dominance negotiates between an allegedly
irreconcilable Otherness on the one hand and a hyperreal Britishness on the other,
both of which aide in forging a reified British identity. Moti Lal’s discourse sets up
an imagined dialogue between presumably moderate and radical voices in the British
polity, and his exhortation of increased surveillance is simultaneously an indictment
of a more conciliatory policy of negotiation.
But his discourse also distinguishes itself from other similar invectives
against female infanticide in his repeated use of the nebulous, gender-
undifferentiated “they.” While most of the writings on the practice, while not
necessarily condemning the complicity and command of the mother, do acknowledge
her role in murdering her own daughter, the dialogue above appears to be among the
first in not excluding her from the purview of punishment. Who delivers the fatal
blow to the daughter’s head that now needs to be diverted? Who needs to be taught a
better mode of employing money? The murky, invisible category of “they” – a
category that can only be delineated through surveillance – reverts to a
defamiliarized epistemic space of homogeneity. The prevailing assumptions of
masculine brutality and feminine passivity are resignified into a fitting case for
panopticism: a strict watch needs to now be maintained over all of “them.” Within
such a paradigm, native subjectivity is constituted in and through the violence
198

inflicted on an established victim. Indeed, the relational exigencies of such
subjectivity can only be performed through the penetration of colonial power and the
process of subjectivation on the subaltern condition. The principal characters in the
crime of female infanticide are mobilized in various ontological and performative
networks around the absence of the subaltern figure of the female infant: if the
Rajput parent is the perpetrator, then the British official becomes the protector, and
other native subjects position themselves variously as observers, sympathizers, and
empathizers. The scopic drive of surveillance, however, repositions these shifting,
relational categories to a more rudimentary ‘them versus us’ or ‘guilty versus
innocent’ binarisms. Vigilance is now redirected towards an avowed difference.
But rather than maintaining a watch over entire villages, the surveillance
seemed to extend only to the shadowy yet visible figure of the expectant mother.
The body of the native woman was to attract increased attention because it was her
changing corporality that dismissed any pretensions to the “nothingness” of the
infant. The measures sought to draw out the woman from within her socially-
mandated space of invisibility to now enclose her within the panopticism of the
Empire. In marking her body as the site on which accusations of infanticide could
now be levied, the cultural particularity of infanticide in India had been curiously
subsumed within the compass of perceptions of infant murder in England. By
redirecting the focus for the suppression of female infanticide onto the body of the
pregnant mother, there was a subtle, but no less radical, shift in conceiving of the
crime as that instigated by the father alone. As in England, the Indian mother was
199

now seen to play an active role in choosing to murder the infant and in committing
the act. And as in England, murder and concealment became synonymous terms in
India as well. Other factors differed considerably, but the infanticidal Rajput mother
– the upper-class, married woman who chose to murder her legitimate female
offspring – had metamorphosed into the infanticidal British woman – the unmarried
domestic servant who murdered her illegitimate infant. Slowly, the attention shifted
away from the Rajput mothers to single women or widows in India who murdered
their illegitimate children.
As with other ideological productions generated through colonial discourse,
there was never one dominant or monolithic construction of the native woman; class,
caste, religion, political alliances all merged to effectuate a complex and varying
conception of indigenous femininity. At the same time, despite the avowed nuances
in representation, the discursive figure consistently missing from historical accounts,
popular narratives, and archival records is the native woman herself. Gayatri Spivak
has already suggested that the subaltern, typified through the exemplar of the sati,
cannot speak and that she is a mute figure, a view that Lata Mani supports by
depicting sati as a masculine battle over tradition. Benita Parry, on the other hand,
has critiqued Spivak’s denial of any agency to women. Parry argues that Spivak
contributes to the silencing of women by ignoring the alternate space that women
create for themselves, speaking from the margins in the performative guise of
singers, artisans, and musicians. In this chapter, I hope to tease out some of these
contradictory and conflicting assumptions – the mute figure versus the speaking
200

subject – that the British entertained about indigenous women. The absence of a
predominant construction that might place the feminine in a binary opposition with
masculinity, might appear to allow for euphoric possibilities of subjectivity. And
yet, at the risk of merely echoing Spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak,
it might be dangerous to only find and attribute multiple avenues of subjective
exploration for subaltern women. Do the archives, in their intense scrutiny of the
murdering mothers, inadvertently reveal an anxiety about female desire? Or does her
desire reinscribe her once again as an object of desire, one that is nevertheless
sufficiently dangerous to now be circumscribed within the panopticism of the empire
and be subjected to the disciplinary apparatus? And where is the female infant in
this enquiry?
In the coalescing of various discourses on infanticide throughout the
nineteenth-century, we see an intense scrutiny on the murder of female infants,
which, inexplicably, ceases after legislation suppressing it in 1870. The silence of
the archives on the matter after 1870 presumes a conflation of the law and practice,
such that the interdiction of the state as parent – the non du père – is an enunciative
as well as a performative prohibition. In remaining silent on the fate and absence of
female infants, the archives silence the father’s non as well as the negation that is
enacted in committing the murder. Through this double negation, the archives
seemingly refute the nothingness of the female infant and, instead, constitute her as
an expected and immediate presence. In their silence, the female infant is at once
constituted as a living subject, whose absence in the archives becomes indicative –
201

however falsely – of a presence outside of writing. The sudden shift from absence to
presence is rendered seamless as the silence is filled with yet another discourse: the
murder of illegitimate infants and children. The civilizing mission continued as one
project was replaced by another.
The androcentric focus of the archive on female infanticide gave way
inexplicably with the attention afforded to the murderous mothers of illegitimate
infants. The focus on the woman implied a decisive move into the private realm,
while simultaneously continuing with the trope of “discovery” of the crime and
marking the continuation of a mode of ethnography. The penetrating power of the
empire increased as a greater emphasis was placed on signs of violence and the
voyeuristic scope that made the visibility of those signs possible. My engagement
with the murder of illegitimate infants centres on what it reveals about the
investigation of female infanticide and the absences that it seeks to correct and
manifest. In the following sections, I analyze the continued discourse on female
infanticide through the refracted lens of the investigation of the murder of
illegitimate infants by focusing on the construction of the native woman and the
voyeuristic desire that it fulfilled.

Chapter 4.1 The Authorization of Voyeurism
The examination into the murder of illegitimate children was a familiar one
to the British, since it formed part of similar practices in England and Scotland ever
202

since the Middle Ages.
x
The modus operandi in all these cases resembled a
template: a lower-class woman, seduced into a liaison outside of the confines of
marriage, felt compelled into murdering her infant out of shame and fear. Few
details differed – in Britain the girls were generally unmarried domestic help who
couldn’t be seen with their new-born infants if they wanted to keep their jobs, while
the murdering mothers in India were often widows with no possibility of remarriage
who would face severe societal disapproval and become outcasts. But far from the
sensational trials in Britain in the assizes that elicited testimonies, accusations, and
tremendous press, the scrutiny into similar murders in India fell once again into the
register of compiling information and statistics. The drama of suspicion, rumour,
detection, discovery, negotiation, and coercion that marked the crime of female
infanticide is conspicuously absent here. The sentencing was predictable as it
relegated itself within the boundaries of transportation for life
xi
or a few years
rigorous imprisonment. Very rarely was capital punishment awarded or carried
out.
xii
Before I engage specifically with the question of murders of illegitimate
children, I want to return to the shift in discourse from female infanticide to
infanticide in general (for the occasional child murder was also inadvertently and
mistakenly designated as infanticide in archival documents
xiii
). I am intrigued here
by the succession of these narratives as opposed to their coexistence. The discussion
of the deaths of illegitimate children appears only from 1871, once that on female
infanticide ceases. With the shift in focus comes a shift in language, a shift in
203

perceptions of authority, a shift in perceptions of knowingness. The verbosity of the
narratives on female murder and the myriad forms that discourse took (letters,
statistics, memoranda, negotiations, hearsay, and so on) is replaced by a clinical
tabulation of details on every aspect of the crime – the names of the mother and the
father, the village where they lived, the name, if any, of the infant, the method of
murdering the infant, the scene of the crime, the presumed motive behind the
murder, the names of any other accomplices to the murder, and the year the act took
place. The stark contrast between the two types of discourses and the alacrity with
which sentences were handed out to the convicted mother and her accomplices
reveals in its opposition a connection between the two types of investigations. I
believe that the British needed to shift their focus onto something they could contain
and deal with effectively in order to throw the spotlight away from the impasse that
their attempts to suppress infanticide had reached. The British had failed in their role
as protector, but the failure of the parens patriae masked a deeper epistemological
failure of the crime of female infanticide itself, one that could only be compensated
for by an intense gathering, compiling, tabulating, and recording of information on
infanticide in general. Every five years, information was sought on the number and
details of all infanticides in all districts of a given Presidency. Act VIII of 1870
suppressing infanticide was quietly repealed in 1905, but the impetus toward
acquiring information did not slow in momentum. The female infant continued to be
murdered in secrecy, as she always had, but as the preoccupation with the discovery
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of murdered illegitimate infants stole the focus, her absence went unnoticed in the
official records.
The horror of female infanticide lay in that absence – of her body, of
discovery, of detection. Female infanticide was discursively represented as a
pervasive crime because it was seamlessly folded into the domestic routines of a
household and was thus almost naturalized. Moreover, as opposed to the murder of
illegitimate infants – be it in England or India – that was thought to be sporadic,
episodic, and impulsively acted upon in a fit of shame and fear, the systemic murder
of female infants formed part of the social order itself. If the tradition of murdering
one’s daughters persisted only within definable caste boundaries, as the British
speculated they did, emotions could not be allowed to enter into the fray. Marrying
into or being born into the caste automatically implied subscribing to its cultural
mores. Regardless of hesitations or personal convictions against the tradition,
entering into and staying within the caste would necessitate following all the rituals
and traditions of that group. And yet, every single daughter in these castes was not
murdered. Indeed, the survival of the caste itself depended on the birth of a certain
number of girls who would embody the hope of reproduction for the continuation of
the lineage, not to mention their more pragmatic function in facilitating the
establishment of strategic political alliances through matrimony.
A certain randomness thus inserted itself into an allegedly fixed and rigid
systemic murder of daughters. And it was that randomness that conferred upon the
epistemic construction of the crime and its perpetrators an air of unpredictability. To
205

appropriate Parama Roy’s analysis of thuggee to this paradigm, anyone and everyone
could potentially be included within the ring of suspicion.
xiv
The supposed
exclusiveness of the crime among certain communities of Rajputs and Punjabis
threatened to contaminate any other tribe in close proximity through an imitative
modality that was contingent upon cultural, economic, and political exigencies. The
careful delineation of the so-called infanticidal tribes from the rest of the “innocent”
ones became an arbitrary measure that identified those who perhaps did commit the
crime, thereby separating them from those who perhaps could commit the crime.
Like the generational “hereditary criminality” of thuggee,
xv
female infanticide was a
crime that was purportedly cross-generational, but, unlike thuggee, the crime was
cross-cultural as well. The vertical and horizontal axes of possible inclusiveness
might help us to explain the contradictory reports whereby the confinement of the
crime to certain castes was juxtaposed with reports of the “widespread prevalence”
of the practice. The murder of the infant marked the beginning of the crime and was
not suggestive of its finality. Each murder potentially unlocked a chain reaction:
continued murders within the same familial lineage and across families and castes.
Conversely, although the crime of murdering illegitimate infants and children
was commonplace across cultures, within the judicial framework it was dealt with
strictly as an individual crime involving single mothers, be they unmarried or
widowed. The transformative and ameliorative power of education was not
proposed as a possible solution to do away with such murders, neither was any effort
made at changing the social conditions and circumstances that would engender such
206

acts of desperation. Although most of the aspects of the crime, such as the act itself,
the modus operandi, and the motives, often replicated themselves across the myriad
of cases, the shroud of emotion around the event – whether excessive or absent –
prevented the crime from being perceived and represented as an emulative practice.
Instead, each act of murder was dealt with as an isolated crime, and almost as an
aside, it was acknowledged amid sighs of resignation that that was an unfortunate
product of the social system.
But in many ways, the discourse on the murder of illegitimate infants in India
was a desired one from the British perspective. It filled the glaring lack and absence
that characterized the practice of female infanticide. The non-corporeality of the
female infant was compensated for by the materiality of the illegitimate victim and
the visibility of the signs of the latter’s murder. Similarly, the shadowy faces of the
perpetrators of daughter-murder were now made visible in the meticulous and
copious identification of the murdering single mother and, in some cases, her
accomplice. The discovery of all the principal players in the emplotment of
circumstances surrounding the birth and death of the infant transformed the judicial
narratives into eyewitness accounts. Indeed, the murder of these infants allowed the
British to revert and rely upon the colonial trope of ‘discovery.’ In most of the cases,
the discovery of the body of the murdered infant – or, in some cases, an infant that
died shortly after being rescued – was the pièce de résistance that now revealed the
plot, the dramatis personae, and the scene of the crime. The discovery quickly set
into motion a whole slew of events that would ultimately lead to the case being
207

brought before a judge, including a confession, an examination of the infant’s corpse
and occasionally, a testimony. Each sentence awarded marked yet another case that
the British had successfully closed, and even though they hadn’t managed to save
any of the infants, the judicial probe into the murders ensured a penetration into
native homes and an indictment of the perpetrators that the murder of female infants
alone had never made possible.
The lurid details of the murders played out the fantasy of omniscience and
epistemic control that female infanticide among the Rajputs had denied the British.
The compiling of information led to a recording of all aspects of the case, so that the
judicial and legislative branches now colluded to create a schema of infanticides in
India. Accordingly, the template of an infanticidal case slowly emerged from the
documents pertaining to these murders. The perpetrators were alleged to be of a
different class of women, women who were either “particularly sensitive”
xvi
to social
mores and pressures, leading them to murder their infants, or whose immorality
made them social pariahs to the extent that society would not want women “of such a
character”
xvii
in their midst. Indeed, one of the main indigenous voices on the matter
himself concurs with the prevalence of an exemplar. In his article on the crime and
punishment of infanticide, Sir Madhava Rao furnishes the following account as
emblematic of the problem in general:
Most or many cases of infanticide in India occur under following
circumstances:- A woman is married early. She unfortunately becomes a
widow while yet in the vigour of health and spirits. Caste-rules prohibit re-
marriage. The young widow, overpowered by the least governable of
passions, yields for a moment to the passion. Conception follows, and so
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delivery. Overpowered by shame – overpowered by the fear of social
opinion – she puts to death her own child at its birth. The dire offence is thus
committed.

Can the subaltern speak? As with the Rajputs’ attribution of the murder to divine
instruction, financial impotence, and caste expectations, there is a similar process of
externalization of the crime. The young widow is at every stage compelled to
concede to a force stronger than her own weak will. She cannot act on her passions
but only yield to them. “Overpowered” by a passion that is “least governable,” by
shame, and by an accusatory and unforgiving social opinion, she – presumably –
yields to the murder of her infant as well. The decoding of the crime was complete
and the British now knew the pattern of all infanticides.
And yet, the compiling of information did not end there. It was not sufficient
to create a model of the perpetrators, victim, and motives of the crime. The
penetrating gaze of the judicial system also sought out the details of effectuating the
deed. The methods of putting the infant to death were just as detailed as the fact of
death itself. Apart from recounting the myriad of ways in which the infant was
killed – administering arsenic or opium, suffocation, strangulation, exposure, injury
to the head, burying the infant alive, throwing the infant into a well – there were
additional sordid elements that were brought into the open, heightening the shock of
the crime and rendering it more dramatic. The mother didn’t merely strangle her
infant but “deliberately killed it shortly after its birth, by pressing its throat with her
own hand,”
xviii
or “caught the child by the knee, compressed its throat, and thus
209

killed it.”
xix
Each of the details provided transforms the narrative into an eyewitness
account that has now been committed to memory. Thus, not only do we hear that
Kashibai, wife of Nana, and an accomplice of the widow Waru, wife of Appa,
murdered the latter’s illegitimate infant, but that she “killed it by strangling it, and
dashing its head against the door of the house; and, immediately after the death of
the child, carried away its body whilst it was yet night, and threw it into the river.”
xx

Nevertheless, despite the free availability of such descriptions of violence, the
sentencing was unequal, ranging from acquittals to transportation for life. If the
marks of violence that the infant embodied had little or no bearing to the punishment
imposed, what was the purpose behind such tabulation?
The sheer facility with which information on the murdered illegitimate infant
was accessible to the British contrasts sharply with any fixity or accuracy of
representation of the female infant. On the one hand, social class becomes a
determinate marker of the limits of encroachment, such that the knowingness of an
urban or rural sub-proletariat, to borrow a term from Spivak, is easily circulated and,
in a sense, always already known. By that yardstick, the details of each murder serve
primarily to reinforce the already established template of infanticides. At another
level of reasoning, however, the unstable and porous boundaries between the public
and private also get momentarily reified and reaffirmed here in the authorization of a
certain knowledge. The illegitimacy of the infant sanctions a voyeuristic discourse
that must necessarily circulate within the public domain of knowledge in order to
mark its own legitimacy as an object of representation. In the case of the murdered
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Rajput daughter, it is never she who is represented in discourse but her absence. Her
localization within the private sphere of the zenana or the house itself confines all
knowingness in that space and in her non-materiality. In other words, it is only the
illegitimate infant’s birth and murder that can now become a legitimate object of
discourse. But the signs of violence on the infant’s body are read inferentially and
inflicted once again on the body of the female Rajput infant. The body of the infant
strangled or suffocated to death visually recreates the Rajput infant’s murder. British
officials’ speculations on the methods of murdering the female infant are played out
and relived in the discovered body of the illegitimate infants. A cyclical
corroboration is at work, where the evidence of infant murder from the 1870s
retroactively sheds light on the means of committing female infanticide and where
the suppositions of British administrators and native informants in the first half of the
nineteenth century anticipate the gruesome infant murders within a barbaric culture.
It was the discovery and re-discovery of the murders of these infants that
provided the panacea to the impasse of female infanticide. The female infant
remained resolutely silent and unseen, frustrating and thwarting the British official’s
desire to prove her existence. In contrast, the illegitimate infant demanded to be
discovered. And it was around this trope of discovery that the conviction of the
perpetrators centred. Most of the women were convicted not for murder itself, but
for concealment of the birth of the infant through the disposal of its dead body. In
another case, while the mother, accused of having strangled her infant, was acquitted
based on insufficient evidence, her brother – an accomplice in the crime – was
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sentenced to eighteen months of rigorous imprisonment for “causing disappearance
of evidence” under Section 201 of the Indian Penal Code.
xxi
Legally, the difficulty
lay in proving that the infant had been murdered. Firm evidence had to be
established that the infant had breathed before being killed, that the mother intended
for the infant to die, and, in the cases where the infant had been abandoned and then
found, that the infant had died from exposure and not because of its “immaturity.”
Signs of violence in themselves did not constitute sufficient proof of wilful
murder.
xxii

But murder alone wasn’t punishable by the judicial system; concealment of
the infant’s dead body also merited a grave offence against the law. As rulers over
the vast land, the British had purportedly achieved, to refer yet again to Ranajit
Guha’s formulation, dominance without hegemony. And this dominance demanded
complete transparency from its subjects, a transparency that was not always
forthcoming. The spaces that were formerly demarcated as residing strictly in the
private sphere, a protective space that ensured secrecy from the penetrating gaze of
the colonial power, were now drawn out into the open. Indeed, corporeality per se
effectively entered into the domain of jurisprudence, in so far as birth and death were
both required to be seen and recorded. As such, a woman who escaped murder
charges for want of sufficient evidence was nonetheless susceptible to conviction
under Section 318 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) on the grounds of “intentionally
concealing the birth of her child by secretly disposing of its dead body.” In addition
to Section 201 and 318, “intentionally omitting to give information of the
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commission” of the murder faced a penalty under Section 202 of the IPC and Section
89 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Colonial discourse demanded complete
transparency of its subjects at all three levels of the visual, the aural, and the psyche.

Chapter 4.2 Woman –Victim or Murderer?
British narratives of infanticide in India in the second half of the nineteenth
century, swathed the crime in the erotic images of unfeeling hypermasculinity and
alluring feminine submissiveness. Offering a different archetypal eyewitness
account in the British press than the one furnished by Eswarjee, R. H. Patterson
described the following scene culminating in the murder of an infant daughter:
“When a messenger from the zezana [sic] announced to him the birth of a daughter,
the Rajpoot [sic] chief would coolly roll up between his fingers a tiny opium ball, to
be conveyed to the mother who thereupon rubbed on her nipple the sleepy poison,
and the babe drank in death with it’s mother’s milk.”
xxiii
The imagery here
highlights the undetectability of the crime, with the silence surrounding the event and
the total absence of speech mimicking the silence that the British encountered when
investigating the practice of infanticide. The eroticized narrative seems to emphasize
the evil of patriarchy and the dangers of the tropics – the enticing figure of the
sensual native male highlights his complete power even outside language, and the
alluring breast of the native woman becomes the destructive breast of the evil
mother. But the image is just as forceful in registering a complete absence of female
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voice and agency – on the one hand, the female infant is subsumed within the act of
being killed, and her silence testifies to her physical and linguistic effacement; on the
other hand, the infant also seems to emulate her mother’s silence. We can only
speculate if the mother is a willing accomplice in the affair or if she is forced to
murder her own daughter.
Among the Jahrejah Rajputs as well, the British often believed the woman
to be the one to murder her own offspring, but only on the command of her husband.
Her own positionality vis-à-vis the practice remains ambiguous and presumably
unimportant. Indeed, in his voluminous 200-page report on the subject, Walker only
devotes a few sentences to the role of the woman in the whole affair. In his
estimation, the decision to preserve or murder a daughter lies with the father alone.
Walker concedes that in a few families the mother might prevail over her husband if
she exerts considerable influence over him, but such cases provide the exception to
the rule. He remarks,
This compliance of the women must appear the more extraordinary, as they
belong to castes up in families where their own existence is evidence against
this unnatural practice; but as they are betrothed at an early age they imbibe
the superstition of their Husband, and some of them appeared even as
advocates for the custom. They have been known to pride themselves like
the Jahrejahs to consider their murder as an act of duty; an act, which these
females who are mild, modest, and affectionate would if married into any
other caste hold in detestation.

There is an interesting shift in the language used to describe the role and perception
of the woman. Where she is first presumed to merely be compliant, she transforms
almost immediately into an advocate. The pride of race, often invoked in oral
214

testimonials as reason for continuation of the crime, is no longer relegated to men
alone. The woman advocating the custom embodies a masculinizing impulse that
seemingly empowers her and puts her, for the only occasion, on an even platform
with her husband. From the passive victim who commiserates with her daughter’s
heartless murder, the woman is now perceived as the uncaring accomplice to her
husband’s murderous plan.
Feminist scholars have critiqued this misreading of women’s position. In
their detailed and insightful analysis of the practice, Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, Renu
Dube, and Reena Dube contend that the British shied away from asking the same
questions of female infanticide that had earlier preoccupied them in relation to sati.
Where sati necessitated establishing whether the act was voluntary or whether the
woman was coerced, the same troubling questions – whether the mother willingly
killed her child or whether she was forced into committing the act – were not asked.
Moreover, they question the delineation of women as “passive victims and/or
participants,” alleging that the portrayal restricts the repercussions of the practice to
the female infant alone. They add that the “the structuring of the scene of daughter
killing as the most secret, concealed, and private of crimes has the effect of
separating the dead infant from the violence that must necessarily be visited on the
women in the family, both as actual crime and as disciplinary apparatus.”
xxiv
The
writers point astutely to the gendered schism that the practice of female infanticide
gives rise to. With the narratives privileging only the relation between the male
parent and the newborn, the woman is reduced to a tool of execution alone. Whereas
215

sati was seen as constituting one of the most horrific of crimes against women,
female infanticide was separated from that larger violence against women to become
its own cause. The physical, sociological, and psychological effects of the crime on
the women in the family is thus not taken into account.
At the same time, to what extent might this instance of misogyny be a
feminine construct? To deny the possibility of women actively participating in and
advocating the practice of female infanticide would result in further victimizing the
woman. Commenting on the practice of sati, Gyan Prakash claims that it “is
impossible to retrieve the woman’s voice when she was not given a subject-position
from which to speak.”
xxv
But while active participation of women in murdering their
own infants might reveal only the deep-seated effects of social conditioning, the
semantic nuances within the practice allow the women to separate themselves from
the violence they inflict on their own daughters. If the birth of the daughter is,
indeed, a non-birth, the narcissistic identification that would allow for empathy for
the victim’s position is perhaps absent here. The masculinizing potential of
adherence to caste and gender politics secures the woman the favour of her husband,
parents-in-law, the extended family, and the community at large. Indeed, to give
birth to a son and to murder their daughter might have been the only possibility for
these women of eschewing the gendered violence. The role of the woman and her
position in the household was unstable and had to undergo a series of negotiations
contingent upon her seniority in the family and her ability to produce a male heir.
Given the prevalence, persistence, and predominance of gendered violence through
216

the course of colonial history, the female represented the ideological battleground for
competing masculinities and authorities.
In the largely androcentric enterprise of colonialism, history privileges the
male homosocial interaction and construes the woman as the medium through which
colonial relations are established and maintained. Revathi Krishnaswamy concurs
with this assumption by delineating women as the lens through which interactions
between colonizing and colonized men are conducted. She adds, “Nineteenth
century colonial ideology and politics are marked by the historic emergence of
womanhood as the most powerful signifier of colonial superiority […] The social
status of women thus became the ultimate and unequivocal measure of civil
society.”
xxvi
The female became the site of restriction as well as that of salvaging.
She became an effective tool that would be exploited by both sides to further their
own agenda. While femininity was signified as the harbinger of tradition in the
Indian context, it was also coded as a fitting case for moral reform and
transformation. With increasing attention on and legislations against practices like
sati and female infanticide, the focus shifted from the public to the private sphere.
In discussing the formation of female subjectivity in and through the violence
of infanticide, I would like to return for a moment to Wassonjee Eswarjee and his
recounting of the silent play of gestures and rituals in the scripted play of murdering
one’s daughter. In the multiple layers of translations and interpretations, I have
drawn attention to the manner in which the tensions in contending authority and
authenticity are contested. But Eswarjee’s memorandum is also interesting in that
217

within the larger construction of female infanticide as a crime orchestrated and
directed by men, it nonetheless lays greater emphasis on the woman’s role and her
actions in the whole affair. The masculine presence strangely recedes into the
background. The testimonial recasts the woman in an active role in committing the
crime and gives the reader complete access to the scene of the crime in the zenana –
something that most native men are also not privy to. Intriguingly, the testimony is
wrought in a way that the chain of command is top-down: the men alone speak to the
women, but the women speak only among themselves. More importantly, the
mother is absolutely silent in the whole affair – the old man speaks to the women, the
father speaks to the women, and the women speak to the mother. It is her position
that is the most silent, but also the most deadly.
By nominating the women of the household as the perpetrators of the crime
and by situating the murder (and if the rumours are to be believed, the burial as well)
of the infant in the private sphere of the zenana itself, the particular case of daughter-
murder is withdrawn from the public eye to become a case of domestic violence. In
Eswarjee’s description of the custom of infanticide, the onus of physically effacing
the life of the infant lies with the mother, the midwife, and the female servants, but
not the father, thereby resignifying the act as an affair of the women. In addition to
the construction of the crime as a customary domestic chore, the repetitiveness of the
play of gestures draws it into the space of the ordinary. While the British believed
the undetectability of the crime to reside in the secrecy with which the crime was
committed and took it as proof of the shame that the natives felt in murdering their
218

own infant, I believe that the murder does not excite attention because it is never
structured as an “event” – to once again return to Ricœur’s conception of the term –
or as anything unnatural. To take that idea a step further, we might postulate that it
is for the same reason that the female infant can never be publicly mourned. If her
birth is greeted with silence, so is her death. Both are non-events that enter into the
register of the “customary” and the ordinary. In contrast, the murder of illegitimate
infants occupies the site of the spectacle. It hinges precisely on the tropes of secrecy
and discovery that allows the British officials to frame the crime within the
investigative logic of passion, violence, and misogyny.
In directing their attention to the method, means, and other details of the
murder of illegitimate children, the archive fails to take into account the slippage
between a functional woman-as-reproductive and a more erotic woman-as-sexual
conceptions of femininity. It assumes all illegitimate births to be proof of failed
chastity, lack of self-control, and an inability to sublimate passion and lust. The
repeated assumptions masquerade as conviction as they centre on the woman’s
absence of control over her own sexuality. However, it also acknowledges the
punitive expectations of young widows to remain chaste for the rest of their lives and
to constantly engage with grief by leading a life of self-abnegation and deprivation.
In so far as it assumes the widow’s pregnancy to be the result of a draconian and
enforced celibacy, the archive helps in acknowledging woman as a desiring subject,
thereby creating a possibility or a space for citizenship. And yet, that narrative can
just as easily form part of the perception of uninhibited and excessive native
219

sexuality. Moreover, even while it sympathizes with the mother by connoting the
murder as an act of desperation borne out of shame and an urge to escape censure,
the minute attention to the murder itself evades a corollary focus on woman as the
object of desire. Was the illicit act consensual? Does the woman’s body bear the
marks of masculine brutality? Is the birth of the illegitimate infant itself a sign of
violence, the memory of which can only be obliterated trough yet another act of
violence – that of its murder?
The violence wreaked on the infant doesn’t exist in a vacuum in the absence
of a signifying system. British and Indian interpreters alike have read the corporal
wounding of the infant as a semiotic mark of passion and shame. In an article that
simultaneously argues against the enforcement of capital punishment in this class of
cases and absolves the mother of any devious intent, Madhava Rao laments that it is
the cruelty of the social system that provokes the mother into taking a step so
unnatural to her instincts and feelings:
In sacrificing her own child, what a terrible punishment the mother inflicts on
herself! For inflicting on herself such a terrible punishment, is she to be
herself put to death?
It is evident, from the very nature and circumstances of the case, that the
woman more dreads the shame of being detected in her frailty, than she
dreads the pain of sacrificing her own child, plus the risk she runs of being
herself hanged.
xxvii

The injury to the infant, within this framework of sympathy, becomes the physical
residue of a psychic injury to the mother. The mother carries the effects of that
emotional strain with her, which might explain the predilection of the judges in
220

passing mitigated sentences on these women. Although it was never officially
named as such, in several of the cases the murder sentence was commuted to
transportation for life, owing perhaps to the judge’s feeling that the woman might
have been suffering from, what in the jargon of eighteenth-century medico-legal
discourse can be called, ‘puerperal fever.’
xxviii
The maternal state was thought to
impose a greater emotional weakness and instability that could result in the woman
having murderous tendencies. In sentencing a woman convicted of murder to
transportation for life, the judge declared, “It is, I believe unnecessary and improper
to sentence to death women who, immediately after the pain and excitement of
childbirth, kill the newly-born infant, and I shall follow the customary course.”
xxix

The judge offers an additional perspective on the transferential injury; not only does
the pregnancy and ensuing birth wreak an emotional toll on the mother, but the
physical pain of labour also contributes to that emotional instability. The infant’s
birth is marked by a physical and emotional violence on its mother, which manifests
itself on the infant’s own body.
But the murder of the infant is just as forcefully a violent negation of
motherhood itself. The purported “shame” of becoming pregnant out of wedlock is
transferred and subsumed into the infant’s body. The illegitimate infant incarnates
the moment of illicit passion, the shame of discovery and its continuation, and the
emotional pain of a lack of social support, and is a constant reminder to its mother of
her moment of transgression. Killing the infant, then, becomes a way to obliterate
that violent memory through another substitutive violence. The memory of that
221

transgressive event is inscribed and recorded in and through the corporeality of the
infant. To see the infant is to relive that prohibited moment of lapse, which therefore
necessitates not only killing the infant but also doing away with its body, such that it
now erases the visual memory of sin. Concealment of the corpse, from the prying
eyes of society as well as from oneself, becomes crucial because it suggests a literal
burial and estrangement of memory. The event itself never took place.
Is the sentence meted out to the mother then a punishment for attempting to
conceal her shame from the law or a constant reminder of the transgression of social
mores and of the law? If the sympathetic and paternalistic view, that the mother
murdered her infant out of desperation and shame, prevailed, shouldn’t there have
been uniformity of opinion on the subject? Why did the sentences awarded vary so
considerably in duration and harshness? Indeed, if the concern of female infanticide
was focused primarily on the motives behind the systemic murder, that over the
murders of illegitimate infants centred on the ideal punishment of these mothers.
The discourse of female infanticide generated questions of cultural difference, the
barbarity inherent in an often irreconcilable Otherness, and the difficulties in
translating one culture’s social mores and prejudices into another culture’s idiom.
This, however, was not the case with the sporadic murders of illegitimate infants.
The murders, as well as the legal and judicial ways of punishing the crimes, already
had a precedent in Britain. The cultural conditions within which such crimes were
allowed to foster were comprehensible, translatable, and familiar. It is thus curious
that the ideal forms of suitable punishment should have created such anxiety.
222

In conjunction with Madhava Rao’s suggestion, the Judicial department of the
Government of India requested reports from all the local governments and
administrations on the prevailing law in their respective jurisdictions. In what might
be seen as a survey of existing laws on the subject, the British government sought to
get information on the number of infanticides in a given presidency over a period of
years and the number of those cases where the sentence awarded was death or
transportation for life. The questions directed to the respondents in the local
governments purportedly attempt to assess the appropriateness of the punishment
meted out, but they also betray an anxiety over the administration’s perceived
efficiency and authority among the people, reiterating the need for complete
transparency from the ruled in order to maintain the control and the “justice” of the
judicial system. To that end, in addition to statistics and narratives of the cases
themselves, the Government came up with a list of the following four questions:
(a) Is the sentence of death or transportation for life often passed by the Sessions
Judge, and confirmed by the High Court, in the class of cases referred to?
(b) Is the Government often called on to moderate the severity of the law by
commuting or reducing a sentence of death or transportation for life in such
cases?
(c) Is it found that Judges in such cases strain their consciences to acquit the
accused or to find her guilty of a lighter crime than she has committed
according to law?
(d) Is it found that there is such a reluctance on the part of the people to furnish
information and give evidence in such cases as to occasion failures of
justice?
xxx

The archetype of “the accused” had been constructed and circulated. The concern
that the benevolence of the British judiciary would pity “her” weakness and
223

instability was apparently a widespread concern. Indeed, the anxiety inherent in
these questions surrounded the women accused of the crime, and not the crime itself.
The women charged with murder constituted a motley crew of young and naïve girls,
young and older widows, married women who committed adultery, and abandoned
women, who nevertheless shared a commonality of having engaged in an illicit act.
In the neat compartmentalization and categorization of women in the centre (married
girls and women integrated within the protective confines of a family) and in the
periphery (widows, prostitutes, abandoned women, and so on), this new category of
women, who got pregnant outside the sanctioned conjugal relationship and then
murdered their illegitimate infants, reconfigured the dichotomous conception of
mainstream and marginalized. The widow and the abandoned woman, already
occupying a tenuous position between the centre and the margins, were pushed
further outside the margins of society with the illicit act to become outcastes. How
do we account for this re-marginalization?
The process of double marginalization appears to create a three-tiered
hierarchization, where those women who have been re-marginalized are prevented
from reintegrating into mainstream society, and the only level to which they can
accede is that of the marginalized. To take this idea a step further, a three-tiered
paradigm would also effectuate a shift in the conceptions of normativity, where it is
the marginal that now occupies the centre – not in terms of power, but in terms of a
culturally-fixed subject-position of caste, occupation, or marital status – and the re-
marginalized and the erstwhile centre are both pushed to the periphery. However, as
224

the work of postcolonial theorists and subaltern historians has made it clear, the idea
of any cultural fixity is simplistic and reductive since culture itself is always already
in a process of translation. What I am proposing instead is that the re-
marginalization of women creates a societal structure not unlike the model of
discursive representation of female infanticide. The tripartite division – mainstream,
marginal, and re-marginal – demarcates the shifting boundaries of normativity, such
that each of the positions serves as the yardstick against which the other two are
defined as margins. The widow is no longer an agonistic articulation of the married
woman within a binary structural framework. Rather, the widow, the married
woman, and the murdering mother are all three representations of contingencies.
Depending on the perspective, each position delimits the norm against which the
other two or multiple positions become circumscribed as the margins. Who or what
lies at the centre? Is there even a centre anymore?
The intellectual debate about the female still presumes an agonistic
articulation, where she enters into the debate in a disempowered position against that
which the male occupies or represents. The avenues of subject-ive exploration for
the woman as subject of discourse and representation are then restricted to the
antithetical modalities of subversion or subjugation. Is the Subject that undergoes
subjectivation a masculine possibility or ideal alone? Can the woman create a
subject-space for herself that isn’t contingent upon a structural power dynamic
against a predetermined masculine baseline? To that end, I am interested in teasing
out the power differentials of desire, normativity, and subjectivity as they play out in
225

a defined feminine sphere. Since our access to this sphere is through the lens of
colonial discourse, we might be tempted to revert to an understanding of this
classification as delineated by and through men. To do so, however, would foreclose
the resourcefulness and authority of women in actively constructing categories of
normativity and reifying those boundaries through performative significations of
identity and identifications.
Such a theorization proposes a radical redefinition of power, a responsibility
that I am not ready to assume. I am not suggesting that the absence of a fixed centre
subverts power or does away with it entirely. To do so would be to ignore the
coercive, subjugating, and disciplinary effects of power. However, I am looking to
complicate the networks and the dealings of power outside of a top-down hierarchy
of dominant-submissive, master-slave, or centre-periphery by examining the
networks and negotiations in various subject-positions. At the macrosocial level of
the different worlds that these women occupy, each world has its own structures,
mores, rules, and power dynamics which constitute it as a normative world. Within
itself, each world has an identifiable articulation of centre and periphery, even
though conventional understandings of power might relegate that world in the
periphery alone. Despite that imposition of a particular lens through which the
effects of power are seen and realized, the only woman who seems to escape the
structured and structural parameters is the unruly woman.

226

Chapter 4.3 Unruly Women
The indigenous woman as a category of representation was evoked primarily
in terms of her silence and submission to the men around her. Across class divisions
and the urban-rural divide, the heterogeneity of female subjectivity was rarely ever
acknowledged. The occasional reference to a woman who wielded considerable
political power made its entry into the archives – Coer Jehajee’s mother, the Rani of
Jhansi, or the Rani of Burdwan – but apart from these stray allusions, it was the
Orientalist fantasy of the submissive and subjugated Indian woman that enjoyed
prominence in official discourse. Col. Walker’s narrative differs a little in that he
walks the precarious line between competing representations of Jahrejah women;
however, even when he comes close to recognizing her perspective on the custom of
infanticide, he reverts to the safety of an established image. Allow me to reiterate
Walker’s perception of women:
There are however instances wherein the blandishment and influence of the
Mother have succeeded in saving the Infant, by obtaining the revocation of
the decree for its destruction; but these instances of Maternal solicitude are
either unfrequent [sic], or but seldom successful.
This compliance of the women must appear the more extraordinary, as they
belong to castes up in families where their own existence is evidence against
this unnatural practice; but as they are betrothed at an early age they imbibe
the superstition of their Husband, and some of them appeared even as
advocates for the custom.
They have been known to pride themselves like the Jahrejahs to consider
their murder as an act of duty; an act, which these females who are mild,
modest, and affectionate would if married into any other caste hold in
detestation.

227

In those instances where her voice was acknowledged, it was nonetheless quickly
dismissed as an internalization of masculine assumptions and perceptions. The
recuperative gesture is crucial to the continuation of the fiction of what Spivak has
termed, “White men saving brown women from brown men.” Female infanticide is
deliberately portrayed as a crime initiated by the male and directed against the
female – a direct violence on the female infant and an indirect violence on the
mother who must act in conjunction with her husband’s wishes. The insistence on
the vulnerability and gullibility of the woman meant that narratives that deviated
from a similar portrayal had to be recovered and resignified to fit into existing
stereotypes through the addition of extenuating circumstances. But even though
Walker had difficulty in attributing any deviousness to Indian women that could then
be construed to be a part of their nature, Indian writers didn’t feel similarly
constrained. Pundit Motilal testifies to the “great influence which the women
exercise in opposition to their male relatives,” indicating that the decision to murder
the female infant among the Punjabis, or, rather, the decision to not murder the infant
did not rest with the father alone. But where Walker sees that influence often
succumbing quietly to the will and demands of the patriarch, Motilal posits that same
influence to be evidence of agency and of the will to resist.
In the Punjab it is a common practice with women to bathe in a state of
nudity in public; and who has not met female processions in the streets of
large cities, composed of most respectable women, singing the most obscene
songs, which any man would be ashamed to rehearse in public? If the last-
mentioned practice has disappeared to a considerable extent, its extinction is
due to certain provisions of the Indian Penal Code. But the Code has not
penetrated into private houses, where mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives
228

still indulge in the use of the most obscene and shameful songs and jokes in
the presence of their sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands; and there is no
hope that the custom will die out at any early period.

Motilal’s description of the boorish, obscene, and unruly Punjabi woman who
shames her husband into a disempowered position through her comportment appears
to shed some light on the resolute insistence on feminine submission in colonial
discourse. The woman’s undue influence and control over her household becomes
suggestive of a lack of self-control as well. Her incivility and vulgarity are allowed
free play and the only rational presence in her life – her husband – is incapable of
exerting a modicum of control over her. Such behaviour denied the need for “saving
brown women from brown men,” rendering one of the main justifications for the
civilizing project obsolete. But the unruliness also had to be tempered publicly and
contained within the private sphere to re-establish the accepted balance of power
within a heteronormative family structure. Within the public arena, then, certain
laws were brought into effect to regulate social behaviour, putting an end to “female
processions” filled with “obscene songs.” But the private space remained outside the
scopic drive of the administration, allowing the British to continue with the fantasy
of the patriarchal Orient.
In her wonderfully wrought analysis of gender and the archive of the East
India Company in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, Betty
Joseph engages with the selective recording of observations and information in the
archive in the service of reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes. To the question of
229

whether Hindu women were kept in a state of seclusion or of slavery to their
husbands, she quotes the accounts of two company officials, Thomas Munro and
Thomas Sydenham, each of whom provided ethnographic observations of women
belonging to different strata of society (rural and upper-class) and each of whom
answered the questions in the negative.
xxxi
They both attested to the centricity of the
woman in her household and to her ability in “conducting the business of the
family”
xxxii
or venturing into the public sphere to organize the management of daily
life. Another official, Teignmouth, put forth a radically different view, however,
claiming, “They are so concealed that we know little or nothing of them…I believe
that their state in general is merely that of slaves to their husbands.”
xxxiii

Unsurprisingly, the view that finally made its way into the Company’s report was
Teignmouth’s. As Joseph explains, “Whatever heterogeneity was offered here did
not contribute in any way to the ‘truth’ of Hindu women. Instead, the version that
won out was the one established by Teignmouth’s initial testimony – Hindu women
were invisible women who were completely possessed by men.”
xxxiv
Eventually, the
normatized silence of the woman was, through a process of repetition, also
normalized, such that any public behaviour that couldn’t be recuperated through a
mode of explication was immediately expelled outside the boundaries of the “truth”
and made different.
The perception of women who murdered their infants underwent a similar
test of normalization, following which they were coded as belonging to a ‘different
class of women.’ Apart from those rare cases where capital punishment was actually
230

carried out, the most severe sentence meted out was transportation for life, which in
turn was often commuted to a few years of rigorous imprisonment. The physical
dislocation to the island prisons in Andaman foreboded a sense of finality and
hopelessness, but some commentators read that move as holding the promise of a
second life. In the various Minutes on infanticide, one of the judges, the Honourable
Mr. Justice West, sees in transportation the possibility for the woman to act on her
sexual instincts without the same overwhelming fear of shame.
The woman punished for infanticide with a term of imprisonment would
return to society a tainted outcast. By transportation, she is placed in a new
sphere, and after a time during which she is, or ought to be, sheltered from
temptation, she is put into a position in which she can allow fair play to her
overpowering instincts in what by her new associates is deemed a legitimate
manner without the resulting terror and the shame which, in her native
village, might recall her murderous propensities into destructive activity.
This surely is the best that can be done with women of such a character.
Native society does not want them back. It has enjoyed the advantage arising
from the example of their punishment; it does not want the mischief arising
from the almost certain renewal of their crimes. (emphasis mine)
xxxv

The moment of lapse or of transgression signalled by the conception of the infant
marked the threshold between differing sites of indigenous femininity that also
implied the impossibility of return to an earlier position. The pregnancy effectively
repudiated the widow’s assumption of a celibate and chaste life, to the extent that
even the death of the infant – whether deliberate or not – could not help her resume
her earlier identity. Seen another way, the pregnancy typified the transgression and
indiscretion of the woman and pushed her across the radical, sensual divide from the
mandated absence of desire to its sanctioned excess.
231

Desire as a monolithic and abstract construct is problematized here in its
quasi-official authorization. In so far as the machinery of the state controls the
female disciplinary body, it also limits the scope and play of desire, such that desire
can now be routed through an accepted, public immorality alone. Nonetheless, the
assigning of a label of criminality or deviance on the woman sets in motion a
juridical chain of events that paradoxically includes a legitimate desire in its fold.
From being the object of desire alone, the woman can accede to a position of
S/subject of desire as well after undergoing a period of atonement though
punishment. The danger, however, in the Justice West’s construction of the prison
as a space where desire is allowed free reign, is that the woman is thrust into this
allegedly hedonistic space regardless of her preference or will. The discourse
assumes that the woman who steps across the irrecuperable threshold does so of her
own volition and desire, that the step across the threshold also signals her wish for a
continuation of that transgressive moment, and that once imprisoned for life in that
enclosed space, she will be able to exercise free will and choice in selecting
partner(s) and giving expression to her sexual desire.
In contrast to the suspected inflexible nature of the threshold that divides
different worlds, sets of rules, and socio-political structures, the permeability of the
tenuous line between being subject and object of desire is never explored and – in the
damning characterization as “women of such a character” – often not even
recognized. The simulacrum of that contained space plays out the fantasy of
unrestricted desire but simultaneously encloses it within and marks it as a designated
232

site of criminality and immorality. The belief in the “certain renewal” of the crime
enforces a structural understanding of desire as circular. Once desire is acted upon,
it demands to be repeated continually. In other words, once desire is detected or
discovered by the judicial machinery in the guise of an illicit affair that led to the
birth and death of a bastard infant, it automatically enters into a regenerative
performative vocabulary, where it is now inextricably and specifically associated
with the act of desire. Desire has to necessarily be reproductive, generating different
objects on which to fix. Fixing desire onto one object-cathexis alone approximates
the established familial model, thereby threatening to generate its own normative
paradigms. Subject and object of desire are both multiple, substitutable, and diffuse.
With the regulation of desire, however, the death of the illegitimate infant
ceases to be a focal point. The discovery of the infant’s body, the absence of which
becomes such a productive site of investigative interest in the case of the missing
female infant, completes the fiction of knowingness and seemingly also marks a shift
in attention from the infant to its mother. The engagement with the question of
infanticide, despite its seeming continuity in official discourse over the nineteenth-
century, is marred by structural dislocations and a rupture in epistemes. What is at
stake when the murder of all illegitimate infants after 1870 is subsumed under the
continued rubric of ‘infanticide’? What is at stake when we ally the deliberate,
clinical, predestined murder of female infants with those murders that take place
under duress? What is glossed over and what is omitted? Can everything be
233

categorized together when the predominant, and perhaps only, link between the two
is that none of these infants are mourned?
An uncertainty exemplifies the discourse on female infanticide as it sifts
alternately through various discursive strands of rumour, suspicion, negotiation,
census returns, and so on. The openness and availability of information in the case
of the murders of illegitimate infants contrasts strongly with that uncertainty, even
though the official, clinical discourse is smeared with a lurid voyeurism.
Nevertheless, the intense information-gathering and tabulation, confession, and stern
judicial pronouncements in no way suggest that the murder of illegitimate infants
attracted loud laments from any quarter. The loss of the infant or child also rejected
mourning, not because it never existed – in the way that the female infant was never
thought to have – but because it could never assume true subjecthood. Indeed,
within a larger cultural absence of mourning such as among the Jahrejahs for their
legitimate female infants, the loss of the illegitimate child is almost desired in the
continuing attempt to civilize the populace. But the question of the sacredness and
desirability of the infant was in doubt. The infant was sacred to the extent that all
human life was considered sacred, but the anxiety over the adequate form of
punishment for the perpetrator betrays a gradation in the perception of sacredness,
rather than it being thought of as an absolute ideal. At one end of the spectrum,
commentators like Mr. Justice West can sweepingly declare, “The punishment of
infanticide forms part of a general system designated for the protection of human life
by throwing round it, in every stage and condition, associations of sacredness which
234

may form the solid central core of the popular consciousness on that subject.”
xxxvi

To a lesser extent, however, the following extract from judicial proceedings that
engages with Madhava Rao’s plea for a mitigated sentence can be seen to allow for
the conscious association of the infant with sacredness, although it serves primarily
as a prop for the government’s own policies and alleged values:
Any relaxation of the provisions of the Code, such as Sir Madhava Rao
proposes, would be understood as indicating a diminution on the part of the
Government of that regard for human life in all its forms, which the rulers of
races, many of which are just emerging from barbarism, should above all
things seek to maintain and extend. It would, moreover, be, or appear to be,
inconsistent with the long continued efforts of the Government to stamp out,
in Northern India and parts of Bombay, female infanticide and its kindred
practices.
xxxvii

Between decorum and the appropriate stance for the Government to assume, on the
one hand, and the continuing desire to abolish female infanticide, on the other, the
life of the illegitimate infant is suddenly endowed with sacredness as well. However,
it is a functional sacredness that, as with the female infant, is allocated to the infant
after its death alone. But while the female infant conjured up heroic images of
saving and preserving and therefore became sacred, the illegitimate infant’s
sacredness was conferred upon it mainly through the prism of official policy and
refracted from the sacredness of the female infant. In acquiescing with Madhava
Rao on the appropriateness of imprisonment as a punishment, as opposed to the
harsh sentencing to death, Mr. Justice Melvill epitomizes the hesitations of many of
the judges on the matter. Regardless of official rhetoric, he enunciates one of the
main conundrums presented to judges trying these cases of infanticide:
235

It is impossible not to feel, with Sir Madhava Rao, that in the generality of
such cases as he describes, a term of imprisonment would be an adequate
sentence, and that it would be well if the Courts of Justice could pass such a
sentence. But it would be very difficult to make any alteration in the law,
with this object, which would not be open to grave objections. The
legislature could not declare totidem verbis that infanticide is not murder: still
less could it declare that the destruction of a lawful child is murder, but the
killing of an illegitimate child is not murder.
xxxviii

My interest in pointing out the absence of any a priori sacredness is not to
put forth a theological argument here. I am, however, interested in pointing once
again to the perceived connections between mourning and the conception of a sacred.
The infant assumes an association with sacredness through its brutal murder, and it is
the loss of that life, and consequently the loss of sacredness, that demands to be
mourned. In the case of the murder of illegitimate infants, the destruction of the
infant’s life was thought to take place under extremely distressing circumstances,
and the distraught or shamed appearance of the mother located mourning somewhere
within the boundaries of that particular instance of murder. In addition, the
punishment of imprisonment or transportation for life that compounded the pain of
discovery, shame, and isolation was certain to elicit a display of mourning – a
demonstration that still evaded the official eye when it came to female infanticide.
In many ways, the discourse on the murder of illegitimate infants
masqueraded as the positive palimpsest or double of the discourse of female
infanticide. It became the desirable narrative that realized and fulfilled the fantasy of
complete knowingness. But it also incarnated the possibility of detection and
punishment, and through that possibility, the narrative played out the projected
236

representation of an efficient and authoritative system of law and order that exerted
complete control over its subject-peoples. But the cessation of any further
investigation into the murder of female infants still posed the question over her
lingering absence. While the end to any official discourse on female infanticide
naturally suggested a shift from a discursive to an ontological and visible presence,
the above extract from the proceedings of the Judicial department points to the
continued practice of infanticide among communities of northern India. If the
erasure of the female infant in the day-to-day life of Rajput and other communities
now extended to an erasure in official colonial discourse as well, where, if at all,
could the female infant be located?

237

Notes:
i
Minute by Sir D.F. McLeod, C.B., K.C.S.I., late Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, on the
Suppression of Infanticide. Murree, the 22
nd
June, 1870. General Department, Vol. 7, 1870.

ii
The title can be translated as “Chief Secretary.”

iii
Since the British assumed the act of daughter-murder to be localized among particular castes and
tribes of Hindus, they also believed any demonstrated or felt sympathy for the tradition – or
agreement with the motives behind it – to remain confined among the same tribes as well, and only
occasionally extending to a neighbouring one.

iv
Macaulay, Selected Writings, 249.

v
Bhabha, 91.

vi
Veena Das et al, eds., Violence and Subjectivity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: The UC
Press, 2000), 1.

vii
The seeming freedom of movement between various subject-positions might appear exhilarating in
its possibilities of multiple identities and subjectivities. However, I don’t believe it necessarily
reflects a subversion to a fixed sense of subjecthood. Moti Lal’s shift between various positionalities
is a movement that is sanctioned, authorized, and desired by the British. Moreover, it doesn’t allow
for an unlimited multiplicity of identity but remains fixed within a certain administrative discursive
parameter.

viii
I am, of course, referring to Joan Rivière’s description of masquerade here as a performative
layering of identity, the peeling back of which fails to reveal a real or true original.

ix
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press,
1967), 18.

x
Refer to Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern
Scotland; Susan C. Staud, Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Murderous Women in the Street Literature of
Seventeenth Century England; Lionel Rose, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain
1800-1939.

xi
Transportation here referred to the criminal spending the rest of his or her days in the prison on the
islands of Andaman and Nicobar, condemned never to see or return to the mainland.

238

xii
Being sentenced to death or facing transportation for life were both perceived with equal horror in
England, as is evident even in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Hetty Sorrel’s fate in both cases is to die a
horrible death alone. In the Indian context, however, it appears that the latter sentence was actually a
ruse to provide an alternate and better existence for the mother than she might have expected in her
own village or town. Given the stringent expectations of widows, a child out of wedlock would
certainly result in the widow being forced to leave her social support network, made an outcast, and
forced to lead a life of even more deprivation and penury. Sympathizing with her circumstances
within a supposedly rigid social structure, the British felt that transportation to the Andaman and
Nicobar Islands would allow her the possibility of building a different life for herself as well as create
an opportunity for marriage. A study of convicted women in these islands is beyond the scope of this
project, but it does pose interesting questions about subjectivity within more demarcated and
hierarchical structures of power, multiple identities, and the gradations involved in perceptions of
murder.

xiii
The slippage between “infant” and “child” in these documents, or, rather, the collapsing of the
boundaries between the two categories is itself an intriguing one that deserves to be studied in more
depth. Psychological and psychoanalytic studies have demonstrated the tremendous differences in the
two categories. However, as I have already pointed out, the discourse on infanticide seemed more
geared towards an analysis of subject-positions and roles (parent and child), which often elided a
nuanced and more complex account of gender and age.

xiv
In a detailed examination of the discourse on thuggee, Roy reveals the conflicts and complexities in
the representation of criminality and subjectivity. Engaging with the more perplexing questions that
the system generated, she asks: “if local officials and the police tolerated and even encouraged
thuggee and ordinary folk made no complaint about it, who could be said to remain unimplicated in
it? Under the circumstances, everything and everyone was liable to suspicion, since the system of
thuggee was both remarkably inclusive and remarkably discreet in its operations” (50). For a more
detailed analysis of the system of thugs, refer to the
chapter “Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee” in her book, Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in
Colonial and Postcolonial India.

xv
Roy, 41, 51.

xvi
This rather charitable view was held by Sir Madhava Rao, K.C.S.I., Diwan of Baroda, in his article,
“Considerations on the Crime of Infanticide and its Punishment in India,” published in the Journal of
National Indian Association in May 1876. Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the Government
of Bombay to the Secretary to the Government of India, Legislative Department. Judicial
Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay Castle, 25
th
July 1877.

xvii
Minute recorded by the Honourable Mr. Justice West, 21
st
June 1877. Copy forwarded by the
Undersecretary to the Government of Bombay to the Secretary to the Government of India,
Legislative Department. Judicial Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay Castle, 25
th
July 1877.
Despite often exclaiming sympathy for the plight of a young widow who was forced to live a life
deprived of all sensual pleasures, the prejudice against women who murdered their infants to escape
social censure remained. Official pronouncements often vacillated between labeling these women
pitiable and marking them immoral.

239

xviii
Ahmednagar, 1873. “Statement showing Cases of Women killing their illegitimate Children
directly after birth, which have come before the Sessions Judges’ Courts in the last five years, 1871 to
1875.” Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the Government of Bombay to the Secretary to the
Government of India, Legislative Department. Judicial Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay
Castle, 25
th
July 1877.

xix
Ratnagiri, 1875, ibid.

xx
Sholapur, 1873, ibid.

xxi
In this case that took place in Dharwar in 1875, the sketchy details of the murder committed by 1.
Basawa, kome Salingapa and 2. Ulvapa, bin Malapa, are provided with a focus on the details, but not
on the evidence:
“The accused No.1 was charged with having committed murder by causing the death of her
newly-born infant.
The accused No. 2 – brother of accused No. 1 – was charged with having caused the
disappearance of evidence by secretly burying the body of the infant.
The woman Basawa was represented to have had illicit intercourse with her brother-in-law
six years after her husband’s death, and to have killed her newly-born child in order to avoid disgrace.
It was found by the Sessions Court that the infant had been born alive, and had been murdered, death
having been caused by strangulation; but the evidence connecting Basawa with the murder was
considered unsatisfactory.
The accused No. 2 was found guilty of the charge.”

xxii
In his examination of infanticide in Britain over the course of more than a century, Lionel Rose
suggests that the vulnerability of infants perhaps allowed many murders to slip under the radar of
suspicion. The high infant mortality was often explained away by a long list of common illnesses to
afflict infants, “nurtural deficiencies” (7) of the mother, and even provoking the onset of symptoms
through neglect. He acknowledges “a separate category called ‘Violent Deaths’, covering burns, cuts,
scalds, falls, poisonings (from opiate ‘soothing’ medicines), suffocations (chiefly in bed), drownings,
and the like, but they formed only a tiny percentage of all recorded causes of death. In 1864, for
example, of 113,000 deaths of 0-1 year olds, 1,730 were attributed to ‘violence’ of which 192 were
classed as ‘homicides’ (murder and manslaughter). This gives some idea of how remote the chances
were of detecting a suspected murder or manslaughter among the welter of infant deaths – let alone of
proving it against the defendant of the Assizes. The more helplessly infant you were, the greater the
chances of dying a ‘violent death’.” Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain 1800-
1939 (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 8.

xxiii
McDonagh, 139.

xxiv
Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, 53.

xxv
Gyan Prakash. “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.” American Historical Review, Vol.
99, No.5, p.1488.

xxvi
Revathi Krishnaswamy, Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1998), 47.

240

xxvii
“Considerations on the Crime of Infanticide and its Punishment in India,” published in the Journal
of National Indian Association in May 1876. Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the
Government of Bombay to the Secretary to the Government of India, Legislative Department.
Judicial Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay Castle, 25
th
July 1877. emphasis in original.

xxviii
Puerperal fever was a temporary form of insanity (as opposed to another belief in the general
mental deficiency of women) that was thought to afflict women around the time of childbirth. In her
essay “Getting Away with Murder? Puerperal insanity, infanticide and the defence plea,” Hilary
Marland states that it “was generally agreed that the onset of puerperal insanity was within the six-
week ‘puerperal’ period, and most likely to occur between a few days and two weeks after delivery,
but it could also manifest itself much later, when it blurred into lactational insanity” (183). Cath
Quinn, on the other hand, claims that “a case of puerperal insanity was defined as such if it occurred
between conception and the end of lactation, suggested that it was considered to be a consequence of
the maternal state, rather than a distinct disease following a particular pathology. This construction
served to emphasize the disruptive potential, and unstable nature, of all women” (195). Her essay,
“Images and impulses: representation of puerperal insanity and infanticide in late Victorian England,”
as well as Marland’s essay can be found in the edited collection, Infanticide: Historical Perspectives
on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000

xxix
Sholapur, 1874. “Statement showing Cases of Women killing their illegitimate Children directly
after birth, which have come before the Sessions Judges’ Courts in the last five years, 1871 to 1875.”
Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the Government of Bombay to the Secretary to the
Government of India, Legislative Department. Judicial Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay
Castle, 25
th
July 1877. The accused in this case, Rakhma, was not a widow but “had been living
separately from her husband for upwards of a year – and the latter denying that he had visited her in
the interval – gave birth to a child, the offspring of adultery, and killed it, immediately after its birth,
by strangulation; and she placed the dead body of the child in an earthen vessel and put some straw
over it, thereby intending to conceal the fact that she had given birth to a child.” The breathless
description of events, rapidly following one from another, has the effect of making the murder seem
impulsive and not premeditated. Once again, the case could be routed through the, by now familiar,
tropes of passion and shame. The sentencing of transportation to life was appealed and the
Government reduced it to two years of rigorous imprisonment.

xxx
“Extract from the proceedings of the Government of India in the Home, Revenue and Agricultural
Department (Judicial), - under date Simla, the 26
th
September 1879.” Judicial Department, No. 6242
of 1879. Bombay Castle, 15
th
October 1879. Vol. 87

xxxi
Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 163-165.

xxxii
quoted in Joseph, 164.

xxxiii
quoted in Joseph, 161.

xxxiv
Joseph, 165.

xxxv
Minute recorded by the Honourable Mr. Justice West, 21
st
June 1877. “Minutes Recorded by the
Honourable the Judges on the Subject of Infanticide.” Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the
Government of Bombay to the Secretary to the Government of India, Legislative Department.
Judicial Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay Castle, 25
th
July 1877.
241

xxxvi
Ibid.

xxxvii
“Extract from the proceedings of the Government of India in the Home, Revenue and
Agricultural Department (Judicial), - under date Simla, the 26
th
September 1879.” Judicial
Department, No. 6242 of 1879. Bombay Castle, 15
th
October 1879. Vol. 87.

xxxviii
Minute recorded by the Honourable Mr. Justice Melvill. “Minutes Recorded by the Honourable
the Judges on the Subject of Infanticide.” Copy forwarded by the Undersecretary to the Government
of Bombay to the Secretary to the Government of India, Legislative Department. Judicial
Department, No. 4532 of 1877. Bombay Castle, 25
th
July 1877.

242

Vanished Without a Trace: Female Infanticide in Post-Independence India
Col. Walker’s observation and opinion on the prevalence of female
infanticide in one particular community of Rajputs became one of the most
authoritative texts on that practice and was quickly absorbed into other official
narratives over the course of the next few decades. Passages from his letter were
quoted verbatim in the two volumes of the Parliamentary Papers in 1824 and 1828 in
England, and passages from all these three texts then reappeared in 1832 in James
Peggs’ book enumerating the barbarity of the subject-peoples. The regurgitation of
the same information in various documents circulates what is presumably official,
classified information and makes it available for public consumption. The
interlacing of words and phrases from the different narratives attempts at once to
gain a measure of authority through its reliance on an already-known text and to
present the novelty of the information by decoding and repackaging it into a new
discursive arrangement. The harmonizing of voices repudiates any notion of fixity
of record or of reading; the archival record recreates itself to generate a continual
temporal narrative. Walker’s observations on the custom, positioned as one of the
first official records of the crime of infanticide, might appear to congeal a particular
representation in a specific historical moment. However, its epistolary nature also
ensures its renewal and reinterpretation with each reading, thereby denying primacy
to a conception of the archive as historical “truth” or even as emblematic of a fixed
historical representation.
243

The archive is far from occupying a position of stasis – literally and
figuratively – wherein it assumes an arrested meaning as the place where records are
stored or as a set of documents that can now be marked and preserved as “the
archive.” The shape-shifting archival document keeps renewing itself and changing
form as it enters into dialogue with and becomes a part of other texts. There is an
active re-construction and re-presentation of the criminalized and/or criminalizable
native subject and of female infanticide each time Walker’s text is invoked and fitted
into a new reading of the practice. This is not only a process of translation but also
of transmutation in so far as that representation gets reinscribed into other
representations and gains a new circulation through it in a new form.
i
At the same
time, despite the archive on infanticide mutating and gradually splitting itself from
the 1870s with the discussion and focus on the murder of illegitimate infants, it still
forms part of an identifiable historical continuity where merely the subject under
discussion changes form, but the archive itself retains its panoptistic, authoritative,
and investigative functions.
Throughout the course of the nineteenth-century, the archive on infanticide
reveals a preoccupation with the question of temporality – the present as connected
to or disjointed from a chronological and temporal trajectory. The need to establish a
motive might perhaps be related to a desire to see the interconnections, if any, with a
cultural past. The wariness of this sense of continuity – in the sense of a practice
having been in uninterrupted motion – of an “already” in a people’s practice points
244

to the intractability in acquiescing to, what Dipesh Chakraborty has called in a
different context, a “stagist” conception of history.
ii
As I have already discussed in
chapter 3, relegating the native peoples to an allegedly and essentially non-European,
circular idea of time allowed the British as well as indigenous voices to demarcate
infanticide as a “custom” rather than a tradition, while simultaneously glossing over
testimonials that put forth a different perspective.
iii
What emerges at the site of
intersection between the synchronous moment of custom and its repetition and the
diachronous movement of tradition and a conception of hereditary criminality? Do
these two temporalities even intersect, or do they, instead, exist as parallel and
concurrent conceptions of time and history? Put in a different way, if we look at the
diachronous axis of the history of infanticide as punctuated by the same synchronous
readings of customs, practice, and the discovery of murders, that history is neither
linear and stagist nor marred by discontinuities and ruptures. Rather, the historical
discourse of infanticide becomes a segmented history, where each segment begins
with a dramatic discovery of female infanticide, elicits information and opinions
from various interlocuters, and engages with the legislative and judicial dimensions
of the suppression of the practice. The indignant and moralizing discourse fades into
a cacophonous and nebulous array of voices raised in protest, until a new segment is
inaugurated with yet another discovery of infanticide, such as through statistics or
through the publication of James Peggs’ book. This identical segmentation of
245

history blurs the multiple intersections and parallels between synchronic and
diachronic temporalities to become the one and the other all at once.
Each document, each layer, each narrative marks the incipit and the
continuation of yet another segment. While the shift in attention to the murder of
illegitimate infants traces a new segment on an already extant pattern, it offers the
reader a dual mode of analysis – the development of a new, segmented history or the
refracted reading of the pre-existing segment out of which the new discursive
fragment is formed. Other discursive representations and colonial stories might trace
a different model: the discourse around sati, thuggee, or even rebellions might well
testify to the continuities, discontinuities, and heterogeneities in the metanarrative of
history, an examination of which is outside the scope of this project. In the
macrological and tornadic conception of the discourse on female infanticide, each
discursive ring, in its own turn, narrates its own segment of the history. The static,
the linear, and the cyclical all coalesce in crafting and narrating this history.
The periodic silences in and of the archives do not, therefore, signal a rupture
or discontinuity in the historiography of female infanticide. On the contrary, the
continuation of the discourse after a gap of a few decades or even after more than
half a century testifies merely to the resuming of a similar narrative. The seeming
atemporality of the representation of infanticide endures well into the twenty-first
century. With decolonization, however, much of the discourse is played out outside
of the official, governmental circuit. Independent India has witnessed yet another
246

discovery of female infanticide, but this time in newspapers, films, and popular
culture. The constitution of this new archive appears to draw its discourse from the
colonialist representation as the narrative focuses once again on dowry and the
devaluation of females as the motive behind the crime. The circuitous and repetitive
discourse on foeticide adds yet another narrative ring to the tornado that has been
circling for over a century.
The absence of the female infant, of which the British were keenly cognizant,
has become even more pervasive but still cannot be account for. While a different
form of thuggee – now a social banditry comprised almost entirely of outlaws – has
been confined to the remote ravines and jungles in scattered parts of the country, and
a ritualized sati takes place sporadically every few years and becomes highly
publicized and meets with outrage universally, female infanticide has become
ubiquitous and has yet continued to operate within the same tropes of secrecy,
undetectability, and tolerance, if not complete acceptance. Recognizing the
magnitude of the problem, the government of India declared September 24
th
as the
national “Day of the Girl Child.” Ironically, on that very day in 2004, a woman set
fire to her five daughters before immolating herself for “not being able to bear the
trauma of not having a male child.”
iv
In the absence of a son and of any mention of
the father, the violence of the murder-suicide is strangely evocative of the mode of
becoming Sati, albeit without the ceremony. Seen in that light, the mother’s
performance of her trauma through that particular act of violence is a fierce
247

mourning for their only hope of stability and support, both qualities that are coded
within the purview of masculinity.
v

More than a century after the British instituted measures to criminalize the
murder of female infants, the crime continues unabated. Declining sex ratios
continue to horrify, with certain communities only registering 893 women for every
1000 men. Newspapers abound with reports of an unwillingness to treat girls for
life-threatening illnesses.
vi
In certain villages, men outnumber women to the extent
that brides have to be ‘imported’ from neighbouring villages. Government
interventions and policies hint at the cultural devaluation of women being the prime
culprit, and much of public perception on the practice appears to concur with the
government’s estimation. I have already suggested in an earlier chapter that while
female infanticide and foeticide can only find favour in an environment where the
woman is culturally devalued, it becomes impossible to ascribe the direction of
causality between the attitudes towards women and the crimes against them. Indeed,
if the deprecation of women is, in fact, responsible for creating the conditions that
give rise to violence against them, at what point did women in India begin to be
disparaged? More importantly, can all forms of gendered violence trace their roots
to the same sense of vilification? Or is it at all possible, as I have mentioned, that
acts of violence could just as easily allow for a derisive attitude towards women?
One of the dangers of centring on devaluation as the cause behind the crimes is that
it forecloses discussions of complexes of power and overlooks the historical
248

development of ideologies, acts, and events. The identification of a cultural
denigration of women also reaches an impasse in terms of effectuating legislation
against the practice. If the commentators and policy-makers in contemporary India,
like their interlocuters in colonial British India, are all zoning in on the same
explanations, such as dowry and cultural attitudes, an initial and superficial reading
would imply that the crime itself, if not the cultural conditions, has remained in stasis
for more than a century. Assuming that to be true, what allows legislation that failed
in the nineteenth-century to be successful today? Are we even dealing with the same
crime?
The continuation of a similar discursive structure across two different
centuries might perhaps be better explained through Homi Bhabha’s identification of
the pedagogical and performative. According to Bhabha, the figure of the people
emerge in the split between being the “historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy”
and “‘subjects’ of a process of signification.”
vii
For the purposes of my argument, I
am going to narrow and change the scope of the pedagogic to focus momentarily on
the colonialist discourse on female infanticide in the absence of a “nationalist” one
that is distinctly separate. The performative, for Bhabha, “interpellates a growing
circle of national subjects,” and it is in the split between the pedagogic and the
performative that the ambivalence of society emerges, an ambivalence, moreover,
that characterizes the very space of the nation. To take an antithetical track from
Bhabha’s notion of ambivalence that is often fraught with possibilities of
249

exploration, I suggest that co-existing with the celebration at the emergence of the
postcolonial nation-state is an anxiety about its failure. The figure of the people are
split between competing pedagogies – colonialist, nationalist, secularist, and so on.
The violence that mars the birth of a nation-state leaves the definition of a “national
subject” open-ended and subject to constant modifications.
To eschew the fragmentation or the split in subjectivity, the performative has
to overlap the pedagogical. The overlap continues the fantasy of a whole subject, a
whole postcolonial subject. The sense of historicism becomes significant for a
people disjointed from temporality and history, where the heterogeneous identities
and multiplicities coalesced, voluntarily as well as forcefully, to form the “Indian.”
In the specific instance of female infanticide, the persistence of colonial discourse
appears to root the problem in historicity while simultaneously displacing the crime
and its associated barbarism spatiotemporally. Thus, female infanticide is what took
place “there” – in colonial India – during that time of colonial occupation. The
clinical discourse of abortion in contemporary India poses logistical issues for the
nation, such as the practical issues of procuring brides and anxieties about the
furtherance of the lineage. However, it doesn’t necessarily conjure a web of intrigue,
deception, and barbarism. Even the barbarism is displaced onto the rural poor, who,
as the co-authors of Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural Analysis point
out, often continue with earlier methods of infanticide since the technology to
facilitate foeticide isn’t always available in the more provincial parts of the
250

country.
viii
Even among the urban rich – the upper castes as well as the upper classes
that are primarily responsible for the gender imbalance – the practice of infanticide
arises out of practical considerations. They eschew a politics of blame by holding
either custom or financial constraints as responsible. The past and the near future are
equally responsible, while the present itself is emptied of thought and affect to focus
solely on the performance of the “now.” The present is constituted of multifarious
temporalities, where the coexistence of transhistorical moments and traditions refer
us, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “to the plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ the lack
of totality, the constant frangmentariness, that constitutes one’s present.”
ix

Chapter 5.1 Emptying the Motherland of its Women
The indelible association of female infanticide with the barbarism of its
perpetrators extends beyond the archive to enter into public consciousness. First-
time director Manish Jha’s 2003 film, Matrubhoomi – A Nation Without Women,
x

takes a hard-hitting look at the preference for male children through a disturbing
portrayal of a village populated entirely by men. The futuristic, almost apocalyptic
vision of the film constructs a future that is knowable through the actions of the
present. The present-day problem of procuring brides in some villages in western
India due to the persistence of the practice of female infanticide has led to the
phenomenon of “buying” brides from neighbouring villages, a phenomenon that has
251

been taken a step further in the film where the neighbouring villages also attest to a
dearth of women. As such, Ramsharan, a father of five sons, having sent his own
family Brahmin priest far and wide in search of a bride for his eldest son is at the end
of his tether and almost gives up hope of finding a daughter-in-law, when suddenly,
the Brahmin chances upon a solitary girl, Kalki, in another village. Ramsharan pays
a considerable bride-price to the girl’s father, and the girl is married – to all five
brothers.
Having finally chanced upon a legitimate, socially-sanctioned solution to
their sexual frustration, the brothers, four of whom are drunk on their wedding night,
calmly distribute consecutive nights amongst themselves to sleep with their new
bride. With five days thus chosen, a new quandary arises concerning the distribution
of the weekend. That dilemma gets easily resolved when their father insists on
sleeping with his daughter-in-law for one night a week. What then ensues is a
horrifying account of rape and objectification where four of the brothers and the
father-in-law take turns raping the new bride. When she writes to her father to
complain, he pays a visit to her new house, but only to extort more money from the
father-in-law for the latter sleeping with his daughter. Antagonized by that betrayal
and furious when she tries to escape from them, her husbands punish her by locking
her in the cowshed, where other men also enter in the dark to rape her. At some
nebulous point in the midst of this violence, she discovers that she is pregnant, which
252

suddenly, and momentarily, draws her back into the centre of the family as the
revered, maternal figure.
While much of the film documents Kalki’s horrifying trial, the repetitious
violation is punctuated with a peripheral narrative of rivalry and vendetta. The
brothers invite the enmity of some of the other villagers, and that hostility only
increases in the course of the film, with Kalki’s body itself becoming a receptacle of
the boorishness and violence of the men involved. In the final scenes of the film,
however, the scene of violence shifts from the site of her body to the village at large.
A fight erupts and the men in the village end up murdering one another. During this
climactic scene of violence, Kalki enters into labour. With the killing of all the men
in the village, Kalki gives birth. In an obvious symbolism, the death of the last man
heralds the birth of the daughter. In the male homosocial and homoerotic
environment of the village, the space of the feminine can only be created on the site
of the negation of masculinity. It is the massacre of the men that makes the birth of
the female infant possible. Each death creates the conditions that allow for the life
and nurturing of the infant. Indeed, the female infant cannot be born until that
masculine and brutal force has been completely destroyed; in that regard, the birth of
the female, already a sign of the sexual violation of the mother, becomes implicitly
contingent upon another act of violence as well.
But her birth also signals a form of healing. The violence inflicted upon the
mother is attenuated, although by no means negated, through the birth of the infant.
253

Even though the infant embodies the mark of that violence through its very
conception and birth, it also incarnates a liberatory potential for its mother and the
salvaging of society in its femininity. The film thus ends on a hopeful note that
society can, in fact, be saved through the birth of the female. And yet, the film can
only uphold the female as a symbol of virtue by reinforcing existing gender
stereotypes and discrepancies. The mother’s look of contentment at the birth of her
daughter refutes her earlier pain to instead reassert the triumph of maternal love and
joy. The repeated sexual abuse wreaked on Kalki can now be forgiven in light of
this triumphal moment, as the mother’s adoring and doting smile on her daughter
appears to suggest. Her distress is sublimated through her pregnancy, and the
physical act of childbirth erases all memory of pain and horror. In a village that has
now been brutally emptied of men in a bloodbath, the saving of that female infant
instantly reverses the gender disparity and seemingly portrays the repeated rape of
the mother as an innocuous act.
The men are massacred but the female presence survives – that is the hopeful
note on which the film ends. The violence inflicted on the mother becomes merely
incidental and is apparently compensated for by the death of her perpetrators.
Justice, or some poetic version of it, has been served. But a focus on the hopeful
moment at the end of the film, when Kalki gives birth to a female infant, coexists
uneasily with the recurring brutalities inflicted on the woman, and with which the
sign of the feminine is now associated. This conjunction of the feminine with
254

victimization through violence is explored in a strong feminist analysis by Rashmi
Dube Bhatnagar, Renu Dube, and Reena Dube. In introducing their reading of
female infanticide in colonial and postcolonial India, the authors locate the murder of
female infants squarely within a continuum of gendered violence and relate “the
violence of femicide to the birthing mother, the surviving sibling sisters, and to other
forms of violence perpetuated on women in postcolonial India like rape (every 54
minutes in India), dowry deaths (every 102 minutes) and the estimated 500
‘accidental’ suicides of housewives that occur in major cities annually.”
xi
The shock
of the glaring figures they provide points to the ease with which the female is made
available and centred on as the object of violence. Matrubhoomi examines that
victimization through the graphic portrayal of Kalki’s mute acceptance of her torture.
Undoubtedly, the complete absence of any other female presence is unrealistic, but it
is in that absence that the figure of the woman is inscribed solely as an object of
desire.
And in the fictionalized environment where society has killed all of its female
foetuses, the iterative murder of females can only give rise to and be supplanted by
another form of violence. Kalki’s unceasing suffering – the innumerable rapes,
being chained and locked in the cattle-shed, almost being murdered – stems from and
continues the chain of cruelty that the female is subjected to. One of the few scenes
in which she gets a reprieve from the virulence is when she becomes pregnant and is
suddenly transformed into a venerated figure. The anticipation of motherhood
255

encompasses the possibility of an extension of the masculine self, for which her body
is the conduit and facilitator. From facing the stark reality of the sudden end of the
lineage, each of her rapists can now entertain the prospect of continuation. It is a
realization of Caliban’s desire to people the island with Calibans, a wish that can
only be actualized through the rape of Miranda.
xii
Pregnancy and motherhood thus
offers one of the only opportunities for escaping, however temporarily, from the
cycle of violence. Is her smile at the end of the film still a sign of the joy at giving
birth and becoming a mother? Or does it, instead, encapsulate the freedom from the
pernicious masculine presence and the consequent escape from the continuum of
gendered violence?
The mitigation of the sadistic cruelty as it is routed through an image of
optimism – the birth of the female infant – demarcates sexual violence as the
unfortunate means to a positive end. This functional violence presumes the
objectification of the female as an established and, by extension, normalized praxis.
Indeed, the only man who doesn’t objectify Kalki, her fifth husband, Suraj, and who
therefore enjoys her confidence and love, is murdered by his brothers, presumably
out of jealousy and competitiveness. However, it is also his refusal to follow the
performative, familial norm of raping her that casts him in the role of a renegade and
authorizes his murder. In his denial of satisfying his lust through a brutal violation,
Suraj rejects the accepted script of denigration of women and can consequently no
longer live within the defined boundaries of society. While his closeness with Kalki
256

becomes a cause for resentment among his brothers, it is his repudiation of
recognized conventions that leads to his murder. This acceptance in the cinematic
narrative, however regretful, of the objectification of women forces us to ask: is the
status of woman as object of desire or as the victim of gendered violence even open
to critical questioning anymore? It is my belief that the acceptance of violence
centred on the female is so entrenched in representations as well as in lived practices,
that a functionalist violence serves almost to efface our – the viewer’s, reader’s,
observer’s, or spectator’s – discomfiture by also effacing the very sign of its bodily
trace. The image of a ravaged Kalki is quickly replaced by an image of abundance
and faith in her pregnant body. In working back from the ends to the means, the
repeated abuse of Kalki becomes comprehensible within the framework of her final
and lone survival.
But even in that moment of sanguineness – and, in fact, sanguineousness – at
the end, which marks Kalki’s and her daughter’s freedom, the film is unable to truly
engage with the question of female subjectivity. Kalki’s volition remains open to
doubt, since her decision to have the baby is well within the acceptable confines of
gender roles. Moreover, each time she demonstrates initiative and agency, it can
only be with the help of a young servant boy. I am not suggesting a closed reading
of her resistance to the oppression to which she is subjugated. Without a doubt, her
silent refusal at one point to sleep with her father-in-law, her refusal to enter into the
play of desire with her remaining husbands save one, and her unwillingness to accept
257

the tyranny to which she is continually subjected, all demonstrate strength and
resolve that cannot go unnoticed. However, in the buoyancy of that final feat, we
have to guard against ascribing complete agency and subversion to the feminine. To
shift the balance of power entirely in the favour of the female would partake in
precisely the same sort of functionalist violence whereby, in the elation of spirit at
the concluding triumph, even the excessive violence is seen as empowering.
The birth of the female infant is endowed with similarly conflicting
connotations. Her birth in a village, where no new-born female infant was allowed
to survive in fifteen years, is a defiance of years of established praxis. Her survival
extends to her physical safety as well, and the brutality which is inflicted on her
mother leaves the infant untouched. Furthermore, as I have already pointed out, her
birth signals a change and correction in the gender imbalance that had prevailed in
that village. And yet, the infant incorporates the trace of every single rape of her
mother. In the course of the unrelenting sexual abuse, it becomes impossible to tell
who actually impregnates Kalki. The daughter, therefore, becomes communal
property, whereby every man can stake claim on her. The notion of the female as
property or as a form of capital is certainly not a new one.
xiii
In the film itself, the
bride-price offered to Kalki’s father in exchange for her marriage to the five brothers
can be quickly read as an exchange of capital or a barter system, where the price
affixed symbolizes the value not necessarily of the girl but of her sexuality. Kalki’s
father’s demand of an extra lakh
xiv
of rupees for the father-in-law’s privilege of
258

sleeping with his daughter underlines the transactional quotient of female sexuality.
With that last exchange of money, the transference of female as property from the
natal home to the marital home becomes complete. The birth of the female infant
then sets in motion a new configuration of property. However, in an interesting
twist, the massacre of all her potential fathers liberates her from those affective and
transactional ties to any masculine presence. Bereft of those enforced moorings,
both mother and daughter can now assume their roles as citizen-subjects.
The film is decidedly not about female infanticide. It is only in the first few
minutes of the film that we, the audience, are made aware of the custom of female
infanticide. The new-born daughter is ceremoniously drowned in a vat of milk by
her father, and it is that pivotal moment which sets the tone for the rest of the film.
The complete absence of the female presence in the village draws us back to that
initial, and only, scene of infant-murder. As the singular visual evidence of the
crime, the cinematic killing thus becomes emblematic of female infanticide in
general by setting three deductive criteria as the template for the murders: all female
infants are murdered, they are murdered by their fathers, and they are murdered by
being drowned in a vat of milk. We see the female infant being lowered closer into
the basin of milk, but the camera reverts to the solemn face of the father immediately
after its slow motion towards the basin, satisfied that it gave us a glimpse of the
cruelty of the practice while trying to shield us from the actual horror of that
violence. We are eyewitnesses to the crime – almost. The shock of having
259

witnessed a crime is accompanied by a doubt of whether that specific crime actually
took place. Did we truly witness the crime? Or did we, instead witness a
continuation of the colonial discursive representation that was already set in motion
since the nineteenth-century?
The film plays upon the invisibility of the girls in post-independence India.
The British fantasy of discovering and unearthing girls can no longer be engaged
here. There is no cadaver to be found, no corpse to be detected. The totalizing
absence of the female in the village focuses our attention on the solitary girl, Kalki.
She enters into a male homosocial
xv
environment to unwittingly become the
receptacle of all the frustrations, anger, and lust of the people. She remains confined
to her room or the cowshed without any contact with the outside world, except for
the pity and sympathy of the low-caste servant boys, and the horrifying contact with
the occasional man who comes in to rape her. The subtext appears to read that the
same barbarism that is inherent in the murder of a female infant is also entailed in the
horrifying attacks on women. In portraying merely one instance of daughter-killing,
the film marks that point as a moment of definitive rupture that results in society’s
degeneration into chaos, sexual frustration, and violence.
But the same sort of reasoning also provides pause in the hopefulness of the
final scene – the female infant survives her birth only to face other heinous trials in
her adolescence and adulthood. This inadvertently resonates with the caveat put
260

forth by Col. W. W. Anderson in his opinion on the draft bill seeking to suppress
infanticide among the Rajputs in nineteenth-century India:
…we must remember that the majority of the adult Rajpoot females, whose
increasing numbers on the census returns we are in the habit of looking upon
with some exultation, actually lead a life of forced celibacy, idleness, and
confinement. Thus, in reality, unnatural death is, in the majority of cases
simply transferred to a later period of life, to take place under more
harrowing circumstances, whilst most of those [who] escape it either lead a
life leading to more infanticides, or otherwise… become miserable spectres
of humanity.
xvi

Despite the different socio-cultural circumstances and historical contingencies and
the divergences that arise from those differences, there is a striking parity between
the nineteenth-century colonial portrayal of the fate of the Rajput woman and the
early twenty-first century cinematic reading of women’s condition in post-
independence India. If the Rajput female, preserved as an infant, grows up to live a
life of despair and loneliness, Kalki also survives the infanticidal wave in that region
but only to be discovered and subjected to unceasing abuse. One might speculate
that had her husbands or father-in-law not been killed in the violent eruption of rage
in the village, she might well have been forced to continue with the performative
ritual of killing her daughter after birth. Since the film posits the father as being the
executor of his daughter’s death, the absence of the father(s) creates the necessary
conditions for the infant’s life. To reiterate an earlier point, femininity can only exist
on the site of an obliterated masculinity. In that one climactic scene, female
infanticide is both suppressed and reversed.
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But the proof of the crime of infanticide hinges not simply on that first scene
of murder, but on the ensuing absence of girls. It is only the complete lack of any
female presence in the village that retroactively confers upon the viewer the status of
an eyewitness to the murder. The film, like the archive of the nineteenth-century,
creates a presumptive eyewitness: one who isn’t necessarily a witness to the murder,
but who knows how the murders take place and who knows that murders have taken
place. The euphemism of the Jahrejah father’s command, “doodh palaunoo” – to
feed milk to the infant – gains a shocking new resonance in the viewer’s eyes.
Indeed, Walker’s disbelief in the drowning of infants in milk as a legitimate mode of
effectuating murder is refuted in this new strand of the archive. His scepticism is
disqualified as invalid, and his masquerade as an eyewitness who is privy to the
crime is dismissed in lieu of a new, credulous testimonial that comes into play. This
new layer in the recording or re-cording of the custom of infanticide doesn’t
necessarily shed new light on the practice despite the different socio-historical
conditions of the crime. Instead, much like the discourse on the murder of
illegitimate infants, it helps elucidate the gaps in the discourse on female infanticide
in the nineteenth-century, which, in its own turn, continues to inform the cultural
practice of the brutality.
What allows for the convergences in the custom despite the discontinuities in
historical trajectory? Is there, in fact, a confluence of actual praxis? Of all the
proposed means of murdering female infants in the nineteenth-century, effecting
262

murder by drowning the new-born in a basin of milk appears the most ritualistic as
well as the most doubtful. In the context of independent India in the past few
decades, the availability of sex-determination tests, albeit illegally performed, has
suppressed the practice of infanticide to a great extent, especially in urban India, only
to supplant it with foeticide. But the image of the infant drowning in milk – the only
spectacle in a practice that otherwise lays claim to secrecy – has persisted in popular
imagination.
xvii
Resonating with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of the “plurality of
times existing together,”
xviii
the fiction of that representation continues well past its
historical time to become reified as a certain idea of the past that prevails
uninterrupted.
Even if we assume for the moment that the practice of drowning the infant
had gained currency in the colonial period along with other methods such as
strangulation, suffocation, and neglect, the primacy of the image of drowning over
the other methods in public memory and its association as the paradigmatic referent
for female infanticide still needs to be explored further. The symbolism behind such
a ceremonial rite seems a fairly straightforward one and allies itself to the other,
more eroticized, image of the mother rubbing opium on her nipples, and the infant
drawing in the opium along with milk with fatal results. Both forms of murder
revolve on the destructive force of the mother and the milk itself as poison. That it is
the father in the film who murders the infant by drowning it in milk becomes
intriguing in that regard. If the woman is already a dangerously seductive force for
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the man, she is equally destructive in her avatar as mother. It is perhaps only the
male child who can drink and withstand the effects of that poison. Or must the
female infant be murdered before she ascends to that same level of destructiveness as
she, in her turn, becomes a mother?
The imagery of the poisoned milk that the infant drinks to its detriment is not
without precedent. One of the tales of infancy of the Hindu god, Krishna, centres on
this theme. Structured in the framework of the Oedipal myth, the infant Krishna’s
life is threatened by his maternal uncle, Kansa, who fears the realization of a
prophecy where he his killed by his sister’s child. On his bidding, the demoness
Putana disguises herself as a beautiful woman and evinces her desire to nurse the
beautiful infant. Krishna’s mother relents, without realizing the true identity of the
woman standing before her. However, the infant god is able to see through the
woman’s wiles and instead of drinking the milk from her poisoned breast, he kills
her by sucking the life out of her,
xix
whereupon she reverts to her hideous and evil
form. The cautionary subtext running through the myth appears to point to the
feminine as embodying the threat of destruction, where even behind the veneer of
beauty, Putana herself could be lurking.
The belief, among the infanticidal communities in the colonial era as well as
today, that raising a daughter meant inviting ruin upon the family has often been
thought of in economic terms – the monetary investment in someone who would
eventually be a part of another family, the expenses for the wedding that her natal
264

family must endure, and her dowry – or in cultural terms as the devaluation of the
female. However, mythological tales of destructive women might also play a
significant role in heightening those fears. Moreover, the circulation among various
communities of Hindus of the fears that these tales generate might explain the
appropriation of the crime among other communities who were never suspected of
engaging in it earlier, as well as provide additional insight on the new association of
the daughter as liability. Barbara Miller cites a conversation between Sleeman, the
British official who became famous for his exposé on thuggee, and a landlord in
central India on the practice of killing infant daughters. The landlord firmly
believes, as do members of his village, that misfortune and ruin falls upon a family
into which a girl is born and also upon the family into which she is married. They
conclude that it must be a “duty imposed from above” to destroy infant female life,
the failure to do which results in tremendous adversity.
xx
Far from being a crime,
the murder of the female infant was encompassed within a cultural and quasi-
religious imperative to forestall the calamity that her life would invite. The
imprecise quality of the “misfortune” that might befall the family has already pointed
commentators to the economic and cultural motives behind the crime, but it appears
that female infants might just as well be killed because they are also believed to
embody the threat of a powerful and therefore, evil sexuality.
xxi

Femininity in the Indian cultural imagination is invested with the dual image
of the sacrificial and benevolent mother on the one hand and the sexually voracious
265

and devouring predator on the other. Unlike the western paradigm of the virgin and
the whore, however, the female in India is at once one and the other. She is the pure
virgin, but she always embodies the possibility of turning into the predator once she
discovers her own sexuality. This becomes most evident in the mythified
representation of the mother goddess. Seen as the benevolent and protective Parvati
or Durga, she is also transformed into Kali, whose wrath can only be contained once
her thirst for male fluids (blood, semen, and saliva) is appeased. In her avatar as
Bhadrakali, she is depicted as a beautiful and dangerous unmarried, virgin girl. Her
virginity creates desire and anger for which she must be placated with male life-
fluids.
xxii
In the light of such terrible myths, the patriarchal injunction that the
woman always be under the control of the man can be seen to derive from masculine
fears of the woman’s uncontrollable sexuality and her own potential to emasculate
him.
xxiii
As I already mentioned in the previous chapter, the woman’s control over her
own sexuality was perceived to be weak at best, thereby providing an explanation for
the illicit passions and transgressive affairs. In the case of Matrubhoomi as well, the
repeated rapes that Kalki has to suffer can still be subsumed within the explanatory
framework of her indiscriminate and uncontrollable sexuality. Within the patriarchal
economistic connotation of the woman as property, Kalki’s abuse at the hands of her
husbands still falls within the acceptable domain of the marriage contract that was
finalised with the exchange of literal and symbolic capital. Her sexuality, therefore,
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must necessarily be routed through and invested in her husbands alone. Outside of
the confines of the familial abuse, she must still perform the prescribed script of the
chaste wife. In the course of her work on violence, Veena Das has also examined the
post-independence avowal by the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan
to return women who had been abducted and perhaps even violated back to their
families, many of whom didn’t want to return home or weren’t wanted by their
family members. Focusing on the importance accorded to the ‘woman’s honour,’
she asks, “What happens to the work of mourning when women have been abducted,
raped, and condemned to a social death? The classical ritualistic solution in this case
is for the social body to cut itself completely off from the polluted individual.”
xxiv

Not only is the individual no longer a desirable one, but the pollution itself is
contaminating in so far as the dishonour extends to the other family members as
well. The family honour is located squarely in the female body and in her sexuality.
Mourning itself is enacted in the ostracism of the individual, who thereby undergoes,
what Veena Das terms as, a “symbolic death.”
However, as the film suggests, the perceived dishonour is combated through
a territorial violence, where the female body – or, in this case, the pregnant female
body – becomes the site around which the battle is articulated. When an enemy of
her husbands and father-in-law claims to be the father of her unborn child, having
raped her while she was tied up in the cowshed, she is immediately transformed into
the fallen woman and accused of prostituting herself. The final eruption of violence,
267

despite the multifarious reasons, is staked around the right to her body. In that
regard, in an acutalization of the fear that the landlord voices to Sleeman, preserving
Kalki at birth results in bringing misfortune on her marital family through her
“unchaste” ways. It is perhaps to avoid invoking a similar form of ruin that the
landlord and other members of his village murder their female infants, an association
of misfortune which – through the circulatory networks of gossip, suspicion, and
rumour – assumes the status of superstition. To save or preserve one’s daughters is
in direct defiance of that superstition, which might summon an unforeseen adversity.
An extraordinary form of retribution is in store for those who defy the “duty imposed
from above.”
The predominance of an oral narrative alone in the discourse on female
infanticide substitutes for the written scriptural authority. On the one hand, the
circulation of the purportedly religious sanction for female infanticide among a host
of interlocuters eschews the presence and authority of a Brahmin pundit, allowing for
a “humane” colonial law to now intervene. However, the allegedly mythic origin of
the practice precedes and renders obsolete the hermeneutic function of the Brahmin
or the British. The prohibitory word against preserving the infant’s life does not
need to be codified and then decoded for the people. The availability of that story to
memory itself removes any need for a mediator or translator. The Rajput no longer
requires Brahmanic or British approval or interdiction in deciding whether his
daughter must live. That female infanticide, like sati, was unevenly practised,
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showing variations within castes, regions, and methods points us to the same
conclusion that Lata Mani reaches in her examination of the religious sanctioning of
sati – that religious belief was either not predominant or not the only explanation.
xxv
Nevertheless, in the “originary” myth of infanticide, the proposal to murder
the daughter for lack of any worthy grooms and the injunction to never “preserve”
any of the female infants are both put forth by the “Raj-gor” or family priest. His
role and his position in the family are crucial since his function is to internalize and
take unto himself any sin ensuing from murdering the female infant or child. But he
was also a reviled figure, performing the funerary rites for the deceased among the
Rajputs.
xxvi
His very presence in their midst serves as a constant reminder of that
originary injunction – however fabricated – against raising a daughter. In the film,
however, if we ascribe the same set of presumptions governing the murder of female
infants in Rajasthan, the role of the Brahmin priest is complete. As the only priest
called upon to officiate at various ceremonies, the totalizing absence of any women
testifies to his success in enforcing and reiterating that originary moment of murder.
The onus of finding a bride in a village that rejects that possibility falls on him. It is
incumbent on him to procure a suitable bride, the repeated failure of which provokes
the eldest son into maligning him. When the priest does succeed in finding a bride
for Ramsharan’s son, he does so in his capacity as the family Brahmin. However, in
marrying her to all five brothers, he also sanctions her rape and the violence inflicted
on her.
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Despite the insidiousness of his duplicitous demeanour and role, the priest
nevertheless embodies the force of religious law. To get a better look at Kalki, he
climbs into her house by propping a ladder against the outer wall of her courtyard.
Caught by her father as he tries to sneak in, the priest protests his innocence. When
that fails to convince her father, the priest can only evade being beaten by reciting
shlokas or verses in Sanskrit. The command of his religious persona resides in that
immediate availability of religious prayers. From being perceived as a thief sneaking
into the house, the priest’s recitation not only makes him instantly innocent, but it
also places him in an honourable and venerated position. Speech or la parole
functions as the normative letter of the law.
At the same time, the quasi-religious or mythic nature of the custom of
infanticide is implicitly counteracted in this film through the latter’s own allegorical
reading of Hindu mythology. The familial set-up of polyandry, where Kalki is
married to all five brothers at the same time, parodies the kinship unit of the
Pandavas in the epic and religious tale, the Mahabharata. The heroic tale centres on
the five Pandava brothers, who live with their mother, Kunti. On winning
Draupadi’s hand in marriage, the third brother, Arjuna, brings his bride home and
calls out to his mother from outside the house to surprise her and tells her that he has
a present. The mother, unaware of the situation, asks him to share his present with
his brothers. Since her pronouncement cannot be undone, Draupadi is accordingly
married to all five brothers and presumably, remains happy with all of them. The
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dark and horrific version of this tale is narrated through Kalki’s descent into
unhappiness and pain after marriage and is framed within the contemporaneous
unnaturalness of polyandry. Even the empathy and commiseration of another female
presence is denied to her, as the benevolent maternal force of Kunti is replaced by
the predatorial and lascivious father-in-law, Ramsharan. Kalki’s misery is
compounded in the enclosed space of a pentagonal sexual arrangement, after
Ramsharan usurps the murdered husband’s, Suraj’s, sexual privileges. Accordingly,
her narrative isn’t merely a sinister version of that of the polyandrous Draupadi, but
it also forms the counter-narrative to the polygamous Rajputs of the nineteenth-
century whose wives were represented in colonial discourse as often falling into a
similar state of misery out of “forced celibacy” and “idleness.”
An even more interesting mythological borrowing in the film is witnessed in
the protagonist of the story being named Kalki, a name that effectively salvages her
status in the film from being merely a passive quarry, turning her around from victim
to heroine. Kalki is said to be the tenth incarnation of Vishnu, an incarnation who
will lead the world from the perils and destruction of this age of darkness or the Kali
Yuga.
xxvii
In an androcentric culture, this seemingly tongue-in-cheek gesture of the
filmmakers to name their heroine Kalki chides Hindus for their preference for a male
child alone. A divine incarnation in a human form, Kalki’s arrival into that village
and in that particular household is testament to the violence and self-destruction
inherent in the Kali Yuga. The eruption of violence in the village and the slaughter
271

of most of the men becomes, in this reading, a form of retribution for the evils of
female infanticide perpetuated in the village for the previous fifteen years. Her
survival and the survival of a few chosen people, such as the new servant-boy, Sukha
– who is her only ally after the previous servant-boy, Raghu, is murdered trying to
help her escape – and her daughter is indicative of their escape from that age of
darkness. Since the filmic narrative also appears to partake of the belief that female
infanticide is a consequence of a widespread and deeply entrenched cultural
devaluation of women, it is significant that the dawn of a new beginning is heralded
by the feminine.
The liberal metaphoric readings from a mythology that is always already
present in a people’s consciousness, familiarize the horrific crime of infanticide as
well as allow the filmmakers to deliver a didactic message. However, the negative
trace of the tales of heroism reveals at once the disjuncture between the mortal and
the god-like, such that any emulation is always a negative inversion and can only
exist as a parodied sameness. At the same time, it also demonstrates the possibility
of the approximation of that ideal, however distorted the image might appear. In the
failure to reproduce the exact imprint of the myth, the characters in the film are
marked by a violent otherness that is irreconcilable to an ego-ideal or idealized
mythic self. Matrubhoomi reflects that distantiation between the overarching
narrative of an idea of Hindu-ness and the performative failure of that narrative – to
return once again to Homi Bhabha’s influential and useful demarcation of the
272

pedagogic and the performative. The bifurcation between the performance of a
negative mythologized Hinduism and the ritualized respect for the pregnant woman
creates a split subject. The practice of female infanticide is constructed as a
signifying custom among Hindus but undergoes a simultaneous process of disavowal
as a signification-in-parody. It now arises out of the otherness within a people’s
discursive practice.

Chapter 5.2 The Absent Subject in a Global World
The different aspects of daughter-murder are often subsumed within the sign
of displacement. The murder is committed by “them,” the barbaric people; one’s
own decision to murder one’s daughter is coded in terms of practical considerations.
Even if a film like Matrubhoomi succeeds in heightening the horror entailed in
drowning a new-born infant into a vat of milk, the current practice of aborting the
female foetus diminishes that horror by displacing the violence from the living body
of the infant. The crime per se can now continue unabated. The latest census returns
in India show an alarming skew in male-female ratios; well over a million female
foetuses have been aborted because of the preference for sons. The BBC cites the
findings of researchers in India and Canada for the Lancet journal that estimate that
over 500,000 female foetuses are targeted for abortion each year.
xxviii
The discourse
of female foeticide in contemporary India requires one to wade through a medico-
legal, economic, and theological quagmire of the specific conditions under which
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prenatal scans and abortions are allowed and justified, of distinguishing between a
legal and an illegal abortion, and of constructing foeticide as a crime as opposed to a
sin. The undetectability of the murder of the infant has assumed a whole new
resonance as it becomes increasingly difficult to target the guilty parties. Where the
crime was once thought to be confined to certain castes alone and to the regions in
which those communities would reside, the net of suspicion has now been cast wide
upon those in the medical profession, those regions where people avail of
sonographies and prenatal scans,
xxix
and all those areas which demonstrate a biased
gender ratio favouring males. The ease with which it becomes possible to
dissimulate the fact of pregnancy as well as the abortion of the foetus means that
even the investigative factions, which rely on suspicion, rumour, and testimonials to
gather their information, can only hope to catch the culprits in the act itself – a
mammoth task in a country where the numbers of aborted foetuses add up to the
hundreds of thousands.
The undetectability of the crime of wilful foeticide is assisted in a great
measure by the murkiness in defining the practice within the boundaries of a ‘crime.’
The clinical erasure of a “foetus” demands a different level and commitment to
violence than physically suffocating or strangling a new-born infant. Apart from
those cases where the mother is coerced into having an abortion, or is forced to do so
because of extenuating circumstances, for many of those women or families seeking
to selectively abort the female foetus, the decision is usually a planned, practical one.
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Since the contemporary mother – unlike her Jahrejah counterpart in the nineteenth-
century – generally doesn’t have to murder the infant herself, or hear its cries, or see
its face, the foetus becomes depersonified. In a close parallel with the Rajput idiom,
just as the Jahrejah parent could not be a murderer since one cannot kill that which is
‘nothing’ and which therefore does not exist, one cannot kill an object which doesn’t
yet exist and which has not carved out an independent existence for itself. In
addition, the absence of any ritualistic aspect to the procedure might have also
facilitated its ubiquity among people from different regions that don’t have a
historical or cultural precedent of the practice. As the practice draws more converts
to it from the broad spectrum of Indians, rather than from particular communities
alone, it gets normalized and drawn out of the recesses of it quasi-mythological
associations and thrust into a pragmatic, rational world. Any attempt to wean people
away from the practice has extended to offering them monetary incentives to
“preserve” their female infant. But if the presumed culprits belong to the upper
echelons of society, as statistical returns seem to reveal, those incentives fall short.
Public service announcements hinge on emotional and pathetic appeals to the
conscience of the perpetrators. But to what extent does that succeed? In a news
article on men in some villages being forced to ‘buy’ their brides from neighbouring
ones due to a dearth of women in their own locality, the reporter has discussed this
gender preference by inserting a supernatural flair, warning that “All those years of
prejudice against girls are finally coming back to haunt this society,” and that “The
275

ghosts of missing babies are finally closing in.”
xxx
The female infant is not thought
of as an absence, but rather as an ethereal and vengeful presence. The images
accompanying the article seem to approach this unformulated zone between presence
and absence of the female. One of the images shows a nude toddler and a child of
about four, both girls, sitting together quietly on the pavement near a slum area. This
marks the undisputed presence of the female, but a presence that is nevertheless
characterized by its own violence of poverty, loneliness, and silence. The caption
accompanying the picture declares that “prejudice against girls runs deep.” Even if
the female is born and allowed to live, the implication behind the image is that even
her physical presence doesn’t soften the harshness of prejudicial social thought, or
lead to an amelioration of her social conditions. The other image, the one that
frames the article and to which our attention is immediately diverted, is that of an
ultrasound. The non-presence of the foetus is directly contradicted in this image that
shows it as living and human. And yet, it is only a partial presence until it is actually
born. The caption, “Ultrasounds seal the fate of female foetuses,” thus
simultaneously negotiate that divide between a presence of the foetus that is
murdered, and a partial presence that serves to differentiate it from the two girls in
the other image.
The semantic play among the presence, partial presence, and absence of the
female complicates the performance of mourning. If the illegitimate child demands
to be mourned for the corporeal sign of the violence inflicted upon its frail body, an
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overt or public display of mourning hinges implicitly on the act of witnessing. A
voyeuristic, scopic drive draws the death of the infant into the real and marks it as
“dead” – as an organic life that once existed but now doesn’t. Indeed, this serves to
distinguish the murdered child from the female infant who never existed, who was
condemned to have a presence only in its nothingness, a non-corporeality that
conferred upon the infant a non-presence. The drawing of mourning into the sign of
the visual might go to some way toward explaining the mediatization of images of
violence. As Arthur Kleinman has suggested in his reading of the advertisements of
the International Rescue Committee (IRC) that likened the mass killings in Bosnia to
those during the Holocaust by juxtaposing images from both tragedies, “perhaps the
deep advertising principle behind the IRC advertisement is that by sending money to
the sponsor we don’t so much feel good about helping refugees as we feel a
reduction in the guilt for not being there.”
xxxi
The act of witnessing - in this case,
witnessing the ravages of civil war through a widely-circulated photograph in the
media – plays upon the nebulous line between sympathy and empathy that, in turn,
creates a sense of loss, the experience of which loss reanimates a feeling of sympathy
and empathy. An image of grief becomes powerful because it resurrects a corollary
feeling of grief and thus locates mourning squarely within the visual.
On a different register, to return to the question of female infanticide, the
continued absence of any avowed and overt display of mourning can also be
explained through the modality of the visual. Even if we can posit that the violence
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on the new-born female infant allowed her to occupy at least a transient space
between life and death and thus realize some possibility of a sense of loss, the
contemporary practice of sex determination tests and abortion of a female foetus
rejects even that possibility.
xxxii
The death-in-life of the female infant in the
nineteenth-century has given way to a different sort of violence. The protective
womb of the mother metamorphoses into a destructive and hostile space for the
foetus. It is an erasure of memory at the site of the visual (literally through the
emptying out and flattening of a once pregnant belly), the psyche (the infant was
never born), and that of the corporeal (the extinguishing of any sign of growing life
within the womb). The counterpoint to that erasure is questioning whether
something needs to be constituted as a presence before it can even enter into
memory. Does the erasure of memory, as opposed to its absence, allude to a
presence – be it a personification or objectification – that must now be expunged? If
the foetus is represented through its existence, it still has a more real presence than
the female infant in the nineteenth-century, who was evoked in discourse only
through her nothingness.
But the interplay between a (partial) presence and absence doesn’t merely
insert an indeterminacy into the work of mourning. The question of how to represent
the foetus or how to articulate its categorization in discourse has implications within
the theological framework as well. Hindus believe that an infant cannot be
encompassed into the category “human” until the twelfth day after its birth, when the
278

family formally and ceremonially bestows a name to the infant. This delay in the
infant entering into the symbolic order might be explained by the high infant
mortality rate prior to medical advances in the field and before the availability of
medical help to a substantial portion of the population. While there is nevertheless
an affective bond that is already formed between the new-born infant and its family,
the deferral of its entry into a conception as “human” provides an inadvertent
loophole in the religious dogma that the infanticidal and foeticidal families can
exploit. The birth of a male is always celebrated immediately as the birth of a “son.”
His welcome into the family occurs instantly after its birth, and therefore well before
the mandatory period of twelve days. However, the postponement is crucial when
the mother gives birth to an unwanted female infant. The delay that is ignored at the
birth of a male progeny is the same that also allows the Jahrejah father to refer to the
birth of the female infant as “nothing.”
The abortion of the female foetus seemingly evades even this insidious
exploitation of the theological question. The multiplicity of the important and sacred
religious texts elicits tenuous and unclear pronouncements on the tolerance, or lack
therefore, of abortion and infanticide. Stephanie W. Jamison, commenting in a
footnote about the seemingly contradictory statements on the (un)acceptability of
abortion or infant-murder in Vedic Hinduism, cites a statement that condemns the
destruction of an “embryo of unknown sex”, adding,

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The reference must be to aborting a child that is still in the womb, hence (in
those days before amniocentesis) of unknown sex. This is implicitly
contrasted with killing a child immediately after birth, when its sex has been
revealed. Needless to say, the children killed at that later point would be
girls, and (at least in the Black [Krsna] Yajur Veda Samhitas) there seems to
be little or no guilt attached to the act […] Abortion is condemned because it
risks destroying a boy, not because of a general ‘pro-life’ stance.
xxxiii

Elsewhere in the same chapter, she adds, “Now we already know the Vedic view of
miscarried fetuses: they do not have a human form.”
xxxiv
A miscarried foetus is not
considered human, but aborting an “embryo of unknown sex” is considered murder
because it encapsulates the potential of becoming human if carried to full term.
Female infanticide, according to the text from the Yajur Veda that Jamison cites,
doesn’t necessarily evoke the same dilemmas or condemnations. The construction of
infanticide as a crime thus arises out of a perception of morality, justice, and public
law that must intervene when religious law fails to discipline and regulate social
behaviour. While later Brahminic texts revered by Hindus construe murder as crime,
rendering the abortion of a female foetus as synonymous with murder doesn’t
necessarily generate the same level of textual support because of those nuances in the
delineation of a human.
While the British enlisted the expertise of Brahmin pundits during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to gauge the scriptural validity of sati as praxis,
the subtle distinctions between various levels of humanity in the case of matters
pertaining to birth, miscarriages, and abortions have been de-scribed and
reconfigured as oral narratives. The internalization of the relative inhumanity of the
280

female infant and the inhumanity of the female foetus into the unacknowledged
archive of public memory has been difficult to combat, especially since abortion
clinics, placed at the interstices between the state and its people, have promoted
selective abortions. The (c)overt advertising of foeticide in these clinics presents the
choice as an economic one: “Spend Rs. 500 to save Rs. 5 lakhs.” To counter the
capitalistic loss of long-term investment in a daughter that would yield little return
(since she would take the wealth to her marital home as opposed to bringing it to her
natal family), the advertisements proposed a long-term gain from a momentary
investment. The amount that it cost to get an abortion, in itself an affordable sum for
the urban middle-class, would not compare on the amount it would cost for them to
raise a daughter, feed her, clother her, educate her, and finally, pay for her dowry.
The value of the (in)human life of the foetus has now been set at Rs. 500, and the
female, this time, has moved from her status as the object of transaction to becoming
the subject of one.
The rhetoric of foeticide in print culture and the media, however, introduces
the idea of an absolute and indiscriminate category of human. By that yardstick, the
foetus becomes human as soon as its sex can be distinguished. The headlines that
read, “India’s lost girls,” or “Soap opera fighting to save baby girls,”
xxxv
and the
pathetic reference to “the ghosts of missing girls” makes the female foetus, that is
less than twenty weeks, coeval with the female infant who has been carried for the
full term. The parity between the two has resulted in a semantic slippage, where
281

news articles talk of families that believe in “aborting the girl child.”
xxxvi
The
horrifying statistics that place the figure of “missing girls” at half a million each year
might thus include within their scope instances of both foeticide as well as
infanticide. Legislative and judicial interventions now have to account for selective
abortions as well. The systemic and systematic murder of female infants has slowly
been replaced by an equally pernicious but more pervasive systemic and systematic
murder of female foetuses.
With the female foetus being conferred the status of a fully developed infant,
the correspondence between the two forms of destruction has raised implications
within a politico-legal framework. The foetus, now viewed as an “unborn child” – as
it has been referred to in the United States, producing a controversial debate – is also
constituted as a subject before its birth to the extent that, as Zizek mentions, the
subject is always already constituted.
xxxvii
The ramifications of such subject
formation on the question of citizenship are perhaps more perplexing. The labelling
of the foetuses as “lost” or “missing” reduces the death to a temporary misplacement
while simultaneously enunciating the possibility of recovery. Are these foetuses
recoverable or, more importantly, recuperable? The concern over the invasive
practices of foeticide has drawn the non-existent female from her nothingness into
the sphere of paternalistic concern. As the legislative exemplar of the sexed citizen-
subject, she has been inscribed into a position of marginality, which doesn’t exist.
Her marginalization is a political one that displaces those already existing in the
282

periphery to the outer limits of discursive representation. Cultural devaluation of the
female is located in the absent bodies of the deformed foetus and the mutilated
infant. It, apparently, cannot be discovered in the raped body of a woman, or in the
woman burnt alive for not bringing sufficient dowry, or in the beaten body of a
woman suffering from domestic abuse. This new, posthumous citizen continues,
across the centuries, to incarnate the ideal model for “saving.”
Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of “white men are saving brown women from
brown men” might have to be modified a little for our purposes to include the saving
of “brown girls from brown men and brown women.” Or it can be adapted even
further to now read, “brown men following white men in saving brown girls from
brown men and women.” The current discourse of femicide in contemporary India
has mimicked the British response to the crime. History, literally, is repeating itself
as the discussion follows the pattern established during the colonial period. The
establishment of a fund for wedding expenses, financed from the taxes levied on the
communities, has been reinstated in certain regions, such as in Tamil Nadu.
xxxviii

Dowry, then and now, has been represented as the driving factor behind the
denigration of women. Most intriguingly, perhaps, legislators in India today are as
concerned about the imperceptibility of the crime as their colonial counterparts were.
While rumours, suspicions, and confessions have played a part in zeroing in on the
perpetrators, the clinical murder of infants has demanded a scientifically reliable
process of identification. In the absence of a more accurate mode of gathering
283

information, legislators have relied upon statistics. And based on the horrific picture
of gender imbalance that census returns have faithfully furnished, both groups of
law-makers have concentrated on greater vigilance as the necessity of the hour to
weed out the perpetrators.
The secrecy with which the murder is effectuated has not changed in more
than two centuries, despite the increasing public attention to the issue in recent years.
The examination of femicide in the past two or three decades has conducted the
discussion at an entirely new echelon by recruiting the visual medium to combat the
practice. Television programs, movies, and images of ultrasounds or of young,
impoverished girls have flooded the media in an attempt to create sympathy for the
plight of the “missing” girls and to bolster more support for the abolitionists. The
sympathy has been wanting, primarily because the representations themselves centre
on framing the innocence or victimhood of the girl, rather than on the violence of the
act. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his analysis of the documenting of widows’ suffering in
Bengal, believes that the ability to feel sympathy is the necessary criterion in the
formation of the “modern subject.” He elucidates,
…the moment of the modern observation of suffering is a certain moment of
self-recognition on the part of an abstract general human being. It is as
though a person who is able to see in himself or herself the general human
also recognizes the same figure in the particular sufferer, so that the moment
of recognition is a moment when the general human splits into the two
mutually recognizing and mutually constitutive figures of the suffer and the
observer of suffering.
xxxix

284

The Indian populace’s evinced apathy and tolerance towards the issue of infant or
foetus murder fails the litmus test of sympathy that is required in order to become
“modern subjects,” unless we take into account the sympathy that is extended to the
parents of a girl child. Chakrabarty adds that in the early nineteenth century, “habit
and custom” could hinder the feeling of sympathy unless it was accompanied by
reason.
xl
The colonial British official positioned himself very strongly as the modern
subject through his horror and distress at the callous murder of female infants.
Nevertheless, even if we are to use these guidelines to help identify the modern
subject, we would all have to be in agreement on what constituted the “general
human,” a definition that would not be susceptible to cultural, historical, or
geographical relativisms. Moreover, if we buy into the multiple nuances in the idea
of the human, does the disembodiment of foeticide still evoke associations of the
general human?
As an alternative possibility to Chakrabarty’s assessment of sympathy being
contingent on the recognition of a general human, I suggest that the demonstration of
shock and dreadfulness at a crime might not be indicative of sympathy for the plight
of the sufferer but – as Arthur Klein has usefully identified in his work on
mediatization of violence – of guilt at not having prevented or being unable to
prevent the suffering. Both affective states might undoubtedly set into motion a set
of processes that lead to social intervention, and both sentiments might be hindered
by habit or custom. At the same time (and this is where the plethora of images on
285

foeticide become important), witnessing the distress of the sufferer or the violence of
the crime is conducive in enabling the emotion. The images accompanying the
articles on female infanticide that frame a young, impoverished female child sitting
nude on the dirty streets of a major city – what, in the more critical cultural studies
circles, is called ‘developmental pornography’ – draws the reader’s sympathy/guilt
onto the poverty of the child or her malnourishment, but its success in transferring
the same emotions transitively onto female infanticide/foeticide is contingent upon a
realization and acceptance of all gendered violence falling in the same continuum.
The secrecy with which the crime is committed refutes that mediatization, and any
visual focus that it draws upon itself is inferential. Although the crime and its
perpetrators refuse to be drawn into the realm of the spectacle, the scopic exercise of
investigative practices has sought other means of witnessing the crime and/or finding
evidence of the procedure. To that end, the state government in Maharashtra in
western India has solicited the help of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in
conducting surprise sting operations.
xli

The demarcation of foeticide as crime has imposed an interdiction on the
verbal communication of the sex of the foetus to the parents. Even if a prenatal scan
is mandated under justifying circumstances, the doctor is prohibited from divulging
the sex of the foetus. The barring of speech and disclosure creates rules of secrecy,
which govern the right and privilege to knowledge. In its refusal to let the mother
have access to information on the sign of and within her own body, so to speak, the
286

law creates an ontological as well as performative category of the bad mother, in
contradistinction to the strength and persistence of maternal love in much discursive
representation, including in Matrubhoomi. The bar of secrecy also resurrects other
implicit binary categories, such as rationality/irrationality, mature/immature,
good/evil, and so on. At the same time, the magnitude of the crime has wrought its
own coded vocabulary about which parents are already in the know. Uncovering a
web of secrecy points the sleuth at yet another secretive code. Thus, in disclosing
some of those covert signs, an article in the Indian newspaper, Daily News and
Analysis, declared that “Doctors often resort to indirect methods to disclose the
child’s sex. Code words like Monday (girl) and Friday (boy) are used to escape the
laws.”
xlii
The referents of the code are made public, but the layer of secrecy doesn’t
dissipate entirely. How were those particular words chosen? Who chose them?
How are the parents able to decode these signifiers? And for how long have such
signifiers been in circulation?
The emergence of secret codes in communicating the sex of the foetus should
not in itself be of surprise to us. After all, among the infanticidal families of Rajputs
in the nineteenth-century, other words and phrases succinctly conveyed the desired
information. The “nothing” of childbirth and the presumed code for drowning the
infant in milk – “doodh palaunoo” – were markers of infant murder in the “idiom of
the country,” as James Peggs informs us. The persistence of a secret language that,
in the current situation, escapes censure on language itself is the continuation of a
287

particular conception of the practice. The code today might be more inscrutable and
resistance to a deciphering, but that interface between knowledge and ignorance,
between the insider’s knowingness and the outsider’s puzzlement creates an invisible
community of sympathizers and supporters. The circles of support in the colonial
era, according to British suspicions, extended to families, extended families, castes,
midwives, and so on. The drawing of circles has grown wider in the contemporary
moment to not only include the supportive networks from the previous century but
also encompass different groups such as the networks between parents and their
doctors. These unnoticed groups of supporters, wider circles of sympathizers, and
even more diffuse groups of silent observers, all fuse together to render the crime all
the more undetectable. It is perhaps the existence of such transhistorical networks
that accounts for the widespread prevalence of the crime, when other preoccupations
of criminality in the nineteenth century, such as sati and thuggee, have been confined
to particularly virulent and intractable areas and don’t enjoy the same prominence
that they did a century or two ago. While they have both mutated into other similar
practices like the murder of housewives by burning, often for insufficient dowry, and
banditry, the perpetrators of female infanticide have maintained their impetus and
conviction, which has translated into similar motives, modes, and beliefs.
In describing female infanticide as a barbarous practice alone, we, as readers
and observers, participate in the effacing of cultural memory and fail to see the
changes and the stubborn resistances to change in the development of the tradition.
288

If, as the British and natives both allege, the Rajputs have been engaging in acts of
infanticide for a few centuries, how and why have certain aspects mutated when the
act of murder itself has remained constant? From the origins of the practice, where
the Raj-gor supposedly burned the Chieftain’s daughter, the British now list feeding
the infant opium, drawing the umbilical cord over its face, and drowning it in a vat of
milk as the more common methods of taking away the infant’s life. An occasional
testimonial also lists neglecting the infant as effecting death in a few hours. Each of
the gory methods contains a different kind of violence, but the commonness and
pervasiveness of the select few methods of killing suggests that the violence of the
murder – like the readiness to murder itself – is transmitted and appropriated from
one generation to the next. With the murder of each successive infant, the violence
gets gradually subsumed within the framework of the tradition such that it is no
longer signified as violence and, therefore, as loss. The mitigation of violence
through replication continues to the present moment in urban Indian where the
‘nothingness’ of the pregnancy now produces an uncanny echo in female foeticide.
The use of modern technology has facilitated the translation and reappropriation of a
particular ritualistic tradition; while features of the ritual itself might have changed
or become obsolete, the tradition itself remains alive.

289

Notes:
i
Undoubtedly, the circulation of these pamphlets raises the question of the readership that such
documents enjoyed and to what purpose were they read. Who, in fact, was allowed to or could have
access to these files, many of which, like Walker’s observations, belonged to the Secret and Political
department?

ii
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2000), 9.

iii
The conflation of “custom” with “tradition” makes any division between the two terms extraneous
to its usage in common parlance. In addition, even if we do propose that there was and is an
acknowledged difference in the way people use(d) the two terms, the many linguistic and ideological
problems with translation suggest that what the various indigenous perspectives alluded to and
continue to refer to remains unclear.

iv
The Times of India, Mumbai Edition, September 25
th
, 2004.

v
In a different vein, Veena Das discusses a woman’s grief at having lost her huband and sons during
the riots of 1984, while she and her daughters managed to survive. In her trauma, her anger was
directed at her daughters because they had survived while her youngest baby boy had not. Das
observes, “She refused to acknowledge her daughters as her children, as if the death of her sons had
annihilated motherhood itself” (185-186). For a more detailed analysis of this case study, refer to
Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 184-193.

vi
“In the capital’s upmarket Apollo hospital, only 5% of girls were treated for liver failure as opposed
to 95% boys in 2003.” The Times of India, Mumbai edition. Monday, September 20
th
, 2004

vii
Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation.” Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 297.

viii
Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, 7.

ix
Chakrabarty, 243.

x
“Matrubhoomi” in Hindi can be literally translated as “motherland.”

xi
Bhatnagar, Dube, and Dube, 3.

xii
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.

xiii
For further reading, refer to the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin, Rashmi Dube
Bhatnagar, Renu Dube, Reena Dube.

xiv
Rs. 100,000 = Rs. 1 lakh

xv
I am referring to Eve Sedgwick’s homosocial continuum, within which she locates not merely
homosociality, but homophobia and homoeroticism as well. Refer to Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985).
290

xvi
Col. W. W. Anderson, Acting Political Agent, Kattywar to C. Gonne, Esquire, Secretary to the
Government of Bombay. Forwarded to E. C. Bayley, Esquire, Secretary to the Government of India.
Home – Judicial. No. 40W, dated the 9
th
March 1868.

xvii
I am not really interested in gauging the “truth” of the practice of infanticide; instead, I would like
to focus on the particular tropes and images that gained currency in the past two centuries. Assuming
that the prevalent method in the nineteenth-century was murdering the infant by drowning it in milk,
the ritualistic nature of that method suggests that the persistence of the practice would necessarily
entail an intergenerational transference of ideas and ideologies. That, however, does not explain the
appropriation of the practice across communities that were never implicated in the crime earlier.
Regardless of whether any infants were actually drowned in milk, I am intrigued by its perseverance
as the image of infanticide.

xviii
Chakrabarty’s reading denies a “now” that is cohesive, absolute, and enclosed within itself.
Instead, commenting on Ranajit Guha’s analysis of the Santal rebellion in the nineteenth-century,
Chakrabarty claims, “One could easily assume that the Santal today would be very different from
what they were in the nineteenth century, that they would inhabit a very different set of social
circumstances […] But the nineteenth-century Santal – and indeed, if my argument is right, humans
from any other period and region – are always in some sense our contemporaries: that would have to
be the condition under which we can even begin to treat them as intelligible to us. Thus the writing to
history must implicitly assume a plurality of times existing together, a disjuncture of the present with
itself” (109).

xix
In different versions of the myth, Putana kills other infants in the same manner before coming to
Krishna’s house. After drinking the milk, not only does Krishna not die, much to Putana’s shock, but
he also strangles her to death.

xx
Barbara Miller, The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India (Delhi:
Oxford UP, 1997), 50.

xxi
The Konds of Orissa, for instance, believe in two primary deities: a male deity and a female deity.
It is the female deity who demands sacrifices and the blood of humans, and she is sometimes depicted
as evil. Similarly, in mainstream Hindu mythology, one of the forms of the Mother Goddess, Kali, is
depicted as a terrible and awesome figure with a necklace of skulls around her neck. Human
sacrifices were performed in the past at Kali temples in Bengal. The British were shocked and
horrified at the reverential worship that Kali enjoyed, and many of the representations of Kali as an
evil figure took root during the nineteenth-century. The negative depictions were only augmented
with the official, investigative discourse on thuggee, and the revelation that the thugs worshipped
Bhawani – another name for Kali – and offered a portion of their loot to her. It was around this time
that worship of this form of the mother goddess began to be represented in colonial discourse as “the
cult of Kali.”

xxii
Sarah Caldwell treats this subject in detail in her book, Oh Terrifying Mother: Sexuality, Violence
and Worship of the Goddess Kali. Analyzing the motif of the thirst for male fluids, she says: “This
fluid fertilizes and cools the hot female womb but weakens and drains the man who gives it…even to
the point of death. The motif of drinking blood is clearly a symbolic displacement of the intake of
semen by the vagina, and in some stories…the two fluids are interchangeable” (164).

291

xxiii
Sarah Caldwell’s observation on the predominance of the phallic mother in the male imagination
is supported by G.M. Carstairs in his essay, “Hindu Personality Formation: Unconscious Processes.”
He proposes that ideally, “woman is regarded as a wholly devoted, self-forgetful mother, or as a
dutifully subservient wife, who is ready to worship her husband as her lord. In fact, however, women
are regarded with an alternation of desire and revulsion. Sexual love is considered the keenest
pleasure known to the senses: but it is felt to be destructive to a man’s physical and spiritual well-
being. Women are powerful, demanding, seductive – and ultimately destructive. On the plane of
creative phantasy, everyone worships the Mataji, the Goddess, who is a protective mother to those
who prostrate themselves before her in abject supplication, but who is depicted also as a sort of
demon, with gnashing teeth, who stands on top of her male adversary, cuts of his head and drinks his
blood. This demon-goddess has the same appearance as a witch – and that brings her nearer home,
because any woman whose demands one has refused is liable to be feared as a witch who may exact
terrible reprisals.”

xxiv
Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
and London: The UC Press, 2007), 48.

xxv
Mani, 31.

xxvi
The priest continues to be a figure of revulsion. Raghu, the servant boy, pees in the sherbet before
offering it to him. There is also current of homophobia running through the filmic text as
homoeroticism is constructed as unnatural, or occurring in the absence of women. The opening
scenes of village men leering at nautch boys in drag are posited as the result of being denied the
normal voyeuristic object – women. The priest himself is shown with a young, effeminate boy in the
room, marking him now as a perverse figure. Bestiality is also placed within the same domain of
unnaturalness; after paying to watch a pornographic film (presumably showing heterosexual
intercourse), one of the men vents that sexual frustration by locking himself in the cowshed. The
sudden and loud mooing of the cow provides its own proof of what transpires in the shed.
xxvii
In the cosmic trinity of the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer, Vishnu takes his place as the
Preserver of the world. Each time the world has faced great danger, Vishnu is said to have manifested
himself in some life-form to save the world. He is already said to have had nine incarnations and is
yet to manifest himself as Kalki, the tenth and final incarnation. This fourth and final age of the
world, the Kali Yuga, literally represents the darkest phase of the earth. When the world is about to
face complete destruction, Vishnu will arrive in the form of Kalki to lead the world, or at least the
worthy among it, into safety.

xxviii
“India loses 10m female births.” The BBC News Online. Monday, 9
th
January 2006.

xxix
Prenatal scans are demarcated for use specifically in those instances where there is danger to the
foetus’s health, in the case of physiological or other disorders, or hereditary illnesses. However, as
the Health Minister admits, doctors often forge these documents justifying the use of a sonography.

xxx
“India’s lost girls,” by Jill McGivering. BBC News Online. Tuesday, 4
th
February, 2003.

xxxi
Arthur Kleinman, “The Violences of Everyday Life: The Multiple Forms and Dynamics of Social
Violence,” Violence and Subjectivity, ed. Veena Das et al, 232.

292

xxxii
Despite the seemingly wide, sweeping, and generalizing statement, I am not insensible to
theological arguments and conceptions of the question of life before birth, nor am I denying the grief
that many parents feel after a miscarriage or abortion. My statement here, as the thrust of my
dissertation shows, refers to a specific demographic – those parents who single out the female foetus
for abortion, either out of a preference for male children alone or, as witnessed in urban centres like
Mumbai, out of a desire to have a small, gender-balanced family.

xxxiii
Stephanie W. Jamison, The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient
India (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1991), 220.

xxxiv
Ibid., 227.

xxxv
By Jane Elliott. BBC Online. 22
nd
January, 2005.

xxxvi
“Curse this sonic mania.” Daily News and Analysis, India. 27
th
March, 2007

xxxvii
Zizek reads the paradigmatic scene of interpellation from Althusser’s text and articulates two
types of denials that Althusser implicitly refers to: the denial of “explanation of interpellative
recognition” through guilt and the denial of temporality of the process of interpellation, in the sense
that “strictly speaking,” the subject is always already constituted. The metastases of Enjoyment: Six
Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 60.

xxxviii
In a country where murder of female infants has shifted to the prenatal period, facilitated by the
availability of the requisite medical technology, the Usilampatti district in Tamil Nadu, an
impoverished rural area, has one of the highest rates of infanticide in the country. It is also one of the
only places in the south of India where people practice infanticide. For more information on the
practice, refer to Female Infanticide in India: A Feminist Cultural Analysis; “Murder goes to the
womb” by Arun Ram. Daily News and Analysis, India. 17
th
October, 2006.

xxxix
Chakrabarty, 119-120.

xl
Ibid.

xli
“Curse this sonic mania.” Daily News and Analysis, India. The government, according to this
report, will be paying Rs. 15,000 to the NGOs. However, it is unclear if the amount is for each raid or
per month.

xlii
“Curse this sonic mania.” 27
th
March, 2007.

293
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Asset Metadata

Creator Murthy, Pashmina (author)

Core Title Archiving the absence: female infanticide in nineteenth-century British India

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/25/2009

Defense Date 06/21/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Comparative Literature,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name India (countries)

Language English

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Modleski, Tania (committee member), Pinkus, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email pashmina.murthy@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m672

Unique identifier UC1152463

Identifier etd-Murthy-20070725 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-526196 (legacy record id),usctheses-m672 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Murthy-20070725.pdf

Dmrecord 526196

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Murthy, Pashmina

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu