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"I saw my daughter lying on the cot, weltering in blood."1 This statement was part of the evidence given in court by Radhamonee, mother of eleven-year-old Phulmonee, who died of marital rape by her husband in 1890. The child's death was widely reported and discussed, and, in 1981, Indian reformers persuaded the colonial government to raise the minium age of consent for married girls to twelve. Hindu orthodoxy and cultural nationalists opposed the Age of Consent Bill. They argued that it violated a fundamental life cycle rite, garbhadhan, which made it obligatory for a girl to have intercourse with her husband within sixteen days of her first period.
An extract from a Bengali newspaper that furiously opposed the Age of Consent Bill noted: "It is the injunction of the Hindu shastras that married girls must cohabit with their husbands on the first appearance of their menses ... and all Hindus must implicitly obey the injunction.... And he is not a true Hindu who does not obey it.... If one girl in a lakh or even a crore menstruates before the age of twelve, it must be admitted that by raising the age of consent the ruler will be interfering with the religion of the Hindus...."2
Nineteenth-century colonial Bengal was not a time when individual rights as an inalienable, public, and explicit claim could be asserted by a woman as such; a woman was not seen, as yet, to be in possession of an individuated identity of self-separable from the family-kin-community nexus-to which rights could adhere. Yet, an argument for an unabridgeable claim to her life was slowly emerging as a perceived necessity in the free-ranging, selfreflexive debates within the emergent public sphere. Her right to life slowly and gradually emerged over the next few decades from the struggle to protect her from violent death. This was an important and contentious beginning, and the long nineteenth century was in a way a long debate over the claims of a woman's community/family/caste to the right to inflict death on her: in controversies about widow immolation and age of consent, her physical survival was the issue, and in the widow remarriage debate, her sexual death was at stake.
In the 1890s, the fledgling notion of a title to...