Gender, Religion, and Infanticide in Colonial India, 18701906

Author(s): DANIEL J.R. GREY

Source: Victorian Review, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Fall 2011), pp. 107-120
Published by: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
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Gender, Religion, and Infanticide

in Colonial India, 18701906
DANIEL J.R. GREY

t
In"infanticide
October 1870,
a scathing
editorial
in as
the
Mercury
proclaimed that
is almost
as common
in England
it Derby
is in India"
("Baby-Farm
ers") .This was a damning statement. Since the eighteenth century, the murder

of female infants in Indiaalongside the subject of sati (widow-burning)

had acted as a cipher, conjuring images of unbridled violence, ignorance, and
depravity for British readers (see Mani; Major). Such images of "savagery" across
the empire were increasingly used during the nineteenth century to emphasize
perceived moral and physical failings among the British working classes, with
commentators likening "unrespectable" urban and rural communities to the
inhabitants of Africa and Asia (see Thorne, Congregational; "Religion"). These
rhetorical parallels also served to spur on campaigns to eradicate what were
perceived as "heathen" customs in the colonies. From the early nineteenth
century onward, missionaries had taken a leading role in attempting to stamp
out infanticide in India, arguing that only by acting in concert with religious
educators would the secular government be able to eliminate these acts (see
Cormack; Peggs). This tallied neatly with widespread perceptions that faith
and custom were inextricably linked in India for both Hindus and Muslims
(Metcalf 133). Many in the colonial administration shared this view, one author
arguing that "it is only divine revelation which proves itself adequate to the
preservation of the equilibrium of perfect morality" (Wilson 10). A number
of different strategies were deployed to eradicate the practice during the early
and mid-nineteenth century, with varying degrees of success (Bhatnagar et al.).
The eventual eradication of female infanticide (that is, the murder of female
infants) remained a key aim for missionaries in the late nineteenth century.
One Bristol-based clericwho, like many Western critics, wrongly believed
that female infanticide was sanctioned in practice (if perhaps not in theological
doctrine) by both Hinduism and Islam1 even claimed in 1886 that eliminat
ing infanticide in British colonies was the ultimate goal for which to strive,
stressing that Christianity had "century after century come into victorious
conflict with that damnable form of cruelty" ("Christianity").
Yet to claim that only Christianity could prevent Indian child-murder
ignored the fact that infanticide could, and did, happen in Christian Britain
and Ireland (Arnot; Farrell; Grey, "Discourses"; "Women's"). Indeed, scholars
have noted that Victorian Britain and Ireland experienced a parallel "infanticide
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VICTORIAN REVIEW

^ Volume 37 Number 1

panic." Concerns that sexual immoralitywith infanticide as the most grue

some result of such misconducthad reached epidemic levels were regularly
featured in the press, in parliamentary papers, and in medical, legal, and social
science journals.Thus, while Padma Anagol's work on infanticide in the Bombay
Presidency demonstrates that the construction of the infanticidal woman in
late nineteenth-century India was a product of colonial racism combined with
Indian (and, indeed, Hindu) sexism, this view should be nuanced by the fact
that a nearly identical but more sympathetic discourse regarding the crime
and its perpetrator was applied to white women by the British judicial system.
Foregrounding the importance of the cultural and social interaction between
colony and mtropole and the traffic of ideas and influences across Britain and
the empire as illustrated by Catherine Hall, this article interrogates why and
how religious discourses and the cultural and legal understanding of infanticide
committed "back home" were intimately linked to debates about infanticide in
India. British commentators vocally singled out female infanticide as a specifi
cally Hindu and high-caste crime (in defiance of all evidence to the contrary),
while failing either to fully acknowledge the parallels between non-sex-specific
child homicides in Britain and India or to successfully eradicate the selective
killing of daughters in south Asia. Individual commentators on child homicide
in the United Kingdom in this period might well touch on religious imagery
in their writing and stress the redemptive power of Christianity to influence
those guilty of the most heinous crimes. Yet an essay from 1866 written by
Scottish cleric Rev. Henry Humble, canon of St. Ninian's Cathedral in Perth,

seems to have been unique in offering a specifically theological approach

to understanding and eliminating infanticide and sexual immorality within
Victorian Britain itself rather than treating them as issues for colonial subjects
in its empire. My article helps to show why, given this focus on infanticide
as a "heathen" practice that could be eradicated by exposure to the Christian
gospel, the use of such a religious discourse to explain or analyze child-murder
and its most appropriate judicial treatment wassurprisinglynever fully
developed in Victorian Britain.
FEMALE INFANTICIDE AND THE LAW IN INDIA

Before offering any critique of how Indian infanticide was read as a crime
by British critics, I will outline the legal context pertaining to infanticide as
well as the key differences and similarities between sex-specific infanticide

and cases of newborn murder where the child's gender was not a factor. As
Martin Wiener observes, there were crucial differences between the post-1860
English and Indian criminal justice systems ( 1^6-92). Most importantly, unlike
in Britain and Ireland, causing the death of another person was always initially
presumed by the Indian courts to be culpable homicide, an offence similar to
manslaughter if wider ranging in its scope. Arguably, this key difference in the

judicial treatment of violence could be seen as owing more to the influence of

Scottish criminal law than to that of England and Wales in colonial India, since
i 08

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DANIEL J.R. GREY

culpable homicide wasand remainsa charge or alternative verdict allow

able under the separate legal system of Scotland (Anderson 72-73). Despite
this general trend against the presumption of malice necessary for a murder
charge and the concomitant death penalty, however, the i860 Indian Penal
Code deliberately attempted to make it easier in India to bring such charges
of newborn murder against suspected persons than it was in Britain.
The complexity of medico-legal rules relating to infanticide and the prob
lems these presented in prosecuting suspected murderers of newborns in
Britain and Ireland were well known throughout the nineteenth century. In
conjunction with the sympathy felt by the men of the jury for the accused
(generally a young and distressed woman), this often meant that British and
Irish child homicide trials ended in either acquittal or conviction on a lesser
charge. As Margaret L. Arnot has noted, this combination of factors could have

profound implications for the judicial treatment of infanticide: not a single

woman accused of newborn murder was convicted on the capital charge in
London between 1840 and 1880 (138). In an effort to avoid similar situations
arising in India, the Penal Code specifically stated that section 299 (which
defined culpable homicide) did not, in cases involving infants, require any
proof that the child had been completely separate from its mother's body at
the time of death or that it had been born alive, both of which were essential
measures needed to indict a person for homicide in the British or Irish assize
courts. As one barrister practising in the Indian courts observed, however, the
ambiguous wording of the code presented a difficulty for the prosecution since

it gave no examples of what circumstances were required to allow bringing

the lesser charge: "They simply say that the causing of death may amount to
culpable homicide, but then no provision is made for the circumstances under
which it is homicide" (Starling 347).
In practice, it was therefore still necessary in India to try women for murder
and subsequently demonstrate in the courtroom that a child had been born
alive, an aspect of forensic medicine that remained extraordinarily difficult
(Lyon 334). At least in theory, then, section 299's vagueness about what was or
was not culpable homicide, rather than murder, could allow Indian defendants
a similar degree of judicial leniency to that allowed to British women tried
for the same crime. Conviction rates thus remained relatively low, with one
Army medical officer stationed in Bengal complaining that only four per cent
of cases he had reviewed over a two-year period had resulted in a guilty verdict

(McLeod 128). Where the possibility of a woman suffering from postpartum

psychosis was raised as a defence in newborn murder trials, physicians and
the judicial system in India seem to have been just as willing as their British
counterparts to accept this as a potential mitigating factor (Mills 199-200).
Attempts to amend the law on newborn murder further were also stymied.
When, in 1876, the influential Indian administrator Sir Madhava Rao recom
mended that the killing of newborns be made a separate offence punishable
by seven years' imprisonment, in order both to improve the conviction rate
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VICTORIAN REVIEW

^ Volume 37 Number 2

and to reflect the cultural and economic circumstances that disproportionately

penalized the widows who made up the vast majority of Indian child homicide
defendants, his proposal ran into the same problems that stalled any changes
in the law on infanticide in England and Wales until after the First World War

(Rao; Grey, "Women's"). Interested parties both within and outside the Indian
government were unable to agree on what (if any) was the best alteration to
make to existing law, and there was a conviction among civil servants that any
potential for miscarriages of justice could be avoided by careful (and discreet)
reviews of each case immediately following convictiona practice that was
quietly standardized in India from 1879 onwards (Anagol 92). Although peri
odic recommendations that the law on infanticide be altered were put forward
by Indian lawyers and physicians well into the twentieth century, no changes

were made (Modi 369).

During the 1860s, however, sex-specific infanticide, which had long been
the subject of investigations and debates in the West, was increasingly perceived

as an issue demanding special legislation. This focus on female infanticide,

which was not perceived as a crime with any Western parallel, allowed for
infanticide in south and east Asia to be singled out as a major social problem

and to be acknowledged as a subject of special interest without requiring

participants to engage with the similarities and differences between this and
the "infanticide panic" that swept Britain and Ireland in the 1860s and 1870s.
British attempts to identify, explain, and ultimately stamp out female infanti
cide can, therefore, best be seen as running parallel to campaigns in colonial

India that also linked imperial concerns (particularly those around sexual
morality issues such as sati, the age of consent and marriage, and sex work)
with domestic debates while obsessing over the supposedly uniquely Indian
aspects of them (Burton; Mani; Sinha Specters). Commentators invariably took
pains to distinguish between this crime, labelled "special to the East" (Lyon
34), and the more familiar descriptions of newborn murders that appeared
regularly in Victorian newspapers. In almost every case, the Indian examples
referred to the killing of daughters; only one commentator during the late
nineteenth century ever seems to have suggested that sons might be specifi
cally targeted for murder, and, tellingly, this writer took pains to explain that
such instances were set far apart from both infanticide where the sex of the
child was not a factor and the deliberate killing of girls as a cultural custom.

Instead, she argued that the killing of a babyeither one's own or the child
of a rivalcould be seen "as an angry wife's most furious form of vengeance
for a husband's coldness, neglect, or infidelity," with the misery of the father

infinitely compounded if the victim was a boy (Billington 24).

The Female Infanticide Act (Act vm of 1870), which has been examined in
detail by Lalita Panigrahi and Satadru Sen, marked a new way of approaching
this difficult issue. For James Fitzjames Stephen, the famous English judge who
helped to formulate both this act and the Indian Penal Code itself, the law
against infanticide could best be described as one of those measuresalongside
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DANIEL J.R. GREY

the campaign against satithat summed up the ideals of the British Government

(Hunter 190). Act vm attempted to determine which regions of rural India

were responsible for female infanticide. In addition to the usual penalties of
imprisonment, transportation, and even death that were already set down in
the Indian Penal Code for unlawful killing, the 1870 act made villages judged
as being prone to female infanticide subject to special measures designed to
detect, punish, and eradicate the practice. As the Pall Mall Gazette put it in May
1871, the goal was to cause the inhabitants of such villages to "generally have
their lives made burdensome to them" ("Indian" "). In order to be removed
from the list of those subject to special restrictions under the 1870 act, a village
had to demonstrate to the local magistrate "general and steady improvement,
[and] the absence of suspicious circumstances" (Lumsden). Although doubts
were regularly expressed about the act's effectiveness from shortly after its pas

sage until the end of the nineteenth century, for the most part it was believed

that "[its] operation had effected much good, and the excessive mortality of
female infants had been checked" ("East India ... 1880-1881 " o).

"this special class of Hindus":2 religion, race,

AND REGION IN DISCUSSIONS OF INFANTICIDE

Although the forensic pathologist Norman Chevers claimed in 1870 that "the
murder of female children... has, for ages, been the chief and most characteristic
crime of six-sevenths of British India" (7174) and the crime was acknowledged as
occurring across the country, in practice the focus of the colonial administration

tended to be concentrated on the Punjab, a predominantly agrarian region that

had come under British control in 1849.3 Importantly, while certainly not rul
ing out other groups, colonial administrators narrowed their efforts still further

to concentrate on one subset of possible offendersthe Rajputs, Hindu land

owning and ruling families in this area. (Kasturi, Embattled 102-36; "Taming";
Malhotra, Gender 47-81 ; "Shameful"). Female infanticide was understood by
the British as resulting from the combination of negative religious, ethnic, and
geographical factorsnone of which necessarily presented a major problem
in themselves, but which combined to pernicious effect. For example, in the
North-Western Provinces, not all upper-caste Hindus were suspected of female
infanticide; some such groups, like the Anavils of Gudjarat, were believed never
to practice it (Vishwanath 119). It was the combination of these issues that was
believed to lead to female infanticide, not the individual elements themselves.
An excellent example of this perspective is provided by the remarks made
in 1870 by W.Young, the officiating magistrate of Gorakhpur, United Provinces.

Despite the concentration of his contemporariesand indeed, of colonial

administrators throughout the period covered by this articleon high-caste
Hindu Rajputs as the main perpetrators of female infanticide, Young argued
that in his part of the North-Western Provinces the crime was non-existent.
He ascribed this to the beneficial results of Gorakhpur's long standing relation

ship with the neighbouring region of Bengal, where, Young observed, "female
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Volume 37 Number 2

VICTORIAN REVIEW

infanticide appears to have been unknown" (Young). Ironically, the negative

perception that Mrinalini Sinha has documented of Bengali society as overly
feminized (Colonial) seems to have meant that in the case of female infanticide,
Bengalis were thought to provide a beneficial example by valuing girls more
than the "martial" Rajputs did. Young believed that, given their geographical
isolation from other Rajput clans and the rest of the North-Western Provinces,
Gorahkpur Rajputs had reaped the benefit of copying the "social and moral
habits, sympathies and tendencies" of their seemingly more civilized neigh
bours to the east (Young).
For one delegate to the annual Belfast conference on Protestant mission
ary work, in 1872, energetic and sustained efforts in both India and China
appeared so important because only through accepting the Christian gospel
could "the fruits of heathenism"specifically "infanticide, human sacrifices

and cruelty"be abolished ("Church").The two motives most commonly

ascribed by the British to communities or families that committed female
infanticide were caste pride and dowry, both of which were claimed to be
specifically Hindu customs. The expenses incurred for the marriage of daugh
ters were relatively high regardless of social rank, and it was widely believed
that "if there are more than two daughters in a family, [its] ruin is inevitable"
(Ramabai 22). For high-caste groups such as the Rajputs, there was also sup
posed to be a concern never to marry a daughter into a lower ranking family,
which would bring about a loss of status. It was argued repeatedly through
out the late nineteenth century that, even in high-caste families that did not
deliberately kill their female children, "the Hindu sees in a daughter a bitter
wellspring of anxiety and expense" (Barnes 56). As the London Missionary

Society informed its members, "There is no moral power in Hinduism to

develop principle, to inform and inspire the conscience, and to control the
conduct" (Report for 1887 66). Female infanticide could thus be seen as a logi
calif horribleconsequence of a wider problem: Hinduism's simultaneous
devaluing of girls and failure to provide the proper overall moral standing and
development offered by Christianity (Cleall 33940). In an 1887 letter to the
Times, Dr. Robert Pringle, a retired Army medical officer, wrote that, judging
from his experience of twenty years' service in the North-Western Provinces,
without Christianitywhich supposedly bestowed higher status on women
than Hinduism didfemale infanticide would continue to plague India (6).
In stark contrast to this view of Hinduism, Islam was considered far less of a

problem for those anxious to eradicate female infanticide in India. This attitude

was partly based on theological grounds, which emphasized the similarities

between Christianity and Islam rather than their differences. Not only did the
Qur'an and the Jewish and Christian scriptures contain the same stories that
implicitly condemned child murder, such as the killing of male infants by the
Pharaoh of Egypt, but the Qur'an also added specific injunctions against infan
ticide : "Kill not your children on a plea of want" (6:131 ). As Avner Giladi has
observed, although it is difficult to ascertain whether this Qur'anic mandate
ii2

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DANIEL J.R. GREY

was effective in preventing infanticide in medieval Arabian society (just as it

is difficult to determine how effective the church courts of medieval Britain

proved in combating the crime [Jones 88-89]), the act was certainly under
stood across the Islamic world to be forbidden by divine decree.
As part of a larger response to Islamophobic diatribes by British writers,
the Indian scholar Syed Ameer Ali not only reiterated the Qur'an's injunc
tion against child murder (56) but began his text by ascribing the problems
faced by contemporary Indian women to the misogyny he saw as inherent
in Hindu theology and society (4-). Given Avril A. Powell's observation that
Ali, who was on excellent terms with a number of influential British femi
nists during the late nineteenth century and later married an Austrian Jewish
woman, was an extremely radical member of the Muslim intelligentsia, it
might be possible to argue that this perspective represents merely his own
focus on interfaithor at least, inter-Abrahamic faithcollaboration and a

strong theological and intellectual commitment to improving women's social

and cultural position.4There is, however, substantial evidence to suggest that
this was in fact a dominant viewpoint among British as well as Indian critics.
Responding to an acerbic letter published in January 1876 by The Times from an

anonymous Hindu correspondent that had described Islamic rule as having

been inherently damaging to Indian society and culture ("Another Indian" 7),
M.H. Hakim, an Indian Muslim living in north London, retorted angrily that
"it does not require a microscope to see that Islam must be superior, at least,
to a religion which sanctions 'suttee' (self-immolation), infanticide, and other

such fetish forms of worship" (7). The district judge of Jullundur informed
his British colleagues in 1896 that to his knowledge "not a single instance has
been heard of anywhere of [Muslims] having killed an infant daughter" (Latif ),
and the following year a lengthy article published by the Pall Mall Gazette assured

readers that female infanticide was unknown among Indian Muslims, while
continuing to be practised in secret by Hindu families, in defiance of Act vm

of 1870 ("Female" 8).

This focus on the murder of girls as a crime committed by wealthy Hindu
families remained, despite clear evidence from investigations by colonial officials

between 1870 and 1906 that, as Veena Talwar Oldenburg has demonstrated in
her seminal studies of dowry murder and infanticide (Dowry; "Questionable"),
there were a number of Punjabi families found guilty of killing daughters that
were either low-caste Hindus or were from Muslim, Sikh, or Buddhist back
grounds. Yet, on those rare occasions that colonial officials broke with this
consensusas when Captain Bradshaw insisted to his superiors at Jullundur

District in 1901 that "the crime is not restricted to [Hindu] land-owners

only"their appeals to their superiors for more sweeping powers, broader
investigations, and increased funding to tackle the problem more effectively
were dismissed. Bradshaw argued that the problem was so widespread it was
essential he be provided with the services of a "Lady Doctor," a man to act as
her bodyguard, and an additional fifty-four police officers in his district with
'i3

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VICTORIAN REVIEW

^ Volume 37 Number 2

greatly increased authority to investigate and punish cases of suspected female

infanticide. Moreover, he insisted that the services of these extra personnel
would be required on a full-time basis for a period of at least three years. Given

the massive budget increase such additional staffing would require, and the
bitter resentment that giving more authoritarian powers to the police would
have generated, it is unsurprising that Bradshaw's superior replied that the
proposed remedy "would land us in troubles greater even than have arisen
from the measure, taken to prevent the spread of plague" (Anderson). But
Bradshaw's insistence that the killing of daughters was definitely not confined

to those upper-caste Hindu groups that the British constantly reiterated were

responsible for it cannot have helped his argument and may well have made
his requests easier to dismiss as unrealistic overzealousness. The association
made between Hinduism and female infanticide by British commentators was
retained even in the face of counter-arguments drawing directly on Sanskrit
texts that set out harsh punishmentsboth on earth and in the hereafterfor

those who killed children (M.L. 144-76). Even the pro-Hindu founder of the
London Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky, conceded that female infan
ticide by Hindus was "not quite got rid of" (221), thoughin a break with
the usual tendency to exonerate Muslims in this contextshe was careful to
explain that this practice was the comparatively recent result of Muslim inva
sions of India in the seventeenth century that had led to the degradation of the

Hindu population (222).

British officials also recognized that the killing of infant girls did not necessar
ily rely on violence or poisoning, but that it might also result from the deliberate

decision to prioritize the care and feeding of male children over that of their
sisters ("East India ... 1878-1879" 12). By the 1890s, there was even a strong
suspicion among sanitary inspectors of the Punjab that this form of "murder
by neglect" might well have replaced more direct forms of infanticide that were
liable to provoke a formal investigation ("Report... 1893-96" 400; "Report...
189697" 228), and the Times of India railed bitterly in 1893 against the difficul
ties in bringing such suspected cases of fatal neglect to justice ("Infanticide").
Certainly, the 1901 census oflndia, published in 1904, came to the conclusion that
"actual infanticide is rare" and ascribed higher rates of female mortality to "the

unconscious ill-treatment of girls" ("East India (Census)" 143-44). Interestingly,

such concerns remained wedded to the traditional view of female infanticide as a
specifically Indian (and more to the point, both Hindu and high-caste) religious

and cultural custom, and failed to acknowledge the parallels between this idea

and the almost identical discourse accusing British working-class parents of

"murder by neglect," which was repeatedly drawn upon in both Parliamentary
and press discussions of child life insurance during the late nineteenth century
(Grey, "Discourses" 279-92). As was the case regarding suspicions of fatal neglect
in the deaths of female children in India, UK commentators who argued that
infant life insurance provided British parents with a direct incentive to collude
to a greater or lesser extent in their children's death agreed unanimously that
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DANIEL J.R. GREY

"it is almost impossible to obtain direct and inculpating evidence of criminality

of this character" ("Select Committee" 423). Since deaths from wilful neglect,
unlike those resulting from direct violence, could easily be mistaken for those
arising from natural causes, actual prosecutions for child homicide on these
grounds were rare in both colony and mtropole. Despite this, the idea that such
cases of "child murder by neglect" were occurring in the poorest parts of British

cities remained commonplace (if not unchallenged) in both popular and elite
forums right up until the First World War (Strange 233-38). Although dealing
with separate regions and opposite ends of the social scale, in both British and
Indian societies, discourses of "murder by neglect" represented the killing of
children as springing from similar causes : failure to control their dominant vices

(identified as greed for working-class Britons and pride for upper-class Hindus)
and failure to conform to the tenets of respectable behaviour.
It is clear that some colonial administrators perceived sex-specific infanticide

as an ongoing and endemic concern in India as a whole between 1870 and 1906.
V.A. Smith, the deputy commissioner of the city of Rae Bareli, complained to

his superiors in 1889 that "the existing arrangements in Oudh are absolutely
powerless to check the crime of infanticide." Indeed, the February report of
the Punjab Home Proceedings for January to July 1900 actually devoted 120
pages to reprinting four years' worth of lengthy discussions of female infan
ticide between British and Indian civil servants about the best way to tackle
this persistent problem ("Arrangements"). Nor were these concerns confined
to the government: the Calcutta periodical Friend of India observed in 1894 that

"infanticide is kept down only so long as preventive and repressive measures

are watchfully enforced" ("Editorial" Dec. 1894), and the editor suspected that
even at the turn of the century the crime was much more widespread than

was generally admitted ("Editorial" Aug. 1899).

In fact, the killing of daughters in late nineteenth- and early twentieth
century India had nothing at all to do with religious justifications for the
practicehardly surprising, given that, as one Indian judge noted, "In every
religion this crime is forbidden, and strict punishments are provided for its
doers" (Singh). Rather, the prevalence of, and probably, as Veena Oldenburg
has suggested, the actual increase in rates of, female infanticide in the Punjab
at this time had much more to do with the changes in landholding legislation
pushed through by the colonial government (Dowry, 41-72; "Questionable").
Ironically, as Anshu Malhotra has noted, attempts to increase surveillance and
punishment of families suspected of female infanticide backfired: "Such behav

iour became a symbol of prestige, as indeed the state recognized the high
born through their 'traditions'" (Gender 61). Most importantly, during the late
nineteenth century, it became increasingly difficult for even wealthy families

to maintain land ownership in the face of spiralling costs, demands for an

almost exclusively male workforce, outbreaks of diseases and environmental
disasters such as famine, and the ever-present threat of eviction, all of which
became more and more frequent among Indian landowners in this period.
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Victorian review Volume 37 Number 2

Such chaotic conditions also made it increasingly difficult for the Infanticide
Regulations to be enforced in the early twentieth century.s Judgments by
potentially infanticida! families as to whether an individual daughter might be
allowed to live or die were thus increasingly contingent on factors such as the
number of existing children the family needed to support and the possibility
of the mother having another (male) child that could ultimately contribute to
their chances of economic and lineal survival (Oldenburg, "Questionable" 172).
CONCLUSIONS

The Indian Female Infanticide Act was repealed in 1906, ostensibly on the
grounds that it had proven a success and was no longer needed. Despite the
repeal, detailed statistics relating to marriage and sex ratios with regard to reg
istered births and deaths continued to be gathered by colonial administrators
until 1912, at which point it was argued that "female infanticide may now be
considered a negligible quantity" ("East India 1911-12" 671).The change in the
law was so discreet as to be almost invisible: "There appears to have been no
public clamour for such an action and news of its repeal was barely reported
in the English or vernacular newspapers" (Oldenburg, "Questionable" 109). In
fact, as both Oldenburg ("Questionable" in) and the anthropologist Barbara
Miller have noted, sex-specific neglect of infants remained a serious issue in
north India well into the late twentieth century. Moreover, despite strict laws
against prenatal sex determination in India, prosecutions for this offence have
been negligible. Recent research strongly indicates that the selective abortion
of female fetuses is an ongoing (and probably increasing) problem, and it is
frequently those states, such as the Punjab, that were historically identified with

female infanticide that now display disturbing imbalances between birth rates
of male and female children (see Jha et al.; Kaur).
It is revealing that in the 1877 report on female infanticide in the North
Western Provinces, the magistrate of Ghazipur could refer without any apparent

sense of irony to comparisons between the available data on infant mortality

in India and that of "a country such as England, where infanticide is never

practised." (Oldham). In factdespite the broad similarities between both

the judicial and popular responses to cases of newborn murder in Britain and
India where the sex of the child was not a factormuch of the reason that
commentators were so obsessed with the subject of specifically female infanticide

in the late nineteenth century was that it did not seem to have direct parallels
with crimes committed in the cities and countryside of Britain and Ireland.
In singling out female infanticide and claiming that it was a specifically Hindu
problem, British commentators were not only able to exclude from discussion
those child murders that betrayed the most worrying parallels between condi
tions in Britain and India (save the fact that widows, rather than unmarried

women, were the principal defendants in the latter nation), but could also

reinforce claims that "The Indian empire is the noblest sphere of effort

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DANIEL J.R. GREY

which the world ever presented to the Christian Church, or which that church
can desire" (lms Report for 1870 41).
Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Margaret I. Arnot, Esme Cleall, Joy Dixon, Naomi Hetherington,

Anshu Malhotra, VeenaTalwar Oldenburg, Orisheweyimi Oiugbo, and the
anonymous external reviewer for their helpful suggestions in revising this article.
Notes

For example, the internationally renowned American expert on forensic medicine,

Theodric Romeyn Beck, argued in 1823 that Muslim countries were historically
the most prone to child-murder, even if a footnote to this wild claim grudgingly
admitted infanticide was strictly prohibited by the Qur'an (134).This section
reprinted with permission from his brother John's 1817 doctoral dissertation
remained in all subsequent editions of Beck's textbook, which was widely used by
doctors across the anglophone world until the 1860s.
See Evans 394.
Although other regions of northern and central India also turned up in reports (and
south India was certainly not exempt), it is significant that parliamentary papers in
this period overwhelmingly refer to the Punjab when discussing female infanticide.
Avril A. Powell has noted that Ali was notably cooler towards the prospect of
collaboration with Hindus, whom he blamed for many of the social problems
facing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India.
The Commissioner of Jullundur reported that a serious outbreak of plague meant a
proposed re-emphasis on female infanticide as a potential issue would need to be
indefinitely delayed. See 13 Nov. 1901. IOR P/6071.
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