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Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the

inquest and the humanitarian narrative
on child rape in India
a
Ishita Pande
a
Department of History , Queen's University , Kingston , ON ,
Canada
Published online: 21 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Ishita Pande (2013) Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the inquest and the
humanitarian narrative on child rape in India, South Asian History and Culture, 4:1, 9-30, DOI:
10.1080/19472498.2012.750453
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.750453
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South Asian History and Culture, 2013
Vol. 4, No. 1, 9–30, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.750453
Phulmoni’s body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian

narrative on child rape in India
Ishita Pande*
Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Downloaded by [University of Tennessee, Knoxville] at 08:11 01 January 2015
This article provides a close reading of the circulation of the case of the ‘child-wife’
Phulmoni Dasi, which is acknowledged to have triggered the Age of Consent Act of
1891. Instead of assuming that the evidence of corporeal trauma triggered the vari-
ous responses to the problem of child marriage – reformist or reactionary – that have
been comprehensively documented by historians, this article scrutinizes the unfolding
of a humanitarian narrative that reconstituted child marriage as a socio-medical prob-
lem that was discovered, diagnosed and administered, through an unprecedented focus
on the body. By foregrounding the formal unity of the autopsy, the inquest and the
humanitarian narrative, this article draws attention to the striking investment in the
corpse as the repository of truth about crime, culture, pain and compassion, on the one
hand, and the obfuscation of the bodily detail in the dissemination of this particular
case from the autopsy table to the courtroom and to the public discourse on child mar-
riage, on the other hand. By comparing and contrasting two narratives that rested on
the child-wife’s body – a colonial medico-legal discourse that served to render the cul-
turally common crime of rape into the uncommon crime of culture through a focus on
the rape of children, and a seemingly universal humanitarian narrative that rested on a
common compassionate response to sexual violence against the child, this article high-
lights the colonial genealogy of modern humanitarianism. This article thus queries the
centrality of the body in the humanitarian narrative in order to interrogate the racialized
underbelly of modern humanitarianism.
Keywords: legal history; medical jurisprudence; humanitarianism; colonial racism;
childhood
Introduction: the ‘textbook case’

Case CXXIV: Total rupture of uterus in girl-wife by sexual intercourse – In 1890 in the
Calcutta High Court a fully developed Bengali, aged 35, was charged with causing the death
as above of his child-wife, a girl aged 11 years and 31/2 months. Medical evidence testified that
the girl, although well developed for her age, was immature, had not attained puberty, and was
wholly unfit for sexual intercourse. The injury inflicted was a rent in the vaginal wall on the
right side of the os uteri, measuring 13/4 inches in length and 1 inch in breadth. Copious hæm-
morrhage took place immediately after intercourse. The girl died of exhaustion 131/2 hours
after the act. The vagina was found to be distended with a clot measuring 3 inches in length by
11/2 inches in breadth, and there was a globular hæmatoma in the right broad ligament, mea-
suring 3 inches in diameter . . . The evidence in this case clearly established the fact that the
fatal injury was caused by sexual intercourse of this mature male, with an immature female,
his wife. The court held that when a girl is a wife and above the age of consent (which at that
*Email: pande@queensu.ca
© 2013 Taylor & Francis

10 I. Pande
time was only ten years), although it is therefore not rape, still the husband has not the abso-
lute right to enjoy the person of his wife without regard to her safety. Found that the prisoner
caused the death of the girl by a rash and negligent act. – ‘Queen Empress v Hurry Mohun
Mythee’, Indian Law Reports, 18 Cal. 49; J Wilson, July 1890.1
In the third edition of Isidore Bernadotte Lyon’s Medical Jurisprudence for India pub-
lished in 1904, Empress v Hurry Mohun Mythee was memorialized as the textbook case of
a heinous crime – the fatal rape of a child by her adult husband.2 Appearing in the chapter
dealing with rape, sodomy and bestiality, the case served as an illustration of a general
question that the medical expert could be asked in cases of rape: ‘May rape cause death’?3
The answer, as the detailed above illustration suggests, was affirmative. This question of
general interest to the expert witness anywhere had additional significance in colonial
India, as Lyon clarified, for ‘such a cause of death was not uncommon amongst the child-
wives in Bengal up till at least 1890 when a notorious case attracted medical notice and led
to the act raising the nubile age from ten to twelve years’.4 Lyon’s use of the autopsy con-
ducted on the body of Phulmoni Dasi, raped to death by her husband Hari Maiti in 1889,
evidences a striking investment in the corpse as the repository of truth about crime, culture,
pain and compassion. It also draws attention to the medical expert’s renewed importance
in the political project of colonialism that had long been justified as a type of humanitarian
intervention: ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’.5 In Lyon’s rendition, the
sheer facticity of bodily detail uncovered by the autopsy revealed the truth of a ‘crime’
(rape), made legible its cultural context (the prevalence of child marriage) and triggered
a remedial response (the Age of Consent Act of 1891) to put an end to the problem of
precocious intercourse in marriage.6
Instead of assuming, with Lyon, that the accumulated evidence of corporeal trauma
triggered the various responses to the problem of child marriage – reformist or
reactionary – which have been comprehensively documented by historians,7 this article
scrutinizes the unfolding of a humanitarian narrative that reconstituted child marriage
as a socio-medical problem that was discovered, diagnosed and administered, through an
unprecedented focus on the body.8 Building upon insights on the use of the bodily detail
‘as the sign of truth’ in the modern humanitarian narrative, this article traces the central-
ity of Phulmoni’s body, opened up during the autopsy and re-cited through the inquest
into her death in the courtroom, to a humanitarian discourse on child marriage in India in
the late nineteenth century.9 But, as this article shows, while the humanitarian narrative
rested on the scrutiny of the body, its success also rested upon the disavowal of these cor-
poreal origins, as evident from the obscuring of the bodily detail in successive stages of
dissemination of Phulmoni’s body from the autopsy table, to the courtroom, the newspa-
per and the public meeting. Why were the somatic origins of the humanitarian sensibility
simultaneously highlighted and hidden from view?
The answer is clarified with reference to the other narratives generated through a
scrutiny of ‘other’ bodies, including that of colonial racialism. For the humanitarian narra-
tive as ‘an aesthetic enterprise of turning the pain of strangers into a call for ameliorative
action’ also rested on an estrangement from the body of the victim. If it created a cer-
tain causal tie between the body and its social context thus provoking a call to action,
its darker thread also enabled a representation of colonialism itself as this ameliorative
action. Scrutinizing this relationship between colonialism and humanitarianism, in the
first section, I locate Phulmoni’s body in the context of a longer medico-legal narrative
on rape in India and draw attention to a peculiar focus on the rape of children, which
transformed an unsensational and ‘common’ form of sexual violence into a seemingly
South Asian History and Culture 11
exotic phenomenon.10 In the next section, I follow the circulation of Phulmoni’s body,
from the autopsy table, to a legal inquest in the courtroom as evidence of a crime, and
finally, into public discourse as the singular case exemplifying the evils of child marriage
in Indian society. In following the circulation of Phulmoni’s body in two contexts, as proof
of a cultural crime and social norm, on the one hand, and as occasion for the humani-
tarian Age of Consent Act of 1891, on the other hand, I ask: Why did the bodily detail,
used to emphasize the difference of rape in colonial contexts in the mid-nineteenth century,
come to be privileged as a trigger for humanitarian intervention, premised on the univer-
sality of human suffering, by the last decade of the century? Did an unprecedented focus
on the body help to update the colonial state’s political project of control as a modern
humanitarian project? Or was the humanitarian narrative concerned with the pain of oth-
ers held together by an invisible darker thread – a racialized narrative about other bodies?
In answering these questions, this article highlights the antinomies of humanitarianism
revealed by the expert and popular focus on Phulmoni’s body in late nineteenth-century
India.
The autopsy: child rape, medical jurisprudence and colonial (in)difference

Instances of this crime appear to be of great frequency in India, and there is also reason
to believe that persons are, by no means rarely, charged falsely with its commission. In the
investigation of cases of Rape, difficulty may sometimes arise with regard to the question
of Puberty. Cohabitation in marriage certainly takes place much earlier here than in other
countries; and, consequently, the development of Puberty is frequently hastened; but it appears
very doubtful whether menstruation naturally occurs much sooner in life in India than in
Europe. – Norman Chevers, Manual of Medical Jurisprudence.11
The rape of children in general, and the physical abuse of the child-wife in partic-
ular, had long attracted medico-legal notice in India. In this very first sentence of the
lengthy section devoted to rape in the Manual of Medical Jurisprudence (1856), which
served as the prototype for subsequent works of the kind produced in India (including
Lyon’s, quoted above), Norman Chevers confirmed two fundamental (if apparently con-
flicting) truths about rape in India: the extreme frequency of the crime, on the one hand,
and of spurious accusations, on the other hand.12 While much of the text was devoted to the
cataloguing of peculiarly Indian pathologies and an account of India difference, these state-
ments signalled Chevers’s fidelity to medico-legal commonsense on the matter of rape in
English medical jurisprudence, with its tradition of treating rape charges with scepticism,
and requiring proof of the victim’s ‘character’. This tradition had been extended into the
colony in 1860, when the Indian Penal Code (IPC) established a uniform criminal law
for all of India.13 Both at home and in empire, as Elizabeth Kolsky suggests, rape laws
tended to place a great deal of emphasis on documented proof of the victim’s character
and prior sexual experience, the marks of violation, and the promptness of complaint. Well
into the nineteenth century, she shows, rates of reporting and conviction remained low, and
the presumption against the woman’s honesty remained in place. In India, these factors
combined with ‘specifically colonial ideas about the unreliability of native witnesses and
other prejudicial ideas about Indian culture’, which rendered Indian rape victims ‘doubly
suspect suspects’.14 Given the attitude towards the violated woman in general, and suspi-
cions about Indian character in particular, medical expertise was also doubly crucial in the
colony. As Chevers explained, the medical expert’s double burden rested upon the ability
to distinguish effectively between the true rape and the false charge.
12 I. Pande
In order to perform this delicate task, the medical expert required ‘a treatise on Medical
Jurisprudence, embodying clear and practical expositions of the various and peculiar
modes by which the natives of this country are wont to effect crimes against the per-
sons, and to attempt their concealment . . . under circumstances entirely dissimilar to
those which call for the like investigation in Europe’.15 This was the special need that
Chevers offered to fill. The emphasis on the peculiarity and the dissimilarity of crime
in India underlined the ethnological mode that dominated much of Chevers’ book; his
introductory chapter was devoted to the ‘criminal characteristics of the people of India’
at large.16 If the character of a people had to be studied to assess their crimes, the con-
verse was also true: the ‘true nature of the pathology of crime’, could reveal the nature
of the people, enabling the colonial state to ‘detect and grapple with those deeply rooted
errors in the native character which now, eluding our notice, baffle our best laid schemes
for improvement’.17 Chevers thus hitched his medico-ethnological efforts to the colonial
state’s improving mission. While the place of improvement in the colonial state’s self-
aggrandizing discourse hardly bears repetition, it might be worth underlining the special
place of medicine and law in the project.
The codification of Indian law, as initiated by Thomas Babington Macaulay, coincided
with the expansion of Western medicine outside of the ‘colonial enclave’ during an ‘age
of reform’ (1828–1856) in India. That this age had dawned with the abolition of the prac-
tice of satidaha (widow immolation) in 1829, also testifies to the fact that the ‘dominant
narrative of colonialism – we came, we saw, we were horrified, we intervened’18 – was
overtly gendered and fixated upon the violated body of the native woman.19 Evoking Partha
Chatterjee’s thesis that the colonial state was rendered distinct from the modern state by
the operation of the ‘rule of colonial difference’, Kolsky has argued that in matters of
rape, however, the colonial state operated on principles of indifference, that is, in India
as in England, rape law discriminated against the woman victim. Or, as Kolsky puts it,
the colonial state was indifferent to crimes against women such as rape because there was
nothing sensational about them, whereas practices such as satidaha elicited attention as
spectacular cultural crimes that solidified a diagnosis of Indian difference, thus justifying
reformist intervention. In contrast to the scandalous and spectacular practice of satidaha,
rape appeared an unsensational (or culturally common) crime, and thus interrupted the nar-
rative of difference that justified colonial intervention as the righteous project of ‘saving
brown women from brown men’. Except, as we shall see, Chevers’s analysis of rape kept
alive the gendered underpinnings of the dominant narrative of colonialism, as he managed
to re-present the ‘unsensational’ crime of rape in terms of socio-cultural difference.
Take, for example, Chevers’s thoughts on tropical puberty, which was the very first
index he referenced in his analysis of the difference of Indian bodies. Repudiating the
widely held view that tropical climates hastened puberty in females, Chevers insisted that
‘Cohabitation in marriage certainly takes place much earlier here than in other countries
and, consequently, the development of Puberty is frequently hastened’.20 That is, instead of
ascribing differences in social norms to any kind of natural or climatic difference, Chevers
insisted that any deviance from the (Western) norm was attributable to pathological prac-
tices. Chevers elaborated upon this culturalist understanding of race difference in other
sections of his Manual, by reading each sign, mark and gaping wound on the violated
female body (or the putrid corpse) as evidence of a particular cultural practice. For instance,
the discovery of deformed aborted foetuses, testifying to the high incidence of ‘criminal
abortion’ in parts of India, was read also as proof of the practice of polygamy, child mar-
riage and the consequent prevalence of young widowhood among some groups in India.
The ubiquity of female infanticide was likewise seen as linked to the cultural preference
for boys.21 In other words, he attributed ‘sensational’ cultural crimes to the normal state of
Hindu society and to a blind obedience to common religious precepts. But how could the
common crime of rape be read as a ‘cultural crime’ and as significantly different from such
crimes at home?22
Chevers’s answer to this question came in his focus on a particular type of rape. In the
1856 edition of the book, for example, he drew a majority of his illustrations on rape
from cases involving children, often child-wives. In other words, just as Chevers read the
high incidence of feticide as proof of peculiar cultural practices that led to the prolifer-
ation of nubile widows, the systematic rape of children was explained with reference to
the norm of child marriage. Given Chevers’s ethnologic that linked crime to culture, it is
hardly surprising that the very first case appended to his section on ‘rape’ featured a 12-
year-old child-wife, whose body testified to the horror of precocious cohabitation: while
the ‘vagina . . . was considerably developed’, her ‘uterus was that of a child’.23 Of the
66 rape trials from the printed Reports of the Nizamut Adalut that Chevers considered, he
emphasized, ‘ . . . that in 30, or nearly one-half of these cases, the females were under the
age of twelve’.24 Such examples proliferated in the Reports, partly because signs of injury
could be most easily verified in the case of those below a certain age (and especially in
cases where the victim had died). For instance, autopsies had revealed ‘a rupture of the
lower part of the vagina to the extent of half an inch’ in a girl of 12 years of age, and ‘the
rupture of the hymen and laceration of the perineum and vagina’ in an ‘infant of six’.25
Cases of child rape were also more likely to be prosecuted, as the innocence of character
of the victim was more readily presumed, unlike in the ‘uncertain’ cases in which ‘girls
past the age of puberty and accustomed to sexual intercourse have been violated’, where
‘some of the statements of the prosecutrices and their friends are not susceptible of confir-
mation by medical evidence’.26 While the preponderance of recorded cases of child rape
in the court records had quite certainly to do with the lower burden of proof required in
such instances, and the higher prevalence of injury and death, convictions were also easier
because questions of consent were moot in cases involving girls below 10 years of age.27
It was in considering the very question of consent that Chevers hinted at the widespread
cultural sanction for statutory or under-age rapes in India: ‘It is certain that some mar-
ried girls of nine and upwards live with their husbands. It may not be considered that this
arrangement takes place with the consent of these unhappy children; indeed we have some
very strong evidence to the contrary . . . ’.28 The rape of child-wives by adult husbands
thus emerged as the truly scandalous – because culturally sanctioned – crime of India. The
narrative of Indian difference thus restored, Chevers devoted the final section on rape to
this ‘very important set of cases which, it is to be trusted, are peculiar to this country . . .
instances in which Fatal Injuries are inflicted on the Persons of Young Girls in the First
Act of Connexion’.29 In this final section devoted to the cultural crime, Chevers outlined
the vicious signs of injury found upon the bodies of victims. In many of these cases, as
he made clear with the very first example, injury and death were caused not only by the
unnatural act of ‘connexion’ between an adult and a child; ‘in many cases, unusual and
extraneous force is employed’.30 Further, such brutality was not limited to husbands alone,
for Chevers had been ‘informed by an eminent missionary, thoroughly conversant with the
customs of the natives in the neighbourhood of Calcutta’, that ‘parents of immature girls’
attempt to ‘render them aptae viribus by mechanical means, especially by the use of the
fruit of the plantain’!31 To provide further corporeal evidence of the cultural crime, Chevers
drew attention to a ‘preparation’ displayed at the Museum of the Calcutta Medical College
for the instruction of medical students, comprising the ‘uterus, vagina and greater portion
of the external parts of generation of a young Mahomedan female, showing laceration of
14 I. Pande
the perineum, and a considerable portion of the vaginal sheath’.32 While the morbid spec-
imen on display bore silent witness to the ‘sudden and unlooked for death of the child, on
the first night of her marriage’, Chevers further concluded that the injuries revealed by the
post-mortem could hardly have been caused by natural penetration, even by an adult man,
and that ‘some hard instrument’, had been used. With this, Chevers made the final move to
translate the common crime into a cultural pathology and to diagnose the rapist’s action as
a culturally sanctioned form of violence.33
A selection of illustrative cases of rape, meant to instruct the medical expert testifying
on rape cases in the colonial law-court, was thus transformed into an exhaustive catalogue
of the rape of children, in the most important textbook of medical jurisprudence of its time.
Since several of these cases were examples of sex in marriage, Chevers’s ethnological
interpretation of child rape as the ‘common practice of Eastern nations of forcing sex upon
children’, was further underlined.34 Finally, evidence of the generalized abuse of children
(apparently to ready them for precocious sexual intercourse) suggested that sexual violence
was routinized in a culture where child marriage was endorsed, if not actively enforced.
As already noted, in his ambition to write the first ‘history of crime against the person
in India’, Chevers did not flinch from detailing the ‘intimate peculiarities of the native
character’.35 But he also harboured wider moral ambitions for his history:
In performing this not uninteresting task, it has been found necessary to dwell somewhat
at length upon many painful details; this, however, has been done unhesitatingly, under the
conviction that, for the censor of morals and dispenser of laws, the vices of society must be
laid bare with a strong and untremulous hand: – knowing where the moral canker lies, it is a
resolve neither of wisdom nor of delicacy to permit it to fester in its concealment.36
In other words, the doctor was to run a knife across the social body, to lay bare the
most intimate truths for wider public scrutiny, and to educate by publicizing these detailed
narratives of trauma. In doing so, and in focusing on a particular type of rape (that of chil-
dren), he also served to reinsert the sensation back into the common crime and buttress
a discourse on difference. Such ideas about the essence of colonized people, as Partha
Chatterjee argues with regard to the ‘rule of colonial difference’, were used not just to jus-
tify colonial occupation, but also to justify forms of government that were different from
those deemed appropriate at home. Since the mission of colonialism was something akin
to the eventual erasure of difference (by the creation of modern, rational subjects), but
because the rationale for such government was fundamentally premised on the perpetua-
tion of difference, the colonial state was caught in a double bind and thus destined to fall
short of fulfilling its normalizing mission.37 Interrogating this idea, Elizabeth Kolsky has
demonstrated the ways in which the ‘rule of difference’ was interrupted in the colonial
criminal justice system’s treatment of rape, ‘a culturally familiar, if not universal, form
of violence against women’,38 to conclude that in matters of rape, ‘something akin to a
rule of colonial indifference’ prevailed.39 I have drawn upon this particular example to
point to the tension between colonial indifference to the native rape victim, as less wor-
thy of ‘rescue’ than the victim of a spectacular cultural crime such as satidaha, on the
one hand, and the reconstitution of a particular form of rape as a cultural crime, which
enabled a new narrative of rescue and difference, on the other hand. Put another way, the
play of difference/indifference in colonial narratives on rape is revealed in the two distinct,
chronologically successive and structurally related phenomena.
In this section, I have drawn attention to an ethnological reading of rape in medical
jurisprudence from the mid-nineteenth century, which remained indifferent to the woman
victim as such, by focusing on the child to reconfigure rape as a crime of difference. In the
next section, I will turn to a humanitarian discourse on rape that emerged in the late nine-
teenth century, which was far from indifferent to the violation of children, but was wholly
entrenched in the logic of colonial difference. The tension between difference and indif-
ference in colonial knowledge on rape points to the ways in which ‘rule of difference’ tied
the humanitarian narrative to colonial discourses of othering. While, in Chevers’ rendi-
tion, the many examples of child rape confirmed the diagnosis of a cultural pathology, the
singular case of Empress v Hurry Mythee, highlighted in Lyon’s text from the early twen-
tieth century, went further to incite preventive action. If the autopsy revealed the ‘moral
canker’ lurking beneath the surface of the body and society, it was the judicial inquest that
ensured the circulation of autopsic detail – and the diagnostic presumptions unleashed in
the interpretation of such detail – into a wider, public realm. While drawing upon autopsic
revelation, the judicial inquest ultimately sought to produce an incorporeal and transcen-
dent document of pain. But the spectre of the ‘other’ body continued to haunt the court’s
proceedings in 1889.
The inquest: the dissemination of medical detail in ‘a painful case’

Police Inspector Cobb: I refer to my notes made at the time. I came to the conclusion that she
was between 11 and 12. The body was well nourished. I found a blood-stained cloth around
her waist and between her legs. I came to the conclusion she had not attained puberty. The
uterus and ovaries were underdeveloped and she had not menstruated. The growth of hair on
the part is one of the signs of puberty, I saw no sign of any. On examining the part, I observed a
blood clot protruding from the vulva, but no laceration or other mark of injury on the outside.
There was no swelling. I opened up the vagina and found the blood clot filled the vaginal canal,
i.e. the whole capacity of the vagina in its length and breadth. It formed a sort of cast. It was
coagulated and become firm. The length of the clot was 3 inches, the diameter 1 and a 1/2 . . .
From what I saw, I think hæmmorrhage was the cause of death; hæmmorrhage from the tear of
the vagina. Such a tear might be caused by a full grown man having connection with a girl . . .
(Then he was asked): In your opinion this man had had several acts of intercourse with the girl
without any ill consequences therefrom; would he have foreseen, in the present instance, that
rupture would be the result?
(And his reply was): I can’t say. I examined the accused; his male organ appeared to me to be
of natural size. I found no marks or abrasions upon it. I examined him a day or two after the
postmortem on the 17th. If this were the first act of intercourse there might or might not be
marks on the male organ, I do not think it likely there would be. I think it more likely that the
appearance of the vagina was due to previous acts of connection than to artificial dilation. –
Transcript of Empress v Hari Mohan Maiti40 .
As this extract from the court transcript of Empress v Hari Mohan Maiti amply con-
firms, given the importance of the corporeal mapping of violence (on the type and degree of
penetration, signs of defloration, the physical marks of force used to perpetrate the crime,
or to resist it) in establishing the truth of rape, the medical expert was indispensable to
the court’s proceedings. Medical details helped restage the criminal inquest as a precise
science. Cobb’s testimony, cited above, was solicited precisely because it was clinical,
impartial and dispassionate. As the case unfolded in the courtroom, Cobb initially seemed
to corroborate the mother’s narrative on the painful death of their daughter with a clini-
cal recapitulation of bodily violence (‘I observed a blood clot protruding from the vulva’).
He ultimately undermined the family’s claims that Maiti had flouted communal norms by
approaching his wife before she had attained puberty. Cobb was conflicted about the dead
16 I. Pande
girl’s physical maturity; confused about the cause of injury (‘the male organ appeared to
me to be of natural size’); tentative as to the girl’s sexual history (‘ . . . I should have
expected injuries at the orifice’) and shy of delivering authoritative conclusions (‘I do not
think if the male organ had previously penetrated as far as the present occasion, the same
result would necessarily have followed’). In the end, Maiti was tried neither for rape, nor
for culpable homicide, but merely for committing a ‘rash and negligent act’.41 It is, of
course, possible to criticize the ways in which the doctor’s stuttering opinion on the causes
of death could – and did – trump the testimony of non-experts (such as the girl’s family)
in court. It is also easy to recognize the limits of the law, according to which the dead wife
was neither a ‘child’ nor had she been ‘raped’.42
But putting aside the outcome of the case, it is easy to see that the surgeon testified
only to solid facts disclosed by the body; he had case notes to prove ‘the length of the clot
was 3 inches, the diameter 1 and a 1/2’. His conclusions were delivered in a measured tone:
he thought she died of a hæmmorrhage that might have been caused by sex with an adult
male; whether or not the husband might have foreseen the fatal outcome of his actions,
he just could not say. The doctor’s exact recollection of empirical detail, and his refusal
to speculate, might be interpreted as a re-enactment of the post-mortem conducted upon
Phulmoni’s body, to allow the non-expert observers to discover for themselves the degree
of trauma, its cause and establish a suitable course of action. Moving beyond a critique
of the disturbing outcome of the court case, therefore, we can see the ways in which the
medical testimony performed another function: by verbalizing each gory detail and gaping
wound found upon a child-wife’s ravaged body, the autopsy and the inquest (extracted in
the epigraphs), made her pain real, thus inviting redemptive action.
Describing the humanitarian narrative in a different context, Thomas Laqueur has
pointed out how ‘unprecedented quantities of fact, of minute observations, about people
who had been beneath notice become the building blocks of the “reality effect” of the
literary technique through which the experiences of others are represented as real in the
humanitarian narrative’.43 Such a narrative, he demonstrates, ‘relies on the personal body,
not only as the locus of pain, but also as the common bond between those who suffer
and those who would help . . . ’.44 Reading the autopsy, the case history, the government
inquiry and the realist novel as genres that share a common form in that they each ‘con-
stitute step-by-step accounts of the history of the body in relation to itself and to social
conditions, and provide therefore a model for the intelligibility of misfortune’, Laqueur
suggests that ‘medical writings present in their purest form the amassing and ordering of
vast quantities of detail to make real the pain of others and to offer a logic of specific
intervention’.45 In other words, the humanitarian narrative requires the minute scrutiny of
other bodies in pain. But inasmuch as humanitarianism requires other bodies, it shares a
field of reference with the ethnologic of colonial medical jurisprudence, as discussed in the
previous section. To evoke sympathy premised on the transcendence of pain, the humani-
tarian narrative must also obscure its somatic origin. In our example, the dead child-wife
Phulmoni’s post-mortem provided an objective account of bodily trauma, and became cen-
tral ‘in exposing evil and creating a common ground of sensibility’46 : it was a few short
steps from the opening up of the body, to finding the cause of suffering, to calling for ‘pre-
cise social action’.47 And while each stage of dissemination continued to evoke the ‘causal
link’ between a problem, its cause and an intervention, each step also diluted the degree
of corporeal detailing. This becomes clear in following the circulation of Phulmoni’s post-
mortem from the autopsy room, to the high court, to a wider public inquest into a cultural
crime and a call for ameliorative action.
For the colonial government in India, this call to action took the form of the modi-
fication to the law on the age of consent. The Law Member of the Imperial Legislative
Council, Andrew Scoble, made the narrative of cause and effect explicit when he referred
specifically to the wounds on Phulmoni’s frail body in introducing his bill to the legislative
council with a ‘frank admission of its medical genesis’.48 The medical genesis was further
clarified to other members of the council with the circulation of Phulmoni’s post-mortem
report.49 The Viceroy Lord Lansdowne too, in his turn, referenced the ‘death of this poor
child’ in his memo to Scoble, asserting he ‘should not be at all sorry to have my hand
forced’ by the case. A humanitarian narrative was emerging around the problem of child
marriage, rendered distinct from other social-reformist discourses on the woman question
not only by its content – the medical detail generated by an unprecedented focus on the
body as the locus of pain, but also by its adherence to a particular form – scrutinizing
evidence, ascertaining a cause and generating a call to action.
No longer limited to the circle of experts, Phulmoni’s bodily wounds were widely
evoked during the more public inquest into child marriage itself as a social problem.
Empress v Hurry Mythee emerged as the single – but by no means singular – case to which
the rationale for a specific humanitarian legislation – the Age of Consent Act – became
hitched. The case was widely referenced, forging a public – and a narrative – which seized
upon the physical body as the locus of suffering. The chairman of a public meeting held in
Bombay responding to Scoble’s bill proclaimed, for instance:
‘The case of Hari Mohan Mytee (sic.), recently tried before the High Court of Calcutta, and
other instances of that character which have recently been brought to light, and which no
properly constituted mind can hear without being shocked, appear to your memorialists not
only to justify the proposed legislation, but actually to render it the duty of the State to resort
to it’.50
Further afield, the ethnographer HH Risley reiterated of the ‘terrible occurrence in

Calcutta’ that while the single case evidenced ‘one of the worst features of the Hindu
social system’, it was definitely not singular in its brutality, as would be apparent to
anyone acquainted with the ‘cyclopedia of horrors comprised in Indian medico-legal
literature’.51 This ‘cyclopedia of horrors’ continued to reverberate outside of expert cir-
cles, as Phulmoni’s case was routinely invoked during speeches in the Legislative Council
and in the popular press.
In an impassioned plea for Scoble’s bill, Rai Bahadur Krishnaji Lakshman Nulkar, a
non-official native member of the Legislative Council from Bombay, asserted that the priv-
ileged facticity of bodily evidence ought to silence any objections against the bill along
religious principles. He suggested that dissenters who believed Harimaiti was an anomaly
ought to turn to the ‘statistics and the results of professional experience and opinions of
eminent medical authorities’. He directed them to Dr Chevers’s Manual for other exam-
ples of ‘crimes of this nature’ and invoked the same text to repudiate the claim that the
consent bill had been hastily introduced without proper discussion. While acknowledg-
ing the earlier efforts of Dayaram Gidumal, Behramji Malabari and the Bombay Social
Reform Conference, he insisted that it was Phulmoni’s case in particular that had helped
push through the new Age of Consent Bill. Finally, he opined that her death had also trig-
gered the vociferous opposition to the act, precisely because the orthodoxy had anticipated
that it would usher in a change to the law on the age of consent.52
The Rai Bahadur was certainly not wrong in assuming that the orthodox opposition
was also attentive to Phulmoni’s body. In fact, the invocation of her case by the religious
opposition serves as a reminder that the autopsy or the inquest – with their reliance on
18 I. Pande
detail and the suggestion of a particular causality – did not necessarily engender the only
appropriate ‘moral response’,53 and that the focus on the body did not displace other uni-
verses of morality. While this other morality was evoked on occasion by the most orthodox
of the religious dissenters against Scoble’s bill, one of whom reprehensibly insisted that
‘it was a thousand times better for one out of a ten thousand girls to suffer from the hasty
indiscretion of a husband, than for several girls to be defiled and outcasted by an invasion
of their persons by strangers’,54 others expressed their disagreement with the conclusions
drawn from the single case,55 but in the terms set by the reformers, with a focus on the
medical detail.56
And so, while the massive protest meeting attended by ‘two to three thousand people’
organized by the Sobhabazar Rajbati in Calcutta on 18 March 1891 might have begun with
a ringing endorsement of an alternative morality (with the suggestion that a father who
resorted to post-puberty marriages for his daughters was sure to go to hell) and a rhetorical
rejection of medical logic (which was deemed fickle and deceptive), the focus on the body,
and the medical detail, quickly returned to the surface. The public resolution proposed and
endorsed at the meeting was seconded by a medical doctor, who flaunted his expert cre-
dentials by asserting he had attended meetings organized by the Calcutta Medical Society
and the Public Health Society, where resolutions of the opposite character had been passed,
before weighing in on the side of the religious orthodoxy. The Sobhabazar memorialists
buttressed their resolution (which argued that existing laws sufficiently provided against
‘all sorts of oppressions and bodily injury’) with a copiously detailed document entitled
‘Medical Opinions on the Alleged Cruelty to Tender Wives by Their Husbands’. The let-
ters compiled in this appendix, signed by over a hundred medical experts and organized
by qualification of the sender (MD, MB, LMS, ‘Native Doctor’, Homeopathic practitioner,
Kabiraj), contained frequent references to the case of Phulmoni and Harimaiti. A typi-
cal response came from Sarat Chandra Basu, who insisted: ‘Harimaitism is not at all so
prevalent in our society, as it had been represented to be, so far as I know Hari-maitism is
perfectly unique’.57 While most of these responses overwhelmingly proclaimed ‘the sensa-
tional case of Hari Maiti . . . an exceptional one’,58 and at least one pronounced Phulmoni
nothing but ‘a medical curiosity’,59 Phulmoni and Harimaiti came to serve as shorthand
for a specific, detailed and highly medicalized phenomenon.60
With the case of Phulmoni and Maiti available for ready reference, the horrifying med-
ical detail could be glossed easily without explicit details in subsequent discussions of the
on the Age of Consent Bill. While the doctors rounded up by the Sobhabazar petitioners
made constant references to obstetrical statistics, medical case histories and their several
years of practice in and around Calcutta, the medical detail was displaced by phrases such
as ‘such acts of cruelty’, ‘similar cases of injury’, besides the more specific Harimaitism.
Harimaiti and Phulmoni, as names for types of evidence, enabled a rhetorical shying away
from the gory detail. As one Mr Hutchins put it, in airing his support for Scoble’s Bill
during its final reading on 19 March 1891 in the legislative council: ‘I do not wish to go
into the details of that case. They are well-known to everyone here . . . ’.61 While it is
clear that not everyone drew the same lessons from the case, it is also apparent that the
autopsy of Phulmoni’s body had provided the details of, and a narrative of causation for, a
‘social problem’ and the inquest into Maiti’s crime further disseminated (spread wider and
thinner) the conclusions drawn from such bodily detailing.
At a greater distance from the dissecting table and the courtroom, the autopsic focus
of the humanitarian narrative became further diminished, and the detail could be evoked
by vague hints or even suggestive silences. Such a modest glossing of bodily trauma was
particularly pronounced in a realist novel on the subject of child marriage that appeared
soon after the Age of Consent controversy, in 1894. Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala:
A story of Hindu life, hailed as the first Indian novel to be published in English by a native
woman,62 deemed unique for its ‘realist’ focus and praised as a ‘novel of reform’, had at its
heart the tragic figure of the child-wife.63 The composition of Kamala soon after the age of
consent controversy has been ascribed by Ellen Brinks to an effort to ‘keep reformist efforts
alive’. While Brinks acknowledges that the writing of Kamala was contemporaneous with
‘a strong public reaction against the 1891 Age of Consent Act’,64 her account overlooks
the Phulmoni case. But closer attention to the details of the case, and to its spectacular
reach, suggest that there might have been more to the imbrication of the novel and the
Act of 1891 than a mere coincidence of subject matter. This realist novel might be better
understood with reference to its formal connection with the autopsy and the inquest, as a
humanitarian narrative.65
Even as all bodily detail is conspicuously absent from the novel (as is the matter of
Kamala’s age, the reader learns only that her father-in-law addressed her as ‘little girl’), the
suggestive silences rely upon the prior circulation of corporeal detail for their effect. There
are hints aplenty to the bodily experiences of the child-wife in the novel: married long
before she started to menstruate, Kamala is pregnant at the end of the novel. Unwholesome
anecdotes are rendered superfluous precisely because the reader is all too capable of fill-
ing in these silences with details encountered elsewhere; the absence of information on
Kamala’s age and the vague hints regarding her relationship with the husband presume the
presence of extratextual detail. These details would have been available to reader, given the
wide invocation of Phulmoni’s case in particular, and the controversy over the age of con-
sent in general, in a variety of magazines, newspapers and privately published pamphlets
in the years immediately preceding the publication of Kamala. The fictitious Kamala, the
tragic heroine poised on the brink of childhood and precocious womanhood, could be
made to appear as though in flesh and blood, because the reader had already encountered
Phulmoni, the archetypical child-wife and ultimate ‘victim of culture’.
The realist novel thus relied on the precise detailing of the life of the protagonist, viv-
ifying the girl who had been but a corpse in the autopsy and the inquest, while obscuring
the particular bodily detail that had linked pain to its cause, and attached public sym-
pathy to social action, in the other genres. Consider the manner in which the Kamala’s
tortured life unfolds in the novel, which reproduces the focus on the body ‘as the object of
scientific discourse through which the causal links between an evil, a victim and a bene-
factor are forged’.66 The plot unfolds as Kamala’s first-born dies in infancy, her husband
takes up with a ‘fallen woman’ and Kamala ultimately survives her husband as a mourning
widow, neatly recalling the themes circulating within reformist debates on the ‘problem of
child marriage’. More importantly, while substituting medical details with a scrupulously
detailed narrative of Kamala’s passage from an innocent childhood, to precocious sexu-
ality in wifehood, to premature pregnancy and tragic loss in motherhood, to the loss of
her husband to adultery, and finally, to a self-denying widowhood, the novel replicates the
‘theories of causation’67 – the move from the recognition of evil, identifying its cause and
soliciting intervention – which were central to the humanitarian narrative. While the sim-
ple causality captured in the unravelling of Kamala’s life, as one tragic stage leads to the
next, was intended to generate the very ‘habits of feeling’ provoked by other types of the
humanitarian narrative, the moral of the story is properly understood with reference to the
details left unarticulated.
In analyzing the context in which this particular novel was produced, Brinks has sug-
gested that Kamala might be read as ‘countering’ the orthodox backlash unleashed in the
wake of the Age of Consent Act. Moving beyond the context of Kamala to its content
and form, we can see that the realist novel might more appropriately be interpreted as
20 I. Pande
a humanitarian narrative that shared its form (with the logic of identification–causation–
action) with the autopsy, the inquest and even the Age of Consent Act itself. For the Age
of Consent act too was a humanitarian narrative. Like the autopsy and the inquest, the Act
represented a move away from the hazy evocation of the suffering of young widows, or the
spectral fears of racial degeneration that characterized, for instance, Behramji Malabari’s
treatises on child marriage and infant widowhood,68 by identifying violence upon the body
as such, in the ‘distended uterus’ and the ‘globular haematoma’. Like the realist novel, the
1891 Act evoked the corporeal detail of the autopsic form with a modest gloss, by refer-
ring to the ‘death of the poor child-wife’ while relegating the post-mortem report to an
appendix.
In this section, by scrutinizing the dissemination of autoptic information on Phulmoni’s
body, I have argued, following Laqueur, ‘medical case histories and autopsies . . . constitute
humanitarian narratives not only because of their policy implications or because doctors
were leading figures in a range of social reform movements . . . but also because they make
bodies the common ground of humanitarian sensibility and explicate the history of their
suffering’.69 I have shown that the medical detail became quite central to the humanitarian
narrative on child marriage, and how Phulmoni’s death provided the flashpoint for the
amassing, ordering and intense circulation of bodily detail, ‘to make real the pain of others
and to offer a logic of specific intervention’.70 In a departure from Laqueur’s analysis
of the unfolding of the modern humanitarian narrative in its European context, however,
I have argued that just as the ‘details about suffering bodies of others’ served to channel
compassion into ‘a moral imperative to undertake ameliorative action’,71 they also served
to fan discussions on the cultural basis of crimes. In its dissemination into a wider public,
I have shown, the humanitarian discourse on child marriage became distanced from the
immediacy of the corpse and the blood of the lacerated vagina, but it never lost the dark
thread that tied it to the ethnological discourse on child rape of the mid-nineteenth century.
The late nineteenth century discourse on the ‘problem of child marriage’, in fore-
grounding the evidence of violation gleaned from a child-wife’s body, remained entrenched
in the earlier medico-legal ethnologic of child rape. It is highly relevant that the Age of
Consent Act of 1891 sought to target the problem of child marriage but indirectly, by rais-
ing the age of consent within marriage; this act (unlike other acts of legislation on child
marriage to follow in the twentieth century) conceived of child marriage as a problem of
the body – the common ground for pain, and the measure of somatic difference. In 1904,
therefore, Lyon’s textbook on medical jurisprudence continued to circulate the wisdom of
the cultural basis of child rape that Chevers had inaugurated in mid-nineteenth century.
Conclusion: child rape, humanitarianism and colonial (in)difference

Young children are more frequently raped than adult women as they are less capable of offer-
ing resistance, and as in India the practice of infant marriage creates a desire for intercourse
with immature girls. Besides an occasional motive for the rape is the old world superstition
common both to India and Europe, that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for venereal disease,
and the younger the girl the greater the probability of her being a virgin. The child-wives of
India are still, to a large extent, the victims of rape at the instance of their mature husbands,
notwithstanding the British Act of 1891 which raised the nubile age from ten to twelve years.
For there is reason to believe that premenstrual congress with children is still largely practiced
in this country under the cover of marriage. – IB Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence for India.72
In concluding this discussion on the autopsy and the inquest as humanitarian narratives,
I return to Lyon’s Medical Jurisprudence. At the turn of the century, as Lyon’s 1904 text
amply clarifies, the medical expert’s reading of bodily detail continued to be crucial in
rape cases. Much like Chevers’s text from the mid-nineteenth century, Lyon reiterated the
ubiquity of child rape: ‘about half of the victims were under 10 years of age, and in most of
the cases the children were badly hurt’.73 Lyon acknowledged a common explanation for
the high incidence of child rape: ‘children are less capable of offering resistance’. He also
put forth an explanation based on colonial difference: ‘infant marriage creates the desire
for intercourse with immature girls’. Much like Chevers before him, therefore, Lyon segued
from a culturally common explanation for the rape of children (‘intercourse with a virgin
is a cure for venereal disease’) to the uncommon or cultural basis of the crime in India
(‘the practice of infant marriages creates the desire for intercourse with immature girls’.)74
Through a close analysis of the bodily detail in the autopsy conducted upon the body of
a violated child, and the widespread social inquest into the violation of a child-wife, this
article has reflected upon this play of difference/indifference, of being caught between the
sentiments of sympathetic horror and alienated empathy, in the medical jurisprudential and
modern humanitarian narratives on the rape of ‘children’.
The ethnological and humanitarian discourses on child rape were both premised upon
an autopsic focus on the body. The focus on the body made possible the universal claims
– and the equivocation – of humanitarianism. I have read Phulmoni’s body as a common
ground for humane sympathy, following Laqueuer’s insight that ‘medical case histories and
autopsies . . . constitute humanitarian narratives . . . because they make bodies the com-
mon ground of humanitarian sensibility and explicate the history of their suffering’.75 In
a departure from this analysis of the unfolding of the modern humanitarian narrative in its
European context, however, this article has shown that just as the ‘details about suffering
bodies of others’ served to channel compassion into ‘a moral imperative to undertake ame-
liorative action’,76 they also served to fan discussions on the otherness of certain bodies and
the cultural basis of trauma. The recognition of the tension between difference/indifference
in colonial knowledge on rape, therefore, alerts us to the constant appeal to the ‘rule
of difference’ by which the modern humanitarian narrative operates. For if the mod-
ern humanitarian narrative focused on the body created a certain causal tie between
the body and its social context, thus provoking a call to action, as Laqueur suggests,
its darker thread also enabled a representation of colonialism itself as this ameliorative
action.
To put it another way, the autopsy and the inquest, in ‘constitut[ing] step-by-step
accounts of the history of the body in relation to itself and to social conditions’,77 entailed
two responses: while the suffering of a distant stranger induced sympathy within the self (as
suggested by the natural theory of sympathy),78 the sensational ascription of a stranger’s
pain to barbaric practices incited a certain horror of the other. This colonial underbelly of
modern humanitarianism might be better understood with reference to a suggestion left
unelaborated by Laqueur: the humanitarian narrative works not so much by arousing self-
less compassion for a distant stranger, but by provoking the very opposite sentiment, in
‘creating a sense of property in the objects of compassion’. ‘Implicitly claim[ing] propri-
etary interest in those whom they aid’, the humanitarian can ‘speak more authoritatively
for the sufferings of the wronged than those who suffer can speak themselves’.79 This
(imperialist) sense of property in the body of another, so fundamental to the humanitarian
narrative, shows up in relief in the colonial context.
But the antimonies of humanitarianism did not simply coincide upon Phulmoni’s body;
these contradictions are inherent to a humanitarian discourse premised on the quest for
other bodies. The recognition of the seamy side of the modern humanitarian narrative
enables us to historicize the continuing tension between humanitarianism and the ‘other’
body, the ‘troubled dialectic between violence and protection, between governance and
22 I. Pande
atrocity’.80 In the case analyzed here, I have highlighted one particular case that triggered
humanitarian action but did little to bring effective justice to the supposed objects of pro-
tection. The use of medical detail, instead of eliciting the truth of bodily violence, served
to somaticize difference. The rendition of the ‘common’ crime of rape as a cultural crime
in India not only failed to make the law more effective, but it also produced a curious
cultural backlash, wherein the bodily suffering of the child-wife was pronounced trivial in
relation to her symbolic burden as bearer of culture (as shown with the example of ortho-
dox discourse, in the second section ‘The inquest: the dissemination of medical detail in “a
painful case” ’). Further, the attention to the difference of rape in India obscured the misog-
yny of Anglo-Indian and English laws on rape as such, for the keen focus on the barbaric
‘norm’ of the rape of children in India effectively preserved the suspicion of the woman
rape victim in both legal traditions.

In scrutinizing the way in which the humanitarian narrative unfolded in the archive,
I am interested also by the historian’s complicity in disseminating its premises. Why do
historians continue to privilege a single case – captured in the autopsy of Phulmoni’s body
and the inquest into Hari Maiti’s crime – in all its clinical yet horror-inducing detail, in
accounts of the age of consent act of 1891?81 The first, simple, answer is ‘the case domi-
nates the archives’. While the extensive archive created in the wake of the Age of Consent
Act of 1891 certainly yields other cases, only one is richly detailed. When another (some-
what detailed) case is referred to in the legislative council, it is described as ‘exactly similar
to Hari Maiti’82 ; several others are simply glossed as cases of Harimaitism. While there
were numerous such cases mentioned in the accounts of Chevers, Lyon and the various
Law Reports, my object here is not to validate, disprove or quantify the prevalence of
certain kinds of rape in colonial India (of which there is much evidence). So I must ask
why a single case dominates the archives. And the more complicated answer is ‘a single
case, excruciatingly detailed and confirming difference, was (and is) sufficient to launch
the humanitarian narrative (and its racializing underside)’.83
Reading against the archival grain, historians of the Age of Consent Act have asked
us to scrutinize alternative impulses and hidden agendas behind the colonial state’s foun-
dational myth of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, and alerted us to
the various politics carried out over the ravaged body of the child-wife. By reading along
the grain, such that the archive lends itself to an ethnography of the colonial state and a
scrutiny of its self-presentation,84 I have shown how the state, in the last decade of the
nineteenth century, helped script a humanitarian narrative that hinged on eliciting sympa-
thy for strangers, through the clinical detailing of a single case. This one case was not only
enough, but it was also more effective in triggering the impulse to own (and other) and
to protect (and victimize). The morality of humanitarianism, in other words, did not come
undone in its colonial career; modern humanitarianism is fundamentally an invasive bodily
technology concerned with an obsessive creation, scrutiny and accounting of other bodies
that justifies intervention in more or less invasive forms.
My main object, in excavating the play of difference/indifference has been to fore-
ground the ways in which colonialism is the seamy side of humanitarianism; both rely on
the (other) body for its truth. The sight of pain, the revelation of causes, and the generation
of intervening action – this three-fold constitution of the humanitarian narrative maps all
too neatly onto what Lata Mani has described as the dominant discourse of colonialism
(usually) premised on the native woman’s body: we saw (with autopsic vision), we were
horrified (by the gory detail), and we intervened (with colonial zeal). While I have drawn
extensively on Laqueur to analyze the shared forms of the autopsy, the inquest and the
realist novel (to pick three examples that replicate the form of a humanitarian narrative),
I have also argued that these forms represent successive stages of the dissemination of bod-
ily detail. While the humanitarian narrative is certainly generated by medical detailing, its
success depends on obscuring the somatic roots, so that it appears resplendent, as though
based on religion, morality or some other ethereal value. The humanitarian narrative thus
shares its content and form with the dominant discourse of colonialism; both bear a specific
relationship to the (other) body, and each successive stage of dissemination obscures the
dark thread that stitches the humanitarian narrative to the bodies of others. The task of the
cultural historian ends here, with a reminder of the antinomies of humanitarianism. The
implications of this analysis for an understanding of ‘harmful traditional practices’85 – a
trope that remains resilient in our time and continues to rely for its truth on the traumatized,
violated and morbid bodies of others – need to be teased out with greater care. The circu-
lation of Phulmoni’s body serves as a reminder that even as the body seems to function as
an incontrovertible measure of trauma and a trigger for affective sentiment, such narratives
about the body are entirely reliant on political explication. The body thus remains a dan-
gerous referent for humanitarian justice in a context where global inequalities continue to
influence both the constitution, and the perception, of other, darker bodies.86
Acknowledgements
I thank the two referees for South Asian History and Culture for their insights, which helped me
frame this essay with greater precision, and Rachel Berger and Projit Mukharji for their input, and
for the opportunity to revisit some of this material.
Notes
1. Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence, 251. All subsequent references to this work draw on the third edi-
tion (1904), i.e. the first mention of this case. Trained at the University College, London, Lyon
joined the Indian Medical Service in 1865, and served as Professor of Anatomy, Chemistry and
Medical Jurisprudence at the Grant Medical College, Bombay until his retirement in 1892.
2. In a longer work on the co-constitution of ‘children’ and laws governing sexuality in late colo-
nial India, I read the 1891 act as an effort to align the biomedical and legal definitions of the
“child.” “Child” is not a stable object of protection here, but a fluid object of legal definition.
Likewise, “child rape” is not being used here as a simple description, but as a problem consti-
tuted by medico-legal discourse. I will drop the quotes around child rape in all subsequent uses
of the term.
3. The first edition had appeared in 1888; subsequent editors/co-authors kept the book updated
over the next few decades, adding new cases as points of illustration, in 1889, 1904, 1909,
1914, 1918, 1921, 1928 and 1935. Queen Empress v Hurry Mohun Maity was first mentioned
in the third edition and appeared thereafter.
4. Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence, 250. (My emphasis).
5. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” here p. 296.
6. The age of consent refers to the age at which the law recognized an individual’s eligibility to
consent to sexual intercourse, and was set at 10 years by the Indian Penal Code (1860). The
Age of Consent Bill of 1891 proposed to raise the age of consent for sexual intercourse for
Indian girls from 10 to 12 years, and to treat all sexual intercourse with married or unmarried
girls below that age as rape, punishable for up to ten years of imprisonment and transportation
for life. The act in its final form compromised on the issue of marriage, removing for husbands
the clause meting out transportation for life.
7. Heimsath, “The Origin and Enactment of the Indian Age of Consent Bill,” 491–504; Sarkar,
“Rhetoric Against the Age of Consent,” 1869–78; Sarkar, “Enfranchised Selves,” 545–65;
Anagol-McGinn, “The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered,” 100–18; Sinha, Colonial
Masculinity, 138–80; Banerji, “Age of Consent and Hegemonic Social Reform,” 21–44; and
Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal.
24 I. Pande
8. For recent historical works using “the body” as an analytical tool in colonial and post-colonial
contexts, see “Introduction,” Mills and Sen, Confronting the Body; Ballantyne and Burton,
Bodies in Contact; and Pierce and Rao, “Discipline and the Other Body.” In keeping a
Foucaultian analysis of the body which suggests that corporeal objectification is a creation
of modern medicine, this article elaborates upon how anatomical medicine enabled new ways
of seeing the body, just as morbid pathology created the lesion as the site of disease, and the
post-mortem constituted a narrative about death that unfolded as a story of cause and effect,
in colonial India. For a general engagement with this understanding of the body, see Jones and
Porter, Reassessing Foucault.
9. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details and the Humanitarian Narrative,” 177.
10. I am echoing Elizabeth Kolsky’s formulation “. . . the colonial legal treatment of the ‘unsen-
sational’ crime of rape was itself rather unsensational . . . In the case of rape, it was the rule of
colonial indifference that prevailed.” Kolsky, “The Rule of Colonial Indifference,” 1095.
11. Chevers, Manual, 460–1. (My emphasis).

12. Chevers, Manual. This was the first Indian publication on medical jurisprudence, intended
by the author to supplement standard authorities such as Alfred Taylor’s Manual of Medical
Jurisprudence by taking into account the peculiarities of crimes in India, a task for which
Chevers felt he was well suited, given the many official positions he had filled since joining
the Indian Medical Service in 1846 (including a stint as Secretary to the Director General of
the Medical Department of Fort William, Calcutta). He was also invested in the task, given
his pedagogical engagements – as Principal of the Calcutta Medical College, Professor of
Medicine and First Physician of the College Hospital, and University Examiner in Medicine
and Midwifery at Calcutta University. The Manual first appeared in 1855 and went through
three editions within six years. It was awarded the Swiney Prize by the Royal College of
Physicians in London, used extensively in colonial courts and repeatedly quoted in later works,
including that of Isidore Bernadette Lyon.
13. The law defined rape as sexual intercourse by a man with a woman against her will and without
her consent, and had deemed consent irrelevant in the case of girls below 10 years of age. The
1891 Age of Consent Bill raised the age of consent to 11 for the woman/child in marriage, and
to 12, without the marital state. For a comparison of Anglo-Indian and Islamic laws on rape
in India, and a comprehensive discussion on the similarities and divergences of medico-legal
interpretations of rape in England and India, see Kolsky, “The Body Evidencing the Crime,”
109–30.
14. Kolsky, “The Body,” 111.
15. Chevers, Manual, 1. Original emphasis.
16. Ibid., 5.
17. Ibid., 13.
18. Mani, “Multiple Mediations,” 18.
19. For a thought-provoking discussion on the body and gender in understandings of the human
and discourses of humanitarianism, see Sturman, “Gender and the Human,” 228–34, as well as
the other articles in this forum.
20. Chevers, Manual, 461.
21. Ibid., 515–18.
22. I should clarify at the outset, lest this argument about the “sensationalization” of the rape of
children in mid-nineteenth century India, be misread as a denial of its existence, or worse still,
a perverse defence of patriarchal violence: I understand rape as a violent crime, which was (and
is) horrifyingly prevalent in India, and elsewhere. Far from denying or defending such violence,
my critique is intended to emphasize how the colonial reading of rape, in racializing a com-
mon crime, preserved the misogyny of the common law on rape in the Anglo-Indian tradition.
For a comprehensive and provocative historical account of rape, law and the rapist in mod-
ern times (not quite everywhere, as the title suggests, but in the Anglo-American-Australian
world), see Bourke, Rape. While pointing to the ubiquity of rape as a violent crime to reject a
narrowly racialist or culturalist reading of it, I am also mindful of the critical insistence on the
heterogeneity of rape and the rape victim. For a careful delineation of the difference between
understanding rape primarily as the violation of an individual body (as it is in the liberal fem-
inist tradition) and as a tool of violence against (or economic oppression of) an entire group,
see Sundar Rajan, Real and Imagined Women, 77.
24. “In these 66 cases, the ages of the females are stated as follow: Four years, 1; six, 2; between
six and seven, 1; seven, 5; seven and eight, 2; eight, 1; nine, 3; nine and ten, 4; ten, 8; ten
and eleven, 2; eleven, 1; twelve and thirteen, 1; thirteen, 5; young girl, age not mentioned, 1;
fourteen, 1; fifteen, 1; fifteen and sixteen, 1; sixteen, 2; adult women, 19; widows, 5.” Chevers,
Manual, 467.
25. Chevers, Manual, 467–9.
26. This propensity to lie about rape in India, he concluded, in keeping with his ethnological lean-
ings, had to do with cultural difference: “The crime of Adultery is punished, both socially and
legally, with so much severity in this country that, in many cases there has been strong reason
to believe that women detected in its commission have charged their paramours with Rape . . .
Wherever it is possible, the opinion of a Medical Officer is obtained by the judicial author-
ities in cases of this kind; but it frequently happens that the reports of native midwives, or
of other and probably less intelligent females have to be taken.” Chevers, Manual, 474. With
these biases against speaking witnesses, it is no surprise that Chevers eulogized the corpse as
the “silent witness who never lies . . . ”.
27. Kolksy has also commented on the higher rate of reporting and of conviction in the case of
“girls” as against “women”; 65% of the cases recorded in the reports of the Nizamut Adalat
between 1805 and 1850 involved girl-victims, and 67% of these ended in convictions, as against
the 25% rate of conviction in the cases involving women. See “Table 1” in Kolksy, “Rule of
Colonial Indifference,” 1100. It is worth noting that the line between girl and woman was
wholly dependent on the age of consent at the time (10 years), confirming my contention that it
is important to historicize the constitution of the child as object of protection by laws governing
sexuality (instead of assuming the existence of a child as an “a priori object” of protection.)
The definition of child (and hence the accounting of the rape of children) would inevitably have
changed with the new age of consent in 1891.
28. Chevers, Manual, 467. Statutory rape is defined as sex with a person below the age of consent;
such cases are treated as rape irrespective of the victim’s assent or the absence of violence.
In India, the age of consent was set at 10 (9 for wives) in 1860, and changed to 12 (11 for
wives) in 1891.
29. Chevers, Manual, 479–84. Original emphasis.
30. Ibid., 480. Original emphasis.
31. Ibid., 480.
32. Ibid., 481.
33. While this is not the appropriate place to detail my thoughts on the many implications of the
colonial discourse on what I have (with deliberate anachronism) termed “child rape,” it is worth
thinking about the ways in which the focus on “child rape” brushed over the horror or the
violence of rape as such, and obscured the problem of marital rape in other cultural contexts.
35. Ibid., 5.
36. Ibid., v.
37. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.
38. Kolsky, “The Body,” 110.
39. Ibid., 123
40. “Case of Queen Empress v Hari Mohan Maiti,” IOR/P/4103. All emphases mine. Slightly
varying renditions of the name Phulmoni are reproduced here, in fidelity to the specific sources.
The police surgeon who conducted the autopsy is referred to as the Police Inspector in this
particular document.
41. “The branch of the law which has no connection with this case is the law of rape,” clarified
Justice Wilson, as “in the case of married females, as you probably know, the law of rape does
not apply as between husband and wife after the age of ten years.” India Law Reports, 18 Cal
49, 1891.
42. For the changing legal definitions of the “child,” the solidification of the boundaries between
child and adult, and the emergence of the child as juridical subject at the turn of the twentieth
century, see Pande, “Coming of Age.” For a discussion on the referencing of sexual norms in
the medico-legal definition of girl-children as well boy-children, see Pande, “Sorting Boys and
Men.”
43. Laqueur, “Bodies,” 177.
44. Ibid.
26 I. Pande
45. Ibid., 182.

46. Ibid., 188. For a further discussion on the counter-intuitively recent origins of the practice of
turning to the corpse to ascertain the truth of violation, and to wrest human rights, see also
Laqueur, “The Dead Body.”
48. “Statement of reasons and objects, Age of Consent Bill,” Legislative Department, Nos. 1–73
(A), (NAI). The statement clarified, “The limit at which the age is now fixed favours the pre-
mature consummation by adult husbands of marriages with children who have not reached
the age of puberty, and is thus, in the unanimous opinion of medical authorities, productive
of grievous suffering and permanent injury to child-wives and of physical deterioration to the
community to which they belong. It has therefore been determined to raise the age of consent
to twelve . . . ”. It is important to recall that a hectic discussion on child marriage reform had
already been generated in the 1880s. The Parsi reformer, Behramji Malabari was very active
in the movement; see especially his “Notes of Child Marriage and Enforced Widowhood.”
A major public debate had raged following the 1885 appearance of Rukhmabai’s four articles
on child marriage and enforced widowhood in the leading daily, the Times of India, where the
author had recounted her own misery, and that of her friends, due to early marriage. For a full-
length study of the Rukhmabai case, see Chandra, Enslaved Daughters. The hectic discussion
generated by Rukhmabai’s case was widely referenced in reformist circles before the sensa-
tional Calcutta case made headlines in the 1890s, and overwhelmed debates in the Legislative
Assembly.
49. “Appendix A,” IOR/P/4103.
50. Janerilal Umashankar Yajnik, Chairman of Public Meeting held at Bombay on 22 February, to
Secretary to Government of India, IOR/L/PJ/6/299.
51. Risley, “Hindu Infant Marriage.”
52. “Speeches in the Supreme Legislative Council at the passing of the age of consent bill,” 42–9.
Besides invoking the medical details in Chevers’s text, this speaker also references two other
statements of medical detail: the resolution of “the Shobha Bazar memorialists . . . in the name
of medical practitioners of different standings,” and the petition of 55 lady-doctors giving “the
harrowing details of suffering and cruel deaths among thirteen cases of child-wives which came
before them within few years’ practice” (sic.).
54. Mr. A Sankariah, President-Founder, Hindu Sabha, Trichoor, to the Secretary of the
Government of India, Legislative Dept, dated 22 November, 1890. Papers relative to the Bill
to amend the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1882 (Age of Consent
Bill), IOR/L/PJ/6/297.
55. The more moderate reading was delivered by B. L. Gupta who, in his response to the Age
of Consent Bill sent to the Government of Bengal, clarified that while cases of Harimaitism
were “no doubt rare,” as “the husbands are often lads of from 16 to 20,” and because “sud-
den and great force is seldom used,” grievous harm to infant wives was not limited to the
‘injury of the exact kind . . . caused in Hurry Maiti’s case.” Just as serious, he emphasized,
was the injury caused by “the forced inducement of unnaturally early menstruation, and by
premature child-bearing,” to which he attributed a “breakdown of the constitution, disease,
weakness and suffering in the woman, and physical deterioration in the race.” Thus while
seizing upon the medical detail as evidence of pain, and of such bodily pain as necessitating
reforming action, BL Gupta repudiated any sensational, ethnologizing conclusions regarding
“Harimaitism.” B. L. Gupta, District and Sessions Judge of Cuttack, to the Chief Secretary to
the Government of Bengal. IOR/ L/PJ/6/299.
56. In fact, the body was increasingly admitted as the common ground in the battle of two dis-
courses on morality, as the Hindu orthodoxy were pushed to rationalize the “moral” duty of
the husband to perform the garbhadhan ceremony in proto-eugenic terms. For more on the
garbhadhan and the widespread controversy over the Act and the militant (Hindu) nation-
alist backlash against the act, see especially Sinha, “Potent Protests: The Age of Consent
Controversy,” in Colonial Masculinity; and Sarkar, “Rhetoric against the Age of Consent.”
57. “Appendix B,” to The Full Proceedings of a Public Meeting Held on 22 January, 1891, at the
residence of the Late Maharajah Kamal Krishna Deb Bahadur, Sobhabazar Rajbati, Calcutta,
to Protest Against the age of Consent Bill, 35.
58. Full Proceedings, 44.
59. Ibid., 46.

60. Newspaper articles that cited the case include: (from Bengal) “A Barbarous Custom,” The
Liberal, 3 August 1890; “Hindu Marriage Customs and the Age of Consent.” Indian Mirror,
7 August 1890; “The Case of Hari Mohun Moitee.” The Bengalee, 2 August 1890; “Much Ado
about Nothing.” Saturday Herald, 2 August 1890; “The Age of Consent for Hindoo Marriage.”
Saturday Herald, 9 August 1890; Indian Nation, 7 August 1890; Samachar, 30 July 1890;
Sanjivani, 22 August 1890; Sakti, 5 August 1890; (from Madras) “A Horrible Result of Child
Marriage.” The Hindu, 1 July 1890; “The Calcutta Press and the Foolmony Case.” The Hindu,
7 July 1890; “The Foolmony Case.” 14 July 1890; “The Calcutta Childwife Case.” The Hindu,
2 August 1890; “The Age of Consent Question.” The Hindu, 8 August 1890; “The Calcutta
Public Health Society on Child Marriage.” The Hindu, 15 September 1890; (from Bombay)
“Cruelty to Child-Wives.” Indian Spectator, 13 July 1890; “A Painful Case.” Mahratta, 6 July
1890; “Calcutta Childwife Case.” Mahratta, 10 August 1890; Indu Prakash, 30 June 1890;
Subodh Patrika, 13 July 1890; (From Sind) Phoenix, 25 June 1890. See IOR/L/PJ/6/288. The
newspapers variously emphasized the degrees of pain aroused by the case, commenting on the
death “under painful circumstances of a young and innocent child”; underlining how the evils
of Indian marriage were “painfully exposed by the case of Hurry Mohun Maity”; emphasizing
how the flaws with extant laws were “brought into prominence by painful domestic tragedies
such as the one recently reported from Calcutta”; and asserting that the law was such that each
day “some fresh victims cry shame on it in the painful agonies of death.”
61. “Speeches,” 52. My emphasis. Another example of the circulation of “Phulmoni” as a textbook
case comes from the Bamabodhini Patrika, a popular woman’s magazine, which depicted the
case as a trigger for action on the age of consent act, and recognized that an interest in her
case had led to the formation of a committee on the matter in England (the article named Max
Muller, Monier-Williams, Miss Cobb, Sir William Hunter and Lord Tennyson as members).
While recognizing the humanitarian narrative that had emerged around Phulmoni’s case, how-
ever, the editors urged a policy of non-interference by the government. Or, as the editors stated,
critiquing the metaphor of colonial government as cure for native pathology, “Pathologies can
be cured by making the patient swallow a pill, but culture is not an edible object.” Anon.,
“Bibahasanskar sambandhe Malabari Mahashoyer Chesta.”
62. Brinks, “Gendered Spaces in Kamala.” The original title was Kamala: The Story of a Hindu
Life.
63. For a discussion of Satthianadhan’s Kamala as exemplary in its “realist focus” and an “archival
treasure” see Satthianadhan, “Introduction.” While broader conclusions on the early Indian
novel written in English, or a close reading of this novel, are well beyond the scope of this
article, I find this realist novel a useful illustration of the humanitarian narrative.
64. Brinks, “Gendered Spaces,” 149.
65. Laqueur points to the common threads that bind the autopsy, inquest and the realist novel,
which allow readers to recognize it as a humanitarian narrative: “It is about what really hap-
pened. The body, almost by convention, is recognizable as a shared locus of sympathy binding
reader to text, and both to social context.” Laqueur, “Bodies,” 195.
67. Ibid., 204.
68. Gidumal, Life and Life-work of Behramji M Malabari.
69. Laqueur, “Bodies,” 182
70. Ibid.
71. The eighteenth century, he argues, saw the production of a new cluster of narratives, which pre-
sented the pains and deaths of ordinary people with extreme detail, so as to “connect the actions
of its readers with the suffering of its subjects.” This aesthetic enterprise, he suggests, “is char-
acterized in the first place by its reliance of detail as the sign of truth.” Laqueur, “Bodies,”
177.
72. Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence, 247.
73. Elsewhere he clarified that the age of the victim had to be carefully determined by medical
scrutiny, “as nearly nine-tenths of cases of rapes in India are in children and the question arises
whether of not she is under twelve years of age so as to be capable of giving consent to the act
. . . ”. Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence, 258.
74. Lyon, Medical Jurisprudence, 247. It is important to note that the narrative was not static:
the literature on medical jurisprudence would respond to the new humanitarian focus on the
28 I. Pande
child – and a greater attention to age – in the twentieth century. While I cannot detail the
transition at length here, it is significant that in a departure from Chevers’s work, Lyon’s later
editions included entire sections on the medical determination of the age of the victim and
perpetrator, especially of sexual crimes.
76. The eighteenth century, he argues, saw the production of a new cluster of narratives, which pre-
sented the pains and deaths of ordinary people with extreme detail, so as to “connect the actions
of its readers with the suffering of its subjects.” This aesthetic enterprise, he suggests, “is char-
acterized in the first place by its reliance of detail as the sign of truth.” Laqueur, “Bodies,”
177.
78. For a critique of a “natural theory of compassion” – sighting suffering as a trigger for sympa-
thy – and a brief engagement with the ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume on the subject of
sympathy (as insufficient accounts of understanding this phenomenon in India), see “Birth of
the Subject,” in Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 124–9. While this is not the place for a
specific engagement with Chakrabarty’s ideas on the matter, I take on board his insistence on
the heterogeneity of concepts (such as rights, subjectivity, citizen, the body, sexuality) in their
colonial translation, but I have also signalled my caution about dismissing categories such as
sexuality or the body to understanding concepts of the self, or notions of sympathy, in colonial
(Bengali) modernity.
80. Pierce and Rao, “Discipline and the Other Body,” 2–3.
81. The case has a prominent place in most accounts of the age of consent cited in notes 5–9 above.
Another phenomenon that unites these highly sophisticated works might be understood with
reference to an observation about “the peculiarities of much history of childhood, where the
historian’s propriety of response is expressed through a kindness to long-dead children, and a
dramatic rehearsal of horror at conditions they might have experienced.” Steedman, Strange
Dislocations, 6.
82. Referred to as the “unreported case of Kali Kaora decided by the Calcutta High Court (Louis
Jackson and JJ White) on the 28 August 1877.” IOR/L/PJ/6/299.
83. For an argument on the politics of archival absence/presence, with a focus on legal medicine
(and a reading of Chevers’s conclusion that sodomy was everywhere and therefore without a
trace in the archive), see Arondekar, “Without a Trace” and Arondekar, For the Record.
84. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
85. UNICEF, Early Marriage.
86. Harvey, “The Body as Referent.”
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Tennessee, Knoxville]

On: 01 January 2015, At: 08:11

South Asian History and Culture

Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.750453

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Phulmoni’s body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian

Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Introduction: the ‘textbook case’

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The autopsy: child rape, medical jurisprudence and colonial (in)difference

The inquest: the dissemination of medical detail in ‘a painful case’

Further afield, the ethnographer HH Risley reiterated of the ‘terrible occurrence in

Conclusion: child rape, humanitarianism and colonial (in)difference

rape victim in both legal traditions.

11. Chevers, Manual, 460–1. (My emphasis).

45. Ibid., 182.

59. Ibid., 46.

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