Key Terms

 Age of consent bill: Pushed for by reformists in India that increases the age at
which a girl can be eligible for marriage.

 Garbhadan: Obligatory cohabitation between husband and wife immediately

after the wife reaches puberty. (Within 15 days of her first period)

Text Points

 Tanika Sarkar provides a necessary counter to all-encompassing views of

Orientalism, pointing out that it’s simplistic to point at the West for the totality of
power structures in the global South. In reality, colonialism has not only
destroyed existing systems of the colonized but enforced certain pre-existing
structures such as the patriarchy. 

 This provokes an ethnocentric viewpoint which discards all outside influences as

corrupt and declares everything that vaguely contests the Western view as
perfectly reasonable, even practices that exist to subjugate women.

 The domestic sphere was a sacred space in colonial India, and the last bastion of
their culture for many. It was to be defended from British influence at all costs.
The British were not allowed to interfere with matters of the home.

 Instead of trying to hegemonize this area, the British left it alone. In a notable
court case where a widow defended herself against accusations of adultery, the
lawyer appealed to the duties of a woman within the caste structure, and both
British and the judge/jury accepted these arguments despite not being strictly law
based. Customs and norms were more important to law than legislation.

 The woman’s body was voyeuristically marked by religion as destined to bear

unimaginable pain in the name of love for the men in their life, and this was
romanticized as a divine choice in the case of sati and child marriage, despite the
horrific reality of the situations. This was presented by nationalist as a higher
form of union than the Western world, a marriage between “two souls” even
though the expectation to bear pain for it fell solely on the woman,

 The Rukma Bai case challenged this widespread notion of love, redefining
marriage as force. It showed the incompatibility of the sanctity of Hindu marriage
vs a woman’s free will. When Phulmonee was killed through marital rape at the
age of ten, this becomes undeniable. 

 Even the discourse around “consent” primarily centered around what age a girl’s
body matured enough for sex and objectification, with the actual consent, aka the
woman’s choice to partake in it, was not even considered.
 Sarkar ends with recounting the account of another girl, testifying against her
husband who violated and abused her. Despite her testimony, the husband was
discharged of all wrongdoing by the British and the girl legally had to return to
him.