Overview

Against High-Caste Polygamy offers a complete, annotated translation of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar's 1871 tract arguing against the practice of high-caste Kulin marriage in Bengal. Vidyasagar published this work fifteen years after passage of the Hindu Widow's Remarriage Act, which owed so much to his earlier reform leadership. However, in the wake of the Rebellion of 1857 British and Indian attitudes toward official intervention in customary practices underwent a sea change.The British were increasingly reluctant to create unrest, while many Indian leaders began to question the legitimacy of seeking government assistance for social change. The age of active collaboration between the British officials and Indian reformers had passed. In Against High-Caste Polygamy, Vidyasagar demonstrates both his continued faith in an earlier approach to reform and his frustration at the new tenor of the times.Against High-Caste Polygamy is not a treatise on polygamy in general. Rather, it addresses a subset of polygamous marriage as practiced among the highest Hindu castes in eastern India, or what then constituted the Bengal Presidency of British India. This particular form of polygamy came to be known in English as Kulinism, from the term for a person who holds high clan rank (known in Bengali as a kulina). As Vidyasagar shows, Kulinism rests on a highly articulated and historically entrenched system of status and rank that trapped women in wretched domestic situations. Against High-Caste Polygamy is Vidysagar's attempt to open the eyes of Bengali readers as well as the government to the extent and dire ramifications of polygamous practices that often left women ostracized, neglected, and abused. This translation makes Vidyasagar's polemic available to English-language readers for the first time. It features a scholarly introduction, extensive notes, and a variety of supplementary critical tools.

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9780197675908

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Against High-Caste Polygamy departs from this pattern, by engaging a range of other rhetorical, interpretive, and explanatory methods. One does find the necessary overview of Hindu legal texts, but readers will discover much more. * Brian A. Hatcher, Packard Professor of Theology in the Department of Religion at Tufts University. *

13/03/2023 Main NY C Sales C 23/07/2023 54.00 HRG HBLL HBTQ

Author Information

Brian A. Hatcher is Professor of Religion at Tufts University. He is the author of Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal and Hinduism Before Reform and the translator of Hindu Widow Marriage by Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in the Comparative Study of Religion in 1992, specializing in the transformation of religion and intellectual life in colonial South Asia.

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