Love and the Law: Love-Marriage in Delhi

In the late 1860s, the colonial state received a petition signed by Keshub Chandra Sen of the Brahmo Samaj to legislate for marriages amongst their members, such that they could freely marry according to their ‘rites of conscience’. Paying little attention to the specific demands and circumstances of the Keshubite petition, the Governor General's Legislative Council began to consider the introduction of a civil marriage law for all Indians, so that those choosing to dissent from the religious practices of their marriage rites could find state sanction for their acts even if they were disowned by their families, castes or ethno-religious communities. The debate that followed the publication of this intention, presented ‘native’ society in a state of anxious turmoil, eager to represent itself as both morally and culturally superior in matters of marriage and kinship relations as opposed to the degenerate ‘Europeans’. Using archival petitions from Indians appealing against the legislation of the first civil marriage law in the late nineteenth century (‘Act III of 1872’), in this paper I detail some of the ways in which love-marriage couples have historically come to inhabit a social space of extreme moral ambivalence. Despite the enormous significance of this nineteenth-century debate, as well as the importance of civil marriage legislation in a country with contradictory and conflicting ‘personal laws’, there has been virtually no academic work (historical or anthropological) that addresses the import of ‘Act III of 1872’ and its legacy to post-independence India. However, the law for civil marriage was nonetheless passed (albeit in a truncated form), thus opening up a theoretical space within which any two Indians could legitimately marry out of choice and love rather than by the dictates of ‘birth’.