Sacred Laws, Civil Wrongs: Gender and the Raj’s Reframing of Minority Women’s Rights in Colonial India

This paper interrogates the disjuncture between the empire’s reformist rhetoric and the everyday legal realities experienced by Muslim, Dalit and Christian women between 1872 and 1947. Deploying gender theory forged in the Global South, it asks: How did apparently emancipatory statutes re-inscribe minority women as objects rather than subjects of rights, and how do those colonial maneuvers continue to shape post-colonial debates on personal law, secularism and sexual justice? Focusing on three landmark enactments :the Indian Christian Marriage Act (1872), the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act (1934) and the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act (1937) ,the study reveals a recurring colonial pattern. First, the Raj’s label of indigenous customs :Islamic bride-price, matrilineal devadasi inheritance, or anti-caste Christian unions as “barbaric” practices requiring civilising intervention. Second, the new “modern” codes selectively criminalised women’s customary protections while quietly reinforcing male religious authority, caste hierarchies and racialised domestic norms. The result was a triple dispossession: women lost customary safety nets, gained only fragile legal personhood, and were denied economic restitution or state guardianship. Conversion, scriptural adherence or ritual dedication became double-edged swords: they cut women loose from older communal obligations yet implanted new civil disabilities sanctified simultaneously by state, church and mosque. By tracing how colonial sovereignty instrumentalised the figure of the “oppressed minority woman,” the paper demonstrates that imperial feminism was never a gift but a technique of rule ,one that nationalist and communal movements later inherited. The legacy endures in contemporary battles over triple talaaq, temple entry or Christian divorce, where negotiation of minority women is still between the promises of secular equality and the perils of majoritarian protection.