A child marriage controversy: difficult conversations within a network of British and Bengali religious liberals and social reformers in the 1870s

This paper focuses on the controversy that erupted in 1878 when Keshub Chunder Sen, charismatic leader of the influential Bengal-centred movement for religious and social reform, the Brahmo Samaj of India, arranged the marriage of his daughter to the Maharaja of the princely state of Cooch Behar.  He went ahead despite both parties being below the marriage age (14 for girls and 18 for boys) stipulated in the Marriage Act which he had a few years before successfully campaigned for the colonial government to introduce for members of the Brahmo religious community, to reflect its rejection of the custom of child marriage. Sen’s actions had major repercussions, leading a ‘female emancipationist’ group to split from him and form a new organisation. It also sent shockwaves through the transnational network of liberal Christian and theist supporters of the Brahmo Samaj. The paper focuses on the reactions to Sen’s action among his key British ‘kindred spirits’, and explores the difficult private conversations and public debates that ensued within and between India and Britain.  It shows that this controversy was not a simple case of East-West division around a question of women’s rights, but rather a complex transnational set of reactions.  In particular, the paper explores the intersecting cultural politics of gender, race and religion in the contrasting responses of  three of Sen’s key supporters in Britain: feminist, writer and liberal Christian Sophia Dobson Collet, feminist and theist Frances Power Cobbe, and leading Orientalist scholar and liberal Anglican Max Müller.