Brian Hatcher’s Against High-Caste Polygamy: A Colonial-Era Appeal to Abolish Kulinism in Bengal offers an engaging translation of pandit Ishvarchandra Vidyasagara’s (1820-1891) 1871 reformist indictment of Bengal’s upper-caste marital customs, Bahubibāha rahita haoẏā ucita ki nā (“Whether Polygamy ought to be abrogated”).
Against High-Caste Polygamy is an important addition to the literature on 19th-century Hindu reformism, as it is the first English translation of the controversial Bahubibāha. Students of colonial South Asia will readily acknowledge its significance, for the arguments of Vidysagara and other Bengali reformists have long constituted a key component of the archive out of which the history of 19th-century religious and social reform has been written. Yet even to date only a handful of Bengali reformist treatises has been translated, and very few translations are simultaneously as accessible and as carefully annotated as Hatcher’s translation of Bahubibāha rahita haoẏā ucita ki nā.
The significance of Hatcher’s efforts to ensure that Vidyasagara’s arguments are more widely available cannot be overstated. In 2003 Hatcher translated Vidyasagara’s 1850 essay Bālyabibāher dosha (“The Evils of Child Marriage”), arguing that it was time to pay greater heed to “the wealth of reform literature in Bengali that still awaits serious scholarly attention” (“The Evils of Child Marriage,” Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 3, 477). Hatcher has since worked to fill the gap, publishing a justly acclaimed translation of Vidyasagara’s most celebrated polemic, the two-part 1855 Bidhabābibāha pracalita haoẏā ucita ki nā etadbishaẏaka prastāba (“On the question of whether widows ought to be able to remarry or not”) and issuing translations of other reformist texts. With the publication of Against High-Caste Polygamy Hatcher now adds Vidyasagara’s last and perhaps most substantive case for thorough social reform to the list of reformist arguments available in English.
Bahubibāha rahita haoẏā ucita ki nā, as Hatcher explains in a detailed introduction, is “not a treatise against polygamy in general” (8), but rather an attack on the “iniquitous custom” (kutsita pratha)—Vidyasagara’s own words—of Kulinism, a complex set of hierarchal arrangements that disciplined the lives of most upper-caste Bengali Hindus. Kulinism prescribed the division of Bengal’s Brahmins and Kayasthas into internal ranks, placing families of kulin status—the most distinguished rank—at the top of the pile. It also notoriously hitched the ability of upper-caste families to claim or maintain their standing in the social and ritual order to their ability to wed their nubile women to grooms of kulin status.
Throughout the text, Vidyasagara insists that marriage under Kulinism debased both kulin grooms and their brides and effectively perverted marriages into an obscene trade: the families of nubile kulin women—expected either to wed kulin grooms or to remain unmarried—found themselves competing with those families of lower ritual rank that sought to improve their standing by acquiring as in-laws kulin grooms willing to wed brides of lower status in exchange for riches. Vidyasagara lost no time in documenting the extent to which the pursuit of hypergamous polygamy under Kulinism was open to self-interested abuse and commodification. Kulin grooms willing to marry women of lower ritual status could spend their lives in the pursuit of one profitable marriage after another, with little or no regard for the ensuing lives of privation, neglect, and widowhood that their many brides would almost invariably experience as a result of these marriages of interest. It is against these “professional” high-status grooms—the “self-broken kulins”—that Vidyasagara issues his sternest condemnation: “No one on this earth is as cruel and sinful as the broken kulins. They know no mercy, justice, self-respect or shame. There is nothing to compare them to. They can only be compared to themselves” (71).
Ultimately, however, Bahubibāha rahita haoẏā ucita ki nā argues that the moral iniquity intrinsic to upper-caste marriage practices was not the result of the moral shortcoming of individuals, including the much-reviled self-broken kulins, but of Kulinism as a whole. “The custom of polygamy,” Vidyasagara concludes, “is of immeasurable harm” (89) and the colonial government ought to bring about its abrogation. Many of the iniquities Vidyasagara had earlier condemned—such as the prevalence of child marriage in Brahmin households and the enforcement of celibate widowhood amongst Bengal’s upper-castes—are also described or hinted at in the text as perniciously logical consequences of Kulinism itself.
In a dazzling display of scholastic logic and erudition, Vidyasagara insists that the custom he is objecting to has no true authoritative grounding in the shastra, and is in fact contrary to dharma—an argument similar to the one he had used in 1855 to disavow the norms that enjoined the celibacy of widows. To these two objections to kulin polygamy, Vidyasagara adds five more, many of which rest on what Hatcher calls an “imaginative sociology . . . demonstrating the ravages wrought by Kulin marriages in his own day” (34).
Hatcher’s Against High-Caste Polygamy is a significant scholarly achievement that helps us understand how, even amongst upper-caste men such as Vidyasagara, a new and emergent “ethic of recognition” allowed the redescription and revaluation of previously cherished practices and institutions—including the entire social arrangement of Kulinism— and enabled previously disregarded forms of gendered hurt and oppression to be acknowledged (18). Precisely because Hatcher has produced such a commendable translation, readers may be disappointed by his editorial decision to omit from his translation Bahubibāha rahita haoẏā ucita ki nā’s polemical second volume, published in 1873. In volume two Vidyasagara bitingly responded to the rejoinders of a growing number of adversaries and deepened an already bitter and very public controversy in which even the noted novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay would take part. Hatcher rightly insists the second volume is “less accessible,” but his singular capacity to translate Vidyasagara’s propositions into fluent, contemporary English and to flesh out the context of Vidyasagara’s interventions would have helped readers navigate the even more pugnacious lines penned by this remarkable protagonist of colonial Bengal’s intellectual life.
Thomas Newbold is an assistant professor at BRAC University (Dhaka, Bangladesh).
Thomas Newbold
Date Of Review:
September 30, 2024