Hindu Widow Marriage.

• Author: Brick, David
• Position: Book review

Hindu Widow Marriage. By ISHVARACHANDRA VID-YASAGAR. Translated with an introduction and critical notes by BRIAN A. HATCHER. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2012. Pp. xxv + 242. $70 (cloth).

Ishvarachandra Vidyasagar (1820-91), a prominent Sanskrit scholar and educator of nineteenth-century Bengal, is best known today for his role as a leading social reformer during the culturally tumultuous period of British rule in India. According to practically all accounts his most important writings comprise his two essays advocating the practice of Hindu widow marriage, and the volume under review consists primarily of an annotated translation of these. Originally composed in Bengali and published in 1855, these fascinating documents are widely recognized as having played a significant role in the passage of the seminal Hindu Widow's Re-Marriage Act of 1856. The first of Vidyasagar's writings in support of Hindu widow marriage is a relatively short essay that lays down his basic argument in favor of the practice--an argument that is fundamentally exegetical in nature and hinges very much upon a particular verse of the Parasara Smrti (4.28). The second is more than ten times as long (although published only nine months later!) and consists primarily of detailed refutations of the various objections raised against his earlier essay. Here too the tenor of the debate is fundamentally exegetical with the assorted Dharmasastras and to a lesser extent Puranas serving as the authoritative scriptures upon which all admissible arguments must rely for support.

Scholars of Dharmasastra, especially of medieval Dharmasastra, will find much that is familiar, but also much that is new in the colonial debate on widow marriage reflected in Vidyasagar's writings. As Brian Hatcher rightly suggests in the introduction to his translation of these works, Vidyasagar's fundamental genius "lies in his decision to create a modern species of traditional legal reflection that could accomplish the goal of advancing a contemporary reformist cause in terms faithful to his own intellectual heritage" (p. 40). That is to say, the form and method of Vidyasagar's arguments in favor of widow marriage provide a clear demonstration of how pre-modern modes of juridical argumentation within the Hindu tradition persisted during the colonial period, where they were deeply influenced, but not wholly supplanted, by modern, Western modes of thought. Hence, one might cite Vidyasagar's essays...