On Feminicide and Empire: Law and the Killing of Women in British Colonial India

Colonial violence was not gender neutral. What happens when we frame the violence of the British Empire not only in genocidal terms—as recent historiographical trends suggest—but also in feminicidal terms, as a system of government complicit in the killing of women? I argue that feminicide offers a key framework to analyze the gendered violence of empire. Most feminist scholarship on feminicide focuses on gender-related killings in contemporary global contexts. I argue that feminicide in South Asia has a complicated past with roots in colonial law and policy. The British Empire in India was built on the structural subordination of women and the legalization of gendered death. Mundane, ordinary forms of gendered violence that were accepted by the colonial state have been overlooked by critical scholars of colonial violence. The Indian Penal Code Act XLV of 1860 introduced the legal concept of “grave and sudden provocation” into a subcontinental landscape defined by various ideas about “honor” and its relationship to the gendered property rights of husbands, fathers, brothers, and other men. After 1860, men who killed women could mitigate their criminal culpability and punishment by claiming that they had been gravely and suddenly provoked to act, as frequently happened in cases involving adultery. The grave and sudden provocation exception extended male control over women’s bodies, sexual agency, and autonomy, encoding a gender bias in the colonial law that has endured in postcolonial South Asia. The present pandemic of feminicide must be examined historically.