Colonial period
Causation
From the pre colonial to the colonial era, British officials in India first became aware of the practice of female infanticide in 1789 in the Benares State, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. It was noted among members of the ruling Rajput clan by Jonathan Duncan, then the Company Resident. Later, in 1817, in the Jamnagar kingdom in modern day Gujarat, officials noted that the practice was so entrenched that there were entire taluks of the Jadeja Rajputs where no female children of the clan existed.[8] In the mid-19th century, a magistrate who was stationed in the north-west of the country claimed that for several hundred years no daughter had ever been raised in the strongholds of the Rajahs of Mynpoorie and that only after the intervention of a District Collector in 1845 did the Rajput ruler there keep a daughter alive.[9] The British identified other high-caste communities as practitioners in north, western and central areas of the country; these included the Ahirs, Bedis, Gurjars, Jats, Khatris, Lewa Kanbis, Mohyal Brahmins and Patidars.[8][10]
According to Marvin Harris, another anthropologist and among the first proponents of cultural materialism, these killings of legitimate children occurred only among the Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. The rationale was mainly economic, lying in a desire not to split land and wealth among too many heirs and in avoiding the payment of dowries. Sisters and daughters would marry men of similar standing and thus pose a challenge to the cohesion of wealth and power, whereas concubines and their children would not and thus could be allowed to live.[11][12] He further argues that the need for warriors in the villages of a pre-industrial society meant female children were devalued, and the combination of war casualties and infanticide acted as a necessary form of population control.[13]
Sociobiologists have a different theory to Harris. Indeed, his theory and interest in the topic of infanticide are born from more generalized opposition to the sociobiological hypothesis of the procreative imperative.[14][15] According to this theory of imperative, based on the 19th-century vogue for explanations rooted in evolution and its premise of natural selection,[16] the biological differences between men and women meant that many more children could be gained among the elites through support for male offspring, whose fecundity was naturally much greater: the line would spread and grow more extensively. Harris believes this to be a fallacious explanation because the elites had sufficient wealth easily to support both male and female children.[12] Thus, Harris and others, such as William Divale, see female infanticide as a way to restrict population growth, while sociobiologists such as Mildred Dickemann view the same practice as a means of expanding it.[13]
Another anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes, has criticized both of these theories. On the one hand, opposing Harris, she says both that the quickest way to get more male warriors would have been to have more females as child-bearers and that having more females in a village would increase the potential for marriage alliances with other villages. Against the procreative imperative theory, she points out that the corollary to well-off elites such as those in northern India wanting to maximize reproduction is that poor people would want to minimize it and thus in theory should have practiced male infanticide, which it seems they did not. [13]
Reliability of colonial reports on infanticide
There is no data for the sex ratio in India prior to the period of colonial rule. Reliant as the British were on local high-caste communities for the collection of taxes and the maintenance of law and order, the administrators were initially reluctant to peer too deeply into their private affairs, such as the practice of infanticide. Although this did change in the 1830s, the reluctance reappeared following the cathartic events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which caused governance by the East India Company to be supplanted by the British Raj.[17] In 1857, John Cave Browne, a chaplain serving in Bengal Presidency, reported a Major Goldney speculating that the practice of female infanticide among the Jats in the Punjab Province originated from "Malthusian motives".[18] In the Gujarat region, the first cited examples of discrepancies in the sex ratio among Lewa Patidars and Kanbis dates from 1847.[19] These historical records have been questioned by modern scholars, as they were observed from a distance, and those making the recordings never intermingled with their subjects to understand the social, economic, and cultural issues facing them that might influence their actions.[20] Browne documented his speculations on female infanticide using "they tell" hearsay. [18] Bernard Cohn states that the British residents in India would always refrain from accusing an individual or family of infanticide as the crime was difficult to prove in court, despite commonly speculating those entire clans or social groups practiced female infanticide. Cohn says, "female infanticide thus became a 'statistical crime'" during the period of colonial rule in India. [21]
Aside from numerous reports and correspondence on infanticide from colonial officials,[10] there was also a documentation from Christian missionaries. Many of these missionaries were also ethnographers who wrote about the ethnography of India during their time there. Many of the missionaries looked down on India and its culture, characterizing it as ignorant and depraved.[22][23] Several scholars have questioned the historical narrative of female infanticide in India, as they were reported by individuals who looked down on Indian culture, with female infanticide being one of their reasons for holding said prejudiced viewpoints. Many have noted that the rate of female infanticide was no different in India than in parts of Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.[22][24][25] Some Christian missionaries of the late 19th century, writes Daniel Grey, wrongly believed that female infanticide was sanctioned by the scriptures of Hinduism and Islam, and against which Christianity had "centuries after centuries come into victorious conflict".[22]
Location and direct method
A review of scholarship by Miller has shown that the majority of female infanticides in India during the colonial period occurred in the north-west and that it was widespread although not all groups carried out this practice.[26] David Arnold, a member of the subaltern studies group who has used a lot of contemporary sources, says that various methods of outright infanticide were used, reputedly including poisoning with opium, strangulation and suffocation. Poisonous substances such as the root of the plumbago rosea and arsenic were used for abortion, with the latter also ironically being used as an aphrodisiac and cure for male impotence. The act of direct infanticide among Rajputs was usually performed by women, often the mother herself or a nurse. Administration of poison was, in any event, a type of killing particularly associated with women; Arnold describes it as "often murder by proxy", with the man at a remove from the event and thus able to claim innocence. [27]
The passing of the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870 made the practice illegal in the British Indian regions of Punjab and the North-Western Provinces.[26] The Governor-General of India had the authority to expand the Act to other regions at his discretion.[citation needed]
Impact of famines on infanticide
Major famines occurred in India every five to eight years in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries,[28][29] resulting in millions starving to death.[30][31] As also happened in China, these events began infanticide: desperate starving parents would either kill a suffering infant, sell a child to buy food for the rest of the family, or beg people to take them away for nothing and feed them.[32][33][34] Gupta and Shuzhou state that massive famines and poverty-related historical events had influenced historical sex ratios, and they have had deep cultural ramifications on girls and regional attitudes towards female infant mortality.[34]
Impact of economic policies on infanticide
According to Mara Hvistendahl, documents left behind by the colonial administration following Indian independence showed a direct correlation between the taxation policies of the East India Company and the rise in cases of female infanticide.[35]
Regional and religious demographics
The decennial census of India from 1881 through 1941 recorded a consistently skewed ratio whereby the number of males exceeded the number of females. The gender difference was particularly high in the north and western regions of India, with an overall sex ratio – males per 100 females – of between 110.2 and 113.7 in the north over the 60-year period, and 105.8 to 109.8 males for every 100 females in western India for all ages. Visaria states that the female deficit among Muslims was markedly higher, next only to Sikhs. South India region was an exception reporting excess females overall, which scholars attribute partly to selective emigration of males.[36]
The overall sex ratios, and excess males, in various regions, were highest among the Muslim population of India from 1881 to 1941, and the sex ratio of each region correlated with the proportion of its Muslim population, with the exception of the eastern region of India where the overall sex ratio was relatively low while it had a high percentage of Muslims in the population. [37] If regions that are now part of modern Pakistan are excluded (Baluchistan, Northwest Frontier, Sind for example), Visaria states that the regional and overall sex ratios for the rest of India over the 1881–1941 period improve in favor of females, with a lesser gap between male and female population. [38]