 |
| When a girl child was born in India, it was customary to kill her |
Barbosa, a Portuguese traveler who visited India at the beginning of the 16th century, wrote how 'daughters are killed at birth or some in the womb'.
This text is the earliest reference to female infanticide in India. However, it was not clear whether this was the case everywhere in India or whether it was confined to certain regions.
At that time, the Mughal rulers had not established a foothold in India. Mughal emperor Akbar's nearly fifty-year reign began in 1542, long after Barbosa's visit.
Emperor Akbar is said to have taken measures to discourage female infanticide and imposed heavy fines on its perpetrators.
During the colonial period, many British officials and scholars documented the practice of female infanticide in India.
For example, in 1789, the British Resident at Nizam's court in Hyderabad, Jonathan Duncan, wrote in a letter to the Governor-General of India, Lord Cornwallis, that female infanticide was 'common in some parts of India.'
Similarly, in 1804, Captain Alexander Reed, a British officer in the Bombay Presidency, wrote a report on the killing of girls in the Kutch region. Reed estimated that at least one-third, if not half, of the girls born, are killed.'
In 1828, the British missionary William Carey, in a pamphlet on female infanticide in Bengal, stated that the practice was 'almost universal or general' among certain castes and communities.
James Grant Duff, Governor of the Bombay Presidency from 1817 to 1827, has written in his book 'History of the Marathas that the Rajputs of Rajasthan are massacring girls.
He writes that 'Among the Rajputs, bringing up a daughter is considered humiliating. The birth of a son is greeted with joy and the birth of a daughter with sadness. It is a common practice to strangle newborn girls or bury them alive.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the British physician Dr. Alexander S. Murray wrote that 'female infanticide is a very old practice in India, which continues to an alarming degree in some parts of the country.'
Historian HM Eliot, in his book on the history of India, has written that 'Despite being prohibited by Hindu law, female infanticide was common among the upper castes, who considered the birth of a daughter a source of dishonor and shame.'
It was from such observations that the British colonial government became primarily aware of female infanticide in India.
However, it was the first census in British India completed in 1871, the results of which provided concrete evidence of the magnitude of the problem of female infanticide.
In Punjab, for example, the census found that in some areas there were only 690 girls under the age of six for every 1,000 boys. While the normal ratio was 950 girls per 1000 boys. Similarly, in North-Western Provinces and some parts of Oudh, the sex ratio was 618 girls to 1000 boys.
Henry Cotton, a British colonial administrator, wrote in his memoirs that a member of the census staff encountered a man in a village in the North-West Provinces who was accompanied by two girls.
When the enumerator asked about his daughters, the man replied: 'The girls are fine. We haven't killed them yet, they are too young.'
Census Memorandum, an introduction to the census, was written by Henry Waterfield.
According to him, the information was collected at different times, often using different methods, with some reports from the provinces being collected six years earlier than 1871.
In towns, censuses were conducted by municipal authorities but in other areas salaried enumerators, chiefs, or commoners were involved. However, many felt that the government would take advantage of the practice and feared that they would be taxed in some way.
According to the census, the average population in British India was 131 persons per square kilometer. There were a total of 493,444 villages and towns.
Of these, 480,437 villages had a population of less than 5,000. 1,070 towns had between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and only 46 had more than 50,000 people.
More than 5.5 million people or less than three percent of the total population lived in cities.
About 140 million Hindus (and Sikhs) made up 73.7 percent of the population, 40 million Muslims made up about 21.5 percent of the total, and nine million 'others' or barely five percent. 'Others' included Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Jews, Parsis, Brahmos, hill people, and others whose religion was not known.
In the words of the author of the report of the census in Lahore, 'After the birth of one daughter after another, the father despairs of bearing the heavy burden and hopes that the girls may die.'
Not getting treatment for the disease is enough to fulfill his 'desire'. This practice of reducing the undesirable part of the population has been going on for generations in more or less violent ways, and its effects are now being felt more clearly by fewer women and girls.
Efforts to curb this barbaric practice have been made by British officials over the past 70 years in various ways, one of which is to reduce the cost of marriage, the memorandum says.
Although these efforts have been largely successful, the practice is still common. For example, a tribe in a village in Meerut has only eight girls under the age of 12 compared to the 80 boys they went to.
In the census, the practice of female infanticide was found among followers of other religions besides Hindus. For example, this practice was also prevalent in some Muslim communities in some parts of India. The 1871 census recorded a significant gender imbalance among Muslims in the North-Western Provinces.
There have also been reports of female infanticide among Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists. However, the practice was most common among certain Hindu communities, especially those that followed strict caste laws and preferred male offspring.
British historian and colonial administrator James Caird wrote that the census revealed a 'shocking' imbalance in the number of boys and girls in some parts of India, indicating that 'female genocide was widespread. was done on.'
There was a strong backlash in both India and Britain. In India, the results of the census were widely reported in the press and called for action to address the problem of female infanticide. In Britain, the results of the census were debated in parliament and the media, and there was public outrage over the practice of infanticide.
There were also some protests and reactions against the results of the census.
British colonial administrator James D. Cunningham describes in his memoirs how some Hindu and Sikh leaders in Punjab objected to the census data on sex ratio, arguing that it denigrated Indian culture and religion. It is a conspiracy of the British.
However, Cunningham noted that these demonstrations were largely unsuccessful and sex ratio data continued to be collected in subsequent censuses.
Based on the census data, the colonial government recognized the need to take immediate action to stop the practice of female infanticide. This led to the passage of the Female Infanticide Prevention Act in 1870, which made it a crime to kill girls.
The law also required that midwives and other birth attendants report the birth of a girl child, and failure to do so was punishable by law. The Act was an important step toward solving the problem of female infanticide, but its implementation was limited.
According to the memorandum, 'this law is being implemented in areas where the number of girls is 35 percent less than the total number of boys, or in other words, where there are 54 girls for every 100 boys. It may be hoped that in course of time, the natural equality of the sexes will be much more closely approximated.'
This law was also opposed.
In the memoirs of Indian social reformer Pandit Armabai, some Hindu priests in Maharashtra opposed the law, arguing that it was against Hindu tradition and a ploy by the British to control Indian society.
Ramabai noted, however, that many Indian social reformers supported the law and worked to raise awareness of the importance of girls' education and the value of women in Indian society.
During the period of five to ten years after the enactment of the law, which also enacted the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1883, about 333 cases of girl child murder were prosecuted in India and 16 were sentenced to death, 133 to life imprisonment and others to death. He was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment for various periods.
A man named Bhairu was accused of killing his infant daughter in the village of Ramnagar in the North-Western Provinces. During the hearing, Bhairu argued that the daughter died of natural causes. However, prosecutors presented evidence that Bhairu had tried to bribe a midwife to keep her daughter's birth a secret and then dumped her body in a nearby well.
Judge Justice John Edge convicted Bhairu of his daughter's murder and sentenced him to death. The judge wrote that the Female Infanticide Prevention Act was enacted to 'save the lives of innocent infants'.
Despite the law of 1870, the crime of killing girls did not stop. A newspaper wrote that 'earlier girls were killed at birth but now since the Act came into force they are allowed to die of disease before they reach the age of one or two years.
"Thus it will be understood that the old custom was less abominable than the present."
In his book published in 1885, the Indian social reformer Swami Vivekananda wrote that 'in some parts of the country the practice of female infanticide is alarming.'
In one of his essays, LS Viswanath writes that 'the British saw this practice as a manifestation of the backwardness and barbarism of Indian society and as a result, they often adopted a paternalistic and authoritarian approach to end it.'
"The practice of female infanticide was often linked to wider social and economic factors, such as the dowry system and preference for male heirs, which the British failed to effectively address."
However, the formal identification of female infanticide in the first census and the law against it proved to be the starting point.
Later censuses every ten years continued to highlight the issue and several campaigns were launched to create awareness and promote educational and social reforms.
Despite resistance from traditional cultural and religious beliefs, public awareness continued to grow and the law became stricter. Thus, this custom could not end, but this m.There was a significant decrease.