Law and Crime in India: British Policy and the Female Infanticide Act of 1870

Abstract

Recent studies examining British attitudes and ideologies which structured colonial policies towards 'outcaste'2 and 'deviant' groups in indigenous society, have suggested that the groups who were marginalised included those whose activities were conceived of as 'threatening' to new normative definitions (Freitag 1983:141-42).3 The twin notions of moral authority and British paramountcy justified the interference in the lives of various communities in the North- Western Provinces by institutions like the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, the
Judicial Infanticide Department, the police and the complex of the criminal law (ibid.). In the 'enlightened' eyes of many British officials, female infanticide, together with sati, thuggee and dacoity, seemed to represent the barbaric and degraded state of Indian society.