A Government That Legislated on Religion

The Bengal Presidency governed while insisting that it did not interfere in religion, and the record shows how unsustainable that position was. The Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 made the burning of widows a criminal offence, and its own preamble argues the case partly on the ground that the practice was not required by the scriptures, which is a colonial administration issuing a ruling on Hindu textual authority.

Lata Mani's study of the debate shows that both the supporters and the opponents of abolition argued from scripture, and that the women themselves are largely absent from the archive that resulted. The same pattern appears elsewhere. The administration codified separate Hindu and Muslim personal law for marriage, inheritance and adoption, which fixed as legal categories what had been variable local practice and gave particular textual traditions statutory force. It funded Sanskrit and Arabic colleges and then redirected support towards English education. In 1905 it partitioned Bengal along lines that separated a largely Muslim east from a largely Hindu west, provoking sustained agitation, and the partition was reversed in 1911. None of these was a neutral act, and the atlas records them as religious history rather than as administration.