Recite the last bylaw: chiefs and child marriage reform in Malawi

ABSTRACTIn the study of modern chieftaincy in Africa, scholars have identified chiefs as important intermediaries for promoting increased voter turnout, new health policies and development initiatives. I add to this literature the importance of chiefs as cultural intermediaries. Using recent child marriage reform efforts in Malawi as a case study, I find that chiefs are key actors needed to implement culturally embedded policy changes. Drawing on descriptive evidence from 12 months of fieldwork across all three regions of Malawi, I find that chiefs are responsible for shifting cultural practices related to child marriage. Using a unique blend of democratic and non-democratic powers, chiefs in Malawi are defying expectations and using their position to promote girls’ rights. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of the political and cultural power of modern chiefs.

Legislating Nonmarital Sex in India, 1911–1929

The third chapter describes how an expanded understanding of girlhood influenced an Indian law restricting child marriage and raising the age of consent. This chapter details changes in legislative politics and in the way Indian legislators appropriated international antitrafficking standards across two decades. It begins by discussing the 1911 Dadabhoy Bill, the first formulation of a distinct age of consent for all nonmarital sex, which was partially provoked by conventions drawn up by the International Society for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic. Next, the chapter examines how Indian Legislative Assembly members in 1922 and 1923-24 responded to the claims S. M. Edwardes made to League of Nations delegates justifying a lower age of consent in India. It then analyzes the 1929 law restricting child marriage, focusing on its effects on sexual consent outside marriage and the resulting anxieties pertaining to parental control. It closes with a fuller analysis of the Report of the Age of Consent Committee and its articulation of parental anxieties. The chapter argues that the 1929 law constraining child marriage, widely considered a key moment of Indian social reform, was facilitated by prior and concurrent measures that fixed a higher age of consent for nonmarital sex. These measures entrenched parental control over daughters’ sexual practices and, ultimately, limited the implications of marriage reform.

A Question of Personal Status

Amid an enduring political deadlock in Parliament, the first civil marriage contracted in Lebanon in 2013 received significant media coverage in a country where the personal status law of eighteen recognized religious sects governs marriage. This case study examines the debate on civil marriage reform and the implications for women’s rights in Lebanon. For advocates, the recognition of civil marriage legalizes interreligious marriages, strengthens secular citizenship, shifts the jurisdiction of marriage from religious to civil law, and ensures women’s rights. Opponents, meanwhile, fear the loss of religious autonomy, the transformation of self-identification in Lebanon from sect to nation, and the destabilization of the confessional system. To date, civil marriage reform has been incremental, given clerical and social opposition, but the winds of change are blowing as couples increasingly take matters into their own hands to reform Lebanon’s system of personal status from the ground up.

Tagore, Rabindranath (1861–1940)

Rabindranath Tagore is India’s pre-eminent writer and was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. He is best known for his poetry collection Gitanjali: Song Offerings, which he self-translated into English from Bengali. Tagore introduced new verse forms into Bengali poetry, and revolutionized literary prose by using colloquial Bengali (calit bhasa) in his novels and short stories. Previously, Bengali literature had been written in refined Bengali (sadhu bhasa), which drew on Sanskritic vocabulary and archaic grammatical forms. Tagore was a strong advocate of caste reform in colonial India, a critic of nationalisms worldwide, and the founder of an international university called Visva-Bharati whose motto was Yatra visvam bhavatieka nidam (‘Where the whole world meets in one nest’). Rabindranath Tagore was born on 7 May 7 1861 to Debendranath and his wife Sarada Devi. The surname Tagore is an Anglicization of ‘Thakur’, which means lord in Bengali. His father was an influential member of the Brahmo Samaj, a religious society dedicated to reforming Hinduism. Brahmoism’s tenets of caste and marriage reform can be seen in the development of Tagore’s short stories and novels from Chokher Bali [Grain of Sand] in 1903 to Char Adhyay [Four Chapters] in 1934.