Today our topic of discussion is Age At Marriage .
Age At Marriage
As early as Adam’s education reports of 1835 and 1838, the wide prevalence of child marriage had been mentioned in official discourse as a deterrent to female education. Hunter in his Statistical Accounts of Bengal, presented a report on marriage norms in 1873:
Both among Muhammadans and Hindus, boys are generally married between the ages of 15 and 20… Girls are usually married at 10 and have no choice. The parents arrange the match if possible in their own village.
Child marriage, featured as an important issue on the agends of the nineteenth century Reform Movement in Bengal. In both communities it would not be unusual to find marriages between girls of seven and boys of ten. (the brides who crossed the threshold of the illustrious Tagore family in Jorasanko, were in many instances ‘child brides’ or balika bandhu).
In the 1890s, a proposed government legislation in family law -Age of Consent Bill-generated a great debate among all sections of the population. In effect, the 1891 Bill was an extension of the 1872 Brahmo Native Marriage Act, to the Hindu community, and proposed to raise the age of cohabitation from 10 to 12 years.
Basically the bill proposed that intercourse/cohabitation with a girl below 12, married or unmarried, was tantamount to rape and a punishable offence. In the agitation that followed, Hindus were the main opponents but some sections of the Muslims also joined in. The Sudhakar group opposed the bill and Muslim participation was noticeable in the protest meeting organized in Dhaka.
Syed Golam Mustafa, Maulvi Makbul Ali, Munshi Bazlur Rahman, Maulvi Shamsul Hug, and Kaikobad all joined in the protest. However, the two leading Muslim associations The Muhammadan Literary Society and The Central Muhammadan Association, supported the bill as did Maulvi Abdul Jabbar deputy magistrate of Alipore, Nawab Ahsanullah of Dhaka and Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.
As the ideas of the Bengal Renaissance started to permeate, and old socio-economic structures started to undergo various transformations, the question of child marriage became a topic for concern.
In the Muslim Community, one one of the earliest and most vocal social critics Nausher Ali Khan Yusufazai (1864-1964) referred with concern to the practice of child-marriage in his classical work ‘Bangiyo Mussulman’ (1890). Sometime later, Mohammad Meherullah Hussein from Sirajganj (in Pabna) wrote a reformist tract on child marriage (in 1909). He, like his predecessor, stated that Muslim society was rampant with ill practices rather than beneficial ones, of which Child Marriage topped the list.
Meherullah concluded that ignorance, ill health, loss of wealth and vitality were the ill effects of child marriage and appealed to fellow Muslims to weed out the ‘evil practice. He also recommended twenty and fourteen as the ages when boys and girls should be married off by their parents, thus apprehending the recommendations of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 and the Age of Consent Act of 1930.
And yet the notion of child marriage had provoked no such diatribe. only a few decades earlier. The custom was in practice in rural and semi-rural areas, if not in towns in the early decades of the present century. It was not unusual to have daughters married at the age of 10 or 12 as late as 1930. (See Appendix for a list of women discussed in this study and their ages at marriage).
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