Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria

Author:Rafia Zakaria
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

The case of Kally Bewah, a high-caste Hindu woman who was found dead in a shack near her home in colonial Calcutta, is an example of how even the body of a dead Indian woman could be used as evidence of her moral depravity and inadequacy as a mother and a woman. The story is illustrative of how the bodies of women who may simply have died during childbirth were made into specimens that testified to their inherent inadequacies as moral subjects.

The body of Kally Bewah had been found nude and partially decomposing with bloodied clothes lying under her head. The coroner of West Bengal, a man named E. M. Chambers, conducted the autopsy sometime before December 14, 1885, and then summarized his findings in a letter to the Jury of Inquest.21 Chambers conjectured that Kally Bewah, being an upper-class Brahmin widow, must, as a very ordinary matter of course, have been “unchaste” and engaged in illicit sex, then hidden the fact that she had sex outside marriage by trying to procure an abortion. If Kally Bewah was dead, it was because she more or less deserved to be. Her body was not the basis of any actual investigation into her cause of death; it was only proof that Hindu culture made its insatiable women into baby-killing sexual deviants.

Unsurprisingly, the jury of white colonial officials agreed with this interpretation, writing, “We are of the opinion that Kally Bewah was really pregnant and the inflammation of the womb from the effects of which Kally died was the result of criminal abortion or miscarriage.” They concluded that in doing so Bewah “committed a rash and negligent act for which she should be committed under Section 304 of Indian Penal Code” and for “concealing birth” under a separate code.

Kally Bewah was already dead and obviously could not be committed anywhere, but that was beside the point. At the time the laws against abortion in England were rarely, if ever, enforced, and yet the crimes of infanticide and feticide were vigorously enforced by the British in India, as further illustration of the moral contrast between the local population and the paragons of virtuous white society.22 The objective of the autopsy was never to collect evidence and find Bewah’s killer. It was instead to collect evidence to indict her culture, to garner support for the fantasy that Indian women were sexually promiscuous to the point of criminality and could only be “reformed” through colonial intervention.

Wrapped up with this assumption of self-abortion was the implication that Brown women were inherently deficient mothers, prone to neglecting and even killing their children. This assumption about mothers of color, contrasted with the Victorian archetype of the white matriarch as “the angel in the hearth,” persists today. Within the United States, Black mothers have been typecast for decades as “crack mothers.” This is simply another criminalizing framework baldly used to prompt assumptions about the moral worth of a racial group. In the modern version of this rhetorical sleight of hand,

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