Contesting Pahari Conjugality in the Western Himalayas: Sexuality, Colonialism and the Question of Inheritance

The historiography of social reform in colonial India continues to be influenced by the dominant language of critique of the lived lives of the natives. In the context of western Himalayan region, the hilly areas of colonial Punjab, this early twentieth century debate was largely influenced by the discourse of migrants who came to settle in Shimla, the summer capital of British Empire in India, in the late nineteenth century. The contestations of a local custom of reet, which defined varied a..