The problem of polygamy in modern India, 1861-1947

Why did Muslim polygamy come up as a social problem in need of reform amongst various groups in late colonial India and how did it come to be so strongly associated with Indian Muslims? The ‘problem of Muslim polygamy’ was raised by different groups in India between 1861 and 1947. The British, Muslim reformers and feminists, Hindu nationalists, and Indian legislators all engaged in debates on Muslim sexuality and conjugality which produced polygamy as a distinct Muslim practice. However, discussions around the Muslim practice of polygamy were not straightforward and took different turns as they navigated the circumstances created by colonialism, religious reform, feminism, and communalism. Muslim polygamy was thus a different kind of problem for different people, from one of civilisation to modernity, patriarchy to demography. Muslim polygamy generated such exciting debates that by the end of this period the social ‘common sense’ of the ‘problem of Muslim polygamy’ was consolidated. This common sense was consolidated through legislation that preserved the legal status of Muslim polygamy, which in turn reinforced notions of Muslim ‘backwardness’, demographic increase, and patriarchy in the Indian imagination. My work denaturalises this ‘common sense’ of naturally polygamous Muslims. I argue that the ‘problem of Muslim polygamy’ was deployed by different groups in late colonial India as a surrogate through which both the colonised and the coloniser sought to reconfigure the sexual regime. Muslim polygamy was an ideological problem that was sustained through a trope of deviant Muslim sexuality by which different groups discursively deconstructed and reconstructed their own sexual identities and conjugal configurations. Muslim polygamy thus became a site of contestation on which various identities were formed and power structures reconfigured, as different groups sought to govern the bodily practices of their respective communities. Discussions on polygamy thus acquired different characteristics, shed old ones, and evolved as they moved through different cultural, gendered, political, and social locations