In which year was the 'Native Marriage Act' passed ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, 1872. The Native Marriage Act is Act III of 1872, also known as the Special Marriage Act, 1872 and, because of who campaigned for it, as the Brahmo Marriage Act. It was passed after a long push by Keshab Chandra Sen and the Brahmo Samaj, whose members had no legal way of marrying once they had given up idolatrous Hindu rites: a Brahmo marriage was recognised by no personal law, which left the wife's status and the children's inheritance in doubt. The 1872 Act created a civil form of marriage for people who declared that they professed none of the recognised religions of India. In doing so it did three things at once — it made inter-caste and inter-religious marriage lawful, it fixed minimum ages of marriage at 14 for girls and 18 for boys, and it barred a person married under it from taking a second spouse.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 1870 belongs to a different piece of colonial social legislation — the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, which required the registration of births and of female children in districts where infanticide was suspected. It is a favourite distractor precisely because it sits two years before the right answer in the same reforming decade.  (c) No marriage statute of this description belongs to 1874. The year is offered only to blur the boundary of the early 1870s — the point of the question is that the civil-marriage law arrived in 1872, not later in the decade.  (d) 1876 is remembered in Indian history for the Royal Titles Act, under which Queen Victoria took the title 'Empress of India' — proclaimed at the Delhi Durbar of 1 January 1877 — not for any marriage law.

Concept: Nineteenth-century social reform in India worked through a partnership: Indian reformers built the public case and colonial legislation gave it teeth. The familiar sequence is the abolition of sati in 1829, the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, the Native (Special) Marriage Act of 1872, the Age of Consent Act of 1891 and, much later, the Sharda Act — the Child Marriage Restraint Act — of 1929. The 1872 Act is the odd one out in that list, because it does not reform an existing religious practice: it steps outside religious personal law altogether and offers a purely civil marriage to those willing to declare they belong to none of the recognised faiths.

State PCS 2019 Q132 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q132 — History PYQ with Answer