Love in a Colonial Climate: Marriage, Sex and Romance in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Cultural Studies/ Asian Studies

A study of the 19th century Bengali society and the changing notions of marriage, conjugality and companionship ushered in through an acquaintance to Western worldviews through colonial rule.

Tapan Raychaudhuri

Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, (May, 2000), pp. 349-378.

Cambridge University Press.

2000

The Media Lab

JSTOR
http://www.jstor.org/stable/313067

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English

Child Marriage and its impact of the child bride's life through personal accounts.
Suppressed sexuality and closed households facilitating extra-marital relations which, even when found were suppressed within the family to prevent "public" denouncement of the family name.
the widow's plight.
Victorian puritan ethos among the Brahmos and the western-educated. Suppression of sexuality as "vulgar",a stand point incommensurate with certain devotional modes and practises prevalent even in Hinduism which ar steeped in sexual discourses.
The lure of "romance" in the post-Hindu College reformist era. Liberalism and introduction to western notions of companionship through literature. The lure mostly unrequitted, yet call for "women's education" rises in which underlies the desire for an "educated companion".

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