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".

PDF

The essay confronts a problem of political thought approached through the question of cruelty inflicted on Hindu widows of Bengali middle-class families. As the harrowing descriptions of oppression raise a mixture of sadness, horror and anger in the author along with a desire and the will to intervene, he questions these emotions in the light of the knowledge of violence on which the state and its laws are founded. He speaks of the violence of the same modernity that teaches us to think of the law as a key instrument of social justice.

Paper