Female infanticide in India has a history spanning centuries. Poverty, the dowry system, births to unmarried women, deformed infants, famine, lack of support services, and maternal illnesses such as postpartum depression are among the causes that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of female infanticide in India.
Although infanticide has been criminalized in India, it remains an under-reported crime due to the lack of reliable data. In 2010, the National Crime Records Bureau reported approximately 100 male and female infanticides, producing an official rate of less than one case of infanticide per million people.
The Indian practice of female infanticide and of sex-selective abortion have been cited to explain in part a gender imbalance that has been reported as being increasingly distorted since the 1991 Census of India, although there are also other influences that might affect the trend.
Definition Section 315 of the Indian Penal Code defines infanticide as the killing of an infant in the 0–1 year age group. The Code uses this definition to differentiate between infanticide and numerous other crimes against children, such as foeticide and murder.
Some scholarly publications on infanticide use the legal definition. Others, such as the collaboration of Renu Dube, Reena Dube, and Rashmi Bhatnagar, who describe themselves as "postcolonial feminists", adopt a broader scope for infanticide, applying it from foeticide through to femicide at an unspecified age. Barbara Miller, an anthropologist, has "for convenience" used the term to refer to all non-accidental deaths of children up to the age of around 15–16, which is culturally considered to be the age when childhood ends in rural India. She notes that the act of infanticide can be "outright", such as a physical beating, or take a "passive" form through actions such as neglect and starvation. Neonaticide, the killing of a child within 24 hours of birth, is sometimes considered a separate study.
Colonial period
Observation
From the pre-colonial to the colonial era, British officials in India first became aware of the practice of female infanticide in 1789 in the Benares State, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. It was noted among members of the ruling Rajput clan by Jonathan Duncan, then the Company Resident. Later, in 1817, in the Jamnagar kingdom in modern-day Gujarat, officials noted that the practice was so entrenched that there were entire taluks of the Jadeja Rajputs where no female children of the clan existed. In the mid-19th century, a magistrate who was stationed in the north-west of the country claimed that for several hundred years no daughter had ever been raised in the strongholds of the Rajahs of Mynpoorie and that only after the intervention of a District Collector in 1845 did the Rajput ruler there keep a daughter alive. The British identified other high-caste communities as practitioners in north, western and central areas of the country; these included the Ahirs, Bedis, Gurjars, Jats, Khatris, Lewa Kanbis, Mohyal Brahmins and Patidars.
A review of scholarship by Miller has shown that the majority of female infanticides in India during the colonial period occurred in the north-west and that it was widespread although not all groups carried out this practice. David Arnold, a member of the subaltern studies group who has used a lot of contemporary sources, says that various methods of outright infanticide were used, reputedly including poisoning with opium, strangulation and suffocation. Poisonous substances such as the root of the plumbago rosea and arsenic were used for abortion, with the latter also ironically being used as an aphrodisiac and cure for male impotence. The act of direct infanticide among Rajputs was usually performed by women, often the mother herself or a nurse. Administration of poison was, in any event, a type of killing particularly associated with women; Arnold describes it as "often murder by proxy", with the man at a remove from the event and thus able to claim innocence.
Reliability of colonial reports on infanticide
There is no data for the sex ratio in India prior to the period of colonial rule. Reliant as the British were on local high-caste communities for the collection of taxes and the maintenance of law and order, the administrators were initially reluctant to peer too deeply into their private affairs, such as the practice of infanticide. Although this did change in the 1830s, the reluctance reappeared following the cathartic events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which caused governance by the East India Company to be supplanted by the British Raj. In 1857, John Cave Browne, a chaplain serving in Bengal Presidency, reported a Major Goldney speculating that the practice of female infanticide among the Jats in the Punjab Province originated from "Malthusian motives". In the Gujarat region, the first cited examples of discrepancies in the sex ratio among Lewa Patidars and Kanbis dates from 1847. These historical records have been questioned by modern scholars, as they were observed from a distance, and those making the recordings never intermingled with their subjects to understand the social, economic, and cultural issues facing them that might influence their actions. Browne documented his speculations on female infanticide using "they tell" hearsay. Bernard Cohn states that the British residents in India would always refrain from accusing an individual or family of infanticide as the crime was difficult to prove in court, despite commonly speculating those entire clans or social groups practiced female infanticide. Cohn says, "female infanticide thus became a 'statistical crime'" during the period of colonial rule in India.
Aside from numerous reports and correspondence on infanticide from colonial officials, there was also a documentation from Christian missionaries. Many of these missionaries were also ethnographers who wrote about the ethnography of India during their time there. Many of the missionaries looked down on India and its culture, characterizing it as ignorant and depraved. Several scholars have questioned the historical narrative of female infanticide in India, as they were reported by individuals who looked down on Indian culture, with female infanticide being one of their reasons for holding said prejudiced viewpoints. Many have noted that the rate of female infanticide was no different in India than in parts of Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries.GA Oddie (1994), Orientalism and British Protestant missionary constructions of India in the nineteenth century, Journal of South Asian Studies, 17(2), pp. 27–42 Some Christian missionaries of the late 19th century, writes Daniel Grey, wrongly believed that female infanticide was sanctioned by the scriptures of Hinduism and Islam, and against which Christianity had "centuries after centuries come into victorious conflict".
Repression by colonial authorities
The passing of the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870 made the practice illegal in the British Indian regions of Punjab and the North-Western Provinces. The Governor-General of India had the authority to expand the Act to other regions at his discretion.
After the passing of the act, colonial administrators became reluctant to report infanticide. Colonial authorities considered that they had identified the problem, and successfully solved it. In reality, infanticide had become a custom.
Causation by colonial taxation
According to Mara Hvistendahl, documents left behind by the colonial administration following Indian independence showed a direct correlation between the taxation policies of the East India Company and the rise in cases of female infanticide. Compared to the Mughal Empire, the company greatly increased taxes. According to Bernard Cohn, these higher taxes made it difficult for wealthy families to afford dowries, without losing land resources. An investigation by the East India Company in 1855-1856 reported that this was the cause of female infanticide.
Other theories on causation
According to Marvin Harris, another anthropologist and among the first proponents of cultural materialism, these killings of legitimate children occurred only among the Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. The rationale was mainly economic, lying in a desire not to split land and wealth among too many heirs and in avoiding the payment of dowries. Sisters and daughters would marry men of similar standing and thus pose a challenge to the cohesion of wealth and power, whereas concubines and their children would not and thus could be allowed to live. He further argues that the need for warriors in the villages of a pre-industrial society meant female children were devalued, and the combination of war casualties and infanticide acted as a necessary form of population control.
Sociobiologists have a different theory to Harris. Indeed, his theory and interest in the topic of infanticide are born from more generalized opposition to the sociobiological hypothesis of the procreative imperative. According to this theory of imperative, based on the 19th-century vogue for explanations rooted in evolution and its premise of natural selection, the biological differences between men and women meant that many more children could be gained among the elites through support for male offspring, whose fecundity was naturally much greater: the line would spread and grow more extensively. Harris believes this to be a fallacious explanation because the elites had sufficient wealth easily to support both male and female children. Thus, Harris and others, such as William Divale, see female infanticide as a way to restrict population growth, while sociobiologists such as Mildred Dickemann view the same practice as a means of expanding it.
Another anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes, has criticized both of these theories. On the one hand, opposing Harris, she says both that the quickest way to get more male warriors would have been to have more females as child-bearers and that having more females in a village would increase the potential for marriage alliances with other villages. Against the procreative imperative theory, she points out that the corollary to well-off elites such as those in northern India wanting to maximize reproduction is that poor people would want to minimize it and thus in theory should have practiced male infanticide, which it seems they did not.
Impact of famines
Major famines occurred in India every five to eight years in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries,B Murton (2000), Famine, in The Cambridge World History of Food 2, pp. 1411–1427, Cambridge University PressMike Davis (2001), Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, pp. 7–8, Verso resulting in millions starving to death.Mike Davis (2004), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, and Social Movements, pp. 44–49, RoutledgeA Sen (1983), Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford University Press As also happened in China, these events began infanticide: desperate starving parents would either kill a suffering infant, sell a child to buy food for the rest of the family, or beg people to take them away for nothing and feed them.Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History, pp. 61–67, Princeton University PressWilliam Digby, The Famine Campaign in Southern India (Madras and Bombay): 1876–1878, pp. 458–459, Longmans London Gupta and Shuzhou state that massive famines and poverty-related historical events had influenced historical sex ratios, and they have had deep cultural ramifications on girls and regional attitudes towards female infant mortality.
Regional and religious demographics