niki.uu’s Reviews > Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime > Status Update

As long as criminal behavior, including infanticide, was seen as rooted in Hinduism and the caste system, little real help or attention would be paid to the asymmetries of power in gender relations, in spite of the British purport to “uplift” the lot of the Hindu woman.

Instead, women become sites upon which various versions of the scripture/tradition/law are elaborated and contested.

The conflicting interests of modern capitalism and a colonial command economy produced a halfbaked, deleterious version of capitalism for subsistence farmers and generated enormous social distortions that worked to the detriment of the interests of women.

(I can't annotate this pdf which is so unfortunate)

-explanations that described and blamed indigenous culture for some of its own miscalculations or the effects of misrule and greed, and justified its territorial expansion into two-thirds of the subcontinent, was perhaps the most widely deployed stratagem of the company to appease its jealous detractors at home. This stratagem is better known as Britain’s “civilizing mission,” with Hindu culture as its prime target.