English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India NANDINI CHATTERJEE University of Plymouth THE “ CIVIL ” OF CIVIL MARRIAGE On the face of it, civil marriage represents both the most typical and most anodyne aspect of modern law. One might say that by instituting civil marriage, a bureaucratic, enumerative, and secularized state permits its subjects absolute individual choice of marital partners, and concurrently, by refusing to take into account the religious affiliation of any party, grants total freedom of religious faith. As such, it may be seen as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, con- nected through the adjective “civil” with other distinctively modern concepts such as civil society, all of which point to a notion of individual liberty, predi- cated upon a modern state guaranteeing the autonomy of large arenas of social life. Indeed, the few existing studies of European civil marriage laws do take such a view. One scholar asserted upfront, “If the central characteristic of democratic capitalist society is mass choice, then democratic capitalist marriage arrived in Britain on 1 July 1837” (the date on which the Marriage Act of 1836, which for the first time permitted civil marriage, came into operation). 1 Prior to this, all marriages to be legally valid had to be celebrated in an Anglican church, in day- light hours, with appropriate Anglican ceremonies conducted by an officiating Anglican priest. Excepted were the marriages of Jews and Quakers, royal mar- riages, marriages abroad, and marriages under the Archbishop’ s special Acknowledgments: The earliest version of this article was presented at the annual conference of the Law and Society Association, in Berlin, July 2007. I am grateful to Tanika Sarkar for alerting me to the importance of Rabindranath Tagore’ s Gora as a key source for this article. I also thank the three anonymous CSSH referees for their meticulous and encouraging feedback, and David Akin for his fine editorial chiseling of this article. 1 Olive Anderson, “The Incidence of Civil Marriage in Victorian England and Wales,” Past and Present 69 (Nov. 1965): 50–87, at 50. Comparative Studies in Society and History 2010;52(3):524–552. 0010-4175/10 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2010 doi:10.1017/S0010417510000290 524