The women's questions arose in modern India as a part of the 19th century social reform movement. What are the major issues and debates concerning women in that period? (250 words).

Major issues

• Sati, especially in Bengal, became the first public test; Rammohan Roy’s campaign and the Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829, treated the burning of the widow as a crime, not as a sacred duty.
• Widow remarriage, pressed by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, 1856, attacked enforced widowhood, tonsure, and social death.
• Female infanticide, child marriage, and the age of consent—raised sharply by the Age of Consent Act, 1891, after the Phulmoni case—put the girl child’s body at the centre of law.
• Women’s education, from missionary schools to Bethune School, Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule’s work in Pune, and later Pandita Ramabai, asked whether the Hindu or Muslim woman might read without losing virtue.
• Purdah, polygamy, property, and the right to move in public were debated in both Hindu and Muslim reform, including Sir Syed’s cautious modernism and later Begum-led efforts.
• The Brahmo, Prarthana, and Arya Samaj, and reformers such as M.G. Ranade and Behramji Malabari, tied women’s uplift to a purified religion and a modern household.

Major debates

• Tradition versus reform: opponents said shastra and custom forbade change; reformers reread texts, as Rammohan and Vidyasagar did, to claim that true dharma did not need sati or the imprisoned widow.
• Colonial law versus community honour: the 1891 age-of-consent controversy saw Bal Gangadhar Tilak and others attack state intrusion into Hindu marriage even when they were not defending child rape as such; the nation was said to be shamed if the Raj legislated the bedroom.
• Civilising mission versus Indian agency: missionaries and officials used women’s suffering to justify Empire; Indian reformers answered that they would reform their own homes, which both helped women and limited women’s independent voice.
• Woman as symbol versus woman as subject: the educated companionate wife was often designed by men for a new middle-class home; Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde, and Savitribai named caste and conversion in ways that embarrassed that script.
• Caste and region: Phule linked women’s bondage to Brahmanic rank; Bengal’s bhadralok debate was not the same as western-Indian or Muslim-ashraf debates, yet all used ‘woman’ to define community.

What the period settled and left open

• Law banned sati and allowed widow remarriage on paper; practice lagged, and property, vote, and work remained twentieth-century fights.
• The nineteenth-century question still taught the later national movement that swaraj without the home would be incomplete.

Way forward for the answer

• List sati, widowhood, consent, education, and purdah, then show the honour-versus-law and symbol-versus-subject debates.