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Behramji Malabari
‐
Writer, social reformer and advocate for women's rights
Other names
Behramji Merwanji Malabari
Phiroze B. M. Malabari
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
About
Behramji Malabari was a Parsee journalist and writer. He was an advocate for women's social reform in India and a champion of women's suffrage in India. He met Mary Carpenter on one of her visits to India in 1875 and dedicated The Indian Muse in English Garb, published in 1876, to her. In 1880 he became editor of the Indian Spectator.
Malabari became known in Britain for his role in promoting women's rights, particularly those of the Hindu widow. On the 1885 case of Rukhmabai, a child bride ordered to live with her husband, Malabari wrote not only editorials in his own paper but also letters to the editors of The Times. Florence Nightingale and Max Müller both became interested in the case and wrote commentary on it. Malabari's reforming role played a part in the passing of the 1891 Age of Consent Act in India.
In 1890 Malabari travelled to Britain. His journey and observations of British life were recorded in 1893 in The Indian Eye on English Life; or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer. The third edition, published in India in 1895, included a chapter that was not present in the British edition, on 'Sex', or women's rights.
The Indian Muse in English Garb (Bombay: Reporters Press, 1876)
Gujarat and the Gujaratis (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1882)
Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood in India: Being a collection of opinions for and against received by B. M. Malabari from representative Hindu gentlemen and officials and other authorities (Bombay: Voice of India Printing Press, 1887)
An Appeal from the Daughters of India (London: Farmer & Sons, 1890)
The Indian Eye on English Life; or, Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1893)
India in 1897 (London: A. J. Combridge, 1898)
Bombay in the Making: being mainly a history of the origin and growth of judicial institutions in the western Presidency, 1661–1726, with an introduction by George Sydenham Clarke (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910)
Burton, Antoinette, 'Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siècle London', History Workshop Journal 42 (1996), pp. 127–46
Burton, Antoinette, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Burton, Antoinette, 'From Child Bride to "Hindoo Lady": Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Respectability in Imperial Britain', American Historical Review, 103.4 (October 1998), pp. 1119–46
Codell, Julie F., 'Reversing the Grand Tour: Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Narratives', Huntington Library Quarterly 70.1 (2007), pp. 173–89
Gidumal, Dayarum, Behramji M. Malabari: A Biographical Sketch, with an introduction by Florence Nightingale (London: T. Unwin, 1892)
Karkaria, R. P., India Forty Years of Progress and Reform. Being a Sketch of the Life and Times of Behramji M. Malabari (London: Henry Frowde, 1896)
Innes, C. L., A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Singh, Jogendra, B. M. Malabari: Rambles with a Pilgrim Reformer, with an introduction by Sir Valentine Chirol (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1914)
Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002)
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Image credit
G. A. Natesan & Co., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
