The study situates its analysis against the backdrop of the nineteenth century, when a wave of reform movements sought the overall improvement of women’s status across Indian society. Yet, as the paper argues, Muslim women confined to the antahpur, the secluded inner quarters of the household, remained markedly marginalised within these efforts. According to the research, their condition was considerably more lamentable than that of their Hindu counterparts, a disparity rooted in lower rates of formal education, stricter practices of seclusion, and social customs that kept women largely invisible in public life. Over the course of the century, however, as education expanded among the Muslim elite, prominent men of the community began to address women’s issues more actively, and the emerging medium of print became the principal arena for those discussions.

The legal framework of the era forms an important part of this context. The study notes that the first law aimed at preventing child marriage was passed in 1860, setting the minimum age of marriage for girls at ten years, a figure that was later raised to twelve. In 1891, the Age of Consent bill was enacted, legalising the notion of a girl’s consent in marriage. These legislative milestones, while limited in scope, gave reformers concrete reference points for their arguments in the press, and the periodicals studied by Islam repeatedly returned to the gap between statutory reform and everyday practice in Muslim households across Bengal.

Central to the paper’s analysis is the emergence of Muslim women themselves as writers and public intellectuals. Eminent figures such as Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Mrs. M. Rahman, and Shamsunnahar Mahmud began publishing in Muslim edited newspapers and journals in the early twentieth century, voicing their concern about what they described as the deplorable condition of Muslim women and linking their writing to active engagement in reform movements. Begum Rokeya, whose essays appeared in Nabanoor between 1904 and 1905 under titles such as Griha (Home), Amader Obonoti (Our Degradation), and Arthangini (Better-Half), used these columns to argue that the seclusion and neglect of women were dragging the entire community backward. Her writings, the study shows, combined sharp social critique with an appeal to the community’s own interests, framing women’s advancement as inseparable from collective progress.

The institutional groundwork for this awakening had been laid decades earlier. The study traces the origins of Muslim educational and associational life in Bengal to organisations such as the Mohammedan Literary Society, founded on 2 April 1863 to promote education and religious consciousness among Muslims, and the National Mohammedan Association, established on 12 May 1878 through the initiatives of Syed Ameer Ali to promote western education. The latter organisation spread its branches beyond Calcutta and played a crucial role in serving village-based students. Such bodies, dominated by male elites, gradually opened space for the discussion of women’s education, even as their own priorities remained focused on the advancement of Muslim men in colonial administration and the professions.

Among the specific debates the study reconstructs is the controversy over purdah, or veiling. Periodicals carried contributions both defending and criticising the practice. An essay titled Muslim Ramanir Purdah Pratha, published in Islam Pracharak in 1903–1904, examined the veiling of Muslim women, while decades later a piece in Sabuj Palli in 1926 addressed the burqa directly. In 1929, Mohammad Nasiruddin published an essay in Saogat titled Purdah Bonam Probanchona, Veil versus Deception, signalling a shift in the debate from whether veiling was religiously mandated to whether it served as a cover for social stagnation. Writers also turned to religious texts themselves, with one 1922 essay in Islam Darshan discussing the doctrine of veiling in Islam, indicating that reformers sought to argue their case within, rather than against, the Islamic framework.

Polygamy and widow remarriage generated equally heated exchanges. A 1905 essay in Nabanoor by Maulvi Imdad-Ul-Haq and Imdad Ali took up the question of polygamy, while a 1926 contribution in Roushan Hedayat defended widow marriage in Islam, pointing to the gap between scriptural permissibility and social practice. The study also records discussions of divorce and of the suffering of women, including essays titled Nari Jatir Durgati, The Suffering of Women, published in Al-Eslam in 1917 and 1921. These interventions, the paper argues, show that the periodical press functioned as a genuine deliberative forum in which the gender norms of the Muslim socio-religious framework were negotiated in real time, with contributors citing the Quran, including Surah Al Nisa, alongside contemporary social argument.

Women writers did not limit themselves to broadsides against custom; they also developed constructive programmes. Khairunnessa’s 1905 essay in Nabanoor, Shikhar Antaray, or Obstacles to Our Education, identified the practical barriers that kept girls out of schools, while S. Khatun’s 1923 piece Adhunik Shiksha, Modern Education, in the Bangiya Muslim Sahitya periodical set out an affirmative vision of what schooling could offer. The study highlights dedicated women’s writing sections that gave these voices institutional support. The magazine Saogat ran a women’s section known as Zenana Mehfil, which the Muslim women of the early twentieth century used as a platform to publish their writings. Similarly, Masik Muhammadi carried a special column called Mahila Mehfil from the first issue of its second year, corresponding to October 1928, through 1930–31, publishing contributions from writers including Mrs. R. S. Hossain, Amina Khatun, Razia Khatun Choudhurani, Subodh Bala Biswas, and Abu Lohani on a range of women’s and social issues.

The study also documents the international horizons of this reformist moment. It notes that the first Indian Muslim woman to receive a senior degree from the University of Cambridge followed close on the achievements of Chandramukhi Basu and Kadambini Ganguly, the pioneering women graduates of India, a fact the author cites to illustrate how quickly the boundaries of the possible were shifting for Muslim women in this era. Scholarly works by Gail Minault on secluded scholars and Muslim social reform in colonial India, and by Siobhan Lambert-Hurley on Muslim women, reform, and princely patronage, are drawn upon to place the Bengali material within the broader landscape of South Asian Muslim women’s history, while more recent scholarship on Muslim enlightened thought in South Asia frames the period’s intellectual currents.

Ultimately, the paper argues that the Bengali Muslim edited periodicals of the early twentieth century constitute an indispensable archive for understanding both the social marginalisation of Muslim women and the strategies by which they and their allies sought to overcome it. By reading men’s and women’s reformist writings side by side across titles ranging from Kohinoor in 1898 to Saogat in the 1930s, the study shows a community in transition: elites beginning to acknowledge women’s grievances, women seizing the printed page to speak in their own names, and a gradual, contested redefinition of what education, marriage, and public life could mean within the Muslim socio-religious framework. The research, supported by a project grant from the Aliah University Research and Development Cell, received on 1 July 2025, was accepted on 1 September 2026, and published on 26 September 2026, adds a significant chapter to the social history of gender reform in colonial Bengal and underscores how much of women’s history survives in the humble columns of long-forgotten magazines.

Subject of Research: Social realities of Bengali Muslim women as reflected in early twentieth-century Bengali Muslim edited periodicals

Article Title: Unveiling social realities of the lives of Muslim women through the lens of Bengali Muslim edited periodicals of early twentieth century

Article References: Islam, T. (2026). Unveiling social realities of the lives of Muslim women through the lens of Bengali Muslim edited periodicals of early twentieth century. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01699-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01699-9

Keywords: Bengali Muslim women, periodicals, social reform, women's education, child marriage, purdah, polygamy, widow remarriage, colonial Bengal, Begum Rokeya, print culture, social history

The research, conducted by Susanta Sen, Asif Ali, Amit Banerjee, and Namita Chakma of the Department of Geography at The University of Burdwan in West Bengal, drew on two rounds of India’s National Family Health Survey: the fourth round, conducted in 2015–16 with 122,955 women, and the fifth round, conducted in 2019–21 with 118,700 women. The analysis focused on women aged 20 to 24 years, the standard age group used to assess child marriage prevalence under international indicators, since these women had passed beyond the age at which a legal marriage before 18 could have occurred. By comparing the two survey rounds, the researchers were able to track both the level of child marriage and the distribution of that practice across the wealth spectrum over roughly a five-year interval.

To measure inequality rigorously, the team employed the Erreygers Concentration Index, a widely used summary measure in health equity research that captures whether a health or social outcome is systematically concentrated among richer or poorer groups. A negative value of the index indicates that the outcome is concentrated among the economically disadvantaged. In both survey rounds, the Erreygers Concentration Index for child marriage was negative and statistically significant, confirming that the burden of marrying before 18 falls disproportionately on girls from poorer households. The index moved from −0.281, with a 95 percent confidence interval of −0.289 to −0.273, in the fourth round to −0.257, with a 95 percent confidence interval of −0.265 to −0.249, in the fifth round, indicating a modest narrowing of wealth-related inequality but no fundamental change in its direction or magnitude.

The absolute picture tells a similarly nuanced story. The absolute gap in child marriage prevalence between the poorest and richest groups narrowed from 20.65 percentage points in NFHS-4 to 19.04 percentage points in NFHS-5. Yet the relative measure moved in the opposite direction: the ratio of child marriage prevalence among the poor compared with the non-poor actually increased, from 2.07 to 2.20. This combination of a shrinking absolute gap and a widening relative gap is a classic pattern in epidemiology and social statistics, arising when prevalence declines faster in absolute terms among groups that already have lower baseline levels. In practical terms, even though fewer girls overall are marrying as children, a girl born into a poor household today remains substantially more exposed to the risk of early marriage than one born into affluence, and in relative terms that exposure has grown.

Beyond describing the inequality, the study’s central methodological contribution lies in its use of regression-based decomposition analysis, a technique that partitions the observed concentration index into contributions attributable to individual socio-demographic characteristics. Rather than simply noting that child marriage correlates with poverty, decomposition analysis quantifies how much of the measured inequality each factor statistically explains. The results were striking in their consistency: educational attainment dominated the explained component of wealth-related inequality in both survey rounds, accounting for 77.06 percent in NFHS-4 and 77.41 percent in NFHS-5. In other words, differences in schooling levels between rich and poor women are by far the largest statistical driver of why early marriage clusters among the disadvantaged.

The composition of the remaining explained inequality shifted over time in ways that offer clues about the changing social landscape. In the fourth survey round, place of residence, meaning the divide between urban and rural areas, was the second-largest contributor to wealth-related inequality in child marriage. By the fifth round, however, the contribution of mass media exposure had risen substantially, overtaking residential location as a key explanatory factor. This shift suggests that access to information, whether through television, radio, newspapers, or increasingly digital channels, has become a more salient axis of inequality as connectivity spreads unevenly across Indian society. It also implies that the messages, norms, and alternatives that media exposure conveys about marriage, gender roles, and women’s life courses play a measurable role in shaping when and whether girls marry.

The study also documented substantial variation across India’s states and Union Territories, underscoring that child marriage is not a uniform national phenomenon but one embedded in highly diverse regional contexts of culture, economy, and policy implementation. States differ enormously in baseline prevalence, in the steepness of the wealth gradient, and in the pace of change between the two survey rounds. This heterogeneity means that a single national policy lever, applied uniformly, is unlikely to produce equitable results. Regions where the wealth gradient is steepest may require intensively targeted approaches, while regions with lower but persistent prevalence may benefit more from broad norm-change campaigns and enforcement of existing legal prohibitions on marriage below the age of 18.

The public health significance of these findings extends well beyond the institution of marriage itself. Child marriage is internationally recognized as a driver of adverse outcomes including early pregnancy, elevated maternal and infant mortality risks, interrupted schooling, restricted economic agency, and increased vulnerability to domestic violence. When the burden of child marriage concentrates among the poorest girls, it functions as a mechanism through which poverty and disadvantage reproduce themselves across generations. The study’s conclusion that reductions in overall prevalence have not been matched by equivalent reductions in socioeconomic inequality echoes a broader theme in development research: aggregate progress can mask persistent, and sometimes widening, disparities that demand explicit equity-oriented policy attention.

The authors point toward a set of policy directions grounded in their decomposition results. Because education explains such an overwhelming share of the inequality, interventions that support girls’ secondary education, reduce the economic pressures that push families to withdraw daughters from school, and keep adolescents enrolled through the years when marriage decisions are typically made stand out as the highest-leverage options. The growing contribution of mass media exposure suggests that improving access to information, and using media channels deliberately to shift social norms around early marriage, could complement educational investments. The researchers also highlight strengthening social protection for economically disadvantaged households and explicitly prioritizing the poorest families in programmatic targeting, since the data confirm that the risk of child marriage remains most intense at the bottom of the wealth distribution.

Ultimately, the study delivers a message that is both encouraging and cautionary. India has made genuine progress: child marriage prevalence declined measurably between 2015–16 and 2019–21, and the concentration index softened slightly. But the persistence of a large absolute wealth gap, the rise in the poor-to-non-poor prevalence ratio, and the stark regional differences all indicate that the finish line remains distant for the girls whom the practice continues to touch most directly. As India and the global community pursue the elimination of child marriage under international development goals, this research argues that success should be judged not only by how far national averages fall, but by how quickly the gap closes for those at the bottom, where the consequences of marrying too young are felt most severely.

Subject of Research: Wealth-related socioeconomic inequality in child marriage among young women in India

Article Title: Wealth-related inequality in child marriage in India using decomposition analysis

Article References: Sen, S., Ali, A., Banerjee, A., & Chakma, N. (2026). Wealth-related inequality in child marriage in India using decomposition analysis. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00488-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00488-2

Keywords: child marriage, India, wealth inequality, Erreygers Concentration Index, decomposition analysis, National Family Health Survey, girls' education, mass media exposure, social protection, public health, NFHS-5, socioeconomic disparity