Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

Dehlvi’s 1914 memoir raises the possibility that the women of the Meerut were not bazaar prostitutes but “women whose men had been imprisoned” – “respectable” women, wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Building on this clue, this chapter asks who were these women, why were they at the cantonment, and how did they regard the British? For answers, this chapter turns to “family pension” records from the 1850s. What emerges are soldiers’ family relationships and, from the British point of view, their scandalous nature. British “Pension Paymasters” came to argue that many bereaved women receiving pensions were not what they claimed to be, namely, war widows. Official distrust of such women grew dramatically in the mid-1850s, largely based on a narrowing definition in the official mind of what constituted legitimate marriage. The result was the denial of pensions to these women and, not infrequently, their criminal prosecution, especially in the region of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, whose marriages were deemed insufficiently legitimate. Pension fraud investigations also revealed, in the western reaches around Delhi, the Punjab, and Afghanistan, secondary marriages to younger women.

This chapter begins with a consideration of concubines, that is, women who had a recognized status as social and sexual partners but were not wives, in the Roman empire and early medieval Europe. As the Church exerted stricter control of lay family arrangements, royal concubinage tended to disappear, to be replaced by purely informal, if often powerful, royal mistresses, mainly drawn from the aristocracy. The kings of Castile were notable for their long-term mistresses, whose children were often of political importance. Bastard sons were usually, but not always, excluded from succession to the throne. Examples of those who did become kings are discussed, including Tancred of Sicily, Henry of Trastámara and John of Avis, king of Portugal. Bastard children of rulers were often publicly recognized, and sometimes culturally identifiable through their names or coats-of-arms. There is a full discussion of the way illegitimate children could be legitimized.

Marital infidelity was not uncommon in the period covered in this book. Nor was it, for much of the time, a hidden or concealed crime. Newspapers regularly reported on bigamy, criminal conversation, divorce and desertion cases that came before the Irish courts and often involved adulterous behaviour. It is impossible to know how extensive extra-marital sexual behaviour was in any period. In this chapter we explore the attitudes expressed towards adulterous behaviour and couples who cohabited without marrying, how such behaviour reflected upon marital relationships and what it says more generally about sexuality in Irish society.Printed reports and newspaper accounts of trials for criminal conversation were an important medium through which the public became aware of adulterous affairs.This chapter reveals the level of non-conformity that existed in sexual matters amongst individuals and couples over a long time period.Sexual non-conformity can be viewed for instance, in cohabitation, adultery, the keeping of mistresses, and the advantage taken of women servants in households. By the end of the nineteenth century, both the Church and the law increasingly oversaw the implementation of sexual norms in society and perpetuated ideals for male and female sexual behaviour.