The paradox of the authoritarian rule of the Indian Raj at the heart of Britain's liberal empire was one that ran continuously through the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism. Both as the unpaid arsenal of Eastern expansion and defence, and as the essential stop-gap to Britain's multilateral pattern of trade, India was the necessary if incongruous adjunct of Liberal England, supporting the doctrines of progress at home on the basis of the autocratic control of its British-born hierophants over the numberless ‘contented masses’ of the Indian countryside. The resulting contrast between the increasingly self-governing white dominions, and the Indian maverick upholding in chains the very fabric of the empire, was also reflected in the political thinking of the motherland itself, by way of the stresses and contradictions which the conditions of the Raj's existence served to create within the liberal framework of the Victorian intellectual world. At the core of the Victorian liberal empire stood the strictly paternalistic government of the Raj in India; at the centre of the ‘benevolent despotism’ that British rule in the subcontinent adopted stood the steel frame of the Indian Civil Service, ‘much more of a government corporation than of a purely civil service’ and the creator as much as the executor of British policy there.

Muslim law confers supreme authority in marital relations on the husband, to such an extent that the husband can unilaterally and extra-judicially dissolve the matrimonial bond by pronouncement of the verbal formula of divorce (talaq). The wife's position may be to some extent protected by the fact that her deferred dower becomes payable to her upon termination of the marriage by divorce or the death of her husband. However, the dower may either have been set at a minimal amount or have been severely reduced by intervening years of inflation so as to provide neither an affective restraint on the husband's exercise of his power of talaq nor much real assistance to the wife after she has been divorced and turned out of her husband's house. On the other hand, if the dower is set at such an amount as to constitute a real restraint on her husband in regard to his exercise of talaq and the marriage breaks down, the husband may refuse to divorce the Wife by talaq (since by doing so he would incur liability for the dower debt) and may suggest that she agree to a divorce by mutual consent (Khul' or mubara' a). However, a concomitant of a divorce by mutual consent is some financial remuneratioin by the wife to the husband; usually the husband requires the wife to relinquish her rights to dower. The wife may thus easily be placed in position of having to buy her way out of an unhappy marriage.