The Hindu Widow Remarriage Act was passed in which of the following years?

Each social-reform enactment of colonial India carries its own specific year — the year at which sustained reformist campaigning turned into a law that received the Governor-General's assent. Identifying the correct year for a named Act means anchoring to the point the Act itself took legal effect, not merely a year when reform debate on the subject was underway.

The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act (Act XV of 1856) was the direct outcome of a sustained campaign led through the early 1850s by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. It received the assent of Governor-General Lord Canning and took legal effect in 1856, legalising the remarriage of Hindu widows and treating children born of such a remarriage as legitimate; under its Section 2, a widow who remarried ceased to hold any inheritance or maintenance claim on her deceased husband's estate, as though she had died.

Checking this against the wider 19th-century reform timeline confirms it:

• 1846, 1826, and 1816 all fall before Vidyasagar's organised petitioning drive of the 1850s that produced this specific Act — no Hindu widow-remarriage law was in force in any of those years.

• Other reforms of the era carry their own distinct enactment years (for instance, the Bengal Sati Regulation abolishing sati dates to 1829, under Lord William Bentinck) — none of them substitutes for the assent year of this particular Act.

Law Commission of India records and Supreme Court judgments citing the Act both place its enactment in 1856.