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Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937

Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937

Author: Ishita Pande
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108489744
Published In: July 2020
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Ishita Pande's innovative study provides a dual biography of India's path-breaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and of 'age' itself as a key category of identity for upholding the rule of law, and for governing intimate life in late colonial India. Through a reading of legislative assembly debates, legal cases, government reports, propaganda literature, Hindi novels and sexological tracts, Pande tells a wide-ranging story about the importance of debates over child protection to India's coming of age. By tracing the history of age in colonial India she illuminates the role of law in sculpting modern subjects, demonstrating how seemingly natural age-based exclusions and understandings of legal minority became the alibi for other political exclusions and the minoritization of entire communities in colonial India. In doing so, Pande highlights how childhood as a political category was fundamental not just to ideas of sexual norms and domestic life, but also to the conceptualisation of citizenship and India as a nation in this formative period.

Provides the first history of 'age' in colonial India
Brings theoretical perspectives and methods from the history of childhood, legal history, queer theory and critical secular studies to bear on the history of child marriage
Uses the archives of colonial India to engage broader debates on the history of age, childhood, sexuality and legal personhood

Introduction

I. Provincializing childhood

1. The autoptic child: The Age of Consent Act (1891), law's temporality, and the epistemic contract on age

2. Juridical childhood: the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), global biopolitics, and the “digits of age”

II. Queering age stratification

3.The sex/age system: boy-grooms, young rapists, and child protection in hindu liberalism

4. Reproductive temporality: the staging of childhood and adolescence in global/hindu sexology

iii. Consent otherwise

5.Rethinking minority: Rangila Rasul, the “muslim child wife,” and the politics of representation

6. An age of discretion: querying age and legal subjectivity in the secular shari'a

Epilogue