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

An innovative study of the establishment of 'age' as a political category in late colonial India.

Ishita Pande (Author)

9781108747486, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 March 2022

338 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'… an important and much-needed theoretical contribution to a nascent but burgeoning field of childhood history in the Indian subcontinent.' Soni, H-Soz-Cult

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.

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

Subject Areas: Gender & the law [LAQG], Law & society [LAQ], Religious & theocratic ideologies [JPFR], Hindu life & practice [HRGP], Asian history [HBJF]