Peer-reviewed article

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

Divya Kannan · 1 Mar 2022

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 by Ishita Pande Divya Kannan Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 By Ishita Pande. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. This book is a reminder of how the past continues to resonate in contemporary debates involving young people in society. Tracing the complex relationships between law and childhood through a micro-history of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 (CMRA), Ishita Pande assembles a wide range of archival evidence to destabilise notions of age as a natural phenomenon and critiques liberal legal frameworks for anchoring it. Departing from earlier feminist historical scholarship that has tended to subsume the figure of the child within the “woman’s question” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India, Pande interrogates chronological age to highlight its inherent fuzziness in constituting childhood as a governable site and pries open the language of liberal law. Divided into three key sections with six richly detailed chapters, this nuanced theoretical narrative pulls together diverse historiographical strands, particularly from feminist legal theory, childhood and sexuality. The first section on juridical and autoptic childhoods draws substantially from the author’s previous scholarship. Here, she brings the reader’s attention to comprehend the nature and extent to which young girls’ bodies were subject to forensic scrutiny in a prejudicial racialised manner and ways in which colonial medicalised classifications of age inscribed new forms of violence on them. Pointing to the tragic case of Phulmoni Dasee, a young girl raped to death by her husband on their wedding night, along with other cases of child-wives, the autoptic and juridical child described by Pande is borne out of colonial projects of knowledge production central to legal attempts to consolidate age as a natural “fact” of life. Her illuminating analysis of various census statistics on children’s ages, medical charts and legal judgments reveals the fixation of liberal law with concretising chronological age despite the evident inherent messiness of statistics related to births and puberty of children in colonial India. The sexualised representations of child-wives, reduced to medical evidence appropriate to these narrow legal readings, accommodated orthodox community practices more than the health and well-being of young girls. Moving slightly away from the legal realm in the second section, Pande provokes the reader to reflect on whom the CMRA intended to protect through a subsequent discussion on sexology. Adding to the recent scholarship such as that of Durba Mitra’s Indian Sex Life and Ashwini Tambe’s Defining Girlhood in India on probing sexuality as foundational to colonial rule, Pande shows the blurring of the public-private dichotomy as sex-educators writing in Hindi and English debated child sexuality to address anxieties regarding “sexually precocious young girls” and excessive male masturbation.1 One may wonder what connects sexology to the debates around CMRA during this period, but Pande deftly demonstrates how sex was conceived as work bound within the “internalisation of the discipline of clock -time” (185) in these writings which attempted to establish age-graded appropriate sexual behaviour. In separating the “child” from the “adult,” notions such as brahmacharya in Hindu ritual discourse was reformulated in a hybrid version suitable for adolescent boys and girls. Here, Pande situates her strategy of reading sideways within a wider canvas and links Hindu sex-education with the circulation of norms of heterosexual monogamy and reproductive normality (185–188). During the debates on the CMRA, such sex-education literature that sought to “sort boys from the men,” simultaneously proclaimed adolescent male innocence, and invited extended state protection for them. The final section of the book deals with the Othering of the Muslim as a deviant form in the discussions on child marriage in India during the time of the CMRA. In critiquing the liberal frameworks of secularism, Pande forays into an arena that has largely been understudied in feminist scholarship on India. She devotes considerable attention towards understanding the challenges posed to the CMRA by alternate readings of the age of consent and marriage under colonial Islamic law in north India. Her analysis of the cases involving young Muslim wives shows...