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

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Provincializing childhood. The autoptic child: the Age of Consent Act (1891), law's temporality, and the epistemic contract on age --Juridical childhood: the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), global biopolitics, and the "digits of age" -- Queering age stratification. The sex/age system: boy-grooms, young rapists, and child protection in Hindu liberalism -- Reproductive temporality: the staging of childhood and adolescence in global/Hindu sexology -- Consent otherwise. Rethinking minority: Rangila Rasul, the "Muslim child wife," and the politics of representation -- An age of discretion: querying age and legal subjectivity in the secular Ahari'a.

"In Mother India (1927), the notorious provocation that shook the British Empire, American journalist Katherine Mayo boldly proclaimed that one had to look no further than Indian sex habits to resolve the demographic puzzle of the subjection of 247,000,000 (the population of British India without counting the numbers that resided in the princely states) to "fewer than 200,000" (which she reckoned was the entire European population in India, "from the Viceroy down to the haberdasher's baby").1 The most pathological aspect of this sex life was child marriage, as Mayo clarified in this description of an exemplary child wife: Married as a baby, sent to her husband at ten, the shock of incessant use was too much for her brain. It went. After that, beat her as he would, all that she could do was to crouch in the corner, a little twisted heap, panting. Not worth the keep. And so at last, in despair and rage over his bad bargain, he slung her small body over his shoulder, carried her out to the edge of the jungle, cast her in among the scrub thicket, and left her there to die"-- Provided by publisher.