Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age

Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937
Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-48974-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 621 g

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pande, Ishita

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Hinduismus Hinduismus: Leben & Praxis, Soziale Aspekte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Theokratische und religiöse Ideologien
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtssoziologie, Rechtspsychologie, Rechtslinguistik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Pande, Ishita
Ishita Pande is Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Queen's University, Canada. She is the author of Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (2010).