Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative on child rape in India

Abstract

This article provides a close reading of the circulation of the case of the ‘child-wife’ Phulmoni Dasi, which is acknowledged to have triggered the Age of Consent Act of 1891. Instead of assuming that the evidence of corporeal trauma triggered the various responses to the problem of child marriage – reformist or reactionary – that have been comprehensively documented by historians, this article scrutinizes the unfolding of a humanitarian narrative that reconstituted child marriage as a socio-medical problem that was discovered, diagnosed and administered, through an unprecedented focus on the body. By foregrounding the formal unity of the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative, this article draws attention to the striking investment in the corpse as the repository of truth about crime, culture, pain and compassion, on the one hand, and the obfuscation of the bodily detail in the dissemination of this particular case from the autopsy table to the courtroom and to the public discourse on child marriage, on the other hand. By comparing and contrasting two narratives that rested on the child-wife's body – a colonial medico-legal discourse that served to render the culturally common crime of rape into the uncommon crime of culture through a focus on the rape of children, and a seemingly universal humanitarian narrative that rested on a common compassionate response to sexual violence against the child, this article highlights the colonial genealogy of modern humanitarianism. This article thus queries the centrality of the body in the humanitarian narrative in order to interrogate the racialized underbelly of modern humanitarianism.