Abstract
The woman question has loomed large in writings on colonial India. This essay extends the debate by focusing not exclusively on the woman, but on the imbricated figure of the girl-child/woman, a figure that finds increasing attention in the Hindi, Urdu and English commentaries of the nineteenth century. The function of the girl-child as it appears in these texts is to essentialize the woman so that even in the absence of discussions of the girl-child, the shadow of this creature haunts the writings on women. The essay seeks to show how the girl-child comes to be represented in and as woman; and conversely, the woman in the girl-child. Among other things, it suggests that the discourses of both the colonized and the colonizers erase the historical figure of the girl-child by only ever acknowledging her as a woman in future tense (mother, wife, nurturer), even as they erase women by infantilizing them and binding their claim to personhood to others (fathers, husbands, sons).
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