Sex, Law, And The Politics Of Age: Child Marriage In India, 1891–1937 by Ishita Pande

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex, Law, And The Politics Of Age: Child Marriage In India, 1891–1937 by Ishita Pande Ashwini Tambe Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937. By Ishita Pande. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xvi + 322 pp. Cloth $99.99, paper $44.99, e-book $78.75. Is age a natural and universal measure of human capacity? This is the central question that Ishita Pande explores in Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937. The book is a capacious biography of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA), a 1929 law that has anchored much scholarship about sexual consent and the women’s movement in India. This book breaks new ground in a crowded field; it is, ambitiously, also an examination of how chronological age itself structures understandings of legal personhood. It accomplishes three theoretical goals. First, in a poststructuralist feminist mode, it unpacks how age is made natural. Second, it takes up the postcolonial imperative of questioning liberal legal universals and investigates how chronologically bound definitions of childhood were universalized. Third, it adopts a queer refusal of the narrative coherence of life stages by “reading sideways” (in the manner of Kathryn Bond Stockton) the history of efforts to end child marriage. The book is divided into three parts, broadly moving from articulating its critique of age as a universal legal category and theorizing it as “a sexed unit of standard time” (19) to examining specific court cases that demonstrate the shortcomings of age-based legal consent, to then imagining a concrete alternative mode of establishing consent. The individual chapters—each dense and impressively researched—take up distinct questions. The introduction poses the question of how age, as an “intimate manifestation of abstract, standard time” (12), came to be understood as a universal measure of individual capacity. Chapter 1 analyzes how courts and medical texts treated a child’s age as [End Page 341] self-evidently marked on the body even though age has always been estimated through unstable physiological measures. Pande makes the case that the capacities that age seeks to mark can be neither universally discerned on all bodies nor reduced to numerical averages. The second chapter, which takes up the antecedents of the CMRA, points to the rise of a concept of “universal childhood” in the 1920s in international circles. It draws attention to the “inherent sympathy” (117) that courts held for parents by ruling in their favor, even when evidence about a child’s age was inadequate, and the various unstable measures courts used to approximate a body’s maturity, such as teeth, height, and weight. Pande pushes readers to consider how the imperative of child protection might be separated from efforts to pin down childhood in forensic and documentary terms. The third chapter takes up another aspect of the CMRA, asking how the impulse to protect boys shaped the specifics of this law. Punting against much feminist historical scholarship on the CMRA that has focused on girls, Pande traces how boys of “tender age” were protected in a series of rape cases. Pande painstakingly reviews bills in provincial legislatures preceding the CMRA and notes that several of them focused on harm caused to boys. The addition in the CMRA of a minimum age of marriage for boys, then, was not so much an afterthought as a “compromise with patriarchal anxieties” (163). The fourth chapter takes a fascinating approach to the issue of opposition to the CMRA: while most historians have described such opposition as motivated by religious orthodoxies, Pande notes how such seemingly orthodox positions also trafficked in the secular Western science of sexology. This chapter broadly tracks the emergence of Hindu sexology, examining texts by a range of authors such as Keshava Deva Shastri, N. S. Phadke, A. P. Pillay, Harnam Das, Yashoda Devi, and Sumati Bai and showing how each reclaims sexology as a Hindu science. Pande is interested in how such works sediment reproductive temporality. One of the book’s most important moves is to foreground how Hindu legislators’ imagined national modernity was based on a foundational exclusion of the Muslim Other. Chapter 5 demonstrates how Hindu authors and...