The State as Surrogate Parent: Legislating Nonmarital Sex in Colonial India, 1911–1929

Abstract

This essay reviews the raising of the age of consent for nonmarital sexual relations in early twentieth century India. Historians have exhaustively studied how child marriage came to be restricted, but have largely overlooked a parallel set of legal efforts to raise the age of consent for sex outside marriage. Reformists in the 1910s and 1920s steadily increased the minimum age specifying when girls could give their consent to sex with “strangers”—those who were not their husbands. Although these measures drew on international antitrafficking discourses, their major focus lay in entrenching parental control over daughters’ sexual practices. Indeed I argue that the 1929 law restricting child marriage, which effectively undermined parental control, was facilitated by the prior and concurrent measures that fixed a higher age of consent for nonmarital sex. A key contribution of my essay is its critical analysis of how apparently protective measures undermined girls’ sexual agency. I also trace how reformists seeking to raise the age of consent positioned themselves as actors on a world stage. In situating reforms on the age of consent in India within an international circuit of influence, my analysis reaches beyond the dyad of British-Indian relations that frames many feminist histories of colonial India.