Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age is a theoretical treatise on age, childhood, and sexuality grounded in sound archival research. The monograph revisits the much-debated and discussed Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 (CMRA) through the lens of child and age. In doing so, the book questions the naturalisation of age as a measure of all humans. While Pande’s book is not the first to do so1, it is the first to provide us with an in-depth and rigorous archival study of the history of age in the colonial Indian context. Central to how she traces the history of age is her understanding of time itself. Time, she argues, does not always move vertically but also horizontally (p. 24). Therefore, Pande urges her readers to look sideways, as such a method highlights the construction of themes and categories that have been passed on to us as “natural” (p. 24). The book is divided into three parts, and running across each part is an attempt to historicise age and foreground the child as the “key figure around which sexual norms are defined in modern societies” (p. 34).

In the first chapter, Pande traces how and when chronological age came to be associated with the body. She puts the much talked about Phulmoni’s case side by side with that of Barbin to illustrate the entanglements of “biomedical truth” and “legal personhood”. She argues that a constant reference to the physiological signs in the debates on the age of consent helped turn age itself into an embodied fact. Even though age stipulation in law had long existed outside the messiness of individual corporeal differences, as was the case in the Majority Act of 1875 and in the debates around the prohibition of child labour in 1891, it was during the age of consent debates that age was naturalised as a measure of all humans “by indexing it to changes in the female body” (p. 59). This, as Pande argues, helped ground law’s temporality in the age of the female body. Thus, her argumentation highlights that the structuring and the naturalness of the law’s temporality itself were gendered. She further contends that it is the failure of the liberal feminists to question the givenness of the law’s temporality that led to the emergence of the child as “the naturalized foil in the history of women” (p. 64).

The second chapter traces how childhood came to be grounded in the digits of age rather than the body, along with questioning the „naturalness“ of age. The first section places the discussion and debates on child marriage in India on a global scale. It shows how the debates in India were influenced by the League of Nations’ global biopolitics. Pande asserts that even though the League of Nations never stipulated a uniform definition of childhood, its mode of enquiries standardised the processes and categories of data collection necessary to govern all. The following section goes on to examine the manifestation of this global process. It looks at how law’s temporality embodied in age was made ubiquitous through census in the colonial Indian context. The third section analyses the legislative debates leading to the 1929 law and shows how certain age limitations to childhood continued to be questioned. Pande reads opposing claims concerning the age of consent by B.R. Ambedkar, women’s organisations, reformists, and revivalist organisations and points out that despite their discrete ideological positions, these claims upheld the law’s temporality by seeing age as a privileged marker. Thus, with the globalisation of childhood in the 1920s, childhood was no longer associated with any physiological signs but became firmly grounded in the digits of age. In the last section, Pande examines a slew of cases tried under CMRA in which the matter of age was far from settled. The chapter thus asks the reader to examine beyond the straightness of time (that gives meaning to success as well as failure) and look sideways as this shows the strangeness of age “as a measure of legal personhood and allows for a recognition of how ‚universal‘ childhood is itself an effect of the law” (p. 74).

Chapter three illustrates how the global humanitarian principle of primarily focusing on the girl child fanned local patriarchal anxieties around the boy child. Taking her cue from Gayle Rubin’s sex/gender system, Pande deploys the sex/age system to highlight the entanglement of sex and age in the constitution of gendered relations of power and to underscore that the meanings attached to age are socially constructed and mutable. To this end, Pande scrutinizes a slew of appeals in rape cases under the age of consent legislation, in which either the victim or the perpetrator was underage. Through a close reading of these cases, Pande shows that even when a girl was by law a child (within the age group of 12-14), in practice the boundaries of girlhood was not always defined by age-stratified laws, as judges often took the moral understanding of childhood (measured by appropriate comportment and sexual innocence) into account. In contrast, though legally defined as adults, the boys in this stratum were meted out lighter punishment on account of their “tender age”. Hence, Pande asserts that even when the definition of the child had solidified in law, in practice, the understanding of childhood remained slippery in the minds of judges and jury.

Chapter four shows how the science of sex was used both in favour and against child marriage. Hence, it underscores the impossibility of writing its history as a narrative of progress. It further highlights the formulation of global/Hindu sexology, which was created by incorporating modern sexology as Hindu Science. Hindu sexology, as Pande contends, made “age-stratified norms appear to be timeless, natural, and indigenous to India” (p. 189).

While chapters three and four collectively showed that the CMRA made Hindu reform compatible with modern liberal and secular values, chapters five and six focus on how Hindu reformism in their drive to secularize all in the name of marital modernization excluded the Muslim community. Through chapter five, Pande illustrates that if Mayo’s Mother India reflected “imperial politics of childhood” by highlighting “sexual perversion of Hindus”, Muslims emerged as the most “visible target of the Hindu nationalist manifestation of this politics” (p. 226). Consequently, Muslims were underrepresented in the debates on CMRA, and their response to it was considered backward.

Strengthening her argument further, in chapter six, Pande continues to analyse why some of the prominent Muslim leaders in India sought exemption from the CMRA. Through a close reading of legal cases involving Muslim girls in India, Pande lays bare the alternatives that these leaders proposed, which did not conform to the epistemic contract on age and hence were seen as an indicator of Muslim backwardness and underdevelopment itself. Thus, when Khan Bahadur Haji Wajihuddin criticised the CMRA on the grounds that “Islam does not prescribe cut and dried details of a uniform nature for each and every individual without regard for his individuality”, his opposition to CMRA was considered regressive. This, as Pande points out, underscores the paradox of the modern liberal justice system whereby justice secured “outside the logic of numbers” was perceived as the “successful expression of liberal ethos, even when they rest on the rejection of liberal epistemology” (p. 282). By bringing this paradox to the forefront, Pande points to a possibility of “justice outside of the idiom of development, and beyond the ‚cut and dried details of a uniform nature‘” (p. 282).

Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age is a theoretical masterpiece when it discusses the historicity of age. However, Pande’s other assertion that childhood emerged as the linchpin of sexual modernity, though implicit in her discussion on CMRA, lacks a detailed analysis. Furthermore, in her discussion on child protection and childhood, Christian missionaries are conspicuous by their absence. Given that Christian missionaries were at the forefront of child ‚rescue‘ and ‚protection‘, one wonders how they might have contributed to this complex history of age, childhood, and sexuality that the author adroitly narrates. Nevertheless, the book is an important and much-needed theoretical contribution to a nascent but burgeoning field of childhood history in the Indian subcontinent.

Note:
1 Radhika Singha, Colonial Law and Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject, in: Studies in History 19 (2003), 1, p. 24; Mary E. John, Child Marriage in an International Frame: A Feminist Review from India, London 2021, p. 8.