Abstract
Sometimes books can well be judged by their cover, and this one is graced with an arresting black and white photograph titled, ‘The Lawyer and his Wife’. This reader was hooked by the cover, but then drawn in by Pande’s personalised associations with archival materials and enthralled by the many unexpected intellectual forays explored in this ambitious monograph.
Ishita Pande’s, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937, is a postcolonial, queer, feminist avant-garde intervention within South Asian scholarship. The book is masterfully crafted in six chapters divided into three sections, bookended with an introduction and an epilogue. The book is as Pande writes, ‘…to be read as a dual biography of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, (CMRA) and of age itself’ (p. 289). To the uninitiated, biographies of a legal act partnered with that of the ‘cut and dry’ certainty of numerical abstraction, that is, age, might not seem an enticing intellectual invitation. The expansive framing, depth and breadth of theoretical dialogue, archival richness and methodological innovation of this book will draw in readers, not only those more familiar with Indian history but those working across multiple geographies.
The book opens with references to the notorious 1927 text, Mother India by the American journalist, Katherine Mayo. Even as it would appear that commentaries on Mother India have been exhaustive over nearly a century, Pande manages to draw out aspects of the book not otherwise highlighted. Pande zooms in on Mayo’s representations of the Hindu child wife, (1) and from here on her commentary on this quintessentially colonial text loops back and forth through the entirety of the book. The first two chapters under the section titled ‘Provincialising Childhood’, work to denaturalise the focus on chronological age as a defining distinction between child and adult. Here the engagement is with postcolonial insights on demonstrating the limits of Eurocentric liberal humanist and legalistic understandings of childhood and who was placed under this signage. Pande is able to map the manner in which an ‘epistemic contract on age’, emerged as a universalised understanding of childhood tied to chronological age. Ironically even as numbers are believed to convey ‘objective’ realities, these numbers themselves shift in defining children across race and gender between 12, 14, 16, 18 and 21 years. Legalistic framing of childhood and children, Pande shows, traversed competitively across the expansive geographical boundaries of the British imperial social formation.
The second section titled, ‘Queering Age Stratification’, builds upon much of Anglo-Euro-American queer scholarship and applies it to India, bringing Queer scholarship in dialogue with area studies. In this instance, Pande acknowledges her inspiration from Anjali Arondekar’s work. Dynamic dialogue across different intellectual traditions is further explored through a creative tweaking of Gayle Rubin’s canonical feminist formulation on sex/gender system as sex/age system to turn the gaze upon Indian boyhood and matrimony. The much-needed focus on masculinity and boyhood that feminist interrogation has made legible as subject of research is evoked by Pande to highlight the relative neglect of masculinity/boyhood in Indian historiographical debates on child marriage and colonial legal interventions to rethink the age of marriage and consent. Across this text, Pande is generous in acknowledging the extensive intellectual kinship in whose company she sharpens her own readings of the archives. Exhaustive footnotes built through citational labour bear witness to Pande’s commitment in fostering intellectual comradery in print.
The concluding section, ‘Consent Otherwise’, captures the politics of Muslim minoritisation tied to the debates on child marriage, drawing upon the infamous salacious vernacular text, Rangila Rasul. Paradoxically, Hindu writers displaced colonial representations of Hindu backwardness, hyper-sexuality and ‘otherness’ onto Muslims. Prophet Mohammad’s marriage to Ayesha is used to draw up the image of a paedophilic spiritual head of Islam. The last chapter brings into sharp relief the less known case of Badal Aurat, where Pande asks how is it that Phulmoni’s case becomes a cause celebre, whereas Badal Aurat is lost to history (258)? Feminist historians and literary scholars have long asked the question about partiality and half-truths within a highly androcentric academic mainstream. In Pande’s book, this resurfaces to interrogate how and why archives are selectively read to realise underlying philosophical assumptions of historical subjectivities, expressions and agency. The writing of the multiple Muslim legal cases of child marriage helps Pande draw attention to alternative modalities of gender justice that existed alongside liberal judicial expression that gained universality. The uniquely Muslim resolution to troublesome instances of child marriages has largely remained illegible as liberatory even as they allowed for a reconciliation of communitarian identities alongside those of gendered and sexualised subjectivities.
The epilogue brings the discussion full circle, whereby the past, present and future are recognised as intricately entwined and queering linear progressive temporalities. The past is better understood through debates and concerns of the present, whereas the contemporary constructivist logics emerge when traced backwards in history; future imaginings likewise are wedged within the dynamics of political visions of the past and the present. Through eclectic theoretical borrowing, Pande weaves a feminist historical narrative rich in analysis and commentary, to produce a work that is intellectually exhilarating.
I could conclude on this positive note. However, advancing Pande’s project is guided by queer feminist practice of interrogating assumptions, partialities and easy resolutions, I want to make space for ethical concerns tied to citational politics in research, writing and teaching. What does it mean for feminist scholarship committed to an expansive rethinking of childhood from the global South, to lean significantly upon Foucault’s myopic Eurocentric intellectual formulations? How does one uphold intellectual fidelity especially given the recent revelations of Foucault’s paedophilic interactions with boys in Tunisia? While these revelations could not have been known when the book was completed, how about a related concern articulated by Dalit feminists under #MeToo calling out bullying and sexual misconduct by leading South Asian postcolonial male scholars, some of whom are prominently cited in the book? Even as this is posed as a question, it is raised here more as a way of acknowledging compelling ethical and moral quandaries within academia that feminist activism has brought to our collective attention.