Abstract
My warmest thanks to Sanjam Ahluwalia, Rachel Berger and Janaki Nair for these thoughtful and expansive readings of my book, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, and to Antoinette Burton and IJGS for hosting this virtual adda with kinswomen. The book, which started off as an intellectual history of childhood and cultural history of chronological age, was bent to its current shape in the wake of the routine violence unleashed by India’s current government on minoritised populations. What does a history of child marriages have to do with this recent history of violence? While Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age—a biography of the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929—is not the easiest book to read, I am grateful to these readers for staying with me to grasp how the seemingly benevolent and enlightened mission to eradicate child marriages, from the late nineteenth century on, relied on logics that engendered violence against putative others, and why historical accounts of ‘reform’ have neglected to fully account for this foundational violence. My book proposes that marriage-age reform appears innocuous, and its pernicious exclusions remain hard to grasp because age, unlike other traits that mark identity (and hence difference), appears to us to be natural and universally applicable. I trace how age was made natural in early twentieth-century India, and how seemingly enlightened age-based discriminations in turn helped naturalise other forms of exclusion. As I explain when glossing the term, the ‘politics of age’ in my book, the legal and affective figure of the child/minor naturalised the political formulation of ‘minority’. My three generous readers note, in different ways, how Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age is both a demonstration of how the regulation of sex fundamentally shaped political life in India at the turn of the twentieth century and the expression of my personal response to the political present.
Sanjam Ahluwalia, capturing the spirit of what I term ‘reading sideways’, notes that history-writing, in my book, is an enterprise that is always contaminated by the ‘concerns of the present’, while ‘future imaginings…are wedged within the dynamics of political visions of the past and the present’. Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age, in her reading, traces the little-noticed political effects of the reliance on age as the measure of identity, guarantor of rights and arbiter of consent. I am delighted that she also recognises the book as a meditation on feminist history writing, shaped by the ‘extensive intellectual kinship’ of the works I cite, and in turn showcasing my ‘commitment to fostering intellectual comradery in print’.
Embracing this spirit of feminist adda she pushes me to reconsider not only my reliance on ‘Foucault’s myopic Eurocentric intellectual formulations’ to understand a place towards which he barely cast a glance, but also the ethics of citing his work, given the ‘recent revelations of Foucault’s paedophilic interactions with boys in Tunisia’. While she generously offers me a way out—I would not have known about Foucault’s interactions when I sent my book to press—I will note that I do cite an interview with him that treats paedophilia as a question open to debate. I included that material in order to draw attention to the sometimes uncomfortable and disconcerting entailments of thinking about child marriage and child sexuality outside of normative liberal juridical frames which, as I argue throughout the book, continue to circumscribe our scholarly analysis.
Reading sideways—a term I use to describe a method that uses and queries postcolonial, queer, feminist and critical race theory by thinking them together—requires me to be upfront about the political potential and ethical dilemmas posed to feminist thought by illiberal and/or queer thinking. Reading sideways, as I explain in the book, entails the giving up of the comforts that come with letting the rule of liberal law stand in for our notions of right and wrong. But to turn to the more specific questions Ahluwalia raises on the ethics of continuing to cite men named and shamed for their sexual behaviour, I along with other scholars will doubtless be mulling over the possibility and necessity of thinking queer theory without Foucault for years to come. Likewise, feminist historians of India will need to decide how to treat the scholarship of teachers and peers charged with sexual misconduct. Will we continue to cite them to give them credit where it is due, to take apart their scholarship, to point to their partial points of view? Or will we scrupulously erase every trace of them because that might be all we can do? I do not have an answer that everyone of us can agree on, but I can explain my citation policy: I err on the side of exhaustiveness. Not so much to give credit where it is due, but to engage in a full conversation particularly when I disagree with an author, or when I seek to dismantle the structure of thought that permeates their scholarship, be it overwhelmingly patriarchal, formidably liberal, unabashedly Eurocentric or frankly communal. To me, it seemed important to clear away with care and diligence the citational bricks that make up the master narratives I am dismantling, which is not to say that I remain unmoved by the power of an alternative politics of citation that in the words of Sara Ahmed leaves the bricks behind and builds with ‘feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable’ (Ahmed, 2016). And finally I would have to think hard about the grounds for banishing someone from the bibliography, given my critique of the certainties and cherished principles of liberal juridical logic—some of which undergird #MeToo’s assumptions about the sexual agency.
One of those cherished principles that my book aims to query is the presumed relationship between age and agency as expressed in regulations regarding the age of consent, or even the age of criminal responsibility. These assumptions, as I demonstrate through a close reading of existing scholarship, also permeate scholarly analysis on the agency of women and children. Janaki Nair recounts how the book questions the relationship between age and agency established within liberal juridical reason, by recognising age as ‘an expression of “law’s temporality”’. Leaving aside a small point she makes in her comments about ‘who said it first’, the more substantive point Nair is perhaps drawing attention to is that an interest in chronological age did not erupt suddenly in 1891, and that age mattered in contexts besides sex and marriage. I couldn’t agree more. While child marriage is my point of focus, and while the politics of age is most stridently expressed around issues of sex, my book discusses the many age-stratified distinctions mentioned in the Indian Penal Code enacted in 1860 (SLPA, 14), during debates surrounding the Majority Act of 1875 (SLPA, 52–55), age of labour (SLPA, 56–59), age-stratified sex education (SLPA, Chapter 4), etc. So, to answer Nair’s question, the epistemic contract on age to which I have drawn attention did indeed extend well beyond the overtly protectionist logic of child marriages; my book traces its genealogy in liberal political theory, and hints at its reach well beyond early twentieth-century India. To take just one example, the Epilogue discusses how the epistemic contract on age and the forensic standards of age it has given rise to are visible in US immigration practices to this day, as are the discriminations obscured by the presumed universality of chronological age as a measure of all humans. So, to clarify once more, the question I am asking is not simply ‘when did age stipulations in the law come into existence’, which is precisely the type of narrowly historicist question that the practice of reading sideways seeks to move beyond, but rather, ‘What is the work that the epistemic contract on age did (and continues to do)’? While I do trace various moments during which age became constitutive of individual identity, legal capacity, sexual maturity, etc., I am more interested in demonstrating what happens once age begins to appear as something given in nature, legible in every body and universally applicable to each and all.
And what happens—amongst other things—are the processes that I discuss in the third section of the book, that is, the constitution of ‘Muslims’ as a homogenised political minority through the use of liberal political arithmetic, and the representation of alternative/Islamic juridical norms as always already backward. I foreground Islamic legal principles to step outside of the epistemic contract on age and to further highlight the provincial roots of the notion of consent that is so fundamental to the disturbingly collapsed domains of liberal law, modern morality and scholarly analysis. In her engaged reading, Rachel Berger superbly captures my thoughts on the ways in which a naturalised understanding of the figure of the ‘minor’ in the law circumscribes and naturalises the political form of ‘minority’. In the last section of the book, I turn to the ‘Muslim child wife’—as a figure in nationalist discourse and as a person that inhabited the colonial courtroom, to read sideways, this time to scrutinise debates and cases that have fallen by the side in a context where liberal juridical categories feed seamlessly into feminist categories of analysis. Berger, a historian of medicine and science, takes note of the many registers on which the politics of age and childhood played out; she also notices how queer critique—with its insights on age—makes possible this history of the sociocultural construction of gender. As Berger suggests, not only does my focus on age makes possible a more expansive understanding of gender, but it also clarifies the place of sexual regulation in the shaping of the nation for, as she puts it, ‘the census and other means of (age) measurement could aim to simply ask: how *old* is the nation?’
So, while Nair suggests that ‘the use of queer theory and this book’s method (i.e., reading sideways) may also be parsed as what feminists have been engaging with for the last 40 years without even knowing it’, I disagree: If we had been reading sideways for four decades, why would I find it so hard to escape some of the very constraints of the ‘methodological Hinduism’ that I point to as one of the shortcomings of most existing feminist scholarship on child marriage? Both Nair and Berger helpfully point to my own shortcomings in critically engaging caste, and I agree with them recognising methodological Hinduism is easier than overcoming it, but it constitutes a first step. If we had been reading sideways for decades, why would an otherwise careful reader find it so hard to understand that I am not simply writing an account of the demonisation of Muslims in Hindu social reform discourse, but I am making a case for using Islamic juridical principles (for instance, age of puberty) to point to the peculiarities of the default liberal juridical principles that permeate much feminist political activism as well as scholarly analysis (as evidenced by the quest for signs of some free-floating ‘consent’ in the past, or the hunt for agency by reading documents against the grain). Had we been reading sideways for four decades, we would not still be debating when exactly age emerged as a fundamental guarantor of rights and consent instead of noting its dubious effects on private and public life. We would not just be beginning to notice how exclusions based on the question ‘how old are you’ slipped (and continue to slip) by imperceptible degrees into exclusions premised on majoritarian tales about the age of the nation.