The epilogue recollects the several exploratory strands opened up by the book and their relevance to the present, as witness our reliance on the epistemic contract on age to imagine the human and gender justice, for one, or our recourse to the naturalized child to launch and obfuscate various political claims, for another. It summarizes the conclusions drawn in each of the six chapters by weaving them into a discussion of two present-day cases – one from India in 2012 and another from the United States in 2017. The cases speak to the continuing power of the “child” to animate political passions, and the (misplaced) reliance on forensic technologies and bureaucratic procedures to provide accurate proofs of age, and hence of childhood.

This chapter traces a case involving a Muslim wife, Badal, who left behind a marriage contracted for her in her childhood on attaining puberty. Ameer Ali’s judgment in the case of Badal Aurat and Anr. v. Emperor (1891) was cited repeatedly as a precedent for the application of the Islamic legal concept of the “option of puberty” in colonial courtrooms. The case sheds interesting light on layered and dynamic historical structure of “Islamic law” and serves as a counterpoint to the tragic and coeval case of Phulmoni Das studied in the first chapter of the book. This chapter traces the afterlives of the case in colonial courtrooms, not with the intent to celebrate Muslim law in its colonial application, but in order: first, to use an Islamic legal principle – the “option of puberty” – to shine a light on the kinks, quirks, and limitations of the liberal legal principle of the “age of consent”; second, to raise questions about the contrasting visibility of the two cases – Badal and Phulmoni – in the historical scholarship on the age of consent and marriage in India; and third, to ask if it is possible to step away from liberal legal categories to imagine consent without (chronological) age.

Puzzling over the repetitive evocation of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis during debates over the age of marriage in the Legislative Assembly, this chapter studies sexology as a site for the dissemination of the age-stratified sexual morality upheld by the Child Marriage Restraint Act. The marriage manuals, antimasturbation tracts, samples of erotica, and sex education texts surveyed in this chapter drew equally on the new science of sex and shastric knowledge and were particularly focused on the regulation of sexuality with reference to children. In making rough translations between two epistemic and ethical orders, these works buttressed an age-stratified sexual morality, gave chronological age roots in (a primordial) India, depicted marriage reform as a return to a (Hindu) golden age, and helped align the time of the (Hindu) ritual body with the temporality of secular body and of the modern nation. While such translations might have aided marital reform, the silent exclusions – of Muslims in particular – that were inherent to this schema could not be covered over for long.

This chapter revisits the well-known case involving the death of a child wife in India, Queen-Empress v. Hurree Mohun Mythee. While it is usually assumed that the signs of violence and immaturity found on the corpse of the child wife led to the passage of the Age of Consent Act (1891), this chapter draws on insights from sexuality and science studies to argue that the autopsy served as a technology to construct the child as embodied. It traces the construction of the “child” as a natural category – by medicine, the law, and perhaps more surprisingly, by history – and suggests that the “child” is created by, and serves to obscure, the epistemic contract on age – an implicit agreement that age is a natural measure of legal capacity for all humans, but which can, in fact, be traced to liberal political theory and its dissemination in jurisprudence.

This chapter recalls the origins of the CMRA – a bill applicable to all religious communities in India – in the Hindu Child Marriage Bill and showcases the procedural and epistemic minoritization of Muslims and Islamic principles in the Legislative Assembly and the public sphere that took place during this transformation. This chapter complicates the so-called Muslim demand for exemption from the CMRA by pointing to the heterogeneity of Muslim opinions on the bill, as well as the multiple sources of dissent – ranging from a movement to reform of Muslim custom that resembled the motivations behind Sarda’s bill, on the one hand, and a protest against the procedural minoritization of the community during the passage of the bill, on the other. This chapter shows how “the Muslim” was rendered into a political minority, and attributed a backward sexuality, just as Hindu reformism assumed the mantle of secularism and the CMRA became recast as the collective goal of the nation.

This chapter locates the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) in the context of two sets of numbers – the census statistics that were used to measure the scale of the social problem of child marriages and the “digits of age” that were used to define the child in order to mitigate the problem. In doing so, it locates the history of the CMRA in a newly enlarged field of play – in the League of Nation’s transnational humanitarian program of child protection, on the one hand, and raging debates on “population” as a global problem, on the other. It argues that while age-based measurements of legal personhood might appear unremarkable now, age had to be made stable by several technologies of government. It examines how a range of nationalist positions came to be articulated as a choice over the age limits of childhood in interwar India. It scrutinizes how age could – or could not – be proved through forensic technologies and documentary evidence in colonial courtrooms. By taking age as a question of power and not a fact about the body, this chapter traces the juridical construction of the child.

The introduction sets up the book as a dual biography: first, of the pathbreaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), which illuminates the history of the burgeoning Indian nation in the early decades of the twentieth century and, second, of “age” as a category for measuring colonial subjects, upholding the rule of law, and governing intimate life in late colonial India. It locates the contributions of the book in the historiography of India, as well as the broader critical scholarship on postcolonial, sexuality, and childhood studies. It makes a case for historicizing age, beyond using it as a category of analysis. It describes the method of “reading sideways,” by cross-fertilizing postcolonial criticism and queer theory, to offer yet another way of writing histories of gender reform that go beyond historicist narratives of “transition” and accounts of success and failure.

Building on the scholarship that traces how changing age of consent laws did not so much protect girls as define the boundaries and norms of girlhood, this chapter shifts the focus to the boy child – a figure who was often evoked during discussions of child marriage and the age of consent in India. This chapter uses the boy child as a heuristic device to study a cluster of Hindu patriarchal anxieties that congealed in a discourse of boy protection and compares Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill with other bills concerned with the ages of marriage and consent. It showcases how adjustments to the ages of consent and marriage also affected the boundaries of boyhood. This chapter shows how patriarchal considerations were articulated along the axes of age as well as sex and gender; it traces the Hindu patriarchal considerations that underwrote the Child Marriage Restraint Act; and finally, it analyzes the seemingly peculiar logic of “boy protection” as discussed by Hindu reformers to reflect on peculiarities of the liberal sex/age system that have become invisible to us.