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2 - The Juridical Child

The Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), Global Biopolitics, and the “Digits of Age”

from Part I - Provincializing Childhood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2020

Ishita Pande
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Ontario
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Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937
, pp. 72 - 120
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • The Juridical Child
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.003
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  • The Juridical Child
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Juridical Child
  • Ishita Pande, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age
  • Online publication: 13 July 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779326.003
Available formats
×