Friday, February 10th, 2012 Coming of Age: Body, Number and Child Protection in Late Colonial India

Description

This paper revisits child-marriage legislation in colonial India between 1891 and 1929 to re-envision the ‘child’ as a subject constituted by laws governing sex, rather than as an a priori object requiring protection from patriarchal sexual norms. I draw attention to a shift from a medical to a ‘digital’ or census-driven construction of the child at the turn of the twentieth century, to scrutinize the biopolitical impulses behind child-protection at this time. To relocate the idea of child-protection within the framework of a critique of colonial government, rather than a history of liberal rights, I draw attention to the new importance of age – as number – in the formulation of legal subjectivities, ethical values and humanitarian accounting in twentieth-century India. In doing so, I reassess some of the ideas on colonial/modern government and liberal racialism explored in my book Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire.

Ishita Pande is Assistant Professor of South Asian history at Queen’s University, Kingston. Her book Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2010) is a study of the impact of the colonial connection on race science in Britain, the place of race in imperial liberalism, the crucial role played by medical experts in colonial government, and the use of a medicalized idiom in the fashioning of the Bengali ‘modern’ in the long nineteenth century. Her interest in a critical understanding of colonial modernity continues to drive her work on the politics of childhood, marriage and sexuality in late colonial India. As part of a larger project on the entanglement of sex and childhood, she is studying the ‘globalization’ of norms of childhood through national and international law in the early twentieth century.