Power, Knowledge, and the Epistemic Contract on Age: The Case of Colonial India.

BRITISH occupation of India, 1765-1947; AGE; SOCIAL contract; AGE (Law); AGE of consent; MINORS; SEXUAL consent; STATUTORY rape; LEGAL history

This article scrutinizes the implementation of age-of-consent legislation in high courts across colonial India to foreground some of its quirky and unstudied effects, and to consider alternative juridical notions of consent conceptualized without the logic of chronological age. Breaking open the naturalized relationship between age and consent, it shows that the use of age standards to measure all humans can be traced to the history of liberal law and its colonial career, just as the standard measures of age are tied to its forensic technologies and rules of evidence. By drawing attention to the provincial—or liberal juridical—roots of age as a measure of legal capacity, this article questions the use of age as a way of accounting for human subjects, and for governing intimate relations, that is meaningful, necessary, or desirable in all historical contexts. Suggesting that a juridical understanding of age continues to circumscribe social-scientific analysis, this article calls for a more explicit, as well as a more cautious and reflexive, use of age as a category of analysis in writing histories for South Asia, and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of American Historical Review is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)