Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

Pande, Ishita

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2011.01676.x

Cited by 59 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Ishita Pande has argued that as the objects of social reform shifted from women to children, 'Women were no longer the mere ground upon which a debate on tradition was to be conducted; nor were they easily identified with the "inner" realm of the nation that was to be modernised whilst being protected from the speculum of the colonial state'. 15 Without denying that shifting objects of reform certainly complicated the role and status of women, my findings suggest that in certain critical ways, women have remained the site or terrain of reform in postcolonial India, even as they may have laid claim to greater subjecthood. To demonstrate this, I turn to the debates of the postcolonial period.…”

Section: The Early 1920s Debates: British Colonial Civilisingmentioning

confidence: 81%

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

Williams¹

2013

Gender & History

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Gender historians of South Asia have illuminated the multiple ways in which gender and religion were constitutive of colonial rule in British India. In this article, I argue that this historical legacy has seeped into the present: that gender and religion have constituted postcolonial rule as well, in ways that are both similar to, and different from, the colonial era. To show this, I focus on debates over Hindu religious laws over time. Copious and insightful historical and political analyses have examined religious laws or debates, or single pieces of legislation, generally in one time period. 1 But comparative studies of religious laws in India, comparing either across religions or across time, have been relatively scant in the literature. 2 This study uses temporal comparison to reveal what snapshot analyses cannot, illuminating both what has changed and what has not in the gendered and religious construction of state legitimacy in colonial and postcolonial India. Like the British colonial state, the Indian postcolonial state sought to reform religion (by reforming religious laws) and constructed women as symbols of progress and modernisation, thus underpinning its legitimacy to rule and manifesting its own postcolonial version of the civilising mission.The study shows important changes, as well as continuities, in the debates over time. Two key changes were in the terms of the debates and the participation of women legislators in them. The terms of the debates shifted from a focus on religious textual authenticity to an almost exclusive concern with gender equity and women's rights; and where no women participated in the earliest debates, by 2006 they were the primary participants. The first set of debates took place in the early 1920s and centred on whether codifying the Hindu personal laws would do more to preserve or to undermine their religious textual authenticity. The second major set of debates took place in the 1940s and 1950s, during a transitional period as India approached independence and the colonial state reconfigured itself as a postcolonial state. In this period, the debates showed an inherent tension between a traditional(ising) and a modern(ising) vision of the new Indian nation, while both visions remained fundamentally religious and gendered. Finally, the most recent debates in 2006 were conducted overtly on the basis of gender and women's rights, even as religion recededGender & History to the background. Thus these debates came (back) full circle most explicitly to the historical place they may never have left: the modern refiguring of the post/colonial state's (gendered and religious) civilising/modernising mission. The arc of the debates over time suggests that, where British colonists held that Indians were unfit to govern themselves based on the status of 'their' women, the postcolonial Indian state has sought to prove its fitness to govern by seeking to improve the status of 'its own' women.These changes, in turn, suggest what has not changed over time, and that is the fundamentall...

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Section: The Early 1920s Debates: British Colonial Civilisingmentioning

confidence: 81%

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

Williams¹

2013

Gender & History

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“…For many missionaries modern discourses of childhood can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century, reflecting the increased impact of liberal universalizing discourses which defined childhood by cuteness, innocence, and plasticity (Vallgårda 2015). By the 1920s there was frequent mention of children's rights in elite discourse, particularly in the context of universal compulsory education and child marriage laws (Pande 2012;Ellis 2017). This sets the tone for an enduring trend, whereby metropolitan middle-class childhoods were "pedagogized as normative" and childhood became explicitly linked to formal schooling (Sen 2013).…”

Section: Childhood and Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

History of Colonial Education: Key Reflections

Ellis¹

2020

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

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The history of education in India has long been a contentious but also particularly productive research field, not only for what it reveals about the philosophies and practice of education but also because the transmission of knowledge to the young has been continuously contested and is intimately connected to wider political structures, institutions, and ideologies. Traditionally the focus for historians has been on the role, relevance, and impact of Western knowledge on colonial educational policies and pedagogical practices and the ways in which colonial education was used to provide justification for colonialism as Britain's gift to the subcontinent, a narrative which has been consistently disputed by Indians themselves. However in the last 30 years, there has been a significant shift towards an engagement with the details of both education policy and practice, so that the reader is now impressed with the vibrancy of the field and the wide range of approaches taken. In short, colonialism is now viewed as only one of many

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“…155 But Pande argues that Indian and British men who argued for consent reform deployed eugenicist arguments that prioritized the 'question of the health of the race and nation', over women's 'well-being'. 156 The autonomy of women and their 'happiness' in marriage rarely, if ever, concerned pro-reform British and Indian men. 157 It is thus unsurprising that in the Sansiya matchmaking project, the NWPO did not attempt to raise the age of marriage above the new age of consent and, thus, considered twelve the age of male and female marriageability.…”

Section: Criminalized Peoples' Conjugal Strategies and Government Matmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conjugality, Colonialism and the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in North India

Hinchy

2020

Studies in History

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The Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871 was a project to geographically redistribute and immobilize criminalized populations on the basis of family units. Family ties were a key site of contestation between criminalized people and the colonial state, as well as cooperation, or at least, situationally coinciding interests. This article’s focus on the family goes against the grain of existing literature, which has primarily debated the historical causes of the CTA and the colonial construction of the ‘criminal tribe’. This article explores a particular type of family tie—marriage—to provide a new vantage point on the minutiae of everyday life under the CTA, while also shedding light on the history of conjugality in modern South Asia. In 1891, the colonial government in north India launched a matchmaking campaign in which district Magistrates became marriage brokers. Colonial governments showed an uneven concern with marriage practices, which varied between criminalized communities and over time. In the case of ‘nomadic’ criminalized groups, colonial governments were more concerned with conjugality, since they attempted more significant transformations in the relationships between individuals, families, social groupings and space. Moreover, criminalized peoples’ strategies and demands propelled colonial involvement into marital matters. Yet the colonial government could not sustain a highly interventionist management of intimate relationships.

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Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

Cited by 59 publications

References 2 publications

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

The More Things Change: Debating Gender and Religion in India's Hindu Laws, 1920–2006

History of Colonial Education: Key Reflections

Conjugality, Colonialism and the ‘Criminal Tribes’ in North India

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