Introduction

Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age

“…Reading sideways, in other words, follows from the long-standing effort to "write a history that will serve as a lever, unearthing the foundational premises upon which our social and political verities rest, in order … to clear space for the operations of a history whose direction cannot be determined and whose end will never come." 65 I use the method of reading sideways to cast this particular storyabout the CMRA and about age -in temporal suspension. This book ranges in time between 1891 (when an amendment to the Age of Consent Act extended sexual protection to wives under twelve years of age) and 1937 (when the passage of the Shariat Application Act technically provided a blanket exemption to the Muslims of India from the CMRA of 1929).…”