Sorting Boys and Men : Unlawful Intercourse, Boy-Protection, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Colonial India

Pande, Ishita

doi:10.1353/hcy.2013.0029

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…While girl victims were the primary targets of new legislation, laws against "gross indecency," such as the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885 in Britain, also targeted the "expression of male lust that could corrupt and sexually exploit England's youth"-and thus also served to redefine the youthful male-aged between fourteen to eighteen-as a creature to be protected from adult men (Funke 2013: 144). Twentieth-century adjustments to the age of consent in India, where the age was raised to thirteen and then fourteen in the 1920s-had an indirect effect on the understanding of male youth inasmuch as judges and juries hastened to protect young men from the new harsher laws that appeared to punish men "for doing what boys do," or on the grounds that youthful males may not be fully cognizant of the consequences of their sexual actions (Pande 2013).…”

Section: Transnational Governance and The Homogenization Of Youth As ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

2022

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where she also directs the Institute for Child and Youth Studies. Her book Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (University of British Columbia Press, 2017) received the Wilson Prize for transnational history and the Canadian History of Education Association Founders' Prize. A former editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, she is also the author of numerous articles and chapters about agency, emotions, settler colonialism, youth organizations, and the First World War.

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Section: Transnational Governance and The Homogenization Of Youth As ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

2022

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“…A body of literature has highlighted the sexual tone that undergirded the evolving national debates on the child-bride, child-rape, and the legal status of this social group through an exploration of the contentious colonial era child-marriage legislation in India (Kolsky, 2010;Pande, 2003Pande, , 2012Pande, , 2013Pande, , 2020Sankar, 2000;Tambe, 2019). This scholarship on the girl-child reveals that sexual innocence, vulnerability, incapacity, and emotional underdevelopment became the key line of demarcation around those not-yet-quite woman.…”

Section: The Historiography Of the Undisciplined Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 Emile, Or Treatise on Education by Rousseau (1762) was one of the earliest works to present this life stage as a period of experimentation and training. The image of a bohemian, suicidal and sentimental modern European adolescent was further popularized by the bildungsroman of Van Goethe during the turn of the 19 th century (Koops & Zuckerman, 2005, 2013. In the Indian context, this resonates with the "awakening" felt by the Young Bengalis following modernity's "arrival" in the ports of Calcutta in the early 19 th century.…”

Section: Defining Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Undisciplined Youth and a Moral Panic in Independent India, Circa 1947‐1964

Wilkinson

2022

J Historical Sociology

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The undisciplined youth is one figure that is key to understanding the 1950s and 1960s in India.Politicians, officials, academics, youth leaders, and journalists developed and spread a discourse that imagined the collective behaviour of Indian youths as falling well below adult expectations of them in independent India. The imagery of the youth lacking in discipline was tied up with cycles of student unrest and the idea that the methods of protest used during the pre-independence period had wrongly continued into the post-independence period, but this discursive formation was often extended to include all Indian youths and it became translated into a long-term anxiety about the future of the newly established nation-state. These tropes about the undisciplined Indian youth became a symbol of the country's unresolved future. Unless the crisis of youth could be remedied, the narrative went, then the potentiality of Indian independence and its first generation of citizens could never be realised. This discourse took on a novel and distinctive shape during the initial years following Indian independence in 1947, it crystallised during the early 1950s, and there was a continued build-up of public concern that lasted throughout the 1960s.The undisciplined youth is one figure that is key to understanding the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in India. Politicians, officials, academics, youth leaders, and journalists developed and spread a discourse that imagined the collective behaviour of Indian youths as falling well below adult expectations of them in independent India. The imagery of the youth lacking in discipline was tied up with cycles of student unrest and the idea that the methods of protest used during the pre-independence period had wrongly continued into the post-independence period, but this discursive formation was often extended to include all Indian youths and it became translated into a long-term anxiety about

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“…13–22. As Pande has shown, the CMRA passed the legislature, unlike other similar bills, precisely because it considered boys as subjects/objects of protection of equal significance to girls (2013: 334).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The sciences of love: Intimate ‘democracy’ and the eugenic development of the Marathi couple in colonial India

Sequeira

2022

History of the Human Sciences

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This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yardstick of ‘emotional democracy’ in late colonial India. Locating Phadke's work against the backdrop of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and its eugenicist concerns, I argue that he conceptualized romantic love as an emotion and a form of sociability central to the state's biopolitical schemes of ensuring modern coupledom but as exceeding the state's capacity to rationally order Indian sex life. Consequently, he crafted literary supplements like the bildungsroman to circulate ‘English’ idioms of emotional and corporeal intimacy in Marathi; his novels domesticated eugenic sexology for its ‘vernacular’ audiences by advocating caste-bound romantic love as the blueprint for Indian marital coupling. As exemplified by Phadke's work, an emerging Marathi discourse of love demarcated a space for the young couple to operate as a vehicle of interpersonal openness within the constraints of the upper-caste joint family. By outlining the parameters of this Brahmanical aesthetic discourse, I show that the couple became the locus of a self-styled ‘democratic’ form of emotional attachment aimed at developing a necessary dynamism within endogamous caste-based marital arrangements without radically transforming them. The science performed through the Marathi novel in the 1920s and 1930s consequently explains the increasing prominence of romantic love as a form of developmental ‘democratic’ discourse at a time when both romantic love and democracy-in-practice were widely experienced as absent from Indian society.

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Sorting Boys and Men : Unlawful Intercourse, Boy-Protection, and the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Colonial India

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

The Undisciplined Youth and a Moral Panic in Independent India, Circa 1947‐1964

The sciences of love: Intimate ‘democracy’ and the eugenic development of the Marathi couple in colonial India

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