Introduction

Summary

The introduction sets up the book as a dual biography: first, of the pathbreaking Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), which illuminates the history of the burgeoning Indian nation in the early decades of the twentieth century and, second, of “age” as a category for measuring colonial subjects, upholding the rule of law, and governing intimate life in late colonial India. It locates the contributions of the book in the historiography of India, as well as the broader critical scholarship on postcolonial, sexuality, and childhood studies. It makes a case for historicizing age, beyond using it as a category of analysis. It describes the method of “reading sideways,” by cross-fertilizing postcolonial criticism and queer theory, to offer yet another way of writing histories of gender reform that go beyond historicist narratives of “transition” and accounts of success and failure.