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Boy-Grooms, Young Rapists, and Child Protection in Hindu Liberalism
from Part II - Queering Age Stratification
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2020
Building on the scholarship that traces how changing age of consent laws did not so much protect girls as define the boundaries and norms of girlhood, this chapter shifts the focus to the boy child – a figure who was often evoked during discussions of child marriage and the age of consent in India. This chapter uses the boy child as a heuristic device to study a cluster of Hindu patriarchal anxieties that congealed in a discourse of boy protection and compares Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill with other bills concerned with the ages of marriage and consent. It showcases how adjustments to the ages of consent and marriage also affected the boundaries of boyhood. This chapter shows how patriarchal considerations were articulated along the axes of age as well as sex and gender; it traces the Hindu patriarchal considerations that underwrote the Child Marriage Restraint Act; and finally, it analyzes the seemingly peculiar logic of “boy protection” as discussed by Hindu reformers to reflect on peculiarities of the liberal sex/age system that have become invisible to us.
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