This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

The study of childhood has been dominated by the field of psychology but a robust tradition in anthropology, dating at least to Mead’s (1928/1961) Coming of Age in Samoa, calls attention to the culture-bound flaw in psychology. Mead’s work undermined the claim by psychologist G. Stanley Hall that stress was inevitably part of adolescence. Less well known was Malinowski’s earlier critique of Freud’s Oedipal theory based on fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands (Malinowski 1927/2012). Universal stage theories of cognitive development, such as that of Jean Piaget, met a similar fate when cross-cultural comparative studies demonstrated profound and unpredicted influences of culture and school attendance (Greenfield 1966; Lancy and Strathern 1981; Lancy 1983). Ochs and Schieffelin’s (1984) analysis of adult–child language interaction also showed that ethnographic studies in non-Western societies could be used to “de-universalize” claims made in mainstream developmental psychology. Bob LeVine has taken on one of psychology’s most sacred cows, mother–infant attachment (see also Scheper-Hughes 1987a).

This chapter revisits the well-known case involving the death of a child wife in India, Queen-Empress v. Hurree Mohun Mythee. While it is usually assumed that the signs of violence and immaturity found on the corpse of the child wife led to the passage of the Age of Consent Act (1891), this chapter draws on insights from sexuality and science studies to argue that the autopsy served as a technology to construct the child as embodied. It traces the construction of the “child” as a natural category – by medicine, the law, and perhaps more surprisingly, by history – and suggests that the “child” is created by, and serves to obscure, the epistemic contract on age – an implicit agreement that age is a natural measure of legal capacity for all humans, but which can, in fact, be traced to liberal political theory and its dissemination in jurisprudence.

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.

Though attitudes towards sexual violence shift and change over time and place, across the past two hundred years child sexual abuse has predominantly been viewed as a heinous crime. Nonetheless, there were many variations on what constituted sexual assault, and how this was understood in the community. An act that might be a heinous crime in one time period or one region may be legally and socially acceptable in another. This chapter will chart a range of attitudes and responses towards child sexual abuse. It argues that children have long been seen as vulnerable to sexual assault, which was understood as morally problematic and often a criminal offence. Yet despite significant social and legal change, state and community practices have failed to solve the problem of vulnerable children, and sexual assault of minors continues to be an issue across the globe.