'… an important and much-needed theoretical contribution to a nascent but burgeoning field of childhood history in the Indian subcontinent.' Soni, H-Soz-Cult
Introduction; I. Provincializing childhood; 1. The autoptic child: The Age of Consent Act (1891), law's temporality, and the epistemic contract on age; 2. Juridical childhood: the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), global biopolitics, and the “digits of age”; II. Queering age stratification; 3.The sex/age system: boy-grooms, young rapists, and child protection in hindu liberalism; 4. Reproductive temporality: the staging of childhood and adolescence in global/hindu sexology; iii. Consent otherwise; 5.Rethinking minority: Rangila Rasul, the “muslim child wife,” and the politics of representation; 6. An age of discretion: querying age and legal subjectivity in the secular shari'a; Epilogue