Introduction
This is not a book that was planned to be written. I first noticed some years ago how much attention child marriage was receiving among international agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) but without a parallel interest from the women’s movement and from feminist scholars. When I was approached by the Delhi office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in 2017 to do a “desk review” of scholarship on the subject in India and made some preliminary inquiries about the state of research on contemporary developments, there was precious little at the time. Indeed, much of the activism on the ground - in the form of numerous NGO-led programmes - appeared to be running along in a kind of epistemological vacuum. I therefore took on a task that I thought would be short and swift. Little did I realize that I had embarked on a long journey, one with many unforeseen twists and turns. The result is this book.
When we begin a research project, we usually have strong ideas about what we are looking for. Indeed, we are primarily interested in confirming prior beliefs. I am no exception to this tendency. Among the many assumptions I started out with, one of the strongest was that there are very good reasons for keeping women’s and children’s issues distinct if not separate. After all, in contexts like India, the “womenandchildren” complex is more than unusually vexed. The concerned ministry to this very day is the Ministry for Women and Child Development, whose budgets have been totally dominated by concerns for children while shrinking and miniscule proportions are available for women. But this assumption was soon in complete disarray as a different subject began to take shape, frequently encountered as a double bind, one that I have rendered as the “childwoman” or “womanchild”.
Having spent almost a lifetime in the field of women’s studies, first as a student, then a researcher and more recently as a teacher, I found it quite disconcerting and not a little humbling to revisit familiar histories with a different lens, such that the social reform of women became recast as all about the child. Tracing notions of marriage and childhood in other, less familiar spaces brought its own surprises. To take just one example out of many - the contradictions of law in modern England, with unexpectedly low minimum ages of marriage of 12 years for girls and 14 for boys, went hand in hand with capitalism at home and imperial policies globally. This kind of bumpy journey has no doubt left its imprint on this book as several sections had to be entirely rewritten in the light of unexpected findings. Feminist takes on childhood in Western scholarship were particularly elusive but then became all the more rewarding when I realized how shortsighted my search for meaningful accounts of girls within masculinist histories of childhood turned out to be. Gender politics has, after all, been very much about the deep asymmetries buried within unmarked universals, and why should childhood be any different? The politics of feminism in relation to children and childhood has been evolving on complex and at times conflicted terrain, and recent years in particular have seen a sharpened interest. Much of this new work, moreover, is happening with a greater awareness of the international scope of the problems at hand.
These, then, are the contexts for taking stock of the twenty-first century, which is witness to massive global efforts to eliminate child marriage. India, we are repeatedly told, has by far the largest numbers of women in the world who have married before the age of 18. This has generated considerable international pressure on the Indian state (and on NGOs) to be seen to act against such a “harmful practice” (to use the terminology of the United Nations and its Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs]). The Government of India appears to be actively contemplating further amendments to its laws on the age of marriage for women, currently set at 18 years for girls and 21 for boys. There have been signs that the existing law against underage marriage could be turned into a no-exception law, making any such marriage a crime. We are quite ill prepared to assess the nature of these challenges.
By way of contrast, consider the status of another “harmful practice” in the United Nations’ SDGs, namely gender-biased sex selection. Here is an issue where the Indian women’s movement has been involved for decades. The pre-birth elimination of female foetuses is currently more responsible than female child mortality for India’s worsening child sex ratio and “missing girls”. The misuse of sex determination technologies was discovered and taken up by the women’s movement in India in the 1980s, and it was only pressure from the movement that produced the first law against these technologies in Maharashtra in 1986. All this was before Amartya Sen made headlines with his global estimate that “100 million women are missing” (Sen 1990). Over the years, the “stakeholders” and “agendas” have certainly multiplied as the issue became ever more daunting, but feminist research, debate and activism are keeping pace. I cannot say the same in relation to campaigns against child marriage.
I mention all this to indicate that the subject of child marriage is approached in this book with motives that are more mixed than usual. On the one hand, I certainly wanted to see greater feminist involvement. The institution of marriage in contemporary India has mostly been an invisible undercurrent in the campaigns of the women’s movement - from domestic violence and dowry murders to debates over a uniform civil code. Protests against cases of “honour killings” (triggered when young couples elope to marry against caste and community norms) certainly highlighted the extraordinary violence that families were capable of as well as the heightened legal repercussions if the girl was under the age of 18. But here too the structures of marriage remained in the shadows. Despite our longstanding insistence that “the personal is political” and even though the cliched contrast between “arranged” and “love” marriage suffuses popular culture, the institution of marriage itself, except for a few occasions of public feminist debate, has not received much attention. One such occasion has been the film festival called Larzish, Tremors of a Revolution: An International Film Festival of Sexuality and Gender Plurality, held in Mumbai in 2003 and 2004. The organizers staged a discussion from Marxist, feminist, anticaste, and queer perspectives in ways that sought to refashion radical perspectives on marriage and family (Shah, Hensman, John, Rao and Rinchin 2005). This is not the only instance when explicit attention to marriage derived most of its energy and purpose from debates on gender and sexuality rather than feminism. At the same time, the question of age did not figure in it.
On the other hand, I have approached dominant frameworks for dealing with child marriage with considerable ambivalence. While there has been much to learn on the subject, questions and problems abound when it comes to the routes of analysis promoted and the “solutions” being mooted today. Thus, this book has required that I step back from my own frames in order to explore the existing kinds of scholarship and writings on child marriage in India and what perspectives could be brought to bear on current concerns and agendas. Although much has changed in the last few years, the enduring unevenness of this scholarship is reflected in these pages. As readers will discover, certain periods in India’s history and some academic disciplines are very densely represented whereas others are almost absent. At times, this has meant reading against the grain, looking for clues about early and child marriage in texts that did not address the subject or confined it to their margins. It also meant looking in unlikely places. While I have tried to represent faithfully the perspectives animating the literature discussed here, this book also takes on the tasks of critique, raising doubts about silences and exclusions and about methodology or frames of analysis.
As in my other work, I have adopted an approach that is broadly historical. The contemporary concern around an inherently social and political subject like child marriage cannot be understood unless one has a sense of its historical evolution in modern times. This lack of historical context stands out in a literature that is inevitably global today, featuring nations from Asia, Africa and South America but offering little sense of their distinct trajectories.
The nations in Africa and Asia most strongly associated with child marriage are not part of my study, not even those within South Asia. The literature that I could access about our neighbours (some of which, like Bangladesh and Pakistan, have a shared colonial past) did not provide a sufficient ground to grasp how child marriage has fared since these became independent nations, the social groups for whom it matters, and the stakes involved. My sense of limitation is therefore not merely epistemological but also political. How should one evaluate global data about changing trends in child marriage across the erstwhile Third World? But equally pertinent is the question of whose agendas are being furthered in these studies, especially when sponsored by international agencies. The fact that a few studies were as detailed and as provocative as they needed to be only added to my sense of inadequacy. Thus, for instance, an essay on child marriage in Bangladesh that I briefly discuss in this book (Amin and Das 2014) portrayed the anomalous nature of trends there, revealing how the authors found themselves at odds with dominant perspectives on the subject. Yet another remarkable essay that raises questions about current approaches “to end child marriage” comes from Bali. Hoko Horii describes with great care the fieldwork she conducted among “child brides” in Bali, some as young as 14 years, with a baby to look after and a household to run. These are accounts where their decisions to marry are taken seriously, neither romanticized nor opposed, and where Horii ends with dilemmas, constraints and unresolved questions about childhood and adulthood. She demonstrates “that the current international child marriage framework fails to walk the thin line between empowerment and protection of children” (Horii 2020: 254). But even a rare account like this one, undertaken in the best traditions of ethnographic research, needs to be complemented by further scholarship that is more fully accountable to local political realities, to marriage practices and social structures, to national and international policy agendas, and to those who may be implementing or questioning them.
This does not mean that the present book is only about India; indeed, it could not be. My title refers to child marriage in an international frame, and it is partly borrowed. Over three decades ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote an essay titled “French Feminism in an International Frame” (Spivak 1987). Spivak explicitly situates herself in the context of US academics at a time when “French feminism” had become quite influential beyond its borders. Spivak begins her essay by recalling an encounter she had with a Sudanese sociologist who told her that she had just completed a “structural-functionalist thesis on female circumcision” in her country. Spivak stages her essay as a response to this meeting. Rejecting both the Sudanese academic’s concept and her choice of methodology, Spivak effectively puts yet others in their place. While she seems absolutely certain that the right term is clitoridectomy (today the official description has shifted to female genital mutilation/cutting), Spivak is more probing and questioning in her discussion of several well-regarded texts from the French feminist corpus for what they might have to offer. Where are the pitfalls and where might there be alternative resources for approaching the exclusions of female pleasure that clitoridectomy evokes, she asks. Spivak’s essay offers a mode of conducting feminist analysis that is critical of universal claims without getting trapped in cultural or nationalist frames. This book has benefited from such a method.
At the same time, it is only too obvious that we are in quite another world today compared with the 1980s. Female genital mutilation (often shortened to FGM) is among the “harmful practices” to be eliminated under the United Nations’ SDGs, along with practices like child marriage. Spivak’s “international frame” was set up as a transaction between “French feminist theories”, her own location as an Indian academic in the US, and a Sudanese scholar’s problematic approach to an oppressive practice. As Chapters 1 and 2 will attest, “child marriage” itself is nameable only in a series of international frames, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century. Some of my international staging has been deliberately counterintuitive. I have foregrounded the presence of child marriage within the borders of the world’s foremost superpowers - the US and China - so as to bring out the specificity of India more carefully. The major difference in my method compared with Spivak follows from the politics of my location in India’s research environment and my links to feminism here. Spivak’s essay leaves feminism in the Sudan entirely outside her frame.
In the time since I began this research a few years ago, the field has expanded considerably. The UNFPA chose to make the “harmful practices” of child marriage, gender-biased sex selection and female genital cutting the subject of their State of the World’s Population Report 2020. It bears the title Against My Will: Defying the Practices that Harm Women and Undermine Equality (UNFPA 2020). We appear to have moved far from the structural-functionalisms of yesteryear and have had to develop critical skills for a situation where the language of feminism is everywhere. Many scholars have added new contributions to this field, and although I have benefited considerably from this recent literature, some came out too late in India for this book to be able to draw from their insights. Ashwini Tambe’s Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (Tambe 2019) and Ishita Pande’s Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937 (Pande 2020) appear to travel along similar paths. The publication of these works is a welcome sign, along with other forthcoming work with which I have been more closely aligned (e.g., Sen and Ghosh forthcoming). Soon, the inadequacy that I felt not so long ago when embarking on this review may be a thing of the past. Yet another study, by Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Mitra 2019), would also have been invaluable but arrived too late to benefit this book. Mitra’s provocative suggestion is that “the heterosexual/homosexual definition” is not the critical driver “in the making of modern sexuality from the nineteenth century” in India (Mitra 2019: 8). In her view, the sexually deviant woman embodied as a prostitute plays a more foundational role. My own interest is in marriage, the institution that must invariably house this inherently dangerous and always excessive female sexuality, one that seems to hold men, especially those creating social theories, in such thrall. Since we are talking about what is after all a thought construct, my question comes from the other side and is clearly relevant for the present moment: Why has the institution of compulsory (heterosexual) marriage - repeatedly invoked as the means to control women’s otherwise unrestrained sexuality - been rather peripheral to feminist inquiry?
This book leads up to my main claim: In twenty-first-century India (if not earlier), it is compulsory marriage that must be the necessary referent for gaining a better perspective on child marriage. Or rather, I should rephrase this from the other side: when seen from “below”, child marriage is the form that compulsory marriage takes. In an essay written over 20 years ago in the context of panics around representations of sexuality during the 1990s, I had tried - unsuccessfully I now think - to shift emphasis away from such panics towards the assumptions undergirding marriage in “its compulsory, everyday, normalised aspects” (John 1998: 386). It is insufficient to speak of marriage solely in the language of the control of female sexuality - as Mitra suggests, this would keep us imprisoned in the thought construct. Economic, social, sexual and reproductive forces are ensuring that marriage is effectively compulsory across class, communities and age. Moreover, I argue that marriage is (what I call) capacious - in its claims if not in actuality - so that consent can be fully accommodated within it. Child marriage is not a separate practice creating unique victims out of children but is structurally bound up within the forms that compulsory marriage as a modern, dynamic and deeply hierarchical system is taking in contemporary Indian society. Whereas child marriage is declining, compulsory marriage is not. The challenge is far greater than the elimination of child marriage, given the differential forces shaping diverse women’s life chances and futures in India today.
A word or two about the term “compulsory”. Here, too, there is a debt to be acknowledged - to Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence” (Rich 1981). Rich wanted to show how widespread the erasure of lesbian existence has been in the history and society with which she was familiar. Even the best feminist texts of her time were contributing to this erasure by effectively naturalizing women’s sexual relations with men rather than recognizing the often forceful and even violent history of heterosexuality. My use of the term shares her perspective but also departs from it. The most pervasive socializing structure in India is marriage and not heterosexuality. Therefore, it is marriage (with heteronormativity folded within it) that feminists in India need to call out. Its most powerful form is not through the actual use of explicit force but through the manufacture of consent - force and violence therefore can be treated as aberrations (and more easily condemned). This is what makes it both compulsory and hegemonic.
My limited task in this book is to call out compulsory marriage in relation to child marriage. The question of lesbian existence in India is, of course, absolutely vital for feminism, as are all non-normative genders and sexualities. Although it is not the subject of this book, a telling example of the pervasive and multiple erasures of non-normative selves is the extent to which the ubiquitous evocation of the “girl child” in public life and policy is always already assumed to be cis-gendered and on the path to (heterosexual) wifehood and motherhood.
To help guide the reader, the voyage of this book has been divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 looks at scholarship from around 1800 to 2000. It covers periods like the nineteenth century - by far the best known, the stuff of school textbooks. But much of this legacy, as it turns out, is yet to be fully grasped. As I mentioned before, what happens when the subject of “women” so taken for granted in histories of social reform becomes recast - on closer inspection and after a critical re-reading of canonical works - to have been all about the child? Yet another challenge is of a more historiographical nature. The contested subjects of Indian history do not allow for any simple act of “recovery” or permit themselves to be transplanted from ancient times into the present: child marriage is an excellent example. Even so, the compulsion to look for ancient roots to modern problems is part of India’s colonial legacy. The period from the nineteenth century up to the 1930s is densely hatched with a rich literature that is now regionally diverse, differentially marked by caste, and still a matter of debate and contestation. Something changes decisively with independence and even more so with the onset of a new moment of Indian feminism in the 1970s. From having been (almost literally) the “mother of all controversies” - with an intercontinental reach and where the first women’s organizations of the early twentieth century cut their teeth on the campaign against it - child marriage recedes into the background with independence. Once the defining “social evil” of a colonized people, child marriage transmutes into the problem of the “other” - the rural poor, disenfranchised castes, minority groups and backward regions. This is the scene as the twentieth century winds to a close.
But rather than pick up the story of its revival in twenty-first-century India, Chapter 2 goes in a different direction altogether. I train an international lens on the very categories that tend to be taken for granted as culture-bound - those of marriage, the child, the adolescent and the “girl”. The trajectories followed by the West as it proceeded to invent and transform ideas of childhood, adolescence and the institution of marriage have had direct repercussions for conceptualizing child marriage in the rest of the world. Moreover, it turns out - as it has with so many things colonial - that there is nothing uniquely Indian or Third World about child marriage. The child-woman encountered in Chapter 1 reappears in all her complexity over and over again in the history of Europe and America. Western feminism itself has had a very instructive relationship to childhood from which there is much to learn. This chapter also briefly explores the histories of two nations not associated with child marriage - the US and China - that have successfully marginalized the phenomenon (and mostly avoided international scrutiny) even though American and Chinese girls are marrying too young to this very day.
Chapter 3 returns to the Indian context at the end of the twentieth century, when international frames work more powerfully than ever to bring “child marriage” back into the limelight. Here, I interrogate the domains of law, policy and demography, which together have been the most prominent sites of intervention and knowledge creation around child marriage in the twenty-first century. Over the years, the age of 18 has been made a converging benchmark in state policy - for many things but especially for reproductive health, sexual consent, and marriage. This convergence does not have a harmonizing effect but creates a host of problems. Of these three fields, only the sphere of the law has seen considerable debate among feminists. Problematic policies, such as conditional cash transfer schemes for daughters, need as much critical attention but have been largely ignored. The work of demography has been quite decisively shaped by international covenants where different registers of analysis get entangled. The new language of the rights of the child, that make any marriage below 18 a violation, go hand in hand with fears of escalating fertility rates and calculations of reproductive health risks. The really critical question here is: How much of statistical weight can age justifiably bear in relation to a host of other factors making for the vulnerability of girls who marry too young? What is the relative causal importance of age at marriage compared with other “independent variables” like poverty, social location, access to health care, education and so on? Does the ease with which age at marriage can be “corrected” by legal fiat - in contrast to the challenges of addressing the other ills and inequalities woven into the lives of those who marry too young - account for its sudden elevation to the status of root cause and prime suspect?
Chapter 4 introduces my own arguments about compulsory marriage. Age at marriage, education, and above all the world of work are, in my view, the most critical interlocking forces shaping women’s life chances in relation to this compulsory institution. I explore the scholarship in these domains in order to build the necessary scaffolding for addressing the paradoxes and peculiarities that characterize our situation. The sparseness in these disciplinary fields when it comes to making links with questions of age has meant that I have gone beyond the ambit of a “review of literature” to mooting ideas of my own. The prevalence of underage marriage - a practice that has declined sharply in recent decades - must be connected to the expansion in education, on the one hand, but also, on the other hand, to the shocking declines in women’s employment opportunities during these very years. Although some of these paradoxes in the sphere of women’s work have been on the agendas of feminists and development economists, they have not really gained sufficient traction in public life, and least of all in relation to compulsory marriage, especially for those who marry too young.
A very influential approach in the current literature on child marriage is to view the problem as a highly regressive social norm among certain communities and families. Solutions range from delaying the age of marriage until 18 to trying to provide adolescent girls with “agency”. The notion of social norms as the root cause and site for intervention is particularly flawed. I would like to think that the directions for positive change on offer would benefit from being reframed in relation to the forces shaping and directing compulsory marriage at the present time. What kind of “agency” will make a difference to life chances when the trajectory of compulsory marriage at higher ages is not even in the picture? What kinds of support are required for those who marry too young? To indicate where the fault lines might lie, I have at times drawn from my own ongoing research on this and related subjects.
I do not see any shortcuts in terms of “solutions” to the problem of child marriage, and the journey is far from over. Or to put it more plainly, the journey has barely begun. Given the current state of our economy, polity and society, there is no option but to critically re-conceptualize and repoliticize the dominant international and national agendas on child marriage. We may well see a further decline in the phenomenon in the years to come, perhaps even in Census 2021 or the next round of the National Family Health Survey. But without a genuine feminist frame and the backing of a movement, such declines may not even be grounds for hope. Feminists have much to learn from those who have been supporting the struggles of the young, including those who have married when they were “children”, who are from our most disenfranchised castes, communities and regions. This book is a plea for more involvement, more research and a greater readiness to name the challenges before us.
References
Amin, Sajeta and Maitreyi Das. 2014. “Marriage, Continuity and Change in Bangladesh”. In Marrying in South Asia: Shifting Concepts, Changing Practices in a Globalising World, edited by Ravinder Kaur and Rajni Palriwala. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
Horii, Hoko. 2020. “Walking a Thin Line: Taking Children’s Decision to Marry Seriously?” Childhood 27 (2): 254-270.
John, Mary E. 1998. “Globalisation and Sexuality in the Visual Field: Issues and Non-issues for Cultural Critique”. In A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India, edited by Mary E. John and Janaki Nair, 368-396. New Delhi Kali for Women and London: Zed Press.
Mitra, Durba. 2019. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pande, Ishita. 2020. Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rich, Adrienne. 1981. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. In Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Sen, Amartya. 1990. “More than One Hundred Million Women are Missing”. New York Review of Books 37 (20) December.
Sen, Samita, and Anindita Ghosh, eds. Forthcoming. Love, Law and Labour: Child Marriage in India. Kolkata: Stree and New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Shah, Chayanika, Rohini Hensman, Mary E. John, Anupama Rao and Rinchin. 2005. “Marriage, Family and Community: A Feminist Dialogue” Economic and Political Weekly 40 (8): 709-710.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. “French Feminism in an International Frame”. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 134-153. New York and London: Methuen.
Tambe, Ashwini. 2019. Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws. Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
UNFPA. 2020. Against My Will: Defying the Practices that Harm Women and Undermine Equality. New York: UNFPA.
