Paper short abstract:

An analysis of medical and legal discussions of sexual violence against children in late nineteenth-century India, which simultaneously produced a new definition of 'the child'; a humanitarian narrative focused on the body; and a racialized discourse on the ubiquity of child-rape in India.

Paper long abstract:

In 1889, a child-wife in Bengal died of "injuries inflicted on her on her wedding night." The autopsy formed the centerpiece in the hectic discussions in the colonial legislative assembly that preceded the passage of the Age of Consent Act of 1891. The details of her case were cited and re-cited in the ongoing discussions to raise the age of consent in colonial India, or to reform child-marriage. The inquest into her death relied on medical expertise to determine her age at the time of death, her physical development, and the cause of her demise. The sensational case entered textbooks on medical jurisprudence in the following decades. Drawing on cultural historians' engagement with the body in the "the humanitarian narrative," this paper returns to the well-known case, and its ramifications for the law, to understand the relationship between medical expertise and humanitarian discourse on the child in the late nineteenth century.

Through a close reading of classis works on medical jurisprudence and by scrutinizing the role of experts in rape cases, especially those involving children, this paper seeks to provide insights into a few entwined histories: the use of medical expertise to define the 'child'; problems with determining the age of victims and perpetrators of sexual crimes in courts; the centrality of the medical expertise in the humanitarian narrative on child marriage, and its racist underside.