The Matter of Age in Colonial India
Is age a simple fact of our everyday lives? In this piece, historian Ishita Pande argues otherwise, uprooting the idea using census records, forensic data and the most absurd cases of bureaucratic bungling.
For some reason, you had to be below a certain age before you could begin school. I have never properly considered the oddness of this before and it is only now as I think it that I realise its strangeness. If you were over a certain age, it was as if you had gone over the point beyond which you could be instructed, like a coconut that had overripened and become undrinkable, or cloves that had been left too long on the tree and had swollen into seeds. And even now as I think of it I can’t come up with an explanation for this stern exclusion. The British brought us school, and brought the rules to make school work. If the rules said you had to be six and no older than six to be allowed to start school, that was how it would be. Not that the schools had things their own way, because parents shaved off however many years it was necessary to have their children allowed in.
- Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea
What is your age? Children around the world are taught to answer the question as soon as they enter schools. This intimate fact about our lives is imprinted on numerous identity documents necessitated by modern life. The question used to be answered in discrete ways, with reference to a major event in the past, to seasons that had passed, to the birth order within a family. It might still be answered in quirky ways, some less truthful than others, but most responses now contain a reference to chronological age, or years since birth. Laws prescribing age limits for driving or marriage, to cast a vote or receive full punishment for a crime, rely on a consensus that chronological age is a reliable measure of human capacity everywhere. The application of such laws is premised on belief that chronological age can be measured objectively for everyone. Much like the narrator in the epigraph above, few of us spend time contemplating the strangeness of the various age-based restrictions that govern our lives. While the ubiquity of such age limits makes them appear not only inevitable but also natural, let us pause, like Gurnah’s narrator, to consider the oddness, arbitrariness and historicity of the rule of chronological age over our lives.
Was it indeed the British who brought the rules regarding chronological age to India, and to their various colonies, as the epigraph above suggests? Is it odd to consider those below a certain age too young for certain activities, just as it is strange to consider those above a certain age too old for some others, “like a coconut that had overripened”? When was chronological age enshrined as a pervasive mode of regulating everyday life in India?
Would it be correct to surmise that the British not only brought us schools, but also chronological age itself, to dictate when one could enter these schools?
Does this colonial history of chronological age in India imply an utter eradication of earlier, indigenous modes of measuring physical and intellectual capacity? Or, did people “shave off” — or add on — years to dodge the colonial laws, much like the parents Gurnah writes about? Were there technologies in place to establish age beyond reasonable doubt, so the various laws that rested on an accurate measure of age could be upheld?
A Minimum Age of Marriage and the Arbitrary Borders of Childhood
There are contexts in which setting a minimum age for specific acts seems eminently commonsensical, if not natural; for instance, the minimum age of marriage is currently set by the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act at 18 for women, and 21 for men in India. There is nothing inherently meaningful about these age limits of course, as these limits have been altered over time. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, the first such law passed in 1929, had defined the child as a person below 18 if male, and below 14 if female. These limits were raised to 21 and 18 years of age, respectively, in 1978. An amendment proposed in 2021, which is currently under parliamentary scrutiny, redefines the child as “a male or female who has not completed twenty-one years of age”. Though the minimum age of marriage varies around the world, it is most commonly set at 18 — which corresponds with the United Nations’ definition of a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.” India’s redefinition of the “child” to include women under 21 years old seems oddly detached from reality not only because the current minimum age of 18 has been hard enough to implement (one of four women is married in childhood, i.e. before 18, according to UNICEF data), but also given the lofty objects behind the amendment.
While the amendment is ostensibly intended to uphold the principle of “gender equality and prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sex” guaranteed by the Constitution, and to ensure the “progress of women in a holistic manner” including progress in “their physical, mental and reproductive health,” it can effect the very opposite. By redefining women between the ages of 18 and 21 as children on paper, the amendment also infantilises them in practice by making youthful marriages of choice particularly vulnerable to parental or community objection and to state intervention. It makes children of men and women considered adults for all other purposes, since the age of majority remains 18. While the recent amendment has been overwhelmingly criticised as being detached from reality, such age limits, even when necessary, are often artificial and arbitrary. Age limits for drinking alcohol, or labouring in certain occupations, vary from nation to nation, and sometimes even within nations. And yet, these age limits are often justified as grounded in bodily matter or based in the measurement of biological capacity.
For instance, when the age of consent was raised to 12 in 1891, the colonial sponsors of the bill represented that age as the median age of puberty in India, suggesting that it captured an intrinsic truth about the female body and its readiness for sexual intercourse. In the reams of paper generated in the passage of legislation, however, no medical consensus emerged to rationalise the selection of the age of 12 as the age of puberty. While some doctors argued that the onset of menstruation was a sign of “attaining puberty”, many others saw it merely as the first signs of a process of maturation that occurred over the next three to four years. Others pointed to the differing rates of maturation based on location, diet, ethnicity, or even cultural practices, and even critiqued the faulty methods used to arrive at the median age of menstruation. The signs of puberty were many, as several doctors consulted during the deliberations pointed out, and these appeared between the ages of 11 and 17; several argued that the age of consent could be set much higher than 12. Religious commentators — both Hindu and Muslim — also pointed to the arbitrariness of selecting the age of 12, and wondered why the “age of puberty” could not simply stand as a referent on its own, with the capacity to consent to sex varying in each individual case.
It was not simply a matter of one group pushing for a higher age of consent and the other for a lower one; the two sets of objections had distinct bases: while the doctors were debating the particular chronological age that could best signify the capacity for sexual consent, the religious commentators were questioning whether chronological age as such — whether 12 of 16 — could be used to dictate normative conduct for the Hindu female. Indeed, it was precisely to assuage religious anxieties that the colonial state rationalised the age of 12 — the new age of consent — as the “age of puberty”, which was significant to the understanding of ritual personhood and legal capacity among Hindus and Muslims alike. But this epistemic compromise with Hindu and Muslim legal cultures did not include a concession to an individually grounded understanding of puberty. A standard chronological age was picked to stand for the “age of puberty” and preferred on the grounds that it was universally discernible, easier to record and confirm, and less contaminated by cultural, religious, ethnic and racial distinctions.
But did everyone really have a chronological age that could be ascertained as required?
Telling Age in Colonial India
Not everyone believed that chronological age could be recorded for everybody. In fact, during debates over a child protection bill in the 1920s, a colonial official had pompously opined that “age is not a matter of fact as in England, but a very doubtful matter of opinion.” In fact, census officers in charge of recording data on gender, caste, religion and other such facts that helped order facts about the population complained about the difficulties with ascertaining age with any degree of accuracy.
Officers recounted the variation in how Indians accounted for age: while some counted from the period of gestation, others considered a child to be aged one at birth, such that there could always be a discrepancy on the age reported on two children born in the same day. They mentioned the use of the same word for previous and next in several Indian languages that led to any return of age being off by a year or two. Other obfuscating factors included the use of natural events to recollect age; the deliberate exaggeration of the age of adolescent girls and the elderly; a taboo on revealing a child’s name before it reached a certain age; and superstition that a statement of age might shorten the length of life. Most misleading was the propensity to round up or down, or a preference for particular “digits of age” due to which, as the 1911 census report noted, a fourth of the population had reported ages that ended with a 0 (i.e. 10, 20, 30, etc.), a fifth had used 5 (5, 15, 25, and so on), while the remainder displayed “a very curious preference for the even numbers . . . with a marked preference for the particular age 12,” which was, significantly, the age of consent at the time.
The misreporting of age was rarely the result of any deliberate attempt to thwart the colonial state’s designs; age was simply irrelevant to most people outside of their encounter with the state. The 1931 census report commented that women in particular were “ignorant about the passage of time” and thus “inclined to give the most wild statements as to their age.” As a magistrate in court, the reporter had himself “heard a woman of about 35 to 40 years give her age as 100 years and having caused a titter at the bar, hurriedly restate it as 200 years.” Those trained to record ages around the country were no better than the rest of the population: as a colonial official wryly noted in 1921, he had had his age “guessed by hundreds of supervisors and enumerators” during the time when they were being trained, “and the estimates were seldom within five years of the truth, and varied between 16 and 60.” While these statements reek of colonial prejudice, the recollection of chronological age presumes a common understanding of time, and a widely agreed upon way of measuring its passage.
The standardisation of time is a recent phenomenon, and hence also the measurement of chronological age.
During discussions leading up to the passage of the Majority Act of 1875, which standardised the age of majority as 18 across various sections of the population, legislators acknowledged the multiple cultures of time that coexisted on the subcontinent, and discussed their implications for computing age. A draft of the bill had referred to “the first moment of the day” as the start of the year in the life of an individual (instead of the time of birth), but a critic pointed out, “the day in the estimation of Europeans, Hindus and Muhammadans, commences in different hours,” and recommended that the bill should specify that the “day” ran from midnight to midnight. Another respondent clarified that the years of age had to be computed “according to the Gregorian calendar only,” hinting at the chaos that would follow if different communities continued to calculate their ages according to local, religious, and lunar calendars. Indeed, the notion of “hours” differed as well. It was only in the 20th century that the colonial state began to unite the several clock times that were in use, and local resistance persisted even after Indian Standard Time was established in 1905.
Each time a new age limit was instituted in the legal code, legislators insisted that better modes of accounting — a wider network for registering births, or more scrupulous record-keeping in schools — would eventually get rid of the contamination and errors in records of age. While birth registration had been introduced in India (in restricted areas) since 1886, it remained patchy into the 1930s. In 1930, the Age of Consent Committee made several recommendations to stabilise chronological age further — by making it a legal obligation for parents to report a birth within seven days, and for local bodies such as the municipal council or village panchayat to maintain an accurate register of births and deaths. The sheer multiplicity of documents that could be produced as evidence of age didn’t help matters; in 1918, a document regulating civil services examinations had specified that candidates could produce horoscopes, family books, or tradesmen’s account books showing entries relating to their birth. Other documents such as school admission registers, the record of the candidate’s age at various periodical school examinations, or a certified copy of a candidate’s application for matriculation, were also accepted. Even the oral testimony of persons acquainted with the candidate’s family was accepted as evidence of age, although each candidate was required to comply with any request to provide further clarification relating to such oral evidence. If a public officer in British India had recorded the date and place of birth, an extract from such a register was accepted as sufficient proof of the date and place of birth. While these varied documents were all accepted as legitimate evidence of age well into the 20th century, few were considered infallible.
In this scenario, legally mandated age limits were notoriously hard to enforce in courtrooms. In cases involving child marriages, dozens of appeal cases ended in reversals of sentences passed on fathers who had initially been found guilty of marrying off underage daughters, since no document could be found to prove the age of the married children. Given the poor documentary records, forensic science was often brought to the rescue. Texts such as the widely used Lyon’s Medical Jurisprudence for India instructed expert witnesses — doctors testifying in courts — how to estimate age through the examination of teeth, height and weight, hair and breast development, degenerative changes, and the extent of ossification. While the stages of bone formation, or the state of degeneration of the body provided clues in the case of corpses, for those still alive, such signs were more difficult to read.
For the young, the order of appearance of the milk teeth in infancy and of the permanent teeth between ages six and 12 years, provided clues. But Indian evidence was deemed unreliable in comparison to England. As a study by a prison doctor in an Indian jail had confirmed, while canines usually appeared between 10 and 13 years of age, they were known to appear as early as at nine in India. Wisdom teeth were “scheduled” to appear between the ages of 14 and 27, but had been observed in Hindu children aged at 12 years 2 months. As late as 1918, there was no information on average height and weight available for India. A table for England was provided as a guide, with the helpful hint that “the average height and weight in the majority of Indian races is lower than that of Europeans.” Moreover, widespread notions of Indian precocity had made age determination unstable at the very ranges when it was most crucial for enforcing the age of marriage.
In the end, it was no easier to diagnose age through medical scrutiny than it was through the examination of documents.
Despite these difficulties, just as age standards contained within the penal code proliferated and became more important, age consciousness was developing in domains outside of the law. In fact, despite the difficulties with ascertaining age in individual cases, as the mechanisms for measuring age became standardised, chronological age came to be referred to as a self-evident fact outside of the legal domain. The new science of psychology, to pick just one example, not only took chronological age for granted, but also helped further disseminate the understanding of age as real, measurable and meaningful. In an article published in the Indian Journal of Psychology, Ananthnath Datta analysed the freehand drawings of the human figure produced by 300 Bengali children aged between six and 13 years with the intention of tracing the gradual stages of development in childhood. The drawings were classified according to the artist’s ability to draw in profile, to depict various parts of the body in their correct position, to capture the proportions of various parts of the body, and to represent the style of clothes, etc. with the understanding that “there should be gradual increase in score with increase in age.” Chronological age was taken as a stable, measurable quantity, and one that was inherently meaningful. The attempts to put in place age-gradation in schools, aided by such psychological studies, likewise encouraged the accounting of age as an everyday habit, instead of a matter of governmental imposition alone.
Do such examples indicate that age had finally ceased to be a doubtful matter of opinion and had become a routine matter of fact?
The Culture of Science and the Politics of Age
Perhaps a better question to ask might be this: Is age a matter of fact anywhere? By following historians of science to acknowledge that any scientifically grounded fact is historically specific inasmuch as it relies on the methods of verification available in any given time and place, we can understand why age remains “a doubtful matter of opinion,” shaped as much by bureaucratic procedures and forensic technologies as by cultural and political biases, even in our time, and around the world. The ways in which politics and culture continue to shape the “scientific” or medico-legal construction of age is captured in the case of a young woman, Yong Xiong, recalled in an excellent podcast by Nadia Reiman.
Yong had travelled from Laos to join her fiancé in the United States in 2017 and, as she walked up to the customs desk at the airport in Chicago, she was asked her age. Yong spoke no English, and indicated she was 19 by gesturing with her fingers. She was then asked to write down her birth date. What she wrote down matched the date of birth recorded on her passport: June 4, 1997. Seemingly unsatisfied both with her oral testimony and the documentary evidence, the officer interrogating her sought the aid of colleagues. Five customs and border protection officers looked her up and down and concluded by sight that she appeared to be under the age of 18. They said she was a victim of child trafficking.
Her answer to the question — what is your age — was deemed either dishonest or inaccurate. At 4 feet 7 inches, Yong stands just below the average height for women in Laos, which is 4 feet 9 inches. As Reiman reports, “It is obvious that Yong is being measured with a Western ruler” by the border agents to whom she appeared to be a child.
The officials were not acting in malice, but a zealous desire to rescue her from becoming a victim of child abuse. They were also acting from a misplaced confidence in their ability to evaluate chronological age by sight, based on their familiarity with standards or averages in their own location. These officers assigned Yong a new birthday: January 1, 2000. This made her a minor, and transformed her into a victim of child trafficking. While altering her birth date had already lowered her chronological age, officials were keen to ground this new fact in and on her body.
Yong was sent to a dentist to further confirm her age. The X-ray of teeth is not an infallible technology for determining age today, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Such X-rays only provide an estimate that ranges over five years. In fact, the US Congress — and the European Union — has warned against the use of this technology to determine the fate of immigrants and asylum seekers at various borders. Identification documents are supposed to trump such tests, but the suspicion that forgery is rampant in some parts of the world creates a veracity gap that is then filled by these fallible tests. In Yong’s case, the dentist reported that “the range of possible ages is 14.76 to 19.56 years.” That is, while Yong might well have been 19 as she claimed, the officers concluded she was 17. Her childhood confirmed, Yong was driven to a children’s shelter in Chicago, by the orders of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).
There she remained until her newly assigned birthday loomed. When Yong was to turn 18, once again, as per the random date of birth bestowed on her by immigration officers, a second dentist re-examined the X-ray of her teeth and pronounced she could be anywhere between 15 and 20. The ORR then used the lowest end of the possible range to modify her birth date once again. They also ordered an X-ray of her wrist to determine age via ossification tests. The X-ray suggested she was likely 18; the doctor interpreted this information to opine she was a 15n-year-old with “advanced bone age”. Yong had landed in the United States as a 19- year-old, and had aged backwards to 17, then to 15. Despite the availability of documentary evidence — including her passport, the family registry in her village, and her fifth-grade and ninth-grade school certificates — she has been made to age in reverse by her zealous saviours. The case not only provides a striking reminder of the blinding power of the “child” (especially one perceived to be in sexual danger) to provoke interventionist action but also points to the constitution of this “child” — and of chronological age itself — at the nexus of legal norms, bureaucratic procedures, political ideologies, majoritarian moralities and cultures of science. An unstable quantity so easily manufactured by the bureaucratic and scientific procedures at the disposal of modern states, as Yong’s case shows, chronological age still remains unshakeable as the measure of legal capacity in our times.
The case provides a most extreme example of how modern states manufacture age and how age continues to be naturalised as an inherent fact about the body.
This unshakeable faith in the universality of age as the measure of legal capacity, and thus as a fair guarantor of protections and rights, is on display in the new legislation on child marriages under consideration in India as well as Pakistan. The age of marriage in Pakistan is currently 16 for females (except in Sindh, where it is set at 18); a bill seeking to raise it to 18 across all provinces is under discussion. Progressive commentators and legal experts take heart in a landmark judgement from October 2021, where the Federal Shariat Court categorically declared that setting any minimum age limit for marriage by an Islamic state was not against Islam. This openness to chronological age — instead of references to the “age of puberty” which is considered a sign of maturity in various schools of Islamic law — is seen as a positive development even though one of the problems with the revision, as a newspaper report explains, is the “slippery slope” of documents accepted as evidence of age by courts.
For instance, the person administering a marriage can provide an affidavit confirming they are satisfied that the parties in question are above the minimum age. But, as we know from history, this officer can be bribed or misled, or can simply make a mistake. An attested copy of the government-issued Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), while seemingly infallible, can simply be swapped with that belonging to a close relative. The medical certificate accepted in lieu of a CNIC might likewise be obtained through bribery or influence, and even at best, it offers an expert’s opinion, with a significant margin of error.
Instead of implementing the laws already in place, looking to alternative solutions, or fully exploring alternative measures of maturity (including the “option of puberty” that permits the dissolution of a marriage contracted in childhood, granted by Muslim personal law and extended to Hindu wives in India since 1976), why do states periodically raise the age of marriage? Historically, the alteration of minimum ages of marriage has had as much to do with political ideologies, or political virtue signalling, as it has had to do with the protection of women and children. In the 1920s, for instance, the League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee had conducted a survey of minimum ages of marriage across the globe, an exercise which, in turn, hastened the passage of a slew of new laws around the world, including in Britain.
The committee’s inquiry had put Great Britain in a group of 10 states with the lowest minimum age of marriage for females (12), along with Cuba, Greece, Hungary, Irish Free State, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela, thus threatening the representation of colonisation as a civilising mission.
Pressure generated by the League of Nation’s transnational gaze hastened the passage of the Age of Marriage Bill (1929). The bill was rationalised in the spirit of national competition and imperial responsibility. “What another country does is no guide whatever for what this country should do,” the sponsor of the bill had noted, nonetheless reminding the House that Turkey, “which we have not been taught to regard as a country very far advanced in these matters,” had a higher minimum age of marriage (15) than Britain. In Britain, the age of marriage was raised from 12 to 16 the same year as it was raised to 14 in India.
What kind of national and international political imperatives lie behind the proposed amendments to the existing child marriage laws in India as well as Pakistan? In each location, discrete political parties, women’s organisations and NGOs continue to be embroiled in a politics of age, with various chronological age limits being used as shorthand to signal distinct ideological positions. While historically, more “progressive” political positions had been hitched to higher chronological ages, this last round of legislation (especially in India) has shown how a further elevation of the minimum chronological age for marriages will only rouse suspicions. But instead of continuing to debate the correct age limits to various activities, or seeking out greater state surveillance to verify age, it might be time to pause to reflect on the oddness of hitching our quest for human rights, child protection, and gender justice to such a “dubious matter of opinion” as chronological age.
Ishita Pande is a historian of post/colonial South Asia and the British Empire. Her recent book Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937, is a dual biography of the 1929 law on child marriage in India, and of “age” itself as a scientific object. Learn more about her work here.
