ANKITA SADHUKHAN (3060) HINDU COLLEGE SUBMITTED TO: PROF. CHARU GUPTA Elaborate the various contours and perspectives in an Age of Consent Debate in the late 19 th Century. What are the shifts that occurred in the passing of the Sarda Act in the early 20 th Century? I It was against the backdrop of the Native Marriage Act III of 1872 and the proposed bill which sparked a controversy as it prohibited polygamy, legalized divorce and laid down a minimum age of marriage. In the debate surrounding the 1891 Age of Consent Act, the issue of Hindu Conjugality was then highly discussed and problematised. The meaning of the word “consent” here is of great importance. The understanding which we get while reading Tanika Sarkar’s article, this word brought a conception of permission, a permission from that entity which was before never considered as having its voice. The scriptures which were we created from ancient times to early modern considered women important as in a sense of bearer of culture etc. but yet voiceless. As far as the Foucauldian concept of body is concerned, we see here that the body of a woman become so much politicized that a whole range of nationalism’s outcry was set into these lines. Predominantly we find the outcry of the conservatives against the Act which set the age of sexual intercourse within marriage for girls should be twelve years. The main arguments of the conservatives were that the higher age of consent would violate the garbhadhan ritual and if this ritual is violated, the womb would become polluted, the bride's future sons will not be able to offer a pure ritual offering to ancestral spirits etc., and it would be death to community. Another perception is intrinsic as well as extrinsic to the conservative argument is that the colonial intervention to the domestic or the private sphere is intolerable. The conservatives while using explicitly nationalistic rhetoric against the legal initiatives of the colonial state and any form of colonial intervention within the Hindu domestic sphere. 1 The Age of Consent Act reconsidered by Padma Anagol-McGinn and, secondly, Phulmomi’s body by Ishita Pande, highlights some of the major complications of the debate around this act with explicit case studies. In the case of Rukhmabai of 1884, where Rukhmabai serves the imprisonment rather going back to her husband who was uneducated, incapable, sick and nine years older than her against the case filed by her husband for the restitution of Conjugal rights. 1 Sarkar, Tanika. Rhetoric against Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child-Wife. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No- 36 Sept 4, 1993.