ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at scholarship from around 1800 to 2000. What happens when the subject of “women” in histories of social reform is seen to have been all about the child? 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. Although the period from the nineteenth century up to the 1930s is densely hatched with a rich literature, something changes decisively with independence and even more so with the onset of a new moment of Indian feminism in the 1970s. Once the defining “social evil” of a colonized people, child marriage transmutes into the problem of the “other”.
