Love, Labour and Law: Early and Child Marriage in India, edited by Samita Sen and Anindita Ghosh

Shraddha Chaudhary, Love, Labour and Law: Early and Child Marriage in India, edited by Samita Sen and Anindita Ghosh, International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, Volume 35, Issue 1, 2021, ebab024, https://doi.org/10.1093/lawfam/ebab024

Extract

Love, Labour and Law: Early and Child Marriage in India comes at an opportune time, adding to the global momentum against child, early, and forced marriage. 1 Ranging from the 19th century to the present day, it is a thorough examination of the efforts of one of the key players in the battle against child and early marriage. South Asia is home to three of the top 12 countries with the highest burden of child and early marriage, 2 with India accounting for one in every three child brides as of 2014. 3

This collection of essays edited by Sen and Ghosh provides a comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of the most significant shifts in the discourse on child and early marriage in India. Public debate in the 19th and early 20th centuries saw dialectic contestations on child marriage in the Indian subcontinent 4 : as an issue (from the perspective of the British colonial government) of a pre-modern society in need of external reform, an internal issue (as viewed by conservatives within Hindu society) of tradition that deserved non-interference, the search for principles of reform within tradition (by reformers within Indian society), as well as the demand (mainly by women’s groups) for ‘new’ traditions. Sen’s Introduction to the essays takes the reader through these shifts, discussing how the issue of child marriage finally went from a subject of public debate to one of public policy in the 1970s–80s. With the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1926, firmly in place, the question was no longer whether child marriage was an issue in need of legal intervention, but how the law could best be supplemented and implemented through policy.