Child marriage in India will be the topic of a talk.
Historian and author, Ishita Pande of Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, will give a presentation titled Of Tender Age: Forensic Proofs of Age and the Performance of Childhood in the Colonial Indian Courtroom from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25, in Schroeder Hall, room 242. The event is free and open to the public.
Pande is a historian of post-colonial South Asia and the British Empire. She has studied the impact of the colonial connection on race science in Britain with a focus on child marriage in India. She has authored numerous books including Coming of Age: Law, Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India and Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire.
She will discuss how the universal value of child protection came to be reconciled with the rule of colonial difference. She will also talk about how ideas of childhood and adolescence were entangled with sexual morality and gender norms in 20th century India.
The event is sponsored by Illinois State University’s Department of History, Department of Philosophy, Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.
For more information, contact Linda Spencer at 438-5689 or ljspence@ilstu.edu.
