The Case of the Bigamous ‘Child Wife’: Proving Age, Leaving Husbands and Performing Childhood in Colonial Law

This talk uses the case of Badal Aurat, a child wife, to turn the gaze back on the liberal political principles and evidentiary standards upheld by child protection laws, to ask: How reliable were forensic proofs of age? What were the social and gender structures upheld by child protection laws? And finally, what are the promises and perils of the epistemic contract on age that undergirds legal subjectivity in modern law?