Although child-bride harm was uncovered during the Age of Consent controversy (1890s), no attempt has been made to excavate its origins in Indian history. Rectifying this void, I investigate the phenomena of child sexual abuse in early modern and modern regions of Bengal and Maharashtra. I adopt a female-child-centred approach that involves engaging with the perspectives of girls and young women. Some questions raised are: Did a girl have rights? If so, how was her freewill visualised by the state, law and popular culture? What can we glean from women’s discourses through historical time on pre-pubertal sex, conjugality and child-marriage and how are they different from official discourses? In order to cast light on an obscured subject, I widen the archive to include an analysis of devotional poetry, bardic literature, personal narratives, royal chronicles besides, the more conventional media reports, religious and medical texts. The essay reveals how religious punditry combined with the state and popular culture to produce a convoluted concept of female agency that authorised girl-bride sexual abuse in child marriage. The study finds more continuities than breaks in the prevalence of child-wife abuse within the institution of child marriage from early modern to modern times.

中文翻译：

---

将早期现代和现代印度的儿童性虐待历史化：童婚制度中的父权规范、暴力和童妻和年轻妇女的代理

尽管在同意时代争议（1890 年代）期间发现了童婚伤害，但并未尝试挖掘其在印度历史中的起源。为了弥补这一空白，我调查了孟加拉和马哈拉施特拉邦早期现代和现代地区的儿童性虐待现象。我采用了一种以女性为中心的方法，涉及到女孩和年轻女性的观点。提出的一些问题是：女孩有权利吗？如果是这样，她的自由意志是如何被国家、法律和流行文化形象化的？我们可以从历史时期女性关于青春期前性、婚姻和童婚的话语中获得什么，它们与官方话语有何不同？为了阐明一个模糊的主题，我扩大了档案库，包括对虔诚诗歌、吟游诗人文学、个人叙事、皇家编年史之外，还有更传统的媒体报道、宗教和医学文献。这篇文章揭示了宗教权威如何与国家和流行文化相结合，产生了一个令人费解的女性代理概念，该概念授权童婚中的女新娘性虐待。该研究发现，从近代到现代的童婚制度中，童妻虐待的普遍性比中断更多。