What logic would dictate setting the legal age for girls to marry lower than the age for them to consent to sexual activity or the age at which they may enter sex work? Whose interests are at stake when rendering girls “old enough” to permanently marry but not “old enough” to consent to sex? Or “old enough” to consent to sex but not “old enough” to take money for the transaction? Defining Girlhood examines the arc of legal debates in India and the global arena that defined and redefined feminine sexual maturity for marriage, pleasure, and business. Ashwini Tambe's analysis, spanning the twentieth century to the present, unearths competing rhetorical positions of British colonizers, Indian nationalists, international abolitionists, patriarchal traditionalists, feminists, economic developmentalists, transnational humanitarians, and always concerned parents. Each rival group took up the task of dictating the “rightful” place of adolescent girls as it behooved their own strategic ends.

The book's most intriguing chapter traces the rise of the concept of “adolescence.” Tambe follows the Indian uptake of early US psychologist G. Stanley Hall's invention of this (somewhat oxymoronic) stage of transition. After the concept of adolescence gained purchase in Indian academic and professional discourse in the 1930s and 1940s, it began to spill into public consciousness and change the popular representation of minor girls. Tambe illustrates this transformation using the covers of the Indian women's magazine Stree. Prior to the 1950s, Stree portrayed two kinds of females: young girls associated with play and married women associated with beauty and domesticity. Starting in the mid-1950s, a new figure emerged: an older yet unmarried (denoted by her jewelry and dress) young woman associated with education who projected somber respectability. Tambe describes these figures as “little women in the making” (p. 54). Such images of not-girls-not-women expanded the prior girl–woman binary, but it would take another two decades before teenage girls—associated with laughter and fun rather than dignified self-betterment—debuted on the influential magazine's cover.

Tambe uses this changing pictorial repertoire as a backdrop to shifting political debates over female sexual agency and the vicissitudes of protectionism. British colonialists originally argued for low marriageability ages in India because of the supposed early maturation of girls from “the tropics.” Here Tambe notes the ways in which colonialists harnessed the authority of scientific racism gleaned from surveys administered by civil servants across the empire to underscore British racial and civilizational superiority. A similar tone was struck by abolitionists who used the dangers of the traffic in women and children as a raison d’être for the League of Nations and subsequent international governmental organizations, arguing for the need to standardize the legal age for entrance into prostitution in order to ensure improved protection in more “backward” climes. Indian nationalists, for their part, used international scientific consensus around the parameters of adolescence to argue for a higher marriageability age as a means to combat imperial discourses of Indian deficiency. Nationalists often debated Indian traditionalists who argued for a low marriageability age and yet high age for sexual consent and prostitution as a means to maintain control of Indian daughters within a wide system of wealth inheritance.

Beginning in the 1960s, Indian girls became the special target of the biopolitical project of population control, which sought to curb their sexuality for the sake of the nation-state and its standing within global hierarchies of “progress.” Later, the “girl child”—as distinct from either the girl (which could be read as an unmarried young adult) or the child (which as unmarked was presumed masculine)—became the special target of yet another biopolitical project: neoliberal investment. The need to extend the span of the girl child's development and thus delay her sexual activity became the preferred path to solving illiteracy, poverty, suitability for employment in globalized supply chains, and a host of other developmental ills.

Across these debates and their varied implications for all three categories of consent, Tambe demonstrates that Indian girls are never conceived of as and for themselves. Instead, they are always a means to accomplish others’ goals, from those of colonialists to those of Nike. Although the markers of achievement change, regulation of girls’ sexual agency becomes a key building block for constructing global hierarchies. India's situates itself vis-à-vis other nation-states through the shifting metrics of achieving “proper” girlhood. While Tambe critiques the ways in which these visions obscure the lifeworlds, desires, and agency of actual Indian girls, it is noteworthy that her book does not attempt to correct this wrong. Never does the book's narrative center the experiences of girls themselves. Readers encounter a host of historical actors who contributed to India's present legal and economic formations, but they never gain insight into the self-same girls whom these laws and biopolitical projects sought to control. Despite this small flaw, Defining Girlhood weaves an otherwise rich and extensive tale of the “girl child” as a rapidly morphing but always potent signifier in Indian and international politics.