The epilogue recollects the several exploratory strands opened up by the book and their relevance to the present, as witness our reliance on the epistemic contract on age to imagine the human and gender justice, for one, or our recourse to the naturalized child to launch and obfuscate various political claims, for another. It summarizes the conclusions drawn in each of the six chapters by weaving them into a discussion of two present-day cases – one from India in 2012 and another from the United States in 2017. The cases speak to the continuing power of the “child” to animate political passions, and the (misplaced) reliance on forensic technologies and bureaucratic procedures to provide accurate proofs of age, and hence of childhood.

This chapter locates the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) in the context of two sets of numbers – the census statistics that were used to measure the scale of the social problem of child marriages and the “digits of age” that were used to define the child in order to mitigate the problem. In doing so, it locates the history of the CMRA in a newly enlarged field of play – in the League of Nation’s transnational humanitarian program of child protection, on the one hand, and raging debates on “population” as a global problem, on the other. It argues that while age-based measurements of legal personhood might appear unremarkable now, age had to be made stable by several technologies of government. It examines how a range of nationalist positions came to be articulated as a choice over the age limits of childhood in interwar India. It scrutinizes how age could – or could not – be proved through forensic technologies and documentary evidence in colonial courtrooms. By taking age as a question of power and not a fact about the body, this chapter traces the juridical construction of the child.