Property and social privilege are two of the most enduring forms of authority, and families often jealously guard the control and transfer of these sources of influence. This chapter explains the social conventions around the Hindu extended family (encompassing control of property, social alliances, and the politics of mobility and public voice) that govern the intrahousehold distribution of power. After exploring how they have been constructed, I study the unintended consequences of multiple attempts during British colonial rule to legislate gender-equalizing social reforms. The British attempted to homogenize diverse religious, spiritual, and pragmatic traditions into a single code with a tiny elite of highly educated Brahman men at the top. Comfortably, the elite’s sense of “tradition” looked much like the male British colonial ideal of “classical patriarchy” in terms of control of property and social authority. Ironically, this British-Brahman imposition has become integral to India’s legal code. The chapter next details the changes to the ecosystem of norms around women’s traditional property rights, and their enforcement, from independence to contemporary India. Where relevant, I include insights from my field research about the continuity of familial expectations around what it means to be a “good” Hindu son or daughter.

Building on the scholarship that traces how changing age of consent laws did not so much protect girls as define the boundaries and norms of girlhood, this chapter shifts the focus to the boy child – a figure who was often evoked during discussions of child marriage and the age of consent in India. This chapter uses the boy child as a heuristic device to study a cluster of Hindu patriarchal anxieties that congealed in a discourse of boy protection and compares Har Bilas Sarda’s Hindu Child Marriage Bill with other bills concerned with the ages of marriage and consent. It showcases how adjustments to the ages of consent and marriage also affected the boundaries of boyhood. This chapter shows how patriarchal considerations were articulated along the axes of age as well as sex and gender; it traces the Hindu patriarchal considerations that underwrote the Child Marriage Restraint Act; and finally, it analyzes the seemingly peculiar logic of “boy protection” as discussed by Hindu reformers to reflect on peculiarities of the liberal sex/age system that have become invisible to us.