Colonial India in Children’s Literature by Supriya Goswami (review)

Although there is certainly no shortage of literature about the history of British colonisation and imperial rule in India in general, Supriya Goswami’s slim but meticulously researched book seems to be the first thorough study to bring together children’s literature by British, Anglo-Indian, and Bengali authors with colonial Indian history. Focusing on six authors, Goswami explores the connections between these two fields, and develops her argument that these authors’ texts “not only engage in political activism, but also seek to empower children (both real and fictional) by celebrating them as active colonial and anti-colonial agents” (3).

In her chronologically arranged research, she devotes one chapter each to The History of Little Henry and His Bearer by Mary Sherwood, The Captives in India by Barbara Hofland, The Story of Sonny Sahib by Sara Jeanette Duncan, The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, and texts by the two Bengali authors, Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray, respectively. Goswami’s book, spanning a period of roughly 100 years from the early nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century, pairs each author’s text with a significant event or occurrence in Indian history.

In addition to including ample background information in each chapter about the socio-political situation in India at the time, the author also offers biographical details about each of the six writers mentioned above, and situates the texts within the wider context of the authors’ further works and the works of other writers. Thus, Goswami does not only provide an analysis of the relationship between the respective historical events and their meanings in the analysed texts, but she also confirms the important role that children’s literature may have played in cementing or fighting against cultural stereotypes.

Chapter 1 focuses on the importance of the missionary debates, which led to the Charter Act of 1813, in Mary Sherwood’s book. Goswami shows how the eponymous protagonist Little Henry, although he is just a sickly little boy, manages to convert his Indian bearer Boosy to Christianity, and thus fulfils an important role as British missionary.

In Chapter 2, Goswami relates why the Anglo-Mysore Wars in the eighteenth century, and particularly the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799, generated such immense interest in Britain, and how Barbara Hofland, who had never even travelled to India, used that interest to write a “captivity tale” in which she is able “to reverse the pattern of cultural contact that the British feared so much” (77).

Sara Jeanette Duncan’s The Story of Sonny Sahib, discussed in Chapter 3, is set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and can be considered, according to Goswami, as an “allegory of the empire saved, greatly improved, and reborn […]” (81). As Goswami argues, its hero Sonny, who survives the mutiny, is brought up by Indians and later reunited with his English father, serves as the ideal post-Mutiny hero who can bring together the two opposing worlds and thus “consolidate British authority in the colonies.” (81)

In Chapter 4, Goswami draws parallels between the unruly and law-defying monkey mob called the Bandar-log in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books, and the emergence of a group of Western-educated Indians who threaten British rule in India through a newly found Indian nationalism. Kipling’s justification of violence in order to re-establish his hero Mowgli’s supremacy is compared by Goswami to the British justification of their supremacy in India.

The last chapter focuses on the Swadeshi movement after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and uses Tuntunir Boi [Tuntuni’s Book] and Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne by Upendrakishore Ray and Ha-Ja-Ba-Ra-La [A Topsy-Turvy Tale] and Abol Tabol [Rhymes without Reason] by Sukumar Ray as examples for “anti-colonial texts that seek to empower Bengali children living under colonial rule” (136)—unlike the books in the previous chapters, which served to justify and strengthen British rule in India.

This engaging study offers a...