Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl (review)

Modern India is fraught with contradictions. As a newly confident nation, it boasts a vibrant democracy buoyed by economic growth, yet the strictures of class and caste exclude many from socioeconomic progress, gender inequities persist, and disabling traditions continue to perpetuate injustices. These exclusions and paradoxes are examined in Michelle Superle’s study of 101 children’s and young adult novels, written in English by Indian and diaspora authors living in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, and published between 1988 and 2008. Viewing these novels through the lenses of postcolonial and feminist criticism, she explores how the construction of childhood and gendered identity intersects with the narration of nation, culture, and the shaping of a “new Indian girl.” Describing this corpus of books as a “literature of emancipation and a literature of containment” (16), Superle probes the ideological gap between the liberal feminist ideology that underpins the authors’ common aspiration for positive social change, and their focalization on upper- and middle-class protagonists who either eschew India’s harsh reality or benevolently save the subaltern girl. Superle’s strength lies in her meticulous demonstration that despite their proclaimed democratic ideals and uplifting optimism, these authors encourage hegemonic values that maintain socioeconomic hierarchies, exclude caste and class issues, and often collapse into cultural essentialism. As India emerges in the global arena, Superle’s timely contribution reminds readers that such literature for English-speaking children and young adults reflects an elitist agenda.

In the introductory chapter, Superle traces the didactic impetus of Indian children’s literature to ancient Sanskrit texts, colonial British models of children’s literature, and India’s postindependence government-supported publishing houses. Framed within this historical background, Indian authors are located in the ideological context of India’s “nation-building project” (87), whereas diaspora authors reflect the genre conventions and concerns of multicultural literature. Unlike Indian authors, who strain to portray national harmony, diaspora authors strive toward forging a bicultural identity that can function harmoniously in a multicultural host country while encouraging pride in one’s cultural heritage. Despite these differing perspectives, both Indian and diaspora Indian authors forefront girl characters (forty-six of the fifty-five authors are women). This overarching similarity provides the focus of subsequent chapters, in which Superle disentangles the complex concerns and forces that shape the representation of girlhood: a “feminist literary project” (38), nation-building activities, and adjusting to a bicultural identity.

Chapter two primarily deals with how Indian authors imagine a “new Indian girl,” who balances the constraints of traditional gender roles with the demands of modernity. Superle observes that Indian authors emphasize the values of care and cooperation in the interrelationship between self, family, and society. Girls rarely act independently, let alone rebel. Strengthening her claim that these values are “better suited to contemporary national values” (52), she points out that these novels unfailingly portray a middle-class protagonist in pursuit of social justice and gender equality. But what about the voice of the subaltern? Dependent on the emancipatory zeal of an attractive, urban, English-speaking protagonist, the disempowered girl is reduced to a token presence. Superle rightly concludes that these novels—by and for English-speaking, upper- and middle-class readers—propagate hierarchical social structures envisioned by the “elite” nation-builders of the future.

Superle’s unique contribution is her juxtaposition of the “transformative agenda” (6) of these Indian authors with the country’s stark reality and the sociopolitical aspirations of Mohandas Gandhi, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Abdul Kalam, president from 2002 to 2007 and author of Mission India: A Vision for Indian Youth. In chapters three and four, Gandhian and Nehruvian principles shed light on the social strategies of friendship, cooperation, and “unity in diversity.” Identifying power relations, Superle argues that though the appeal to the upper and middle classes to “transform” society reflects a Gandhian ethos of interconnectedness, it nonetheless...