A Juvenile Periphery: The Geographies of Literary Childhood In Colonial Bengal

Introduction

In India between the 1850s and the 1930s, the ‘child’ was re-examined and reinterpreted in the cultural and intellectual climate of colonialism, and the ‘new children’ that emerged from these interrogations found various new uses in colonialist and nationalist projects. As the uneasily shared wards of British and Indian elites, native children became embroiled in debates about race, nature, civilization and the impact of colonialism upon the modern self. These debates were produced within, and productive of, a set of experimental and institutional spaces that might be described as the ‘juvenile periphery’ of colonial India: schools, reformatories, laws, committees of inquiry, children’s literature, etc.¹ Within these spaces that were apparently set apart from overtly ‘political’ zones of adult contention, the marginal condition of the native child could serve as a model and a mechanism for the marginality of various segments of the colonized.

The juvenile periphery is a rewarding subject of historical inquiry² precisely because it is a periphery: in the context of modernity, it invites experimentation, colonization and reclamation. Such interventions resulted in the creation of a body of knowledge that was not only about childhood, but also about ‘Indians’ and ‘Europeans.’ ³ Because this knowledge was typically generated through the agency of people identified with the modern and with the colonial regime, it was endowed with an authority that elite Indians could not ignore. They could, however, contest this knowledge, influence its production, and usurp it as they sought to position themselves as being both like and unlike modern Europeans. In the process, childhood could be redefined not only as a state of preparation for the battles of adulthood, but also as a set of moral meanings and normative (and abnormal) behaviors that might be mapped on to the colonizer and the colonized, the dominant and the upstart, the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional.’

I examine here a specific site of this production of meaning: children’s literature in Bengal in the period between the Russo-Japanese War and the Second World War. I argue that as a part of the juvenile periphery, Bengali children’s literature enabled certain experiments with transformation premised on the plasticity of the child.⁴ The method of these experiments was to generate a powerful set of geographies of childhood, in which Indian elites might locate not only the defeated present and the modern future, but also the pre-modern, pre-colonial past. The literary child moved constantly between these geographies, fleeing the anxieties of colonialism and chasing its pleasures. The landscapes of the past were typically constructed as the innermost refuge of the colonized child: a space charged with escapism, innocence, femininity and other ‘mindsets’ that might be experienced as nostalgia. At the same time, this landscape generated unease, which stemmed not from the anti-modernity of the past, but from its perceived implication in a pathological modernity. Experimental geographies generated by middle-class encounters with colonialism were generally unstable: there were experiments within experiments, and geographies beneath geographies. These ‘hidden’ spaces of childhood were profoundly disruptive towards the larger political project of producing the middle-class child as a modern subject.

Four Geographies of Literary Childhood

The juvenile periphery should not be regarded as a laboratory without limitations. The plasticity of the colonial child was neither certain nor unlimited. It was contingent upon a range of colonial discourses that included the nature of the parent, the nature of the native, and fantasies of rebellion and retreat. The political context of the children’s literature I examine in this article is perhaps evident from its temporal boundaries: this is a period when the identity-politics of the Bengali middle-class was informed not only by specific shifts and continuities in the global theater of race, power and civilizational authority, but also by ‘domestic’ developments that included the partition of Bengal, the swadeshi movement, revolutionary terrorism, and the competing hegemonisms of a province in which an insecure Hindu minority had established a disproportionate claim upon the cultural capital of Bengaliness.⁵ These developments were accompanied by less nakedly political stresses in the life of the middle...