A strange and sublime longing: Looking back at childhood in Calcutta in A Strange and Sublime Address and The Blue Bedspread

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Studies of the “poetics” of childhood have focused on the evolution of the concept of childhood in the West to show how it has swung from being considered a wicked state that requires management to a state of innocence that contrasts with an emergent industrial society (Gavin, 2012; Natov, 2014). In her study of autobiographical narratives about childhood, Kate Douglas comments on the “binaries of innocence and experience” around which narratives of childhood can swivel (2010: 13). This has often resulted in a negative evaluation of the child as “lovable, spontaneous, [and] delicate” while being “simultaneously dependent, unreliable, and wilful”, to be guided, reared, and disciplined (Nandy, 2010: 203). This ambiguity in the Western attitude to children is unlike the celebratory and indulgent attitudes fostered in the Indian tradition towards male children (Kakar, 2004: 209–210). Thus, an exploration of Indian literature of/for children needs to take into account the specificities of an Indian way of growing up and not focus solely on Western theories of childhood.

Sudhir Kakar characterizes Western attitudes to childhood as moving from a general lack of empathy to a more “humane and nurturant” one (2004: 208), from conquering the will of the child to according him greater freedom (Kakar, 2004: 209). He contrasts this with an Indian ideology whereby the child is not only joyfully welcomed, but childish impulses, at odds with an adult world of rationality and detachment, are encouraged (2004: 210), coinciding with the “concept of utopia of childhood” (2004: 201). In colonial India, within a doctrine of progress, primitivism and childhood became corollaries, the latter being cast as “an inferior version of maturity, less productive and ethical”, and in need of intervention and reform (Nandy, 2020: 131). This rationale infantilized native populations and justified the use of force to “civilize” them (Nandy, 2020: 130; Bharat, 2003: 110–111). Western, particularly colonial, scholarship often portrayed Indian children as being emblematic of the colonized people’s disregard for the uniqueness of childhood (Nieuwenhuys, 2009: 147). This further justified notions of colonial civilizational superiority.

Despite the difference in Western and Indian attitudes towards childhood, the former have influenced childhood practices in Bengal. ³ Children were seen as crucial to the bhadralok’s self-fashioning in the nineteenth century (Banerjee, 2015: 221). Satadru Sen (2016) demonstrates how the nineteenth-century bhadralok accommodated wider roles and aspirations for children, demonstrating its willingness to adapt to colonial expectations of self-discipline and management. Bengali middle- and upper-class children came to be seen as antidotes to the oppressive colonial life “outside” the home, marking a separation between the public and the private as well as between adulthood and childhood (Bose, 1995: 118). The child was at the centre of a new pedagogical project, with the city of Calcutta as the site for reimagining the new nation (Banerjee, 2015; Sen, 2016: 144). As a result, Bengali children’s literature from the late nineteenth century onwards was a space for “experiments with transformation premised on the plasticity of the child” (Sen, 2004: 2) that reinforced ideas of a new nation and what the bhadralok envisaged as ideal future citizens (Sen, 2015: 30). This focus on the child as a potential ideal citizen in the future led to a simultaneous nostalgia for the past of childhood as a time of “escapism, innocence, femininity and other ‘mindsets’” (Sen, 2004: 2). Due to the increasing distance of the urban middle and upper classes from the rural and a simultaneous proximity to the West, especially England, the school and the home in the city became major sites of childhood (Sen, 2004: 2–9).

In the post-independence era, the bhadralok’s fascination with Calcutta was upbraided for hindering the progress of Bengal as a whole (Bagchi, 1985). The decline of the bhadralok in the twentieth century can be linked to Calcutta’s own decline around the time. The loss of the jute-producing areas after the creation of Bangladesh resulted in a vast influx of refugees to the city, straining an overburdened urban infrastructure. The policy of “freight equalization”, enacted by the central government, and the decline of the city’s port by the 1960s also played their part in the city’s economic decline (Chatterji and Roy, 2020: 273). The growth of trade unions and labour struggles, especially around the jute industry in the 1960s and 1970s, that had mobilized workers and legitimized their rights had been instrumental to the ascension of the Left government in 1977 in West Bengal. However, the condition of mill workers worsened in the 1980s, and by the time of national economic liberalization in the 1990s, “the government proved to be less supportive of labour and more solicitous of capital” (Gooptu, 2007: 1926). At the same time, there was large-scale casualization of the manufacturing sector, coupled with a flight of industries, educated professionals, and the financial service sector from the city. The bhadralok identity underwent a reversal of attitudes, which saw them being derided for decadence and insularity (Sen, 2013: 63). The perceived loss of cultural relevance was accompanied by a feeling of being abandoned by the state as it focused on the development of rural areas (Chatterji and Roy, 2020: 274).

The state government encouraged private investments, especially in the IT sector, after 1994. The transition of the newly rich to the outskirts of the city, beginning in the 1950s, did not ease the congestion in the city centre even in the 1970s amidst rising rents and property prices (Munshi, 1978: 18). This escalated in the 1990s with the shift of the “higher end organized sector” to the eastern fringes leading to the creation of planned townships and business and consumer zones in these areas (Chatterji and Roy, 2020: 275). However, in the core areas, residential neighbourhoods (paras) witnessed increased gentrification and erosion of para culture (Ghosh, 2016: 204). The anxiety about the rapidly changing present spawned nostalgia for an earlier time and led to a return to narratives about the domestic arena of the family, childhood, and parenthood. At the same time, a new postcolonial middle class sprung up in Calcutta which, though separate from the colonial middle class, attempted to gain legitimacy by evoking nostalgia for the myths of “intellectuality” and “withdrawn ascestism” (Sen, 2013: 63) that seemed to characterize bhadralok life. As in the nineteenth century, the bhadralok community of Calcutta attempted to fashion a distinct identity for itself by circling back to the home and family.

Literary depictions of childhood are inherently nostalgic because childhood is already a territory that is behind most readers but also because it is familiar yet unknowable. Texts might even reveal a longing for childhood while depicting trauma. Since we are always already “emplaced” (Casey, 1993), to be nostalgic for one’s childhood is to be nostalgic for the places of childhood (see also, Christensen and O’Brien, 2003). Nostalgia for childhood, characterized by a despair of the present, regret for the passage of time, and a glorification of youth, evokes nostalgia for the spaces and places of childhood even if we have not personally experienced those places. Associating this nostalgia for childhood with the city runs counter to the pastoral idyll that has traditionally been allied with the prelapsarian innocence of childhood. In the texts under consideration, childhood is inscribed within the cultural milieu of the Calcutta bhadralok and, hence, we are led to feel nostalgic for the bhadralok family unit, the home, and the city of Calcutta.

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Within a dominant Hindu society, it was the male child who was (and continues to be) seen as key to future prospects (Bharat, 2003: 116). According to this thinking, male children deserved emotional and financial investment (Sen, 2016: 149) given their potential actions in a future society (Bose, 1995: 141). In contrast, female children belonged to their future husbands’ families (Sen, 2016: 149) and their training involved the acquisition of domestic skills (Bose, 1995: 141). Due to this centrality of the male child to the future of the nation and the continuation of the bhadralok in the nineteenth century, they were accorded a special position within society and the family. The centrality of male children for the Bengali middle class in turn led to the emergence of their parents as a newly fashioned category. Bhadralok parents, especially fathers, were figures of authority demanding unflinching respect in return for affection and discipline (Bose, 1995: 119). This expectation of detached severity placed a great burden on the child and guilt on the parent.

Sudhir Kakar notes that “the rationale and structure of the Indian extended family” facilitated the diffusion of parental authority among all the children in the family (2004: 131). Amidst prevalent anxiety over the declining joint family system, BBS takes fatherly attention to its extreme and depicts the consequences of growing up without the mediating influence of the joint family complex or of a mother. There is only one instance where the maternal grandfather is mentioned as a “protective” presence (115). At home, the unnamed child narrator and his sister are either ignored or severely penalized. The figure of the narrator’s father is a perversion of the concept of the self-sacrificing male. While remaining dutifully unmarried since the death of the children’s mother, this sexual sacrifice is channelled into violent repression of both the children. While the narrator is subjected to sexual abuse as a perversion of paternal love for the son, the daughter is at the receiving end of corporal discipline, reflecting the father's attitude towards women. The narrator feels the father’s severity and guilt early on as he remarks, “I keep looking at the stapler and the Scotch tape […] feeling Father’s guilt pushing at me” (Jha, 2009: 29). ⁴ The father is described as being above everyone else, where even rain cannot reach (34). Despite his seeming imperviousness to the rain, however, the child narrator recognizes the precariousness of his authority as he observes the father’s soaked calves, with “the hair all neatly lined up” (34), and describes his father as looking “funny” (29) and “wet” (29) with his trousers rolled up (31), and generally as being angry (39–41). In looking back at his childhood, the narrator, now an adult, realizes that the father’s authority was open to being challenged. Interestingly, it is through the father that the narrator learns that “you can always write it down” (32), initiating the child into the world of narrative that will eventually help him make sense of the trauma he has experienced by reconstructing the past nostalgically. It is through writing that the adult writer is able to revisit and recover his childhood from the tropes of helplessness (Bharat 2003: 115). This recuperation of the child is based on a nostalgia for notions of an ideal childhood, allowing for the possibility of a better future.

Chaudhuri’s SSA takes a more nostalgic turn as it reflects upon the relative freedom from individualized attention that a child enjoys in an extended household. The pantheon of the family is replete with uncles, cousins, and deceased grandparents who are kept alive in photographs on the walls. There is a general permissiveness signified by summer vacations and a visit to the mamabari (maternal uncle’s home). The father as authority figure is relegated to the margins. The child protagonist, Sandeep, only glimpses his father occasionally, often within the privileged spaces of the company car or expensive hotels. In SSA the paternal presence is never a penalizing force in the children’s lives. Instead, fathers stand for the bhadralok class’s hopes and desires for the future generation: “Everywhere in the lane, fathers prayed their sons would be successes” (Chaudhuri, 2016: 26). ⁵ Fathers also reflect the differential attitudes towards female children within bhadralok culture, as daughters are taught to “dance and paint and sing” in order to be married to successful men (27). Other than collectively representing the bhadralok’s aspirations for the future, fathers, whenever individually mentioned, are bodies that anchor their children, manifested by Sandeep’s little cousin walking on the back of Chhoto mama’s (Sandeep’s maternal uncle) (90) or the baby urinating on her father’s shirt (80). Sandeep’s father’s upward mobility, though an individual achievement, is supplementary to his uncle’s failures in business in a politically charged Calcutta. The extended family in SSA is portrayed as an important support system rallying together when Chhoto mama is in hospital following a heart attack. Chhoto mama helps distant family members seeking jobs in the city “because money was meant to flow from the hands of one member of the family to another” (59).

In SSA, fatherhood is as much symbolic as it is biological, “referring to the leadership roles in an incipient nation” (Banerjee, 2015: 223). Gandhi, the symbolic Father of the Nation is reviled by Chhoto mama in SSA as a “sham yogi who knew no economics” and set against the deified figure of the martial father, Subhas Bose, of whom he spoke with “the pride a son feels when he remembers a calumniated father” (94). The symbolic play among the children takes on an additional layer of meaning when Sandeep’s cousins stand for Bengali masculinity and pride as they claim Bose for themselves while Sandeep, the outsider from Bombay, is cast as Gandhi. Chhoto mama is described as “an archetype of that familiar figure who is not often described in literature — the ordinary breadwinner in his moment of unlikely glory” (21). He stands for a genteel modernity where the elders are expected to maintain an air of easy dignity without being too imposing. When a young couple stoop to touch Chhoto mama’s feet to receive blessings, he retreats good-naturedly with “‘There’s no need for all this’” (77). It is perhaps indicative of the nostalgic element of SSA that the sublimity of childhood is associated with vacation at the maternal uncle’s home, as traditionally the mama (maternal uncle), being outside the paternal household, signifies freedom. Nivedita Sen notes that in “stark contrast to one’s own home with its stern requirements of routine and discipline, the institution of the Bengali mamabari (mama’s house), which children visit only during vacations, is proverbially associated with fun and games” (2015: 73). SSA reflects this when Sandeep associates Bombay with an odd unhappiness and isolation in contrast with Calcutta that is the place of his mamabari, and hence, a place of engagement with the family and the community. Uncles, usually maternal, are sources of childish fantasies and adventures. Thus, while the paternal household, presided over by the father, signifies living under the father’s law, separation from the maternal world of protection, and eventual entry into society (Kakar, 2004: 126), the mamabari stands for a re-immersion into the maternal network. ⁶ This is especially true of male rather than female children who are able to maintain a separation from the network of male relatives for longer. The family in SSA is a reflection of Bengali bhadralok society as remembered in nostalgic musings.

Yet, the other side of this picture of carefree middle-class childhood betrays a constant preoccupation with discipline and punishment. Nineteenth-century Bengali manuals about child rearing reflect anxiety over the most effective “disciplinary strategies of character formation” (Bose, 1995: 133). The aim was to not be so harsh that the child ended up resenting the parent while also not being so lax that the child’s moral fibre was weakened (Bose, 1995: 148). Concerns over the harshness of discipline did not exclude physical force: “any disobedience against the parent’s dominance” was “necessarily met with physical punishment” (Bose, 1995: 134). The shadow of nineteenth-century parenting remains even today as some Bengali middle-class parents continue to legitimize corporal punishment. The notion that such forms of punishment are “generally true only in economically deprived class contexts” (Sen, 2015: 54) is belied in BBS as the narrator recalls the excessive punitive force of the father’s treatment of the smallest of missteps. It reaches its horrific conclusion as the father asks the narrator to undress in order to show how grown up he is and sexually abuses him (52). This leaves him traumatized even after twenty-five years as he remembers how his “body still hurt, where Father had put his entire weight on that evening” (56). This act of abuse is also an attempt to undermine the child’s agency and sense of self. The narrator describes the anguish of not being able to communicate his trauma meaningfully in a city of nameless people. It is only when he is able to take his father’s advice and write it down, that he begins coping with the trauma. Looking back and writing about the event allows the narrator to question why his father failed (57) at attaining the ideal of the bhadralok father who, though stern, is always benevolent and deeply engaged in his son’s wellbeing. As an adult, the narrator is nostalgic for an idyllic childhood characterized by the presence of a supportive father. He uses nostalgia to create the vision of an idealized family to affirm the idea of a better future. By the end of the novel, the adult narrator achieves his unrealized desire for such a childhood by adopting his sister’s baby.

The authority of the patriarch within the bhadralok family, as it emerged out of the nineteenth-century colonial encounter, does not diminish the role of the mother within the respectable Bengali family. She was expected to manage the finances of the home and supervise the implementation of new regimes of childcare. Even today, fathers’ work outside the home necessitates the involvement of mothers as caregivers and authority figures. In fact, the bond between mothers and sons continues to be “the basic nexus and ultimate paradigm of human relationships in India” (Nandy, 1980: 37), given the continuing importance placed on the male child within the family. The importance of the relationship between mothers and sons in India is reflected in the numerous myths about mother goddesses and their sons as well in everyday utterances that “bless” a married woman with a “thousand sons”. In SSA and BBS, mothers, absent or present, are portrayed sympathetically and remembered nostalgically. In SSA, Sandeep’s mother is part of the maternal unit, consisting of his aunts and the maid, that represents the core of the bhadralok joint family. They are described as assuming “an unimpedable vegetable dignity” (103). Though they are figures of authority, they never assume the role of punishers. They are indulgent and thus associated with bhadralok childhood and the vacation time of the mamabari that stands against the regimentation of adult life. Remembering vacation time with the family provides a source of security amidst adult anxieties of middle-class decline. Nostalgia here is occasioned by a sense of loss of community and continuity with the past.

By contrast, in BBS, the mother is absent, a “memory, a fragment, more sound than image” (73). Her memories offer solace to the narrator and serve to assuage the trauma of the father’s cruelty. The narrator’s elder sister had filled the role of the absent mother in his childhood. The narrator describes how he used to play “the Blanket Game” with his sister (100). For the narrator, his now dead sister is a source of nostalgia and the hope of finding “some love trapped in some fear” (101) because it was her motherly presence in his childhood that had sustained him through their father’s abuse This illustrates how the presence of trauma need not preclude nostalgia for childhood. In BBS the memories of a failed family life inspire nostalgia for a bhadralok milieu that the narrator never had access to as a child but nevertheless aspires to. It impels the narrator to reflect nostalgically upon the ideal family and imagine a family with his sister’s baby.

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The urban home and the family generally represent “inalienable connections” to the past and restore a sense of continuity with it (Bennett, 2015: 11). The family home and the city of one’s childhood are places that are nostalgically associated with a time and space of comfort and security. As such, an examination of these spaces in the novels is crucial for the exploration of nostalgia for childhood. In BBS, even glimpses into the intimate world of the family bristle with danger. No matter how safe the environment might be, how insulated against the city the child might be, its fumes find a way in. On a journey back from the doctor’s office on a rainy day, the child is sitting in the taxi trying to hide from the rain: “So we keep moving away from the windows until we sit real close, Father and I, like two friends huddled in the rain” (30). The fear of the child is fully expressed later as the reader learns of the abuse that the child underwent at the hands of the father.

SSA is full of wonderment for the geography of the city. The child narrator notes the many “irrelevances and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city”, creating a world without a tangible “beginning, middle and conclusion” (57–58). The factual geography of Calcutta is referenced in a discontinuous manner to evoke a generalized yearning for the city of his childhood where the larger details of place are subordinated to the finer minutiae of everyday being. This cityscape, organized by the curious eye of a child, is an “indiscriminate mosaic” (Chakraborty and Kumar, 2020: 8) of statues, buildings, and billboards, “like a black and white photograph of another era” (18–19). The text refers to far-flung areas such as a “hillside on the Western Ghats” and “a cave in Kanheri”, places brought together by the remembered “holiday mood” of the child (2). This geographical range attests to the access to a networked mobility of the bhadralok. The psychogeography ⁷ of the child’s memory encompasses not just the home but also the city and the universe. This cosmic scope is depicted early on when Sandeep’s mother unravels gifts for her family in Calcutta, and “a galaxy of hand-woven stars, a cosmos of streaking comets and symbolic blue horizons” leaps out (5).

Bourgeois domestic spaces in Calcutta achieved the confluence of the public and the private in the modern drawing room, metamorphosing the home into “an attempt at self definition and national identity” in the colonial period (Chaudhuri, 2007: 222). However, the aristocratic drawing room, which inspires nostalgia for past opulence, is unlike the utilitarianism of middle-class homes that often do not provide “the luxury of a separate drawing room” (Chaudhuri, 2007: 227). Instead, the intimacy of the home is bolstered by the presence of large beds in the outer rooms that serve as functional reception areas. Such homely spaces generate nostalgia for the mundane and familiar. In SSA, the family gathers on the large and ancient bed that testifies to the respectable age of the house and the people who have occupied it. The small “rusting iron gate” outside the house is more a swing for the children than for keeping intruders out. Everything is small, “unlovely and unremarkable” (3), and yet within the walls of the house unfold daily banalities that define the ordinary comfort of middle-class life. The bathroom is described as a place of safety outside which “pigeons sat through their afternoons with a serene lack of urgency” (8). The rooms enclose a “cool and dark and spacious inside” (34). The house protects the children from the outside world, the shuttered windows allowing them the luxury of fading in and out of it at will (35). Nostalgia finds refuge around the dining table and the bed, and in the bathroom. Even the space outside the home is inviting and open, allowing the residents to watch the movies being screened in the ground beyond. The verandah is a place to sit and mingle with the neighbours. The “juvenile territory” of the pavement is reserved for boys and girls to play and even take their first steps.

Though structurally the houses in BBS and SSA are similar in their absence of a living or drawing room, in BBS the house is described as overlooking a crowded and narrow street, and the verandah looks “down on the tram wires; the street light, the yellow sodium vapourlamp […] you can see dead insects trapped in the plexiglass cover” (3). The children too are trapped within the house and the city of anonymity. The city appears like a greedy monster, “fattened, its sides spilled over into the villages” (4). It is cut up into areas and flung around: “Russell Street”, “Bowbazar”, and “Lake Town” are suspended in a painful mapping that resists the possibility of coherence. The house is stuck between railway stations and the airport and their noisy traffic (5). Instead of enfolding a space of coolness and safety, the doors hide the children’s abuse from the outside world; the bedroom door is to be locked while the sister is being beaten by the father, and the brother and the maid can do nothing but stare (36). While the bed in SSA is where the children “wrote and rewrote themselves into their imaginary expeditions and adventures” (40–41), in BBS it is the site of abuse despite being “very old” and a relic of the protagonist’s mother (33). The narrator remembers a scene of idyllic middle-class domesticity from his childhood — his father is reading to his mother from a book, the curtains in the window rising gently as if in an evening breeze. However, this picture of Bengali bhadralok domestic bliss is overturned as we learn that “Father beats Mother” (51). Just like the bedroom door that conceals the violence happening inside, the little garden outside the house is a veneer that hides the dark underbelly of family life within the house. Here the private space of the house is less secure than the train where the father cannot resort to beating his wife. Even the neighbourhood is not a space of play. Rather, it is alienating and alienated, containing the shell of a factory that has long shut down, a testimony to the city’s industrial decline.

The novels extend the house and the neighbourhood into the larger space of the city. In both BBS and SSA, Calcutta is a constant presence. In SSA, Calcutta is a benevolent, if perhaps derelict, place. It inspires nostalgia by being the place to which the child of the narrator’s recollection is drawn. Somehow, this makes the city itself more pastoral in that it is the place where the child, Sandeep, finds respite from the carefully maintained routine of Bombay life where he attends school. It is where extended family is — the maternal aunt, the everyday hero Chhoto mama, and his cousins who are the subjects of his holiday kingdom. Even Sandeep’s parents, though living in commercial Bombay, fall into the rhythm of Calcutta on their arrival to the city. The company car is exchanged for Chhoto mama’s comically battered and malfunctioning car. There are conversations on an endless stream of subjects over cups of tea. The slow chaos of the Calcutta home is different, as Sandeep observes, “from the quiet and perfected apartment he lived in in Bombay” (7). There is a chain of associations made in the novel — the adults stand in for the ideal bhadralok Bengali family and the home stands for the city of Calcutta.

While the house in BBS hides the unpleasantness of family life, the city is a place where the anxiety of bhadralok irrelevance is in danger of erupting. It is a “city of twelve million names” (1) where the characters are left nameless to underscore the alienation felt by them. The narrator often mentions that things have remained the same in the city — the shuttered mill, the house, the insects, and the salarymen waiting for their trams. On its surface, the city is a place of decay which is mirrored in the narrator’s own physical decline with age as he is left with a drooping paunch. But the adult narrator also feels nostalgic for the idea of anonymous romantic companionship as he recalls fleeting moments from his childhood when he had experienced attraction towards a girl in a crowded bus (39). It is the vast expanse of impregnable buildings and millions of people that offers the possibility of imagining alternative narratives of one’s past because of the anonymity it provides. The very act of recollecting the city of the past is nostalgic because nostalgia involves yearning for a time that cannot be recovered. For the narrator in BBS, the city is the place of traumatic childhood memories. But it is also the place where the narrator reimagines a better future for himself as an adult. His vision for the future is placed in the city, making it the place where regret for the passage of time and a desire for things to have happened differently are situated.

In SSA nostalgia for the city is expressed more directly by recollecting the time of childhood vacations. Unlike in BBS where the adult narrator’s voice maintains control over his childhood memories, in SSA the narrator allows the child’s observations to shape the city. Even the dust is turned into “modern art that neither makes sense nor has utility” as the child observes the constant digging of the roads in preparation for the new “underground railway system” (13). Under the nostalgic retrospection channelled through the childhood self, the narrator recalls not a city of millions of unknowable people, but one of deserted Sunday roads through which he floats in the car “as effortless images of shops and restaurants passed by him as coral and anemones pass by a fish’s life” (19). Compared to the towering apartments of Bombay, Calcutta is charming in its miniaturized uselessness. As the narrator states indicatively, “Alone in the big apartment on the twenty-third floor, he was like Adam in charge of paradise […] At school, he was Adam expelled […] But here […] he had liberty” (36). By associating Calcutta with his childhood, the narrator also renders it more continuous with the rural, stating that “in spite of its fetid industrialization”, it “was really part of that primitive, terracotta landscape of Bengal” (40). Contrasted with this is the city of excess where “the streets had the air of a fancy-dress party as shawls and cardigans and jackets floated by solemnly” (116). Unlike the intrusive noisiness of the city in BBS, in SSA “the noise of the city drowned out the noise in their heads and lulled them to sleep” (144). It is a city of slow-moving, good-natured chaos, a metonym for the post-independent “secular India, free of ritual and religion” (77). This is also how Calcutta has sedimented in collective memory, disintegrating daily into dust and rising again (13), and how the Bengali middle-class in Calcutta has fashioned itself — genteel, austere in its outlook, and maintaining rituals that have been largely shorn of their religious content because “What you prayed for mattered least […] all that mattered was the vivid entertainment of the moment” (45).

Conclusion

Though childhood narratives can be nostalgic or traumatic, certain narratives problematize such divisions because childhood is rarely completely untouched by trauma. In fact, trauma and nostalgia are often intertwined, and writing about such experiences in a fictional or non-fictional setting can help to ameliorate the trauma of the past. This nostalgia might not be directed at any specific point in the past. Rather, it can be expressed as a mourning for the very passage of time. Writing about childhood requires the author to inhabit the space of childhood and this requires remembering. It is an exercise in recovering some measure of continuity with a time, space, identity, and community that is all but lost. The irrevocability of childhood and our distance from it produces nostalgia that allays the anxieties of the present, the loss of innocence and of youthful vigour. The figure of the child, seemingly distanced from worldly cares, has been romanticized as a counterpoint to the logic of constant progress. Paradoxically, the crystallization of childhood as a concept during the nineteenth century saw Bengali children transformed into a symbol of the hope of an emergent nation. Anxiety about the nation and the world was reflected in concerns over how best to govern and direct bhadralok children. The home, the city, and the nation formed concentric circles of identity formation.

The anxiety of colonial times persisted into the twentieth century as the bhadralok in Calcutta seemed to face a decline in fortunes and grappled with how to make a space for themselves within a postcolonial city whose own fortunes had seen major change. We see an effort to address these anxieties in the two texts as they place the bhadralok child at the centre of the home and the family. In SSA, the narrator’s memory enfolds the childhood home in Calcutta as the centre of belonging within the concentric circles of the universe, the solar system, the city, and the home. In BBS, nostalgia is complicated by trauma, and as the narrator yearns for a different kind of childhood, the blue bedspread comes to embody the coalescing of trauma and nostalgia. The narrator expresses his desire to transcend the memory of his unhappy past by imagining having a family of his own. Nostalgia for an idea of bhadralok family received from the nineteenth century influences the reimagination of the future. Nostalgia in SSA preserves childhood memories of the city, the middle-class family, and the reassuring mamabari, confirming bhadralok assumptions about childhoods. In BBS, the confluence of personal childhood trauma and an idealized conception of the family leads to a desire for nostalgic restoration in the future. The novel explores the anxiety of bhadralok decline but displays a desire to maintain continuity with the past. The centrality of the child allows for a more interiorized examination of the middle class, and both texts evince a hope in narrative’s ability to confer a coherent identity not just on the individual but also on the community. While SSA is more openly nostalgic for the place and time of a middle-class Calcutta childhood, nostalgia in BBS serves to help imagine a better future. Ultimately, both novels attempt to resolve the anxieties of the bhadralok milieu that emerged after the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s by drawing on the perceived comfort afforded by the notion of an idealized childhood and family.