Abstract
The remarkable feat of Balakrishnan’s book is to sketch a meta-narrative of political discourses about children and childhood, across the sub-continental expanse of India, from the late colonial period through Independence to the early 21st century. Readers, both inside and outside the country, who have been led to believe that debates on children and their rights are largely Euro-American in origin and momentum, will now have evidence and cases to demonstrate that in other parts of the world too, political discourses have addressed critical issues about children and childhood. This book, as it claims, ‘opens up another conversation on children, their rights and their experience of childhoods’ (p. 15).
The plural usage ‘childhoods’ is deliberate, underlining that there is no overwhelmingly universal experience of childhood, neither across the world nor in specific regions of it. As the book puts it, childhoods are different, yet they are all political. The book concentrates on the Indian subcontinent and on diversity within India from Independence onwards, drawing on authors such as Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy to demonstrate internal (rather than Western derived) approaches to understanding what children signify, in particular political discourses, especially when we probe below surface platitudes.
Evolution over some six decades of national history is traced and analysed, beginning with the sovereignty of the state as related to the unquestioned or contested sovereignty of the family. This was, for example, brought to the fore by the bloody events of Partition, when adults could choose one side of new national boundaries whereas children (particularly those born to abducted women) had these choices made for them. Historical cameos presented in the book illuminate the political inconveniences represented by children whose positions were ambiguous and inconvenient to the two new nations that were determined to forget that they had once constituted a unity. Especially notable was Sita Hasina, the three year old girl without relatives who systematically gave both Hindu and Muslim names for herself and each of her parents (p. 95), as reported by Begum Anees Kidwai:
…I took her straight to Gandhiji. I said, Bapu, this girl will cause riots among Hindus and Muslims. She calls herself by two names, she does the same for her parents too. Now tell me what to do with her. He smiled…
On the eastern front, debates around children at the time of Independence reflected a different political dynamic, that of Assam’s determination not to be overrun by Bengalis, whether Hindu or Muslim.
The story moves on after Independence, tracing in a series of chapters how political perceptions of children as adjuncts to their parents and especially their mothers gave way—through the Nehruvian period—to political presentations of children as future assets and thus as valuable citizens and adults in the making. Influential Indians carried such presentations beyond the borders long before international agencies adopted the same stance. Later, Indian activists mobilised around working children to assert that children hold rights in the present, no less than adults do, and that children constitute an interest group in a similar way to Adivasis, Dalits and women. This latter position too now typifies global organisations and groups that advocate for ‘children’s rights’ or even for ‘child rights’, although this use of the singular implies the universal childhood that the book takes pains to argue against.
This presentation of the Indian state’s changing perceptions and discourses around childhood is distinctively captured by the image of the patriarchal avuncular state as exemplified by Nehru, who described himself as Chacha (father’s brother) to all Indian children and who was enthusiastically greeted as such in public events involving children (p. 83). (In contrast, his relationship to adults was represented by the term Panditji [the scholar leader].) Here, the political discourse of kinship is significantly different from when Gandhi was hailed as ‘Bapu’, ‘father’ of the emergent nation, by both adults and children.
Commendably, this book is not modern Indian history writ small because the subject is children, but instead, the grand events that marked the subcontinent’s history in the 20th century—from Partition to the promulgation of the Emergency and afterwards, up to the agitation for the Right to Education in 2001—are presented in a manner that demonstrates how intrinsic debates about children and childhood are to the exercise of power. This is in contrast to the general invisibility of children in national historiographies, as if they are considered too small for Great Stories and should instead be relegated to a separate subaltern account (if at all they are represented).
A short review cannot do justice to the scope and detail of this book. However, the book would have benefitted from more thorough and careful editing, not so much of its ambitious sweep or its imaginative prose, as through routine grammar checks and immediate citing of sources rather than leaving the reader to guess what these might be. It would be a pity if the consequent undermining of clarity and sharpness deprived the book of the national and international audiences that it deserves. In fact, the main title of the book does not do it justice. Something on the lines of Childhood and Political Discourse in Independent India: A Meta-Narrative of Memory, History and Identity might have better conveyed its scope.