Abstract
Portrayed images of children in India through the web, cinema and other media tell partial stories; they often hide the larger narrative that unfolds with serious academic research and policy interrogation. Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends and Transformations is a genuine attempt by the editors to bring together scholars from diverse fields of childhood studies, child development, juvenile law, paediatrics, schooling, social and education policy to engage with critical questions about childhood in India. This edited volume covers a range of themes—deconstructing the history and politics of childhood, examining narratives of power and representations of childhood through sociocultural perspectives, interrogating popular and institutionalised notions of the ‘normative’ child, and examining legal frameworks and provisions that inform social policy and practice. While the intention was to present ‘interdisciplinary’ perspectives of childhoods in India, the editors acknowledge that the volume presents at best a multi-disciplinary compendium of conceptual and empirical engagement with the subject.
The book starts with a section on ‘history and politics of childhood’ and a scrutiny of why research on marginal childhoods in post-colonial societies parallels the ‘child figures’ of the colonial era. Having engaged with the construct of multiple childhoods for well over a decade, Sarada Balagoplan urges scholars to move beyond the binary of a singular, normative childhood versus multiple childhoods. Beginning with the premise that colonial logic engendered the ‘child figure’ and not ‘childhood’ as the key site of intervention, Balagopalan argues for the need to deconstruct the idea of ‘multiplicity’ of childhood. A rigorous analysis of ‘multiple childhoods’ she maintains, is necessary to understand how we frame the everyday realities of marginalised children.
In the same section, Uma Chakravarti presents select segments of popular mythologies from a pre-modern past to search the notion of childhood of girls in India—arguing that popular myths continue to circulate even today. While contending that the girl child is virtually absent from history and mythology, she conjures up past images of childhood through the narratives of two powerful women of nineteenth century India: Pandita Ramabai and Muktabai Salve, a Mang girl who studied in Jotiba and Savitribai Phule’s school. Chakravarti illustrates Ramabai’s relentless struggle to create an alternative society for young girls, brutalised for becoming widows or simply abandoned due to poverty and famine. The second narrative highlights how Muktabai turns her own childhood experiences as a girl into a ‘powerful analysis of relations of her time’. The article emphasises the need to interweave life experiences along the axes of gender, caste and class, in an attempt to investigate the construct of childhood in the distant past of Indian society.
Interrogating the impact of neo-liberal policies on contemporary Indian society as a backdrop, Vasanthi Raman catechises the UNCRC discourse of child rights. She builds the argument around the basic disconnect between social policy and issues of equity and social justice. Raman asserts that the social location of the child is critical to understand her life chances, and that the neoliberal model grossly undermines the realities of children and their families.
The second section on ‘narratives of power and representations of childhood’ begins with Nandita Chaudhary’s scrutiny of childhood through a socio-cultural lens. Questioning the dominant ‘normative’ discourse, Chaudhary argues how modern schooling has become synonymous with childhood. She explains how schools have assumed the function of social control, leading to judgemental evaluation of the child’s family, home and community. While the need to foreground the criticality of cultural lives of individuals and communities in formal education is a well-established argument, the real challenge is to resolve the tension between the view of traditional cultural practice as a medium of meaningful engagement and as a subject of interrogation.
The chapter on the changing contours of parent–child relations foregrounds the asymmetry of adult–child relations in Indian families. However, it falls short of adequate reflection on how patriarchy continues to prevail, even as forms of control, change. The authors appear to lay excessive emphasis on the empirical observation that ‘tradition and modernity coexist’. Such a position leads to a series of sermonising claims like the ‘well-being of the child rests on the shared responsibility of families and societies’. As a result, critical questions around the assumptions of institutions such as the school and the family and the role of the state in addressing tensions between individual families and society remain unaddressed.
Jane Sahi makes the important point that notions of childhood are neither static nor discrete, but continually shaped by tradition, power equations and market forces that impact society. The author illustrates how ‘creative tension between the child and the adult’ in the mythical stories of Bala Krishna can be seen as a means to challenge the normative—where ‘the adult’s own dependency on self-imposed boundaries and constraints are limiting and corrosive’. Sahi argues for the need to learn from rich mythologies that challenge assumptions of power and hierarchy; towards the goal of creating open democratic spaces for children, who much like Bala Krishna play and imagine with a sense of abandon and the pure delight of being—refusing to conform.
Beginning with the premise that childhood is conceptualised through norms and values society places on children, Nidhi Gulati examines popular conceptions of the child in Hindi cinema. Film narratives across three decades of post-independence India reveal a fascination for the ‘orphan’—a symbol of emptiness to be filled and a childhood constituted as ‘rescue’. The author argues that a critical view of children in popular consciousness helps understand why public institutions including schools, take upon themselves the task of ‘protecting children and promoting in them values of morality and citizenship’. Through the figure of the ‘orphan’ in Hindi cinema, the author foregrounds ‘rescue’ as a ‘technology’ couched in mechanisms of social control that continually protect the prevailing social order.
The adult–child binary is also addressed in Devika Mehra’s article on representations of marginalised childhoods in graphic novels. While acknowledging that childhood is a potent means of naturalising cultural formations, Mehra argues how the subversive nature of graphic novels and picture books can give voice to the unheard child and disrupt hierarchical adult–child relationships. Reclaiming childhoods of marginalised children through powerfully designed texts, she argues, enables questioning of normative constructions of childhood; it creates the possibility of challenging religious and caste-based social norms through educational experiences.
Shailaja Menon and Rakhi Banerjee try to decipher the child imaginary scripted in curricular and education policy documents since the Kothari Commission Report of 1966. They glean three different conceptualisations of children from major policy texts—the child as citizen, the child as a site of cultural revivalism and the various shades of learner-centric portrayals of children. The article lacks cogency as it attempts to address too many issues related to children and their education simultaneously—from romantic ideas of child centeredness, the limitations of universal developmental view of children, issues of diversity and inequity, and changing conceptions of knowledge and pedagogy. It concludes that the ‘child-in-context’ offers a better unit of analysis than the ‘child’ as has been the case. Despite the promise of raising critical questions around the child imaginary in the policy discourse, the article falls short of offering robust arguments around childhood that could give direction to educational research and practice.
R Maithreyi calls out the social implications of ‘life skills education’ (LSE) programmes, including the deficit understanding of children of the poor and the normative and patriarchal beliefs that determine the discourse of LSE classrooms. Using a discursive analysis of the curriculum, the article demonstrates how ‘life skills’ are no more than ‘behavioural outcomes that emphasise personal responsibility against a context of structural disadvantage’.
The final article in this section—‘cultures of fear’—examines how most children experience fear in schools, given the structures of inequality and the prevailing mechanisms of institutions and its actors. The article also presents alternative philosophies of schools and institutional arrangements that demonstrate concrete possibilities of designing spaces of learning free from fear. The ‘voices’ of children they argue, need to become a critical area of enquiry in childhood studies, as such research would contribute towards institutionalising non-threatening, democratic spaces of learning for children.
The last section of the book looks at the legal system, policy issues with regard to early childhood education, the history of paediatric practice and issues of nutrition for the physical and socio-emotional development of children. The larger narrative of this section has little direct reference to the construct of childhood. Nevertheless, the articles present issues and concerns that have a bearing on how children are perceived through the systemic lens of law, medicine and education. Asha Bajpai’s article examines some of the key contradictions and debates related to the various legal provisions vis-à-vis the child and how inconsistencies create impediments in bringing justice to children. The journey of paediatric medicine and practice foregrounds the need to interweave traditional medicinal systems with scientific modern medicine with the aim to bring a robust system of healthcare to Indian children. Following this, Seshadri recommends the revival of traditional food practices and the need to strengthen food security and school feeding programmes, as well as empowering communities to address the nutritional needs of their children. The last article throws light on some of the major gaps between social policy for children and research, arguing that these have led to constitutional dilemmas, emanating from India’s social and cultural diversity.
The articles contained in this volume address a range of narratives and stances on the construct of childhood in India. The volume comes across as an uneven mix of scholarship: those with a rigorous line of reasoning based on empirical data and field-based theorisation, others with viewpoints desiring substantive evidence and exactitude of argument. Some of the key contentions also reflect tension across different viewpoints. One such tension, centred on the theme of child rights is the subject of conversation among select contributors to this volume, presented in the Epilogue. The editors of the volume must be commended for inventing this unique way of ending the volume—in the spirit of continuing dialogue and inquiry on the critical subject of understanding childhoods in a socially diverse society.
The book brings to light the sociological critique of socialisation theories, emphasising that children are ‘social actors’; and not lesser or inferior adults as some of the dominant psychological theories have had us believe. The sociological view also questions the practice of privileging the adults’ view of the child. Strangely, however, articles in this volume do not present voices of children, although a couple of scholars advocate the need to do so. What one misses sorely is empirical research that presents children’s views of adult thinking and analysis about child rights or say, experiences of schooling—the single most important space controlled by adults and within which children spend substantive precious moments of their childhood. While the volume speaks for the need to understand and examine multiplicity of childhoods, it falls short of foregrounding the agency of the child in an adult world. It privileges and accepts once again, the adult view of the child without critiquing it. As argued by Oswell (2013, p. 6), children’s agency permits thinking through children’s capacities to make a difference, rather than being constituted as difference—and this is possible through analytic interpretations of children’s active engagement with their everyday lives.
The most significant contribution of Phillip Aries was the view of the child as ‘constituting not only a social and psychological, but an historical subjectivity’ (Oswell 2013, p. 9). While the sociology of childhood has drawn three significant aspects of Aries argument about childhood—that childhood is a historical invention, it is a social institution, and constitutes segregation between children and adults—it needs to engage more proactively with the idea of child agency. There is ample empirical research even within psychology that foregrounds children as social beings who interpret and make meaning of the social and physical world around them, indicating the capacity to manipulate their environments.
Three critical aspects about childhood have been addressed in this volume. (a) Who is a child? (b) How is childhood different from adulthood? (c) The constant tension between the freedoms and control that adults concede to children. As argued in this volume, chronological age as criteria to define a child has served the purpose of running ‘modern’ institutions like the school with considerable convenience, despite several arguments to the contrary. More importantly, the criteria of biological age reinforced by psychological theories of cognitive maturity, is seen to be central to the process of learning and development. This is despite the fact that anthropological and social research has drawn attention to the criticality of cultural contexts in developing cognition, self-regulatory, relational and pro-social dispositions in children.
The category of the child as ‘cultural figuration’ appears in several of the articles in the section on narratives of power and representations of childhood. Scholars attribute this within the convergence of a variety of developmental discourses (Burman & Stacey 2010), including universalistic trajectories of development and the normative image of the child. However, in critiquing neo-liberal policies (that has the potential to intensify the dynamic of socialising children into passive recipients of culture), some of the arguments appear to have fallen into the trap of romanticising the traditional and the cultural, what Woodhead (1999) calls, a form of ‘inverted imperialism’. The sharpness of this debate emerges in the commentary presented in the Epilogue, wherein it is argued that contextualising does not mean diluting the power of general principles emerging from the rights perspective. It points to the fact that the debate between universal and cultural specifics is both false and naïve.
Moreover, the continued exploitation and neglect of children despite central legislations like the right to education cannot be explained by arguments of ‘gaps between policy rhetoric and ground reality.’ Neither can the problem be explicated as a constitutional dilemma as argued by Venita Kaul and Meenakshi Dogra nor as a conflict with the universal rights frame as argued by Vasanthi Raman. It is about how children’s rights are sought to be met given cultural plurality that may well work as impediments within familial and social spaces as well as within the institution of the school. It is therefore, not about choosing the ‘cultural’ over the ‘universal’, but about foregrounding the role and accountability of the state in improving children’s lives by safeguarding their rights. Jyotsna Jha’s analysis of gender and education policy, framed within Amartya Sen’s idea of freedom as an ‘end’ and a ‘means’, foregrounds the need to address ‘patriarchy’ that underlies economic and development policy, rather than through ‘empowerment-based’ education alone.
The apparent running thread in the volume remains within the confines of the popularly accepted idea of ‘difference’ between adults and children. In reality, the everyday lives of children are shaped through social relationships with adults who control institutions that justify and support dependency that children experience (Matthews 2007, p. 327). Children’s dependence on adults therefore, needs to be seen as ‘dependency and oppression’, rather than ‘difference and deficiency’. The important takeaway from this book would be to re-view children as epistemic entities whose engagement with everyday life, largely controlled and shaped by adults, needs substantive inquiry and theorisation. The sociological enterprise to locate the study of childhood in the study of societies (Mayall, 2000) (and not simply as ‘child-in-context’) is likely to be enriched by primary research inquiry into diverse children’s lives amidst enduring patterns of the social and the historical.