Minor Lives, Major Questions: "The Child" in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

In 1900, the Swedish feminist sociologist, Ellen Key wrote a book called The Century of the Child, anticipating the age when "childhood" as a social construct would universally come under unprecedented legal, cultural and political scrutiny. Taking a cue from Key's work, this course explores how the "child" became the center of many social, cultural, religious and educational controversies in the history of modern South Asia. We will examine how "childhood" with an accompanying notion of "infantilization", was not only a potent concept in questions of empire, civilization and racial hierarchies, but also one that still gets invoked in contemporary conversations about "development" and "progress". Being a concept loaded with discourses of power, "childhood" lends itself to ideologically inconsistent formations. On one hand, we will see how colonial educational policies, nationalist reckonings and postcolonial reconstructions have variously positioned the "normative child" as the future of the nation, society and family. On the other hand, we will note how children, whose lives do not follow the normative codes, could be perceived as unchildlike, vis-à-vis their class, caste and gender identities. By centering the figure of the "child", we will examine how children's literature, textbooks, biographies, short stories, photographs, advertisements and comics could be important sources for rethinking institutions, social systems and cultural genres of South Asia.