EDITORIAL

Is there an Indian childhood?

Childhood Copyright © 2009

SAGE Publications. Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC,
Vol 16(2): 147–153.
www.sagepublications.com
10.1177/0907568209104398

In the past two decades, Indian children have been the object of policy
attention on a scale never seen before. Next to a myriad of quickly growing
government and non-government programmes and actions, an avalanche of
publications has cast their lives into categories of problems such as ‘child
labour’, ‘street children’ and ‘child prostitution’ from which real, living chil-
dren may seem quite impossible to extricate. The publications allude to the
inadequacy of government, the ignorance of parents, the callousness of the
public and the lack of educational opportunities, and they construct Indian
society as lacking in a fully developed conception of childhood. The resulting
image is that the largest child population in the world is in urgent need of
outside research, advocacy and intervention. An example is a letter written by
a Dutch organization urging the government of the Netherlands to admonish
the visiting minister of commerce of India to take the fate of child labourers
more seriously, suggesting not only that the government of India is slack or
inefficient in addressing the matter and hides the real numbers, but also that
the whole of Indian society needs western guidance when it comes to under-
standing childhood.1
The academic construction of Indian children into ‘problems’ born of
the lack of awareness of proper childhood has benefited from two interrelated
phenomena: the colonial heritage and the general Euro-American dominance
in global academic research. British colonial rule, which ended officially in
1947, sought justification for its presence in a self-asserted cultural superiority
grounded not only in science and technology, but also in progress made in
discovering the innate rights of human beings, including children. Infanticide
and child marriages, among other practices, were used to testify to Indian
society’s lagging behind in these discoveries, and were profusely applied,
together with widow burning, to ideologically buttress the ‘white man’s
burden’ in taking over the rule of India from the native population. Indian
ideas about childhood were discarded as irrelevant, or at most bizarre, to be
tolerated only as long as civilization had yet to perform its mission. Though
limited in scope, colonial research on children developed a language around

147
 CHILDHOOD 16(2)

‘inadequate parenting’ to directly intervene in the lives of poor children. As

the colonial power showed little patience with Indian nationalist scholars
challenging the colonial representation of their societies, official debate
strategically favoured the opinions of revivalists resisting westernization.2
James Mills (1773–1836), the respected liberal philosopher and utilitarian,
justified colonialism in this way: Britain was to be like a good father guiding
the young, immature and hence primitive Indian society towards adulthood
(see Nandy, 1987: 58). How could the colonizer think that there would be any-
thing in children’s upbringing in India worth studying for purposes other than
eradication and reform? This attitude, sadly, has not disappeared but continues
to inform most research on Indian childhood even today.
The oil crisis in the 1970s and the ensuing debt crisis in the 1980s frus-
trated the steps undertaken by the newly independent government of India to
develop a debate on childhood and child welfare. Though studies tended to
adopt the rather strict disciplinary boundaries we know in the West, there had
also been debates questioning the adoption of western ideas of childhood. With
the crisis, international organizations such as UNICEF, the ILO and the World
Bank, and to an increasing degree government and non-government western
donors, started funding research on children, but under the strict conditions
that researchers conform closely to their set priorities – often laid down in great
detail. The role of the Indian researcher was to be, and still is, to fill in the gaps
in quantitative knowledge, not to question underlying assumptions about the
problematic aspects of childhood in India. With hindsight, the set priorities
were born of a concern to govern Indian childhood while circumventing a gov-
ernment deemed ineffective.
Constructing Indian childhood into a series of fundable ‘issues’ such as
‘child labour’ and ‘street children’ did little to undo the colonial imagination
of India as a country lacking a proper notion of childhood. The issues cast
Indian children’s lifeworlds in a series of binaries that divide their childhood
into what is undesirable and therefore must be addressed and rectified and
what is not and can therefore be ignored. Apart from its overly negative over-
tones, issue-oriented research submerges and marginalizes the everyday life
of the vast majority, with the result that ‘solutions’ still hinge on the belief that
Indian childhood is either non-existent or at most in such a distressed state as
to need urgent intervention. Even when children are approached as meaning-
ful actors who have the right to participate in the solutions offered, as is now
increasingly the case in NGO interventions, the agenda is firmly set within the
parameters of a limited set of choices. These choices are designed to help guide
Indian society towards realizing what development agencies have decided is
the highest possible goal, the emulation of a kind of childhood that the West
has set as a global standard. The claim that huge masses of humanity would
need to challenge this standard has consistently been discarded as ‘cultural
relativism’, in other words as attempts to challenge the innate, universal rights
of children.

148
 EDITORIAL

The challenge for childhood studies in India has been to carve for itself
a space in which to face up to a monolithic approach that in the name of
saving children suffering at the hands of their own societies leaves little if
any room for alternative views. Two authors of international renown stand
at the cradle of the enterprise to set out alternative views: Ashis Nandy and
Sudhir Kakar. In a now classic study, Kakar (1978) studied Indian childhood
as a western-trained psychoanalyst, examining the network of social roles,
traditional values, customs and kinship rules with which the threads of Indian
psychological development are interwoven. In doing so, he looked at high
caste Hindu infancy and childhood in order to show how these are shaped
and acquire their meaningfulness within a specific cultural context. If Kakar
looked at the Indian psyche – which is also his own – from the vantage point
of the psychoanalyst formed in the West, Ashis Nandy’s gaze was outward
looking. Rather than exerting himself, as Kakar did, to demonstrate to a
western audience that Indians should be considered mentally sane even if they
do not conform to western ideas of normalcy, he asked why western ideas
have succeeded in constructing the Indian self into ‘an intimate enemy’. In an
early essay (Nandy, 1987), he took issue with the colonial conflation of the
colonized with the figure of the child, proposing to deconstruct childhood as
a metaphor for institutionalized violence visited upon humanity in the name
of progress:
The struggle to disown one’s ‘childish’ past in personal life is also an attempt to
disown one’s collective past as a pre-history or as a set of primitivisms and trad-
itions. The struggle to own up the child within oneself is an attempt to restore the
wholeness in ruptured human relationships and experiences. (Nandy, 1987: 74)

Ashis Nandy’s audience was the Indian intellectual who seeks to carve
up for him- or herself a place that restores the wholeness ruptured during the
colonial encounter. The much publicized Indian child that is the object of
NGO salvation – the prostitute, the street pick-pocket, the illiterate artisan – in
short what Nandy calls the ‘undersocialized’ child, offers a unique possibil-
ity of liberation: ‘the final test for our [Indian] skill to live a bicultural or
multicultural existence may still be our ability to live with our children in
mutuality’ (Nandy, 1987: 75).
It is perhaps not by chance that in November 2008 the institute where
Nandy has been director for many years, the Centre for the Study of Develop-
ing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, organized the first conference to review
and discuss childhood studies in India. According to the website, since its
inception in 1963:
. . . the Centre has been known for its skepticism towards any one conception of
modernity and received models of development and progress and has sought ways
to make creative use of local traditions in the making of multiple and alternative
modernities, much before these ideas become fashionable in intellectual discourse.
The CSDS has always promoted conversations between and within cultures. It has
tried to delink cultural resources from violent expressions of political identities and

149
 CHILDHOOD 16(2)

promoted the idea that dissent is crucial for creative conversation between cultures
and societies.

The challenge for the conference organizer, Sarada Balagopalan, a

member of the editorial board of Childhood, was to try to look at childhood in
India without presuming that it lags behind and must catch up with the West.
As Kakar and Nandy forcefully argued, postcolonialism does not believe
that the western experience of childhood would be superior to the Indian
one. It wants to establish a dialogue between cultures and societies on the
basis of mutual respect for each other’s experiences. The conference sought
to move the vectors of the debate beyond the binaries that force researchers
to either comfortably sit with donor-driven anxieties about ‘saving’ the child-
hoods of poor children or adopt a defensive stand that celebrates but also
reifies and idealizes culture with the danger of eliding historical, spatial and
representational linkages.
Participants were a small number of preselected researchers, 19 Indians
and seven westerners. Among the westerners were two editors of Childhood
(Virginia Morrow and myself) and a member of the editorial board, Erica
Burman. Indian researchers came from different parts of the country and
represented a fair selection of the themes and approaches that fall under what
we may term the emerging field of postcolonial childhood studies in India. My
intention here is not to review the many interesting ideas that were discussed
during the conference, but to take a summary stock of this emerging field to
suggest an answer to the question that preoccupies me here. Three main strands
can be discerned: historical studies of how a specific Indian model of modern
childhood emerged among the elite during the colonial encounter; literary
studies of how fiction both constructs and represents Indian childhood; and
critical social science that seeks to uncover children’s active participation in
struggles for social justice. As I highlight in the following examples, the three
are clearly linked and reflect a vibrant social imagery of the Indian child as
someone quite different from the victim she or he is believed to be in western
imagination.
Gautam Chando Roy (Vidyasagar University, West Bengal) gleaned a
possible history of Indian childhood from the numerous children’s magazines
published between 1880 and 1920 in Bengal. The resulting image reverberates
with adults’ hopes and desires towards the new generation, both boys and girls,
who were offered an attractive alternative to the dry, boring and humiliating
contents of the British-controlled school curriculum. The intention was to set
the children free in a make-believe world over which the colonial masters
had little control and to send their imagination soaring to realms that were
beyond colonial bondage. Childhood was, in short, construed as the imaginary
future nation from where the freedom fighter and the future citizen would
one day emerge. One finds a similar preoccupation in the paper read by
Deepa Sreenivas from the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies,

150
 EDITORIAL

Hyderabad. She focused on Dalit3 writers of children’s stories and how they
bypass the given standards of normal childhood by focusing on ways in which
children negotiate and cope with the material conditions of their marginality,
often drawing upon community relations and shared pasts. The life of the
Dalit hero of one such story, a boy named Badeyya, for example, is woven
in rich detail around food, work, games and family relationships, all of which
are not presented as absolute difference but as entrenched in the everyday
life of the community. In the process, childhood acquires a complexity and
substance that the author feels to be a source of positive identity and hope. A
third paper, from critical social science research, delves head-on into one of the
hypes that has brought Indian children to world attention: child prostitution.
The authors, Debolina Dutta and Oishik Sircar, are independent researchers
from Kolkata, West Bengal. Contesting the much publicized vision of sex
workers’ children as being at risk and in need of rescue,4 the authors present
children as enmeshed in the political society of sex workers and actively
engaged in struggles to gain dignity for their mothers and claiming their own
rights as children of sex workers. Presenting an ethnography of the children’s
organization Amra Padatik (‘We are Foot Soldiers’) of close to a thousand
members, the authors foreground that children are politically astute citizens
and stakeholders in policies that concern and affect them. What stands apart
is, in the authors’ view, the clarity with which children understand their lived
realities and their ability to build solidarity with other marginalized groups.
These three authors seek, all in their own way, to bypass the terrifying
images of Indian childhood that feed the ‘enemy within’ and do so by recon-
structing childhood as both continuity with a reconstituted past and hope
for a better future. The awareness of the constructed nature of childhood is
hereby not a fashionable intellectual choice, but a necessary step in resisting
paradigms of knowledge that have brought (and, sadly, still bring) desolation
and oppression. Investing childhood with freedom, imagination and creative
energy is the way to reconstruct it together with a new society.
We can learn a few things from the Indian experience. First, that per-
haps the greatest injustice done to children is claiming ownership over what
childhood is or ought to be. The answer to the question: ‘Is there an Indian
childhood?’ is positive, though there are many childhoods, under either decon-
struction or reconstruction, and no way of settling how many and which they
are. Second, the role of critique is limited. Childhood studies in the West
have long been hindered by the formidable power of disciplinary strongholds
that monopolize and solidify their ‘irrefutable truths’ about childhood by
presenting them as natural ‘facts’. This has been the case in such disparate
arenas as developmental psychology, labour studies, medicine and strategic
studies that construct the issues for which they assert to be in possession
of the only good solution: pacification and disarmament for child soldiers;
labour laws and inspections for child labourers; medicines and prevention for
HIV/AIDS-affected children; institutionalization for children of sex workers;

151
 CHILDHOOD 16(2)

trauma therapy for children who are victims of war. As long as the main goal
is trying to be heard by these powerful lobbies, a critical stand that refuses to
accept that solutions can be devised outside and even against the struggles of
the people for social justice is condemned to remain a barely tolerated and
hardly audible voice. The Indian experience with childhood studies suggests
that ‘reading the other side of the picture against the grain’, to borrow from
Robert Young, is not only a highly inspiring, refreshing and optimistic way
forward, but also one that can provide a much firmer future base to the field of
childhood studies than the preoccupation with critique (Young, 2004).
A third lesson from the Indian experience is that the future of childhood
studies will critically depend upon the openness with which debates are pur-
sued. For the past 20 years or so, western studies of childhood have repeated
over and over again the adagio that children are not objects or victims but
active agents, without the adagio apparently gaining any credit in compart-
mentalized disciplinary fields. What struck me most during the conference
was not so much that there are childhoods in India, but that Indian scholars
see childhood as a battlefield about Indian-ness, as a project, in other words,
under active construction from below in which enduring bonds forged between
generations as childhood is reconstructed carry the struggle against repression
and domination forward. This was not merely, I feel, the effect of preselecting
the contributors, but also of a widely held belief that Indians still need to
liberate Indian childhood from the colonial heritage.
Two consequences strike me as important: one is that the NGO-induced
saving operations of the Indian child should be critically assessed for how
they mesh with this active construction, to use Said’s happy expression, of
‘contrapuntal’ childhoods (Said, 1994). The other is that by opening our eyes
to the contrapuntal in our own histories and cultures we can learn from India
how to rescue our own children from modern childhood.

Notes
1. ‘Brief van de Landelijke India Werkgroep aan staatssecretaris Heemskerk’ 18 November
2008; at: www.indianet.nl
2. I am grateful to Sarada Balagopalan for her insightful remarks on an earlier version of this
article.
3. Dalit is a term used by various groups in South Asia formerly designated as ‘untouchables’.
4. See the award-winning documentary ‘Born into Brothels’ (2004), by Ross Kauffman and
Zana Briski; at www.imdb.com/title/tt0388789. For an Indian critique of the colonial overtones
of depicting the children as completely helpless and isolated and fully dependent on western
rescue operations, go to: www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=190

References
Kakar, Sudhir (1978) The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

152
 EDITORIAL

Nandy, Ashis (1987) Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted in: A Very Popular Exile, 2007.)
Said, Edward (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Young, Robert (2004) Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Olga Nieuwenhuys

153