Family, School and Nation

Family, School and Nation This book recovers the voice of child protagonists across children’s and adult literature in Bengali. It scans literary representations of aberrant childhood as mediated by the institutions of family and school and the project of nation-building in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author discusses ideals of childhood demeanour; locates dissident children who legitimately champion, demand and fight for their rights; examines the child protagonist’s confrontations with parents at home, with teachers at school and their running away from home and school; and investigates the child protagonist’s involvement in social and national causes. Using a comparative framework, the work effectively showcases the child’s growing refusal to comply as a legacy and an innovative departure from analogous portrayals in English literature. It further reviews how such childhood rebellion gets contained and re-assimilated within a predomi- nantly cautious, middle-class, adult worldview. This book will deeply interest researchers and scholars of literature, espe- cially Bengali literature of the renaissance, modern Indian history, cultural studies and sociology. Nivedita Sen is Associate Professor of English literature at Hans Raj College, University of Delhi. Her translated works (from Bengali to English) include Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire ( The Home and the World , 2004) and ‘Madhyabartini’ (‘The In-between Woman’) in The Essential Tagore (ed. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, 2011); Syed Mustafa Siraj’s The Colo- nel Investigates (2004) and Die, Said the Tree and Other Stories (2012); and Tong Ling Express: A Selection of Bangla Stories for Children (2010). She has jointly compiled and edited (with an introduction) Mahasweta Devi: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2008). Her collaborative translation of Sibaji Bandopadhyay’s important work, titled The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic: Colonialism and Children’s Literature in Bengal is forthcoming. This page intentionally left blank Family, School and Nation The child and literary constructions in 20th-century Bengal Nivedita Sen First published 2015 by Routledge 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001, India by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Nivedita Sen The right of Nivedita Sen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book. ISBN: 978-1-138-88948-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-68492-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface vii 1 Western approaches to childhood: An overview 1 2 Literary and nonliterary representations of the child in nineteenth-century Bengal: A Background 21 3 The twentieth-century child versus the home and family 53 4 Growing resentments: The school and the education system 79 5 Escapes: Real and fantastic 109 6 Encounters with the world beyond: Responding to the nation in crisis 135 7 The rebel child and the conformist resolution 165 Glossary 194 Select bibliography 200 Index 217 This page intentionally left blank Preface 1 The acknowledgment that the child is a human being whose identity is different from the adult, and who justiﬁ ably desires, at times, to break free of the adult establishment and adult norms, was documented in Western thought as early as the Romantic Movement in Europe. The writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), William Blake (1757–1827), Charles Lamb (1775–1834) and others brought in their wake the recognition that children have a right to judge the world in their own terms. Rousseau celebrated the ways of children in his Emile (1762), and granted them a right to seeing, feeling and thinking differently from adults. William Blake perceived the unfair imposition of an adult world view on the child’s spontaneous and imaginative participation in life itself. Both these writers, however, were hardly ever read by children and remained inaccessibly esoteric as far as children were concerned. Charles Lamb, known for his child-sensitive writing and writing both for and about children towards the close of the eighteenth century, went to the extent of appreciating even the special and complex need for all adults to resort to childlike reﬂ exes now and then. Recently, in a reading of the history of Western discourses on childhood, Hugh Cunningham not only recuperates the rising insistence on seeing childhood as a special time and state but also a growing convic- tion that it must serve as an antidote to adulthood, suggestive of the need for adults to keep alive their inner child and move closer to a childlike mode of being. This view, on the upsurge since the eighteenth century, is of course informed and moulded by Romanticism. In India, childhood has not been theorized with the same rigour as it has in the West. Approaches to childhood, therefore, have to be collated from writings on education, memoirs and autobiographical works of writers over viii Preface a period. Rabindranath Tagore, undoubtedly the Bengali1 writer who has written most on and for children, however, does not subscribe to the view that there is a child within each adult but acknowledges the otherness of the child: The recognition of an absolute otherness thus opened the self to a stranger to be approached with laughter, a non-antagonistic otherness, a difference that could be the source of the greatest pleasure to both. This is one way of relating to otherness, not as an extension of the self, or as a supplement, or as something to be ingested or conquered, but as ineffably the other; to be met, therefore, with tender amusement. (T. Sarkar, Rebels, Wives, Saints 280) The view of identifying the adult with the child, in fact, has not gained much credence over the centuries in Indian society, where ‘the notion of children’s literature, [too], evolves only after the “child” is understood as a separate category with its own distinct needs, demands and desires’ (Chat- terjee and Gupta, Introduction 3). Although literature for children has existed as a distinct genre in the West for these last two hundred years, it has not received its share of serious, scholarly attention till recently. Over the last two centuries, its trajectory indicates not just branching into a distinct subgenre but a preoccupation with a general liberation from the hegemony of adult perspectives, what Nicholas Tucker calls its ‘old, semi-pedagogic role’ (Child and the Book 1981). Twentieth-century writing for children, in particular, is characterized by a movement away from instruction to entertainment. In 1932, F. J. Har- vey Darton wrote: ‘By “children’s books,” I mean printed works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, not solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet’ (emphasis author’s) (1). 1In my final draft, I had used the word ‘Bangla’ throughout to describe the language, while I had used ‘Bengali’ to depict the people. The use of the word ‘Bangla’ while writing in English is a relatively recent trend that I would have preferred to follow. Indian scholars, critics and academics like me who have been nurtured on a post- colonial sensitization to Anglicized indigenous names feel that it is more politically correct to reject the word ‘Bengali’ and retain ‘Bangla’ instead while referring to the language, thereby challenging the universality of spelling our words the way the English chose to distort them. Routledge felt that the word ‘Bangla’ might be unfa- miliar to Western readers, and since this is a text that is aimed at s a global readership, I accommodated their contention that the word ‘Bengali’, used for both the people and their language, is more reader-friendly. Preface ix As late as 1981, however, Fred Inglis conflates the two programmes when he says: Only a monster would not want to give a child books she will delight in and which will teach her to be good. It is the ancient and proper justification of reading and teaching literature that it helps you to live well. (emphasis added) (4) It would seem from Inglis’s statement that instruction and entertainment are not just synchronous but synonymous. But by and large, the more recent the children’s text, the more it caters to the desire of children to find in the books that they read characters, situations and happenings like themselves and what happens around them rather than have adult writers telling them what they should or should not do. The author’s effort to entertain must be accompanied by an awareness that the child reader would want to identify herself/himself with these characters, situations and happenings. Also taking into consideration that the writer and reader of a children’s book must share a more or less egalitarian relationship, C. S. Lewis says that he talks to the child reader ‘man to man’ (34), for he ‘never wrote down to anyone’ (38), and Barbara Wall traces this tendency to treat children at par with adults as a sociological phenomenon that has developed in the latter half of the twentieth century: The impulse to give children the best, to treat them as equals, to see them as having rights, and having rights which need not be champi- oned and fought for in what often seems an increasingly regimented and insensitive world, has gained force since the Second World War and manifests itself in many ways.

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