Abstract
This book explores the culture of childhood among a section of the Indian middle class which has long been the subject of extensive academic debate owing to its close association with colonial rule. The interest in culturally conditioned diverse biographical phases of ‘youth’ or ‘childhood’ might have lost some of its shine decades after Margaret Mead’s seminal work on Samoa but it has far from run out of steam in the contemporary social science research on childhood and children.
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Notes
- 1.
The term Bengal has been used in the book to refer to the region of Bengal in India. While after Independence, this corresponds to the State of west Bengal in contemporary india, the erstwhile province of Bengal before Partition, comprised of West Bengal as well as East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh.
- 2.
The birthday of the first Prime Minister of Independent India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on the 14th of November is celebrated nationwide as Children’s Day.
- 3.
Bengal here is used to refer to the state of West Bengal in India. However, when pre-Partition India is talked about, the region of undivided Bengal, comprising both the current Bangladesh and West Bengal is referred to, that together made up the province of Bengal in colonial India.
- 4.
Bühler-Niederberger (2005) argues in Macht der Unschuld: Das Kind als Chiffre that the image of the ‘innocence’ of childhood was more than a romantic construct, but has served as a code, a Chiffre that is instrumentalized to serve different social interests. The reference to this constructed aspect of childhood, especially as a moral ‘Chiffre’ has been made in some of the following chapters in this work.
- 5.
Ariès contrasts the immodesty of the child Louis XIII with a more moralistic perception of childhood in some contexts in sixteenth century Europe where a greater sense of the ‘indecent’ existed where children were concerned. He gives the example of classics that were abridged among Protestants and Catholics in France and England from the end of the sixteenth century, until they were considered fit to be read by children (Ariès 1973,p.l03). The reference to the awareness about moral purity of childhood in the Bengali context is similarly made by Mitra (1999) in Shatabdir Shishu Shahitya 1818-1960 (The Century’s Children’s Literature 1818-1960) in the context of abridged texts. Mitra says that in the era of Bengali children’s literature that he calls the Vidyasagar era, after the social reformer and educationist Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, a number of classics from Hindi and Sanskrit, such as the Betalpachisi were abridged, and obscene phrases were removed in the versions made for children from 1857 onwards (Mitra 1999, p.58).
- 6.
A historical event that left its scar on freshly Independent India was the Partition. Two regions of India, the province of Bengal and that of the Punjab were most affected by the carving out of Pakistan, in the massive riots at the borders, where millions of lives were lost, the mass migration that occurred on both sides of the borders, and in the trauma and memories of leaving one’s homeland behind, in what was to become, almost overnight, another country.
- 7.
The Calcutta School Book Society was set up in 1818 in Calcutta with the aim of creating text books and disseminating education in Bengal. According to Mitra (1999), the organization had European and Indian members.
- 8.
Situated in the Hooghly district of current West Bengal, the town of Srirampore was the erstwhile Danish colony where missionaries set up a printing press, from which most of the books of the Calcutta Schoolbook Society were printed.
- 9.
Baader (1996) in Die romantische Idee des Kindes und der Kindheit gives a compelling and detailed account of the poesie and the poignancy in the imagery of childhood in Europe by the early romantics, particularly in the works of Schlegel and Novalis. Though it arose in a different context than the romantic imagination of Apu’s childhood in Bengal, her work emphasizes the aspect of paradise lost in such romantic imagery of childhood.
- 10.
The novel written by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay was published in 1929 and captured the life of a rural Brahmin Bengali family, where Apu the son of a respectable but poor Bengali priest, was sent to Kolkata for an English education.
- 11.
A romanticization of the pastoral child or the ‘country’ child is also found in Europe. Heidi, the character created by Swiss author Johanna Spyri in the late nineteenth century is one of the most celebrated examples of a romantic image of ‘country childhood’. Romantic imageries of childhood are often tied to other issues, such as those of national or cultural identity, as was Heidi’s. Apu, in this sense exemplifies romantic Bengali thinking of the nineteenth century, but not simply because of his pastoral childhood, but also because of what his his two creators (Bandopadhyay and Ray) in print and film stood for, to the educated Bengali middle class.
- 12.
Ray himself came from a family that was renowned for some of the most prominent intellectuals of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal. The family was incidentally also known for its association with children’s literature, especially in the founding of the children’s magazine Sandesh (Sweet) by Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore Raychowdhury in 1913.
- 13.
The issue of children’s media consumption and how it questions the conventional understanding of the ‘distinctive’ childhood has been discussed by some of the contributors in The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies (Qvortrup, Corsaro, and Honig 2009). While Cook (2009) talks about ‘changed childhoods’ in view of children’s consumption of media, Buckingham (2009) focusing on children’s television viewing and Drotner (2009) on the subject of children’s consumption of digital media, particularly gaming, show how earlier understandings of childhood and of children need to be redefined in a context where children are economically significant in their role as consumers, and also consume media that is not specifically in keeping with the image of the ‘protected’ childhood.
- 14.
This is a reference to the film Taare Zameen Par in which the art teacher, played by Amir Khan rescues the protagonist, a boy with dyslexia from the tyrannical regime of schools and parental attempts to bring him up ‘right’.
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Sen, H. (2014). Introduction. In: ‘Time-Out’ in the Land of Apu. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-02223-5_1
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