‘Consuming Children’

Abstract

What makes ‘corrupt’ children such efficacious or nodal symbols? How and why is it that certain groups of children take on this signifying function? How do narratives about corrupt children provide people with a way of mediating and articulating more general anxieties about social change or rupture? This article begins to explore these questions by analyzing how people in the city of Banaras, India talked about the corruption and consumption of the lower caste and lower class boys who worked in the informal sector of the foreign tourism industry. Through the invocation of two culturally paradigmatic ‘useless’ figures, the loafer (awaaraa) and the addict (nasheybaaz), people in Banaras not only critiqued these youngsters’ consumptive practices and their new found purchasing power in the bazaar, but they also articulated larger fears about the way that foreign tourism was ‘consuming’ these children.