Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl Poushali Bhadury (bio) Superle, Michelle. Contemporary English-Language Indian Children’s Literature: Representations of Nation, Culture, and the New Indian Girl. New York: Routledge, 2011. A paradox lies at the heart of Michelle Superle’s recent project. Using post-colonial and feminist theory as her two critical foci, Superle analyzes 101 contemporary English-language Indian children’s novels published in India and abroad between 1988 and 2008, labeling them “an aspirational literature with a transformative agenda” (4). In these texts, child protagonists break traditional societal constraints, espouse liberal, humanitarian values, and supposedly reject the dogmas of religion, class, and caste alike in situations that are more ideal than real. As Superle convincingly argues, however, these novels also actively “endorse hegemonic power structures” (11). With their overwhelmingly urban, middle class, higher-caste protagonists, the books published in India present homogenized, idealized, and blinkered visions of the Indian nation and privilege the voices of the “powerful middle class” (17) to the exclusion of almost all others. Thus, they dangerously normalize what it means to be “Indian” even as they ostensibly champion diversity. Many texts didactically valorize Indian [End Page 217] nationalism, support Hindu-centric cultural hegemony, and feature utopian nation-building efforts by empowered, ideal(ized) child protagonists. Even diasporic Indian novels remain ensconced within the genre conventions and politics of multicultural children’s and young adult literature as they explore fraught notions of “Indianness” and their protagonists’ “syncretic bicultural” (143) identity formations. Superle argues that these diasporic novels present oversimplified and “consistently positive” (144) visions of harmonious Western multicultural societies. The choice of English as the language of composition in a former British colony is, of course, inherently political. Following the Indian Education Act of 1835, which mandated widespread English education and effectively created a class of interpreters and administrative officials to help the British govern the country, India began producing fiction in English alongside other vernacular literatures. Crucially, even post-independence, English-language children’s literature imported from the West was as much of an influence on the development of Indian children’s literature as were seminal indigenous Indian children’s texts. In a chapter on “The Development of Contemporary Indian Children’s Novels,” Superle highlights the complex socioeconomic and political debates surrounding the present status of English in India, while concisely tracing the history and critical reception of Indian children’s literature in English. English, a pan-Indian link language, has become an elite bastion, and unfettered access to it a mark of socioeconomic privilege. As Superle points out, “in reality only a small percentage of children [have] access to English-language books” (23), and these children tend to be middle or upper class, usually upper-caste, English-educated, and urban. Hence, the audience helps determine the texts’ ideological content, propagating a limited and skewed discourse. Superle’s discussion of the hegemonic politics of English would have benefited greatly from a closer consideration of the language as authors change, impact, appropriate, and make it into a hybrid “masala” version, that is, “Indian English.” Such appropriations of the former-colonizer’s language are inherently postcolonial acts, and examinations of such are vital to a project like this. One of the parameters Superle sets for her study also merits critique. She “refer[s] to ‘Indians’ as those who currently or originally live/d in India and who are ethnically Indian through at least one parent” (5, my emphasis). As both Superle’s introduction and Meena Khorana’s foreword briefly acknowledge, this leads to the exclusion of “Anglo-descent” children’s authors from India, most notably Ruskin Bond, whose impressive oeuvre spans more than four decades. Such definitions of “Indianness” are problematic on many counts, not least because they privilege ethnicity over citizenship. Bond, for instance, was born and brought up in India and despite his British heritage, [End Page 218] identifies as an Indian “in the broadest, all-embracing, all-Indian sense of the word” (xvi); the exploration of a composite Indo-British identity informs much of his work. Omitting English-language Indian children’s writers simply on the basis of ethnicity, in...