History of Childhoods in South Asia

Abstract

The history of childhood is a relatively new field of scholarly inquiry in South Asia. Until a few decades ago, questions of behavioral formation, health, and schooling were perceived as the domain of developmental psychology and the pursuit of topics related to children and childhood were a largely relegated to graduate departments of educational studies. Although no dedicated academic departments or formal degree programs to study the history of childhood in South Asia currently exist, critical feminist scholarship and the field of history of education have provided significant impetus to the history of childhood and youth in the region, especially India, since the late 1980s. In particular, feminist historians have focused on questions of age of consent, colonial law, social reform, nationalism, and the making of middle-class identities in the 19th and 20th centuries and framed some key concerns shared by childhood studies scholars today. But they have not addressed the central issue of caste and religious inequalities pertaining to the fashioning of gendered childhoods. These are now gaining attention in recent historiographical shifts which have resulted in several historians, such as the authors of Ellis 2023 (cited under State, Policy, and Development) and Vallgårda 2015 (cited under Colonialism, Missionaries, and Education), drawing upon interdisciplinary methods to explore the complex contestations between adults and children of various castes, and constructions of childhood involving the British colonial state, Catholic and Protestant missionaries, Indian reformers, nationalists, caste associations, and various female education activists, and provided a rich roadmap for further study. Yet, the wide gap in global knowledge production and circulation in academia has often led to the propagation of Western assumptions of a “universal childhood” with its attendant norms and ideals. This has produced, sometimes uncritically, the representations of children in South Asia’s past and contemporary contexts as “helpless, weak, passive, and powerless,” rendering them as subjects incapable of becoming modern and determining their sociopolitical trajectories. Since the early 2000s, the opening of a new array of sources for critical study such as missionary archives and Indian-language material and a greater commitment to multi-scalar perspectives have resulted in the growth of this field of history of childhood and a greater acknowledgment of practitioners and activists working on and with children. In particular, the theorization of age as a useful category of analysis by Pande 2020 (cited under Gender and Sexuality) has challenged Western generalizations and assumptions regarding universal attributes of innocence and protection in colonial and postcolonial societies and complicated our understanding of unequal power arrangements. Who and what is a “child” and what constitutes childhood in South Asia? How can we trace changes in marriage practices, family organization, child-rearing, and schooling? Do “global” historical narratives of childhood and youth help bring into focus South Asian bodies and what histories do they obscure? These lines of inquiry have raised pertinent insights about the historically uneven processes of modernity in the region and the centrality of discourses on childhood in the production and reproduction of moral and labor regimes. Despite the lack of primary archival sources left behind by children in the past in South Asia, historians are piecing together narratives that foreground matters of child agency in negotiation with various structures of power by asking essential questions about the politics of childhood.