Magic Realism, Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Children’s Fiction in India: Reshaping Gender Attitudes

Abstract

One of the objectives of using fiction as a medium of socialization of children is to infuse an understanding of gender roles in society. A number of children’s fiction books published in India in the last couple of decades have addressed this concern and contemporary critical studies on children’s literature have focused on the representation of gender and the biases inherent in it. Globalisation and the staggering advance of technology have triggered innovative fictional responses to gender roles and attitudes to appeal to the digital generation addicted to virtual reality and video games. The children’s text examined in this study represents technology as empowering adolescents and investing them with the capacity to transform age-old conservative attitudes towards gender identities specifically manifested in the still recurrent practice of female foeticide in India. Ranjit Lal’s Faces in the Water, creates a kind of magic realism by interweaving virtual reality into an everyday organic world, almost blurring the distinction between the two; an experimental narrative device that aims at re-examining conventional notions of masculinity and feminity. The purpose of creating an alternate world of virtual experiences is to comment upon the real world and effect transformatory action.