Rimi B. Chatterjee and Nilanjana Gupta
Orient Blackswan
Rs 395
Pp 216
ISBN: 978-81-250-3700-2
Hardback
About the book
Children’s literature as a genre has not received much attention from the academic world in India up till now. This collection of essays and articles, is an attempt to look at the shape of writing for children from the nineteenth century onwards, and to question the political and cultural context in which it took place. Crucial questions include the conundrum of whether (and how) childhood and its books have been ‘invented’ by publishers and writers, and how and from what sources literature of the child has been produced and presented.
This includes the vexed question of textbooks and their relationship to the State, the imperial context and the creation of the categories of subject and ruler in child readers, the marketing of literature through journals and other media, questions of gender and gendered reading, and the complex interplay between real and fictional children.
Focusing on India but ranging all over the world, these essays create a foundation and a starting point for discussion on this subject in academic contexts in India. Written by experts in their various fields, the essays cover subjects as diverse as the philosophy behind the Amar Chitra Katha comic books from the 1960s onwards in India, the writings of Lila Majumdar, a pioneer writer for girls in Bengali, Rudyard Kipling and his imperial animal kingdom, Dhan Gopal Mukerji, winner of the Newbery Prize for children’s fiction in 1928, Winnie the Pooh as a version of the pastoral, and secret readers of the Boy’s Own Paper. The introduction pulls together the various critical strands implicit in the book and situates Indian scholarship on the map of genre theory, providing students with a handy point of reference.
Now that teaching and research in India is becoming interested in popular genres, and syllabi are broadening to include non-canonical literature, this book will fill a need for critical work on literature for children.
Review
Can literature for the young be analysed as an exclusively academic exercise? To engage with the genre, critical perspectives are as important as a sense of fun…
Children's literature is at the intersection of at least three major areas of experience – that of the readers – children, the writers who are, most of the time, adults, and academics, who are adults too. Does this make it an area which is too heavily populated by protagonists who end up not being the central players? It is indeed a peculiarity of the field that both the creators and the analysers are not active participants of childhood, and therefore, can have only a slightly removed engagement with it – through memories of their own childhood, and through observation. This is a paradox that Reading Children recognises in its introduction itself, and reveals a self-reflexivity about its subject: children's literature reveals much more “about adult preoccupations and fears than about adults themselves.” The lenses through which the studies are carried out are primarily historical, sociological, feminist, and on occasion biographical, (although of course there are intersections between these fields) and the sense of self-reflexivity is carried on into each article in the book.
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