Any intervention into the field of children's reading in India must take into account the new investment in childhood that came following Independence. This included a major overhaul of the colonial education system, alongside initiatives such as the Children's Book Trust, National Book Trust, Nehru Bal Pustakalayas and Bal Bhavans. Several key literary figures and artists were part of this endeavour, and a substantial number of remarkable children's books were published. Popular initiatives such as the Amar Chitra Katha comics series also participated in this enterprise. Yet more than 50 years later, it comes as a shock to find, in book after book that came out of these projects, both protagonist and audience so obviously elite and upper caste. It took the women's movement and activists raising questions of caste and religious community for the public to realise how systemic, and how related to the nature of power and authority, these representations were.
In India, children's reading materials were long (and continue to be) addressed to an urban, middle- and upper-caste child in ways that reflected his or her economic resources, family relationships, beliefs, school experiences, food habits and language. They recorded and endorsed the world, the sensibility and the authority of this child, resulting in a self-assured hold over the world that was later a key enabling factor in such children's success. Other children, however, were not provided with such psychic support. In such books we hardly ever found a child who had come to school hungry and sits there dreaming about food, for instance, or one who had to scheme in order to acquire books for class. Children from different contexts sometimes did find a place in these stories, but were generally forced to establish their 'smartness'. A tribal boy, for instance, needed to establish that his knowledge of the forest can be valuable for his urban, middle-class classmates; a disabled girl must excel as a craftsperson. Even in the case of middle-class children, only a restricted set of situations were generally admissible, thus glossing over the fact that children often lead complex lives. We rarely encountered a child whose mother was depressed or one who was coping with a death in the family – such children lived with the knowledge that they must anxiously guard such secrets.
Recently, the Andhra Pradesh-based Anveshi Research Centre for Women's Studies did a study in a few government schools in and around Hyderabad, and found a disabling gap between children's home life and the assumptions on which school culture was built. Most of the children who attended these schools shouldered responsibilities in their families, and contributed towards their economic survival; these children's sense of worth was positively constituted through the role they played. Yet such lives had no legitimate space in the education system. In fact, set against this dominant culture, these childhoods could only appear as deficient, deprived of play, pleasure and parental guidance. Children often dropped out because the school remained a forbidding place, identified not only with abuse from upper-caste teachers but also with the absence of recognition and endorsement of themselves or their home lives.
The dominant idea of 'childhood' is today so firmly entrenched in most people's minds that it is difficult to imagine it as historical. Yet around the world, this naturalised idea emerged as a separate entity only around the mid-17th century, as a result of key shifts associated with modernity. Up to that period, there was no ideological separation of the categories 'child' and 'adult'. A child was simply a small adult, an apprentice rather than a full-fledged worker. In the absence of this distinction, it was impossible to publish books for a non-existent audience. With the philosophical focus on the child associated with the European thinkers John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, a paradigm shift took place, suddenly rendering possible a branch of writing for children. From its very beginnings, children's literature has thus assumed the responsibility of moulding a 'national child' and, in the process, has taken on a subtly disciplinary and more obviously normative form. The result, however, is the marginalisation of non-normative childhoods.