Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the norms of Indian childhood were substantially reinvented and disseminated by new forms of children’s literature and adult autobiography.1 Drawn into the nursery of Indian nationalism, children were imagined as an alternative nation that could be either better or worse than the colonized reality inhabited by parents, teachers and writers. Simultaneously, in India as in western Europe, remembering childhood as a life apart and intervening in shaping its contours and content became central to adulthood and freedom.2 While these shifts were consistent with the novelty of Victorian childhoods, in India the changes were fundamentally schizophrenic, framed as they were by expectations of continuity — articulated as tradition and culture — even as tradition and culture were redefined.3 Child-rearing became a complex response to colonial rule, which itself became not so much an act of education, punishment and government, as an act mandating the education, punishment and government by natives of their own offspring. Indeed, child-rearing came to encompass the rethinking and supervision of a broad range of relationships within the family, since wives and even husbands would often themselves be children. Conjugality and childhood cannot be separated in histories of the Indian family.
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Notes
Satadru Sen, Disciplined Natives: Race, Freedom and Confinement in Colonial India (Delhi: Primus, 2012), 42–68;
Sen, Traces of Empire: India, America and Postcolonial Cultures (Delhi: Primus, 2014), 58–74.
Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995), 134–62.
Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–24, 109–35.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 217–31.
Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 23–52;
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116–34;
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Effeminate Bengali’ and ‘Manly Englishman’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Sumit Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 10–37.
Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 135–90.
Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 338–39.
Rosinka Chaudhuri, ‘Three Poets in Search of History’, in Michael Dodson and Brian Hatcher (eds), Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 189–207.
Sen, Disciplined Natives, 13–41; Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), 127–55.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. I (New York: Vintage, 1990), 75–131.
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 42, 62.
See Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2 (1993), 383–414.
See Brian Hatcher, Vidyasagar: The Life and Afterlife of an Eminent Indian (Delhi: Routledge, 2014); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 191–26.
Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62, 86.
Satadru Sen, Benoy Kumar Sarkar: Restoring the Nation to the World (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1, 6–7.
Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 1850–1945 (London: Anthem, 2006), 15.
Tithi Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, 140–55; Gwilym Beckerlegge, The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), Hindu Nationalism: A Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 97–138, 271.
Haridas Mukherjee (ed.), Benoy Sarkarer Baithake, vol. II (Calcutta: Deys Publishing, 2011), 534–35.
Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Arabinda Samanta, Malarial Fever in Colonial Bengal 1820–1939 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 2002), 36–37.
Mukhopadhyay, ‘The Woman Whose Children Are Living’, PS, 54–55; Hark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo–Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 166–201.
Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 28–29.
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 11–60; Harrison, Public Health in British India, 139–65.
Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 251.
M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 34–37.
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Sen, S. (2016). Health, Race and Family in Colonial Bengal. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_9
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