Re-forming Lives: The Child on the Street and the ‘Street Child’

Abstract

In the early nineties, Calcutta, a city that has long been identified with the charity of Mother Teresa, began to experience a radically different kind of philanthropic affect. Elaborating itself through newer NGOs and charity organizations, this new secular humanitarianism gathered around a figure who was previously noticed, but not spectralized or ‘recognized’, as a singular target of reform. This was the figure of the ‘street child’. In post-partition Calcutta, as the city dealt with unprecedented population shock waves of refugees and rural migrants,¹ poor children on the street became a common sight. But they only helped produce the general picture of desperate poverty, a displaced postcolonial humanity struggling for survival in the modernist city. They were not unique or visible as a singular and special category of a problem that needed fixing. As an indistinct part of the mass of the poor, they gradually served as metonyms for the city’s decline and its inability to keep pace with the increased aestheticization and modernization in other Indian metropolises, thus effectively reinforcing Calcutta’s commonplace conflation with charity and decay (Hutnyk, 1996). However, within this generic conflation, in the nineties newer shifts in technologies of acting upon the poor had started emerging. These shifts, which had strong linkages with a transnational, ‘development’ form of governmentality, incipiently emerged against a waning backdrop of Marxist dreams of a revolutionary society and came to redefine the city’s relationship with its children on the street.