Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century India: Some Reflections and Thoughts

Children’s Literature in Nineteenth Century India: Some Reflection and Thoughts.In 1962 the National Library of India, known as the Imperial Library under the British Raj, compiled a bibliography of children’s literature in Bengali that listed 5060 books and 133 periodicals published between 1818-1962. With Calcutta as the imperial capital of the British until 1911, this Bibliography on Bengali literature represents the works and engagements of the burgeoning Indian middle class who envisioned through their writings a reformed family, an ideal woman, and a "perfect" child. My paper focuses on the 19th-century periodical literature for children that became an equally important vehicle for shaping the minds of children and the ideas and cultures of childhood in colonial India. The confluence of different literary styles, genres, and writers in the periodicals prove particularly instructive in locating the authors' concern with class, gender, national identity, modernity, and progress. Engaging with the contents of the periodicals, my paper asks to what extent the articulation of different themes in the diverse genres of children’s literature was tied to the projects of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Was Bengali children’s literature an epistemological space based on colonial difference created by the colonized subject or was it a derivative discourse and if so, to what extent