Existing between Possibility and Impossibility: The Othered Indian Children\u27s Literature of the Pre-Colonial Era

The accepted evolution pattern of Indian children’s literature is beginning with the missionaries to the development within education framework, diversifying into magazines and to come on its own through entertainment-centric writing. This temporal progression credits the post-independence children’s literature with modernity, creativity and originality and others the body of precolonial material for children through either erasure, essentialization or derision. By delving into the variety and plurality of this othered material for children in the pre-colonial era, this paper establishes the central presence of children in this writing, demonstrates how it employed dual address, freed itself from clear-cut moral schematism, and tailored to specific needs of children. I argue that the categorization of children’s literature as a distinct genre and the resultant age-based stratification of audiences created an impossibility of ‘children\u27s literature’, smuggled in the essentialized notions of constructed children vs. constructive adults and brought in the patronizing double address. I seek to raise concerns about the existing definitions, permissions, segregations, omissions and categorizations