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Childhood
A fascination with childhood -
as historians, anthropologists,
psychologists and pedagogues
have noted - is a rather
recently developed phenomenon in
the West. Philippe Aries, in his
ground-breaking study
Centuries of Childhood
(1962) traces the emergence of a
sentiment de l’enfance or an
‘awareness of childhood’ in the
early modern period. Critics
like DeMause, Stone, Plumb,
Pollock and others have since
argued in favour of or against
Aries, emphasizing either a
‘change’ or a ‘continuity’ in
reviewing the history of
childhood. More recent critical
strategies are inclined to study
childhood as a social construct
that is bound to vary with time
and culture. In other words,
though “the immaturity of
children is a biological fact”
differences would exist “in the
ways in which this immaturity is
understood” by different
cultures in different periods (Prout
and James, quoted in
Heywood).Given this idea of
childhood as a socio-cultural
invention, the vast area of
pre-colonial Bengali childhood
remains to be critically
examined. The versions of
childhood and children as
represented in medieval and
early modern Bengali texts are
yet to be researched and
critiqued to produce a
substantial body of study that
would collectively outline and
define the principles and
paradigms of
‘indigenous’ Bengali
childhoods.
The ideas of childhood that are
generated through a reading of
Bengali children’s books of the
nineteenth and the early
twentieth centuries illustrate a
complex (and often uneasy) blend
of the indigenous and the
foreign precepts, of the old and
the new social orders and a
combination of the traditional
and the reformed world views. In
the early decades of the
nineteenth century along with a
new print culture, there was the
inception of an English
schooling system. Breaking away
from the traditional educational
systems like
pathshalas or
makhtabs, the new curriculum
emphasized a rationalist
pedagogy and initiated a whole
new order of disciplines that
were far removed from the
prevalent indigenous ones. With
such a momentous change in
schooling and education, the
norms dictating juvenile
education as well as juvenile
conduct underwent radical
changes. Simultaneously, there
remained, till the late years of
the nineteenth century, residues
of thriving pre-print traditions
that surfaced in the form of the
widely available cheap
Bat-tala books and also
continued as popular forms of
entertainments and practicing
folk rituals like
jatra,
kathakata and panchali.
The numerous memoirs,
biographies and autobiographies
that recall a period of growing
up in mid or late nineteenth
century Bengal record this
simultaneity of traditional and
new-fangled elements. These
writings speak of both
indigenous and colonial cultural
aspects as important influences
moulding contemporary middle and
upper-middle class Bengali
childhoods.
For the newly formed urban
middle class, children
increasingly became a subject of
special concern and childhood an
area of growing importance.
Manuals for parental guidance
advocating a hygienic practice
and a rationalist discipline for
child-rearing (for instance,
Paribare
Shishu Shiksha
[Child
Education in the Family],1890 or
Santaner Charitra Gathan
[Developing a Moral Character in
Children], 1912) began to be
published.
The puritan and
reformative elements of
Brahmoism did much to usher in a
modern childhood in the Bengali
society. By the turn of the
century, a flood of children’s
books from Brahmo households and
Brahmo authors like
Pramadacharan Sen , Rabibdranath
Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore,
Gnanadanandini Devi, Shibnath
Shastri, Yogindranath Sarkar,
Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri
enlivened the juvenile reading
sphere with entertaining,
lighthearted writings and
attractive pictures. They
brought to the children’s domain
a playful spirit and endowed it
with much of the innocence and
happiness that became
intricately associated with the
cult of the modern child. Also
apparent in their construction
of a separate terrain for
children was a studied
censorship, especially noted in
the will to erase all traces of
sexuality from children’s texts.
The asexuality of the modern
child – unlike the more
‘unguarded’ childhoods of the
earlier ages – was an active
imposition of an adult ideology
at work which consciously sought
to fence in the ‘naivety’ and
‘vulnerability’ of children.
However, beyond these moral
reformations and ideological
reconstructions, childhood
remained further divided by the
social variables like religion,
caste, class and gender.
Thus as winds of change blew
over Bengal, the societal norms
were reviewed and reformed.
Along with the shifting dynamics
of the institutions of home and
family the paradigms of
childhood too signaled a change.
The rigorous discipline and the
severe penalties of
Branaparichay
(1855) are tempered by a
cheerful indulgence in the happy
rhymes of
Hasi Khushi (1897). The
children’s periodical
Sakha (1883) carried the Wordsworthian dictum “The Child is father
of the Man” as its epigraph
while Tagore’s romantic
apotheosis of the child found
repeated expressions in numerous
works, most famously in
Sahaj Path (1930) – an
innovative alphabet book that
was unlike any other.
Periodicals like
Amar Desh (1920) hailed their young readers – the boys and girls of
Bengal - as the future citizens
of a nation.
In nineteenth century Bengal,
‘child’ and ‘children’s
literature’ were re-formed and
reinterpreted in the cultural
and intellectual climate of
colonialism. This reformation
and radical change was fraught
with complex anxieties that
infected both the children and
their guardians. Ashis Nandy
notes that
with greater and more intense
cross-cultural contacts,
childhood now more frequently
becomes a battleground of
cultures.…the Indian middle
class child became, under the
growing
cultural impact of
British rule, the arena in which
the battle for the minds of men
was fought
between the East and the
West, the old and the new, and
the intrinsic and the imposed.
(Nandy 65)
The following illustrations
offer visual examples of
childhood as portrayed in
Bengali children’s books.
Indeed, these evidences point to
the fact that instead of one
homogenous idea of the child or
a single precept of childhood,
there existed simultaneously,
fragments of different versions
of childhood – be it indigenous
or Western, traditional or
modern, idyllic or realistic.
References Consulted
Aries, Philippe.
Centuries of Childhood
Heywood, Collin.
A History of Childhood
Nandy, Ashis.
Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias.
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