Children and Knowledge

Contemporary and Historical Perspectives from India

Zazie Bowen, Jessica Hinchy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367374334
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000740417
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Children and Knowledge sheds light on what it is to be a child in India in the contemporary moment and in history.

While acknowledging the ways Indian children are situated within structures of power, this volume foregrounds innovative methodologies for conducting research into childhood and children's lives that meaningfully engage with young people's understandings, stories and agency. The chapters probe conceptualisations of Indian childhoods, and interrogate both singularising models of childhood and the idea of 'multiple childhoods'. The contributors use the theme 'children and knowledge' to analyse young people's interactions with institutions of modernity and social structures – including gender, family, class, community and caste, as well as media, markets and development – that often marginalise and frame children in multiple, cumulative ways. The chapters juxtapose and triangulate three approaches to knowledge: knowledge about children; knowledge for children; and children's own knowledge. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how this juxtaposition is a useful framework for the analysis of historical and contemporary Indian social processes.

Demonstrating that understanding Indian children's experiences and knowledgeable perspectives is fundamental to any proper understanding of social complexity and change Children and Knowledge will be of great interest to scholars of childhoods studies, gender, education and South Asian studies. The book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Introduction: children and knowledge in India

Zazie Bowen and Jessica Hinchy

In contemporary postcolonial India, states, ethnic groups, elites and marginalized people are rearticulating identities in relation to transnational forces. Neoliberal capital and globalization have produced new forms of the ‘politics of culture’¹ including: redefinitions of ethnic identities in the context of late capitalism; changing politics around caste; the increasing prominence of Hindu nationalism; and digital media producing new youth identities. To understand these complex social changes, and their historical trajectories, an understanding of the experiences and perspectives of young people is crucial. The articles collected in this special issue are focused on children’s lives in historical and contemporary India, but were informed and enriched by broader discussions about childhood across the South Asian region at an interdisciplinary conference held at The Australian National University in 2013.

Children and youth comprise a staggering 51.1% of India’s population, with 0- to 14-year-olds accounting for 30.9% and 15- to 25-year-olds accounting for 20.2%.² Constituting almost half the population, such prominence begs numerous questions about how India’s young people are situated in social, cultural and economic transformations. How have rapid social changes of recent years affected diverse Indian children and youths? And how do Indian children themselves understand, resist or shape emerging and contradictory social contexts?

Beyond the demographic significance of young people, the contributors to this special issue view childhood as a framework for the analysis of wider political, social, economic and cultural dynamics in India.³ Childhood, as a social construct, provides a window onto broader transformations in historical and contemporary India. Furthermore, the children who temporarily inhabit the category ‘childhood’ are part of wider social fields.⁴ Their lives, and the more abstract category ‘childhood’, thus reflect upon and speak with social, political and economic issues of their time.

In addition to interest in ‘childhood’ as an analytical frame, the idea that children’s lives deserve to be understood and researched in their own right underlies this collection.⁵ Today in India, the education of children is the subject of intense government, media and scholarly attention. The Indian Government’s push to implement compulsory primary schooling as well as powerful development discourses that see education as a prerequisite for ending poverty have produced an intense focus on Indian children. However, the Indian government and the development sector generally interrogate children’s lives more for what they will become than for their perspectives and experiences in the present as children – as ‘human becomings rather than human beings’.⁶ There is, however, a growing body of scholarship on childhood in South Asia which aims, like this special issue, to foreground children’s experiences.⁷

In particular, the articles presented here intersect on the theme of children, knowledge and narratives in India. Together, the articles demonstrate that Indian children are at once subjects of knowledge about childhood; targets of knowledge via educational regimes and pedagogies; and knowers in their own right. Children construct narratives and knowledge based on their positioning in age, gender and social hierarchies. Sharon Stephens argues that domains formerly regarded as non-political, naturalized spaces – such as the body, the self, the family and childhood – are in fact continually restructured to accord with shifting political and economic demands.⁸ These shifts underscore the cultural and political potency of constructions of knowledge about and for children. They also alert us to the necessity of paying attention to how such shifts are subjectively experienced and conceptualized by diverse young people. In sum, the contributions to this special issue show that a focus on knowledge and children sheds light on broader social transformations in historical and contemporary India, as well as on the lives of young people. We consider this triangular relationship between knowledge about, knowledge for and knowledge constructed by children as productive for developing scholarly understanding of childhood and society, with applicability to children in any contemporary or historical social context.

‘Knowledge’ is, of course, a broad term that has provoked scholarly inquiry into comparative epistemologies throughout the twentieth century and ongoing debates surrounding the ontology of knowledge itself.⁹ Anthropologists such as Barth adopt knowledge as a framework of analysis, regarding knowledge as the interplay of: (1) a corpus of assertions; (2) a mode of transmission via specific media (language, symbols, etc.); and (3) institutional social relations which stake claims on authenticity and accessibility.¹⁰ Cohen emphasizes knowledge and cognition as embodied processes, inseparable from the bodily experiences, social interactions and environmental contexts within which they are produced.¹¹ This is an idea which underlies the ‘play as interaction’ theory in Zazie Bowen’s study of peer play and peer conceptualizations of local environment in this issue.¹² More broadly, we consider ‘interplay’ or interaction between different forms of knowledge about children’s lives as essential to an understanding of childhood incorporative of multiple angles, an understanding that is both more curious about knowledge claims surrounding children’s lives and respectful of what children know.

This issue represents an interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and anthropologists, which allows us to enrich our understanding of the past through anthropological structural and critical perspectives – and to complicate our analyses of the present through engagement with historical processes and multiple, sometimes contested, historical narratives. The importance of interdisciplinary scholarship is highlighted in anthropologist Sarada Balagopalan’s recent analysis of the childhood studies concept of ‘multiple childhoods’, the idea that ‘multiple modernities’ in South Asia have resulted in diverse childhoods. Balagopalan complicates the underlying liberal assumptions of ‘multiple childhoods’ through the historical analysis of its colonial antecedents. In colonial India, caste, class and region-specific ‘cultural’ logics rationalized exceptions to the European ideal of childhood that reinforced culturally specific plural childhoods, which were well suited to the underlying economically extractive basis of colonial governance.¹³ In brief, a crucial interplay exists between colonial past and postcolonial present in understanding South Asian/global South ‘childhoods’ and the ongoing reverberations of the past in present day children’s lives.

The analysis of children, knowledge and narratives is a useful approach to navigate issues surrounding agency and power. One of the underlying premises of childhood studies is the foregrounding of children’s experiences and agency, in the context of historically specific structural notions of childhood. This raises a number of questions, which have parallels to discussions that have occurred in Subaltern Studies and gender studies about the agency of marginalized peoples and the reconstruction of their lives.¹⁴ How do we as scholars learn about children’s experiences and how does this vary between disciplines? How do structures of power and dominant concepts of childhood impact upon children themselves? Moreover, what counts as children’s agency? What do our concepts of children’s agency tell us about the ways we as scholars conceptualize childhood? Human rights scholars of childhood insist recognition of children’s agency is a fundamental right¹⁵ – an assertion that supports a shift in approach, less concerned to empirically prove children’s agency and more concerned to challenge, beyond academic circles, any misconceptions that they are passive. However, this still leaves open questions about the dynamics of young people’s agency.

The contributors to this special issue conceptualize children’s agency in a nuanced manner, highlighting forms of agency that do not directly resist figures of authority or explicitly subvert hegemonic ideas about childhood.¹⁶ For instance, Jessica Hinchy’s article argues that although child slaves in eighteenth century Awadh did not undermine social hierarchies, they did seek to shape their circumstances and cope with their enslavement, particularly through forming kinship networks.¹⁷ Meanwhile, Bowen examines the ways that children in rural Odisha construct meaning and narratives about their local environment through peer play in ways that both rearticulate and transform adult understandings of village space.¹⁸ We are also aware that scholars’ and the development sector’s concepts of children’s agency can imply particular notions of Indian childhood. Annie McCarthy illustrates that NGO policies to promote children’s ‘participation’ in development idealize particular attributes of children, such as creativity and innovation, as evidence of agency, reflecting a historically and culturally specific notion of childhood.¹⁹

In order to negotiate these issues with the analysis of children’s agency, the contributors to this special issue examine multiple dimensions of children’s interactions with knowledge: adult knowledge of children and for children, as well as the ways that children interpret received knowledge and narratives and form their own ideas and stories. This is by no means the only approach we could take. However, this focus on the production, interpretation and reception of knowledge allows us to analyse children’s experiences and agency in the context of structures of power and historically contingent ideas about childhood.

Knowledge about children

Scholarly concepts of childhood in India

‘Childhood’ commonly refers to a period in the life of any individual. This period, with a beginning and end, is associated with mobility (socialization and child development) oriented out of childhood towards future adulthood. Scholars of childhood increasingly appreciate that studying childhood entirely as anticipation of adulthood is not helpful. The newer perspective has increased focus on childhood as a permanent segment in the social structure of most societies. For Qvortrup,²⁰ and following Hendrick²¹ and Aries,²² the structural form of childhood changes continuously through interplay with other societal parameters within any given time and place, which imbues childhood wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: children and knowledge in India
• 2 Play on the mother-ground: children’s games in rural Odisha
• 3 Adivasi children and the making of indigeneity in Jharkhand
• 4 Adivasi young people and the risk of education in rural Chhattisgarh
• 5 Enslaved childhoods in eighteenth-century Awadh
• 6 Telling stories, washing hands: exploring the role of narrative in development programmes targeting children
• 7 Duties of a ‘good citizen’: colonial secondary school textbook policies in late nineteenth-century India
• Epilogue
• Index